Interview excerpt transcribed with permission from Dan Blank at www.wegrowmedia.com

Dan Blank interviews Jackson Pearce, author of "Sweetly." They discuss blogging, author videos, self-publishing, and the life of an author.

Dan Blank: Hi, everyone, my name is Dan Blank from wegrowmedia.com and today I'm speaking with YA novel author Jackson Pearce, who just recently released the new book called "Sweetly." So, welcome to the program.
Jackson Pearce: Hi, thank you for having me.

DB: So, you really do a lot in terms of putting content out there on the web and really sharing yourself and connecting with your audience. So on maybe like a weekly basis what does it look like in terms of how you connect with people in terms of social media and the web or even in person events?
JP: I do a lot, I do a lot on the Internet. I do two videos a week at a minimum. Twice now I've done a set where I do a whole month of videos where I do a video every single day. I did it last October and I did it this past July. Every Wednesday night for one hour I do a live show where I'm live on video and then there's a chat room of people chatting. And then I am fairly constantly on Twitter. I don't really schedule Twitter, necessarily. I know some people say they take, like, 15 minutes out of every hour to tweet and I'm just like "Oh, my cat did something weird, here's a tweet about it." And then I try to answer every email I get, and I have a Facebook page as well. And I just started a Tumblr [account], so I'm all over the Internet, actually.

DB: So which of these were the first thing that you started doing?
JP: The blog, I have a blog. Unfortunately, I'm not able to do text blogs as much as I used to. Before I started doing videos, long before that, I blogged just text almost every single day because I had a day job that I didn't like so I spent the first hour blogging instead. But I did that for years long before I ever sold a book, since I was like a senior in high school, I think. And I really loved it and it's unfortunate that there's not longer really time to do both text and videos blogs because then I would have no time to write books. That was the very first, and actually my editor, my very first editor, found me via the blog. We were submitting to her anyway, it's not like she just pulled me out of the blue. But we were submitting things to her and she recognized my name and said "Jackson Pearce, I could've sworn I just read something by someone named Jackson Pearce" and she had read this blog entry I posted, this really funny entry, about my boyfriend and I trying to move his mattress in a Camaro. And she loved it and it was a good starting point for our editorial relationship.

DB: That's interesting. So were you writing the blog about being a writer and writing this kind of genre or was it just a personal blog?
JP: It was both. Because...it was a day-to-day life kind of blog. Some posts were about writing, some posts were about moving a mattress. There was really no--it was actually very similar to my videos. I do talk about writing a lot because that's what I do, but I also talk about whatever I feel like talking about a lot. I don't think everybody that even if they love reading and love writers they don't necessarily want to hear about writing every single day at all hours.

DB: Right. So when your first started blogging was this something that people, you know, just did, it was a normal thing, because it was the time that you grew up in?
JP: Yeah, absolutely. It was a live journal when I first started. Live journal was huge, all of my friends had one when I was in high school. Yeah, it was just something to do.

DB: So you started doing the Youtube videos about a year before publication of your first novel, is that correct?
JP: Yeah, the novel had already sold, but I started doing videos about a year before it came out.

DB: So why do the videos? Because it's a really big jump from a text blog.
JP: It was! I, to be honest, it was like a lark in the middle of the night. I was thinking "Oh, man, you know, I have a"--I wish I had the camera right here to show you, it was just a regular point-and-shoot camera that had a video setting. And I was like "I'm not doing anything right now, so I'll film a video." And so I did. And then I started doing them like once a month and for a while they took a really long time to put together. Like, if I was going to do a video, that was going to be a three- or four-hour endeavor. But once I started doing them more often, I mean, now I can film and get a video on the Internet in about an hour and a half. So now it is a much speedier endeavor, which is really good because it means I'm able to do them more often.

Watch the entire interview by visiting www.wegrowmedia.com