TBF Marianne Sciucco | Podcasting Network

 

Most busy caregivers don’t have the time to read a book, so they go listen to a podcast. This is why podcasting is so essential, especially in the healthcare industry. Where do you go if you want to know more about a diagnosis? You look for a podcast. This is what Marianne Sciucco with AlzAuthors is doing for the Alzheimer’s and Dementia group. Join Tracy Hazzard as she talks to her in this episode. Marianne is the host of Untangling Alzheimer’s and Dementia, An AlzAuthors Podcast and the Author of Blue Hydrangeas: An Alzheimer’s Love Story. Learn how Marianne is helping people who experience Alzheimer’s and Dementia or know someone suffering from them share their stories to the world. Discover why podcasting is the best medium for this. Start spreading awareness today!

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How Podcasting Expands Network And Influence In The Healthcare Industry With Marianne Sciucco Of Untangling Alzheimer’s And Dementia, An AlzAuthors Podcast

I have a group that podcasts altogether. I’ve got Marianne Sciucco. She is a part of The Whole Care Network, the Home Care Matters network, and AlzAuthors. She’s bringing together AlzAuthors: Untangling Alzheimer’s & Dementia and AlzAuthors podcast. They are co-marketing together. They’re helping to promote together. They’ve banded together because they’re all focused on the same niche, Alzheimer’s and dementia care.

This is interesting because you’ve got your storytelling within this market and network. This is a beautiful way to build a podcast network and build a show together. When you’re focused on the same audience, that is so unique. Often, I get networks and other things that don’t have that focus. I’m impressed with everything that Maryanne does here.

I’m so glad to be able to bring her forward. Maryanne Sciucco is a registered nurse, dementia daughter, and author of the novel, Blue Hydrangeas: An Alzheimer’s Love Story. She’s the Founding Member of AlzAuthors.com, and a director, manager, podcast producer, and host. Tune in to this show and Maryanne Sciucco.

About Untangling Alzheimer's And Dementia, An AlzAuthors Podcast Host Marianne Sciucco

TBF Marianne Sciucco | Podcasting NetworkMarianne Sciucco is a registered nurse, dementia daughter, and author of the novel Blue Hydrangeas, an Alzheimer’s love story. She is a founding member of AlzAuthors.com and a director, manager, and podcast producer and host.

Follow Marianne Sciucco on Social: Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn

 

Marianne, what a tough subject. What a rod and yet narrow focus that you’ve picked on. Alzheimer’s and dementia, there are so many ways you could have gone with this, but you decided to go the caregiver story route, the stories of what’s going on. I love the model that you’ve built here. AlzAuthors blending in with the AlzAuthors Podcast: Untangling Alzheimer’s & Dementia, I love that model of what you’ve done together here. How’s it been working?

It’s been working great. Thank you so much for having me on the show. It was such a natural thing because I’m an author. I had written a book called Blue Hydrangeas: An Alzheimer’s Love Story. I’m a nurse. I have been on my own dementia journey and many others, vicariously through my profession. I was having a difficult time marketing my book, as you can imagine.

I decided to reach out to some of the authors that I was acquainted with to see if maybe they wanted to cross-promote with each other. To help promote the books, and to also bring awareness to Alzheimer’s and dementia caregiving. We started that back in 2015. It was just 3 of us at first, and now we have over 300 authors in our organization, and more than 300 books and resources.

 

TBF Marianne Sciucco | Podcasting Network

 

We work pretty hard. We’re a small but mighty team. Everybody works for free. We’re all volunteers. Everybody’s been on a journey. We all know what we’re talking about. Everybody’s written a book, for the most part, or some other resource films, podcasts, and blogs as well. Primarily, we focus on books because we believe that storytelling is an important component of caregiving.

Storytelling is an important component of caregiving. Click To Tweet

It ties really well with podcasting because storytelling and podcasting are essential. It’s an essential part of the process. I love podcasts. It’s one of my favorite areas to cover. It’s what I would call edutainment, where you’re educating what you’re entertaining. Whether it’s a sad story or not, it’s still entertaining in the fact that you’re helping to sync that educational piece in, sync that message in through the story.

You do that well with your authors. Maybe because they are all the authors that are coming on your show, they already have this ability to weave that story into what they’re talking about. You touched on the biggest thing. Marketing books is hard. There are some aspiring authors out there that are reading this who maybe are thinking, “Do I write the book first? Do I start a podcast first?” I would love to know your advice on that as well as, the hard part of marketing a book.

I think the hardest part of marketing a book is that there are so many books. Every day, I think I read that Amazon publishes 10,000 books a day, 1 million books a year, or something crazy like that. It’s insane. You become a little drop in the ocean. The keyword is a platform. If you don’t have a platform on which to launch a book, it’s going to be very hard to gain any traction.

The hardest part about marketing a book is that there are so many books. If you don't have a platform on which to launch a book, it's going to be very hard to gain any traction. Click To Tweet

That was my issue back in 2013 when I first published my book. It was self-published. I had no idea what I was doing. I’m a nurse. I majored in English in college. Some people go to college and major in Marketing. After four years, they know what to do. I had no knowledge of the business. Anyway, I managed to get the book out there and tried to build my own little platform, and it’s slow going and working. I don’t have a lot of contacts. What we ended up building with AlzAuthors is a platform for other authors to use when they launch their books. They come to us, looking for us. We have provided them with all of these tools.

I love that you’ve leveraged that together by creating a niche. It’s so often that there are a lot of networks for authors, but it’s so broad. You’ve got an author who writes about addiction, you’ve got an author who writes about Alzheimer, then you’ve got an author who writes about fitness. They’re so broad that the audience isn’t all there. That’s not a true platform.

A platform is built on the actual people who might read your book or refer your book to other people. That’s as essential in the process. I imagine over the years now and with 300 authors that you’ve managed to build this broader connection piece where that community’s eager to hear what the next book that comes out is. You’ve got a built-in platform already ready for that. That’s huge.

It is huge. We have two audiences. We have our authors whom we service by providing them with opportunities to get their books out there. We also target our caregiving audience, which is number one. The idea is to get these books into the hands of the people who need them. We offer a clearing house for people to go to.

If they are looking for resources, they’re not going to be wasting a lot of time waiting through a bunch of stuff that doesn’t apply to them. They can go onto our website. They can look at the category. Let’s say, “Caring for Your Mother.” They will find a variety of books about caring for their mother. Each author writes a blog post for us, specifically telling why they wrote their book, about their story, and about their book. It’s much more personal than going to a book sale page and reading the little synopsis that they give.

It’s much more personal. I’ve read your blogs there. They’re personal and I like that. One of the things I want to ask you about here is Blue Hydrangeas. Why Blue Hydrangeas? Why was that the title of your book?

TBF Marianne Sciucco | Podcasting Network

Blue Hydrangeas: An Alzheimer’s Love Story

My book takes place on Cape Cod. The main characters are innkeepers. They own a bed and breakfast. They named their bed and breakfast, Blue Hydrangeas, after the beautiful blue flowers that grow all over the Cape. If you’ve ever been to the Cape, you would have seen them. They’re amazing. I can’t grow them here at my house in New York. It doesn’t work.

I tried growing them. I’m from Rhode Island and they used to have them all up and down the coast in Rhode Island. I tried growing them in multiple places, including upstate New York. It did not do well.

It doesn’t do as well. They’re captivating. I love them. They make me feel good. I was thinking about this book. I was thinking they were going to name the house, and I was coming up with all these possible names for their house. I thought about the Blue Hydrangeas, and then I thought, “What kind of people name their house?” If you get down to the shore, like Cape Cod or other places, people always put little plaques on the side of their houses with the name. I came up with that, and then I thought, innkeepers, they name their house. That’s how they became innkeepers. They’re living this beautiful retirement lifestyle

It’s part of the charm of the way I see a lot of the books on your platforms. When I’m looking through them, there’s this connection piece and a story. Blue Hydrangeas personally connected with me. That’s why I wanted to point out the story here. That’s something that I have loved about all the places that I’ve lived. It’s one of the things that I adore.

It connected with me and it made me go, “Let me check out the story.” There are these little personal touches in both the way all these books are titled. I don’t know if you’re helping to advise them, but there are these little personal connection pieces. I have to say that in a lot of the self-help book areas, you see a lot of dry titles. It’s like, how to survive this and how to do that. That’s not the way your books are titled there. They are very story-driven.

The books are already published when we get involved. We don’t have any input on titles, but they’re all based on personal experiences. These people literally bleed onto the page. They conjure up very difficult memories, and times in their lives that most people want to forget. They do it because they want to help other people.

They know that they have been on something tremendous and that what they’ve learned from it is so valuable. You can’t get that anywhere else. There’s no way to learn how to be a caregiver for someone with dementia. You can read every book and nothing’s going to capture the entire experience. We don’t have anything to do with that. A lot of book titles now are SEO packed.

Search engine optimization for you, newbies, out there. I want to dive into these two pieces that we’re talking about on the platform idea. The platform is a very old-school book publishing term. It is not something that everybody understands until they get into it that you start hearing the word platform again and again. There are different types of platforms.

There’s what we call authority platform, which is a digital technology term. It’s this search engine optimization. I have authority. It doesn’t matter how popular and amazing you might be and how great it is that people want to read your book and hear about you. If Amazon’s book search engine or Google’s search engine doesn’t serve you up first and foremost, then you’re a hidden expert. That doesn’t help anybody progress.

You got to play the digital authority game, and you got to have a great book at the end of the day that people are going to review, love, share, and want to push out what you’ve got to help others. That’s going to grow your platform in your community. It doesn’t have to have both sides. Very often, authors think they only need one, which is the non-digital version.

Your podcasting model and your blog model of what you’ve built on your website help them do both in a better way. Most often, book recommendations, recommendations for podcasts, and recommendations for help are things that we type into Google at 2:00 in the morning because we’re stressed out and worried about how we’re going to care for our parents who just got diagnosed with dementia or Alzheimer’s.

That happens at 2:00 in the morning, and we’re going to do 3 things. We’re going to google it, we’re going to check Amazon, and we might check out a podcast or a video. Those are the areas that we’re going to dive into at those private times when we’re looking for help. You’re going to show up in all those places, and now your authors are, too.

You created this wonderful model for them being found when someone needs them the most because no amount of push marketing is going to help them. I may not have that problem now. I don’t have it until weeks from now, and I may not remember that I saw an advertisement from you. It doesn’t work like that. It works to be in the right place at the right time for someone who needs you, and you built that.

Thanks. I love you when you talk about it.

This is the other thing, though. Once someone finds you, they now have all these resources. By not having each author have their own podcast, each one of you working so hard to build a community, you’ve banded it together, which makes it so that I can binge. This is your binge factor for Untangling Alzheimer & Dementia, AlzAuthors. It’s to be able to make a place at which I can binge on whatever I need at the moment.

If I need stories that are based on caring for my parents, if I need stories on a sandwich generation, which is when you have aging parents and children that you’re caring for at the same time. It doesn’t matter what my needs are. There’s going to be one of your episodes and one of your authors that covers this. That means I can skip around, find what I’m looking for, binge the entire catalog, get a very concentrated amount of help quickly, and find what I’m looking for. From a caregiver’s perspective, and your audience’s perspective, you have made a wonderfully supportive binge experience.

Thank you. It came after a lot of hard work and no planning.

Stumbling into it is perfectly good. Let’s talk about how you got started. I heard your very first episode and you were being interviewed by Chris from The Whole Care Network. I love that that’s the first episode because the first episode is so difficult for podcasters to like, “How do I tell you about my show?” He does it in an interview model, which so helped. There’s a story here as to how you ended up podcasting. Tell me that story.

I am a listener. I listened to podcasts all the time and I listened to audiobooks. I love audio. It’s valuable, especially for busy caregivers who don’t have time to sit and read a book. Chris had grown his Whole Care Network, which is dozens of different podcasts related to health, wellness, and caregiving. He approached me and asked me if I would be interested in doing a podcast, but I wasn’t.

I didn’t know anything about how to do a podcast. How do you edit audio files? I don’t have the equipment. I didn’t know anything about it. Yet he continued to pursue and encourage me to take it on. As we thought about it more, the problem was publishing all of the blog posts. Also, doing all of the work that we were doing on social media, trying to generate traffic wasn’t working the way that we had thought.

Part of the reason why is caregivers don’t have time to sit down and read a book. Many people don’t read. Even if they are, the idea of thinking, “I’ll read this book,” you know that’s going to take ten hours out of your life and you don’t have it. You might say, “Forget it. I’m not doing that.” I thought, maybe we do need to have an audio component where we can bring the stories to people in an hour’s format where they can listen when they have 10 to 15 minutes. When they’re doing something else, they can shut it off, go back to it later, listen to it again, and then maybe that would motivate them to take the next step.

Yeah, because it helps them understand, “Am I going to connect with this author? Am I going to connect with this book? Is it going to be worth that amount of time that I’m going to have to invest in reading that?” It gives you that without having to do a lot of heavy lifting on the listener’s end. That’s smart. What I like about it though is that you’ve dovetailed into Chris’ model as well.

Chris MacLellan, Whole Care Network, what he’s done is create models of support for caregivers in general, all kinds of caregivers. You’re that niche within it, that is Alzheimer’s & Dementia, and then he has others within that. By doing that, it’s creating a greater resource model. As we talked about before, you’re a resource to those caregivers. Some of those caregivers might become your authors, and then you support them, too. It does go both ways.

Getting the resource to referral networks, people who are going to refer many people have multiple needs. They need Alzheimer’s, or heart care. They might need all different kinds of care that they are referring people out to. Having one network that can do that and have many shows that are professional in how they’re also produced makes a big difference here.

I think that that has been in your favor. On our network, we have a lot of healthcare-style shows. They have a hard time, especially if we talk about self-help, addiction space, or caregiving space. Even within that, there’s not as much communication between others. I’m less likely to go out there, share that on social media, and say, “I’m listening to this great podcast. It’s been helping me deal with this.” It’s too raw. The sharing of a show is more limited.

I might be in a Facebook group with other people who are like me and I am sharing your show within that. I’m less likely to share it with the broader audience which is my followership. That makes it more difficult for a show to grow when you don’t have a referral network. That’s what’s brilliant about your whole model here. Your model for the authors has done that. The model for the network you’ve built yourself with and on. the model that you’re also putting yourselves in those blogs and in the podcast. In the audio space, it’s also crossing all the different dimensions of things that you need. That’s great.

What I want to know is, how is it going for you? How is the monetization model working in terms of, are people selling books? Is this working for growing your network? I know everybody’s a volunteer, but there’s still a lot of time and energy put in. Is the return on investment there for you, for the network, and for the authors in general?

As far as book sales, we don’t know because we don’t have any access to that unless the authors tell us. We just run a book sale. We have an annual book sale for Caregiver Appreciation Month. The point of it is to try to gain visibility. That’s our number one goal. Book sales would be nice. We’re finding that the book sales didn’t pan out the way that we would hope. That’s an issue.

Mainly, our finances come from our donors. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. We get money from the authors themselves. They are not charged any money to be on our network, but we do ask them to make a donation if they would like. We have other donors. We don’t even know where they’re coming from. Some of them are extremely generous.

I haven’t done any monetization. It’s in discussions. We’ve always prided ourselves on being clean without having to pad our website, blog, or podcast with things that may not be relevant. We do know that the podcast is the one place where we could take on advertising products that were related to our audience.

TBF Marianne Sciucco | Podcasting Network

Podcasting Network: A podcast is the one place where you could really take advantage of advertising products that your audience would be interested in.

 

You already have ads on this show. You do have ads for The Whole Care Network. You have ads for your own 501(c)(3). You’re running what we call promos rather than ads. They’re a little bit of promotion. You already primed your audience to accept that, especially if they’re very relevant. You can command that at this point. You certainly have enough episodes. You certainly earn the right to do that. I think the decision is how you do it. You don’t want to have five minutes of ads before your stories start. You need to do it in a nice fluid way that respects the audience.

That’s why with the author of interviews, I sat every episode with an excerpt from the interview with some hook to get people into what this is all about, or some hot statement that they might have made.

Yeah. Sometimes, I’ve heard you start with a little bit of a story about why you brought this author on or some little background bit before you played the clip. You’ve done a couple of episodes where you do that. It works both ways. I would call it the preamble. You do a little bit of preamble. It helps to say, “I want to wait around and I’m okay with listening to a couple of promo spots before this happens.”

We do virtual events, but those are recorded and made up on YouTube, and then into the podcast as well. Those have a bit of a different intro because everything is included already in the show. We usually have 4 or 5 panelists at a time. Those are hard to edit, but you can clean them up well. I record everybody on a single track on their own track.

They’re worth it. It’s something that when you do those panels, the important part as the moderator or as the host is to make sure that you’ve differentiated the voices. When their voices are too similar and they don’t say, “This is so-and-so.” When you’re listening, it gets confusing and hard. It’s just as hard for the audio editor. It’s hard for the listener, too, to follow along when there isn’t a distinction in voices. Just a tip to planning panels, find distinct voices. That’s helpful.

Many of the authors of the episodes that I listened to had this story of looking at it in retrospect. They were not in the middle of it at this moment when they were writing this. That’s an interesting thing because you’ve got this community and platform that you’re building. That is then going to lead to them becoming authors with them. This is just an idea. Are you thinking about starting to make a more distinctive connection and partnership with a book authoring company that could also make kickbacks into the organization when someone comes from your audience into becoming an author with them?

Not at all.

That would be a great idea because I guarantee you there’s someone in the audience that is going like, “I had this story that’s burning, but I don’t know how to do it.” If you connect them to someone, because you’ve got 300 authors, I guarantee you there are some bad stories and good stories about someone who’s gone through and has a great publisher, somebody they worked with, or ghost writer.

Whatever it is that they worked with, there’s some model in there that could work for you. Those referral fees that you would normally pay could be paid to the organization. That would be also another monetization. I’m always looking at ways for alternative monetization, especially when you want to keep it clean and not run random ads.

That’s a great idea. We are working with someone in January 2023 to do a writer’s workshop for caregivers.

That’s an awesome idea.

Most of the books were journals that people kept, and that became the backbone of their books. Some people are writing in real time because they’re blogging, and the blogs are current. “This is the situation now.” It’s not reflective. They go back and they turn their blog into a book. That’s an intriguing idea to come up with that because so many of them are self-published. We could certainly do a seminar on how to publish a book. I used to teach classes in independent publishing, so I could teach how to publish a book on Amazon. I could do that. We’re an Amazon affiliate, so we do get income from them.

I don’t think it changes anything to be self-published. There are a lot of book networks and book assistance. If you want like the workshops, writing, and helping somebody support you through that. There are a lot of those that are very low cost. Also, though, they end up self-publishing anyway, so the model’s still going to work for you.

The other thing you mentioned is audiobooks. One of the things that self-published book authors don’t realize is that a lot of those that get book deals end up writing away their rights to the audiobook. If the publishing of the book doesn’t do well enough, the audiobook never happens and they don’t have the rights to record that audiobook at the end of the day. You’re right here.

An audiobook is maybe even more valuable than a printed book for these busy caregivers who are going to be the readers and listeners of the stories that are going on here. Making sure you don’t give away your rights there is essential as well. You were talking about some things that are going to happen in 2023. You’re going to do a writer’s workshop. What’s next for the podcast and for the AlzAuthors Network?

Right now, we’re working on a terrific project with Larry Smith from the Six-Word Memoirs. The idea is to tell your life story in six words.

I love that idea. It’s like a haiku.

It’s crazy. People go, “What? I can’t do that.” Yeah, you can, and it’s not that hard. Once you get started, you won’t stop. You’ll be able to figure it out quickly. I worked with him and it took me a year to get this off the ground. I didn’t even tell anybody it was my little secret until I had the goal from him and everything in place. I announced it to my partners. They’re like, “What are you talking about?”

Anyway, what we’re doing is collecting stories. It’s not just from the authors. It’s from anybody in Alzheimer’s and dementia world to talk about their dementia journey. One of the questions is, “What I wish I learned about Alzheimer’s and dementia that I didn’t find out until later?” Another one is like, “What’s one takeaway from my Alzheimer’s and dementia journey?” It’s to share information with people in a very short format. We’ve collected about 100 or so stories now. The goal is to create a book, and then the book will become a source of income.

TBF Marianne Sciucco | Podcasting Network

Podcasting Network: We’re collecting stories not just from the authors but also from anybody in the Alzheimer’s and dementia world to talk about their dementia journey.

 

That’s fantastic. I also think that you’ve got an amazing social media program right there. To raise awareness for the AlzAuthors podcast, for your website, for the whole thing. I can see killing it on TikTok and Instagram, and all the right places for that. Another interesting place that we find works well for specifically this area and authors, in general, is inspirational quote images on Pinterest. This would be a great place to have an entire board on these six-word memoirs. That would be so cool. That would be amazing.

I’m looking for a volunteer to help us with the Pinterest page because having the book covers on there would be great.

Just even having that, yeah. We have in the Feed Your Brand, the sister podcast of The Binge Factor. We did both a workshop that was on Pinterest and a discussion of what was working for us on Pinterest. We’ll do it again in 2023 as well because we have a whole another year of data on it. We do try to cover Pinterest pretty frequently through there.

You may even want to at least check those out in the meantime to help you find someone. I think that that idea of anything you can do that is bringing and growing your platform is benefiting all involved and it’s going to bring you, donors. This is the one thing that is our personal connection. I’m going to say that this is my husband’s and my fear. He has a fear that he is going to have Alzheimer’s like his grandmother. He’s so scared of it.

That in itself breeds this opportunity for donors that come out of nowhere and say, “This has been burning in me and I want to give.” They hear one of these stories and they’re like, “I want to give.” They see one of those six-word memoirs and it touches them with the experience they had with their grandparent, or whatever that might be, and they give. Making sure that that tie-in to where you can give is so essential to have one platform. When you’re doing it disparately through every single author separately, that doesn’t work as well as you creating this consolidated resource for it.

We say, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others.” It’s an old African proverb, but it speaks to what we’re trying to do.

Is there anything that our audience could learn from what you’ve done that you think was successful, or things that you wish you did differently?

I’m fortunate in the fact that I have a built-in audience. That’s something I get all the time, “How do you find your guests?” I’m like, “I have people banging on my door.” There’s a new author every other week and a podcast in between. Having that built-in audience has been helpful. Building that network up, it’s easier than starting from scratch. I’m not concerned about finding a great guest because I have so many that I can pick from. They all wanted to get out there and tell their story and promote themselves. It’s a win-win for everybody.

It’s built that way. Your platform’s going to give them publicity and visibility through the podcast. It’s going to create blog posts, it’s going to create all of these models of things. It’s already built into your whole system of what makes the engine of the podcast run for everybody.

I have a lot of great partners. There are 6 of us on the management team, and then we have another 6 or so volunteers performing different functions and some bigger than others. We’ve been together, the first three core members, since 2015. The most recent one joined us in 2019. These people are who get up every morning, work, and do something related to AlzAuthors every day.

We’re in constant communication with each other. We use Slack and we’re going all day long. I’ve never met Susan. She came to us in 2019. I’ve only met my other partners in person once or twice. We don’t even have that. Everybody’s spread across the country and we are all committed to this one cause. We’ve all been touched by this experience and we believe that it was our lost loved ones who have put us all together to do this job.

 

 

That’s beautiful and wonderful. You’ve created lasting friendships and impact through what you’ve been building.

We call ourselves sisters. We’re all sisters because we all had a tragic experience.

That binds people together in a great way to create impact, vision, and social good.

You said your husband is terrified of Alzheimer’s, but you can read some of our books and you’ll find that people who have Alzheimer’s are doing okay.

That’s what I was thinking.

It’s not all doom and gloom. A diagnosis doesn’t mean the end of your life. You can die from something else in the meantime. Most people living with dementia learn how to live well, and they’re trying to dispel that stigma. Part of our goal is to dispel the stigma that people still have something to offer. They’re no different than they were the day before the diagnosis.

It's not all doom and gloom. A diagnosis doesn't mean the end of your life. You can die from something else in the meantime. Click To Tweet

That’s so interesting. It is this thing that because of the age he was when it happened, and because we’re the oldest children and the oldest grandchildren, our help and assistance became necessary. Having watched how it happened at the early stages was frightening to him that it could go so quickly. It was one of those things that left such an impression on him.

Also, everyone’s a different person, but his creative mind is something that is so essential to who he believes he is. The idea that that might disappear from him is frightening. When he might have a chance to relax and enjoy it, that scares him. It’s understandable. It’s been one of those things where we’re always paying attention to what’s going on in research and to what’s happening in Alzheimer’s in general because it matters.

For some people, dementia makes the creativity.

That’s good to know. I might have to read that book.

We’ve got people who are writing, art, drawing, painting, creating, doing photography work. They never did it before. They never did anything like that until after they were diagnosed. It’s unbelievable.

TBF Marianne Sciucco | Podcasting Network

 

We put Tom’s grandmother into an assisted living center that’s near us. We moved them from Savannah, Georgia up to Providence, Rhode Island where we were living. We put them near us because we worked for ourselves. It was a little bit easier for us to help than anyone else. It was right at the corner literally. We had a five-year-old at the time.

The assisted living center did all the heavy lifting because his grandfather and grandmother were together. It had an assisted living separated section for Alzheimer’s. It was pretty progressive at the time because this was the late ’90s. They’re separated. They could be together now before she progressed to a stage at which they couldn’t, and they had to separate her into the Alzheimer’s area.

We looked at that, and it made a difference. They used to have her in these art classes because Providence has Rhode Island’s School of Design and that’s where Tom and I went. They would bring in these creatives and they would run these beautiful art classes, and I remember her loving it. She had a creative mind. She would make these beautiful frames that were detailed. She as much lost her agility in her hands before she lost her mind completely there. That probably happened first, but I remember her doing that, and then loving it. It was always a good day, the day she was being creative. Thank you so much for sharing all these stories.

Thank you for everything.

Bringing these messages out, bringing this podcast out, and creating a vehicle for helping these authors understand the power of the platform and the power of collaborating together, you’ve created something so wonderful here. If there’s anything our audience can do for you, they need to reach out because Marianne and her team are doing this all alone. They are all together, but still on their own with no funding. Everything is supported through donations to the organization. Thanks, everyone for reading. Marianne, thank you for being here and for bringing AlzAuthors: Untangling Alzheimer’s & Dementia to the world.

Thank you so much. I appreciate your time.

There was so much here in Marianne’s interview and us talking about the way AlzAuthors bands together. There’s so much to a guesting strategy that’s working for them. There’s the journaling and blogging standpoint that’s working for them. There’s so much of this idea of growing this audience, and then the idea of banding together. Why not podcast with a couple of other people in a niche? It doesn’t have to be a network that you’re completely controlling in this particular case, and you don’t always have to be the host.

There are some interesting ideas to diving down and working with others collaboratively within your niche. You can get inspired by AlzAuthors in the way that they handle things there. Check out the show. Check out Marianne Sciucco and everything that they’re doing over there. I look forward to bringing you other interesting ideas and other interesting podcast hosts next time.

 

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