S5 EP222 | Global Intrigue Fuels Joe Battaglia's Near-Future Olympic Suspense Thriller

Bleeped word: m@ss@cre

Hello My Happy People,

This week on Book Banter with Dianne Burckhardt — Book Talk Podcast, award-winning journalist Joe Battaglia joins the show to discuss his international thriller Beneath the Rings, a suspense-filled novel set during the 2040 Summer Olympics in Doha.

With more than three decades in journalism and over twenty years covering the Olympic movement, Joe brings a rare insider perspective to the world of elite athletics, media pressure, and the global spectacle surrounding the Games. He worked with NBC Olympics, contributing to Emmy-winning coverage of the Beijing and London Summer Olympics. 

Joe discusses his path from journalism into publishing, beginning with his self-published children’s book The ABCs of Track and Field, an educational alphabet book introducing young readers to the history, athletes, and excitement of track and field. He shares how the experience taught him the realities of the publishing industry and gave him the confidence to move forward with the thriller he had long wanted to write.

In Beneath the Rings, veteran journalist Nova Mendelsohn is pulled into a terrifying international crisis when twelve athletes vanish during the Olympic Games. As governments, media officials, and powerful organizations scramble to control the narrative, Nova races through the shadows of Doha searching for the truth before time runs out.

His thriller Beneath the Rings was recently awarded Gold in the 2026 Manhattan Book Awards.

If you enjoy political thrillers, international suspense, and Olympic drama, this is an episode you won’t want to miss.

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Transcript

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Dianne Burckhardt 0:01

You're listening to BookBanter with Diane Burkhart, your Book Talk podcast. Join me every Wednesday for real conversations with authors and publishing insiders, where you get to connect with the humans behind the books you love. Let's get on with our show today. Hello, my happy people. Today is May 13th, 2026. And today we are stepping into the high-pressure world of international sports, investigative journalism, political tension, and a terrifying crisis unfolding during the 2040 Summer Olympics in Doha. My author guest is uniquely qualified to create a believable world around the realities of journalism, the global spectacle surrounding the Olympic Games, and what could happen when twelve athletes suddenly vanish in the middle of one of the largest international sporting events on Earth. What makes this conversation especially fascinating is that today's guest didn't just create this world from pure imagination. He has spent decades covering professional sports and the Olympic movement as an award-winning journalist, giving him a first hand understanding of the pressure, the politics, media chaos, and the international atmosphere surrounding events on this scale. His experience brings a touch of reality to his incredible thrilling fiction. So let's not waste any more time. Please welcome to Book Banter with Diane Burkhard. Joe Battaglia. The way that I like to start these episodes is just to have my guest tell everyone who you are and what you do.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

Hi, my name is Joe Battaglia, and I'm the author of Beneath the Rings.

Dianne Burckhardt 1:41

But you also have a very long career as a journalist.

SPEAKER_00 1:44

Yeah, I've worked in sports journalism since I was 18 years old. Started working for the Newark Star Ledger newspaper in New Jersey, and I did that for 13 years, and then transitioned to NBC Olympics, where I was the track and field producer for the Beijing Summer Olympics. I was the Alpine skiing producer for the Winter Olympics in 2010 Vancouver.

Dianne Burckhardt 2:07

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_00 2:08

From there, I went to Universal Sports, which was the uh at the time NBC's kind of year-round uh Olympic arm. And uh I continued to do track and field and alpine and and marathon, and then NBC folded Universal Sports right before the 2012 Olympics. So I went back to being the track and field producer for London in 2012, and then I also did Alpine for Sochi in 2014. And then after that, I went to Flow Sports, where I was the director of content first, and then the VP of editorial for Milesplit, which was the high school track and field division. So stayed within track pretty much my whole nine years at Flow Sports.

Dianne Burckhardt 2:53

What is it that's so appealing about sports journalism for you?

SPEAKER_00 2:57

It changes every day. Uh, you know, when when I started doing high school and college sports at the Newark Star Ledger, I was, you know, covering different teams, different sports, traveling all over the state of New Jersey, uh, amplifying those high school sports, uh, built up girls' volleyball and swimming pretty big during my time there. And that was a lot of fun. And grassroots cover a lot of athletes. One of my neatest stories was the very first sporting event I covered for a byline was the Essex County Cross Country Championships. And it was run at Branchbrook Park, right by where I grew up. And I covered a race that was won by Hazel Clark for Columbia High School. And I continued to follow her career through her collegiate running at the University of Florida, and then she made the Olympic team alongside her sister and her sister-in-law, and then she made the Olympic team again in 2008 when I started working at NBC. So we we continued to connect there, and she's been a lifelong friend. We did uh a neat collaboration when she was in charge of sports tourism for the Bermuda Tourism Authority. We put on cross-country and track and field meets where we brought athletes from the US over to compete against Bermudan athletes. And, you know, those things are to me are priceless. Those those kind of relationships.

Dianne Burckhardt 4:32

Um definitely.

SPEAKER_00 4:34

Yeah, I wouldn't have traded that experience for anything.

Dianne Burckhardt 4:38

That's that's an incredible networking experience to be able to meet somebody and follow them for pretty much their whole career.

SPEAKER_00 4:45

Yep, yep. Right from when she was in high school right through to an Olympic team. So it's uh it's pretty rare.

Dianne Burckhardt 4:52

So now at some point you decide that you want to try and write a book. But the first one that you wrote was for kids.

SPEAKER_00 4:59

Yeah, yeah. So in February of 2014, I was laid off from Flow Sports and uh I had a lot of time on my hands suddenly, and I was sitting here at my desk, like wondering, you know, all right, what am I gonna do? And I was looking at this picture on my desk of of my daughter and just thought back to how when she was learning her alphabet, she had all different kinds of alphabet books, but never there was never a track and field themed alphabet book. I mean, you can go on Amazon and find them for every sport under the sun, you know, even some team-specific ones for you know pro sports, but there wasn't a track and field one. And I thought, well, that would be a neat thing to try to do. And so I sat down and kind of put that together, starting with like, okay, who are my you know, 26 athletes A to Z? I'm and making sure that had the balance between international athletes and American athletes and men and women and different sporting groups. And once I did that, then I sat down to come up with like two sentences for each athlete that kind of encapsulated why they're among the greatest in the sport and then have it rhyme. And so I self-published that book and I learned a lot from that, and I think it got my juices sort of going and and gave me the confidence to sit down and and write the novel that my parents have begged me to do since I was young and just never really had the time to do because I was working full-time, you know, from when I was a teenager right through to traveling around the world to these track and field meets and these marathons and all of that stuff, and you know, when are you gonna squeeze in novel writing, you know, in between all of that? So that was sort of the uh a a good icebreaker for me.

Dianne Burckhardt 6:45

How long do you think it actually took you to bring that book completely together?

SPEAKER_00 6:49

Beneath the rings?

Dianne Burckhardt 6:51

The ABC book.

SPEAKER_00 6:52

The ABC book came together really quick. I mean, I had that pretty much done in a week. Oh wow. That did not take long at all. The hardest part was just narrowing down my list of 26 athletes and making sure that like they were connected to a letter of the alphabet. And then, you know, what once I did that, I mean, I was familiar enough with all of these athletes' careers that having the context of the two sentences wasn't really that hard. It was just figuring out a hook to make those two sentences sort of run.

Dianne Burckhardt 7:21

Would you want to do any more children's books?

SPEAKER_00 7:24

Um, I don't know. If I did, it would be totally different. It wouldn't be an alphabet book, it would be some other themed book, but I don't know if I uh if I want to go there again, you know, especially after writing Beneath the Rings. I think tackling that meteor, like more mature content um sort of appeals to me more now. But I'll I'll never say never.

Dianne Burckhardt 7:47

Not only sports journalism, you've also covered news and politics. And, you know, I did headline news, and the one thing that I was really surprised about, nobody ever explained to me in journalism school how depressing doing hard news can be.

SPEAKER_00 8:02

It is depressing. I had the actual opposite experience when I was in college. My journalism professors actually poo-pooed sports journalism and said that if you weren't covering courthouses or you know, police blotters or that sort of thing, then like you really weren't a real journalist. And that was kind of a turnoff to me because I had already started working as a stringer really to start in sports, and that was kind of where my my passion was going. And I kind of got disenfranchised to to school and really put more in. I feel like I learned more on the job than I did in the classroom. And yeah, if I'm being completely honest, you know, I did the bare minimum at that point to just get my degree and get out. My dad wanted to slap me upside the head with my motto D equals diploma. Um but just hearing that from a professor just kind of turned me off.

Dianne Burckhardt 9:04

With your book, Beneath the Rings, you actually kind of combine news and politics and sports with some very real heavy world issues. Does writing something like this make it easier for you to deal with those topics when you're creating the world yourself?

SPEAKER_00 9:22

A little bit. I mean, when I set out to write Beneath the Rings, I knew that I wanted to set it like in the Olympic setting because that's the world I've lived for a long time and really familiar with. And I I started writing and I got about five chapters deep, and uh, you know, I'm kind of ready to introduce the bad guys, and kind of dawned on me that at that point I was I'm no geopolitical expert, but I knew that I wanted to sort of root that group and their radicalization, defranchization, you know, in some real-world, you know, conflict in history. And so I stopped writing and like went into research mode and uh you know, spent a couple months just doing my due diligence and research on the Middle East and some of the pivotal conflicts and figuring out well, okay, like this could be a sentinel moment in history where I could tie this back to this individual and say, like, yeah, this is where they kind of went off the rails. And once I did that and kind of felt grounded enough with that material, like I was able to go back and start writing again. And that was that's a little bit of a different experience for me. Like I I had I don't know that I've ever started writing about a topic and had to stop and and do research midstream. Usually when I was writing even a long-form sports feature or profile, right? I was familiar with the subject and did my research up front before I even like got to the interview process and you know started pulling more material out. So that was a bit of a different experience for me.

Dianne Burckhardt 11:03

Now, your book is set around the 2040 Olympics. Did you choose that setting because it's something you're so familiar with, or because of the broad spectrum that you could use with all of the different countries being there, allowing like so many different political aspects coming into this to kind of feed the thriller aspect?

SPEAKER_00 11:23

Yeah, I there's a couple reasons why I chose Stoha as a setting. One, I wanted to set this high-stakes thriller in a fictional Olympic setting, and I didn't want to do it like post-dated. I wanted and write something that was more historical fiction. I I wanted to future date it. I didn't want it so far into the future that we wouldn't even recognize the Olympic movement or an iPhone or you know, anything crazy like that.

Dianne Burckhardt 11:53

People will be expecting flank cars and the kind of name.

SPEAKER_00 11:56

Exactly, right? Like not too futuristic. And so I set it in 2040, so that's several Olympics out. And I chose Doha for a few reasons. One, I've had the opportunity to go there three times for track and field events, and I absolutely love the city. It's got this unbelievable combination of modernity, you know, and this new architecture and these state-of-the-art sporting venues and like this old-world part of town with a soup market that's unbelievable, and and mosques and ancient architecture. And so I felt like I would be able to sort of contrast the glittering venues and the shadowy back alleys and my writing there. And then Doha is also super involved in hosting international sporting events. They've had the World Cup, they've, like I said, they've hosted track and field world championships. There's a Diamond League international track and field meet there every year. There's been international swimming events, gymnastics events, they've hosted the Asian Games, they're bidding for Olympics. I mean, it would not surprise me the least if Doha wound up with the 2040 Olympic or one of these that is up for grabs. So it made a lot of sense for me to do that. And then it was also easier for me to sort of bring in the kidnapping event, which I did tie that a little bit back historically to the 72 Munich Massacre. And I thought that's something that hasn't happened in 68 years, thank God. But if we suspended disbelief about security and all the things that happen at the Olympics, could it happen? Yeah, maybe if it's gonna happen, where is it gonna happen? Probably in the Middle East.

Dianne Burckhardt 13:42

In Beneath the Rings, you deal with institutions staying silent in the face of wrongdoing. Have you ever personally experienced this in your journalism career?

SPEAKER_00 13:52

Yeah, I I I think there's a certain amount of that that happens all the time in international sports. I think Olympics, sometimes Olympic ideals collish with real world tensions. And I think that's sort of the beauty of the Olympics, right? It has this unfiltered soul where you you contrast the magic of human sporting achievement and the gritty realities of politics and ethics and and global tensions. You know, I've witnessed some of that firsthand, not so much maybe, you know, in my Olympic coverage, but some of my Olympic sports coverage, particularly in track and field. And so beyond the thrill of the conspiracy and the chase that happens here, I wanted people to come away reflecting on how sport can expose those truths, but also bridge divides and inspire resilience because I feel like that's what the real Olympic Games do, and that's sort of what helps shape the story.

Dianne Burckhardt 14:50

Oh, definitely. Now, your veteran journalist is a woman and you place her in a setting like guitar. Was there a specific reason for that choice, especially given the environment she's working in?

SPEAKER_00 15:02

Yeah, I rooted Nova in a a couple different ways. I wanted her to be from North, New Jersey, because that's where I grew up. So, first and foremost, I wanted to tie back something deeply personal and having her hail from a section of the city that's a middle-class Jewish sort of part of the town and a community with a lot of resilience. So that like helps shape her. I've got a really good friend named Alan Abrahamson, who was our columnist at NBC Olympics, but he's also spent many years as an independent Olympic journalist. He's got his own website called Three Wire Sports, which was sort of my inspiration for making Nova a independent journalist with her own website, which was a limpulse in the book.

Dianne Burckhardt 15:46

I like that name, by the way.

SPEAKER_00 15:48

Yeah, yeah. I was like, I gotta get clever here and come up with something. So I think that was one inspiration there, like somebody that's a a good friend of mine. I wanted her to be female because I think if I use a male character, uh uh I mean, everybody probably could have sniffed out that Alan was an inspiration. So I I I I partly did not want to do that. But you know, I also look at Nova's grit and drew a little bit from Lara Logan and you know, some of what she went through in Egypt in 2011. And then I'm looking for some tenacity, right? And so some historical figures like Nellie Bly and Ida Tarbell come into play. And I also wanted bits and pieces of some pioneering women journalists then, you know, in the sports world, like Helene Elliott and Leslie Visser, and just blending all of those elements created Nova and like forged her into the character that she was in the book.

Dianne Burckhardt 16:48

So now for listeners who haven't picked it up yet, can you go ahead and give us a more complete overview of Beneath the Rings?

SPEAKER_00 16:55

I can. So, like I mentioned earlier, Beneath the Rings is a high-stakes thriller. It's set at the 20 Doha Olympics, which you know are the first ever hosted in the Middle East. Venerant journalist Nova Mendelssohn, she's a sharp, no-nonsense Olympic insider. She stumbles into a nightmare when 12 athletes, six uh from Israel and six from Lebanon, are kidnapped in this brazen midnight raid. Ransom demands soar, and ancient vendettas explode, and Nova races through the venues of Doha and the back alleys of the town to unravel the conspiracy before the world's eyes kind of go from celebration to catastrophe. Yeah, and that's that's it in a nutshell.

Dianne Burckhardt 17:39

One thing that I thought was really interesting was you have a very simple dedication at the front of your book.

SPEAKER_00 17:44

Yeah. For mom.

Dianne Burckhardt 17:46

Was it a surprise or did she know that was coming?

SPEAKER_00 17:48

She had no idea it was coming. My mom is an avid reader, and she was a school teacher when I was growing up and really emphasized reading for me and my sister. I remember growing up, we would spend our summers in Florida, and you know, we always had school reading lists that we had to get through before the summer was out. And we would go to the beach in the morning and come home and have lunch, and then you know, we had to read after lunch, otherwise, we weren't going back to the beach in the afternoon. And on top of our school reading that we had, we would always go to the public library in Fort Pierce, Florida, and check out more books and read. And to this day, you know, my mom's 80 and she can't stop reading. Like she, when we go on a family vacation and she'll go through three, four books in in a in a week, week and a half. You know, she she reads like it's a job. And so, you know, that on top of her and my dad always pushing me to write a book made it a no-brainer to have a dedication to mom at the beginning.

Dianne Burckhardt 18:53

So, what does she think of your book?

SPEAKER_00 18:55

She liked it. She yeah, she got one of the first copies and she didn't power read it. She she took her time going through it, and sh there were some things like towards the end that she she had some questions about, but overall she uh she thought it was good.

Dianne Burckhardt 19:11

Now that you have this long career as a journalist and you're stepping into being an author, where are you right now? Are you still working in journalism at all? Or have you already made that transition to full-time book writing?

SPEAKER_00 19:23

I haven't made I wouldn't say I've made a transition into full-time book writing. I'm not working in journalism currently. I'm actually looking for some more full-time employment, I think, just financially, like that's what makes sense for my family. But I haven't ruled out writing another book. I'm currently working on some potential screen adaptation of Beneath the Rings. I'd like to pitch Beneath the Rings as something for the big screen or limited series or you know, on a streaming platform or something like that.

Dianne Burckhardt 19:59

This would be the kind of action thriller that would be perfect for that sort of thing.

SPEAKER_00 20:04

Yeah, I and that wasn't my goal when I set out to write it, but you know, after finishing it and and reading the finished product, you know, again after we went through the edit process, it sort of dawned on me that, yeah, this might make for a a good screen adaptation. And I've got a friend that I went to high school with that works in the business and sent him a copy and yeah, he agreed. And so, yeah, that's something that I'm working on right now. But to in terms of writing, I'm not I haven't ri you know started writing anything new. I haven't decided.

Dianne Burckhardt 20:37

Do you think there will be more of Nova and her world, or do you want to maybe venture into something completely different?

SPEAKER_00 20:44

That I haven't decided. I you know, I've I've you know, there you know, without giving too much away, like if I wanted to go back to Nova and Nova's world, I can just the way Beneath the Rings ends. But I haven't decided if I want to go there or do something completely different. You know, I've I've sketched out some ideas for what a return to Nova's world could look like, but nothing too in-depth or crazy yet.

Dianne Burckhardt 21:11

Well, one thing that's really nice about a character like that, with her being in journalism, you can take her in so many different directions.

SPEAKER_00 21:17

Yeah, yeah, and I think that's true. You know, I think one thing that's a little maybe a little bit limiting is her age.

Dianne Burckhardt 21:27

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 21:27

You know, she's covered at you know, at this point, 14 Olympics or whatever the number was, and it's like, okay, well, is she gonna keep doing that? Or is she going to branch away from sports and like you said, like take another journalistic avenue, which she certainly could. So it's kind of open there. You know, I don't know that at her age again, without like giving too much away, I don't know if she can endure any more than she endured in Beneath the Rings. Um, you know, continuing to chase down stuff like this. The in the sports realm, but I don't know.

Dianne Burckhardt 22:03

This seems like the perfect time to do our five quick questions that never turn out to be quick, but I hold out eternal hope that it will happen someday.

SPEAKER_00 22:11

Okay.

Dianne Burckhardt 22:12

So for you, we have the sports edition. Are you ready?

SPEAKER_00 22:16

Yes, I'm ready.

Dianne Burckhardt 22:18

Question one. If you had to give up one sport and never be able to watch it again, what would it be?

SPEAKER_00 22:25

Soccer.

Dianne Burckhardt 22:26

Wow, that was quick.

SPEAKER_00 22:29

Yeah. I mean, I can appreciate soccer for what it is, but like I've never been a huge soccer fan.

Dianne Burckhardt 22:36

Oh wow, that's really funny. You know, you started in sports at 17, so did I, working for a sports magazine covering soccer.

SPEAKER_00 22:43

Okay. Okay.

Dianne Burckhardt 22:46

Question two: what sport would you rather play than watch?

SPEAKER_00 22:51

Hmm. That's a good one. Um, probably volleyball. I like I I like watching volleyball. My daughter and I you know have season tickets to Texas AM, women's volleyball, and they just won the national championship this past season. And she's seven and she plays just starting out, and she loves it. But I think it would be a lot more fun to play than watch. It's fast-paced, it's exciting, it's explosive. I like those aspects of it.

Dianne Burckhardt 23:19

So, question three Who is the nicest sports figure you have ever interviewed?

SPEAKER_00 23:25

Bob Beaman. Bob is the 1968 Olympic long jump champion. I got to know Bob really well doing a documentary film on him for Flowtrack, and got to tell a unique story that a lot of people didn't know. Everybody knows about his magic leap and setting the Olympic record that still stands. Nobody's come close to it since Mexico City. And but before the Olympic Games, he was competing for Texas Southern, which is now UTEP, and protested, civil rights protest, uh competing against BYU and in Utah for their just the you know at the Mormon stance at that time against uh African Americans, and he lost his scholarship, got thrown out of school basically, and lost all his training avenues and pretty much everything. The rug pulled out and from underneath him before the Olympic trials. And that's a story that really wasn't told, and so got to tell that. We went back to UTEP, you know, with Bob and interviewed his old coach and you know some of his teammates at UTEP, and really got to the bottom of that story and got to know him really well. And he's an amazing guy. He plays music, he's into jazz, and a really, really great guy. You know, I wish more people got to know him because he's just fabulous.

Dianne Burckhardt 24:45

Definitely sounds like he made an impression.

SPEAKER_00 24:48

Yeah, he did. He really did. I didn't know much about that story before I went in, and boy, did I learn a lot. You know, just through the interview process. We did, I don't know, something like a four-hour sit-down on-camera interview for this piece. Wow. With him, on top of the auxiliary interviews that we did, you know, like with his teammates and uh his coach. And yeah, it's really amazing. I actually have an autographed picture of Bob in my office and a uh a ticket from the Mexico City Olympics, the the session that he set the Olympic record. Um, yeah, he talked about people that have made an impact. Yeah, he's he made an impact.

Dianne Burckhardt 25:26

Wow, that's incredible.

SPEAKER_00 25:28

Yep, not a quick answer, sorry.

Dianne Burckhardt 25:30

That's why these are never quick.

unknown 25:32

I know.

Dianne Burckhardt 25:34

So question four: who is a sports figure you wish you had been able to interview, but never had the opportunity?

SPEAKER_00 25:41

Who um that's a good one too. I've interviewed so many, so many people. I'm like I'm like going through the Rolodex. Who did I not get to interview? Um, I I met him uh at a track meet, but it was really informal and he wasn't doing interviews and didn't get to interview him. But Lou Zamperini, he again, an another amazing story, was uh an Olympic runner and went to war in World War II and was shot down and in the Pacific and survived on a raft. They they made a movie about his life, it's amazing. I would have loved to have the opportunity to interview him and get to know him a bit, but yeah, I just got to meet him and shake his hand.

Dianne Burckhardt 26:27

That's incredible though. It's like I feel like I should be on Family Hugh going, ooh, good answer, good answer. Now, your final question. We're asking everyone the same question this season because we're making a list that's going to go in our book banter year-in bookbind guide for the holidays to give people ideas for buying books for gifts this year. So, question five. What book to movie adaptation do you think has been the best that you have seen so far?

SPEAKER_00 26:58

Book to adaptation. Was it a movie adaptation? Does it have to be a movie adaptation, or could it be a limited series adaptation?

Dianne Burckhardt 27:06

Oh, that works too.

SPEAKER_00 27:08

Okay, I'm gonna go with a limited series adaptation. And I think that I have two in mind, and I think they both were adaptations. Yeah, I'll go with this one. I'm gonna go with November 22nd, 1963. Stephen King book, and it was adapted into a limited series. I think it's on it might be on Netflix now. It wasn't originally, I think it is on Netflix now, but it kind of follows a character that goes through a time portal to try to stop the Kennedy assassination.

Dianne Burckhardt 27:40

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:42

And the adaptation like was surprisingly close to the book. It was really, really good. That's a sleeper one of mine, but yeah, I think I would go to that one. I would recommend people read the book and then watch the series. It's it's I think it's eight episodes or something like that. It came out in 2016.

Dianne Burckhardt 28:02

So I need to see if I can find that on any of the streaming services here in Germany because I haven't been able to find it yet, but every once in a while somebody will mention it to me again. I think, oh, I need to look again, see if it's in see if it's where I can see it yet. I may just break down and buy it.

SPEAKER_00 28:17

It's streaming on Netflix now here in the US. I don't know about Germany, but I watched it when it originally came out, and I I forget where I watched it originally, if it was on Amazon or somewhere else, but it was produced by JJ Abrams, and he did a he did a like I said, he did a a great job. Um it was on Hulu originally, and and I and I I recently watched it again um with my wife, and it was we watched it on Netflix.

Dianne Burckhardt 28:44

Yeah, I'm gonna have to see if I can find that this weekend.

SPEAKER_00 28:47

Yeah. It's good. James Franco is the lead, he's awesome in it. It's yeah, it's really good.

Dianne Burckhardt 28:53

So now tell our listeners where they can find more information on you and your books.

SPEAKER_00 28:59

Okay, my website is booksbybitaglia.com. I think one of the things that would be great for people that want to learn more about the characters that are in this book. There are about 15 blog posts with like backstories on all the characters. So I didn't really bog the narrative down in the book with a ton of backstory, but if you want it, you got it. It's there. And it's got links to where you can purchase the book. It's available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble and Apple Books everywhere you can get your books online. Hardcover, paperback, Kindle, Apple Book. You know.

Dianne Burckhardt 29:33

And we should point out that people can also go to independent bookstores and request that they get it in for them.

SPEAKER_00 29:39

Yes, that would be amazing. That's been a struggle, honestly. I mean, it's kind of getting it into some independent bookstores. Even for me locally, I've gone to a couple, and there's one in in town that I'm working with right now that is doing like a local author's month, and like we were able to get the book in there, and then there was another one that like took one book and said see you later. Um, so yeah, go to your independent bookstore and and and request it. We would love to get it in um uh to more places.

Dianne Burckhardt 30:09

And people can also request them at their local libraries too.

SPEAKER_00 30:12

Yes. One of the things that I learned from the alphabet book and you know made sure we applied for Beneath the Rings was doing the paperwork for uh getting the book and the title into the Library of Congress. So we have that number, so it's very easy for for libraries to request it and um and get it in.

Dianne Burckhardt 30:31

And as always, we will be sure to put in the description of today's podcast all of your information and links to your social media so it will be very easy for people to find you and your work so that they can just click and go and buy your book.

SPEAKER_00 30:44

Yes, please do.

Dianne Burckhardt 30:47

This has been absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much for doing this with me today.

SPEAKER_00 30:51

Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it.

Dianne Burckhardt 30:54

So there you have it, folks. That was my conversation with the incredible Joe Bataglia. If you are looking for a thriller packed with international intrigue, then Beneath the Rings is definitely one that you're going to want to check out. Considering Joe spent decades covering global sporting events as a journalist, the realism in this story is incredibly compelling. Be sure to follow him on social media so you don't miss out on what's coming next for him. Now, next week we're going to be shifting gears just a little bit as we sit down with Sonia Dakaret, author of The Roots of the Guava Tree, a memoir exploring identity, family, culture, immigration, and growing up as the daughter of a Christian Palestinian father and a Jewish mother. We had a wonderful conversation and she was incredibly easy to talk to. I think you're really going to enjoy hearing about her experiences growing up and how her memoir came to be. And now for a quick update on Burkhart Books and Book Banter Productions. On the podcast and magazine side of things, we are gearing up to attend the Frankfurter Bookmesa this year in October. So if you are an author, agent, publisher, publicist, anyone involved in the publishing industry who is planning to attend the bookmesa this year, we would love the opportunity to be able to interview you live on the convention floor. Be sure to reach out so that we can schedule a time to get together during the event. Now, over on the Burkhart book side, make sure you are following us on our Facebook page because we are beginning to roll out character spotlights and behind the scenes information for the upcoming Haunted Hearts Paranormal Romance series. And you might not be aware of this, but we actually have two Facebook pages, one for the Burkhart book side of things and one for the Book Banter production side of things. So if you're wanting to check out the books, you need to follow us on Burkhart Books Facebook page. Be sure to check the link directly to our Burkhart Books Facebook page. In the description of today's podcast and the first book of our Haunted Heart series, Langston Watch Hotel, is tentatively scheduled for release this October, and we are starting early to introduce readers to the cast, the mysteries, the paranormal investigations, and the haunted world behind the series before the first book officially launches. And if you would like to find out more about this Haunted Heart series, check out our season five, Episode 216, podcast takeover episode with Sebastian Duro Russell, where he interviewed Diaz Stevens all about this new paranormal romance series we're developing that is based on actual ghost hunting adventures that the author went on in college. Well, I think that's enough for today, folks. So you know what that means. It's time for you all to go forth and be really happy. Thank you for joining us today. Be sure to subscribe to BookBanter with Diane Burkhart on your favorite podcast streaming service. Because if you love books like we do, you do not want to miss a single episode of this podcast.