Clark Fredericks

He goes, yeah, one of the parishioners has written several books and I'll hook you up with him.

Hooked me up with this guy and the guy hooked me up with his literary agent and signed me up right away.

And this guy, we hired a person to draft our first book proposal.

And the guy from church paid the $5,000 out of his pocket.

I said, dude, I don't know when I'm going to have money.

He goes, I'm not looking for you to pay me back.

He's like, I love your story.

And he goes, so he paid it out of his pocket.

That first book proposal didn't go anywhere.

I wrote another book proposal.

That didn't go anywhere.

On the third book proposal, I got a publishing deal from Simon & Schuster.

They made an offer, gave me a nice advance and signed me to a publishing deal.

I also did a documentary with the producer of Dateline NBC.

and they they had a series uh of eight different stories and this aired on their oxygen network and from doing that documentary with them uh i got on the tamron hall daytime talk show and from doing and i was on the tamron hall show with gabrielle bernstein

And she's like this, you know, motivational nine-time best-selling author.

When I was locked up, I was watching Oprah's Super Soul Sunday show and she was on that and I just loved her.

And now here I am on Tamron Hall with her.

I was just like, wow.

And we both came out of the bathrooms at the same time and there's like an alcove there.