The Truths Behind Book Publishing In the Modern Age
We've got a little bit of a special episode today. We will be talking about publishing, and I want to start with a question for Todd. Todd, why did you want to publish a book? What did you think it would solve in your life?
Todd: “I never wanted to publish a book. Early in my sales career, I was at a sales seminar, and at all these sales seminars, they always have speakers that come as guests, right? And then there was the big keynote speaker. I was with my boss, and when I found out what the speaker made, who wasn't very good, very interesting, or very funny, I wanted to do what he does. He made more in an hour than I made in two months. So, I signed up with Toastmasters to start learning how to public speak, and I bought this book called Speak Grow Rich. This is what the first chapter of the book said: If you write a book, you become an instant expert. This means if you take a hundred doctors, and then two of them write books, they're also doctor authors. They're going to be more desirable for those well-paying speaking gigs.”
Joe: "In a sense, a book is something you can stand on and puts you higher than the rest of the crowd.”
Todd: “Yea, and going back to your original question, what will this solve in my life? I thought I was going to be rich drugs and tiger owning money. It was gonna solve my poverty issue. However, that didn't happen, of course, and I have learned throughout the years that there is no such thing as an instant expert.”
Joe: “For those that listen to the re-engineered you, Todd will sometimes call me an award-winning author. That is not completely true; he's very polite. I have some contest awards from a couple of minor national contests and honorable mentions from a couple of international ones, so nothing earth-shattering. Now, Todd looks at publishing the way the older generation looks at it, which is something you do to raise your career. I went at it from the younger generation’s perspective, which is growing up knowing that self-publishing was an ocean and that when you drop your book into that ocean, it just makes a little plop nobody pays attention to. And the way to try to overcome that is to prove it first by going to contests until you win something massive. That is when you can start submitting to agents and editors.”
Todd: “Let me tell you something about self-publishing. I was such a cornball trying to be famous. I even tried to make it sound like a big Publishing House. I guess Evel Knievel would be proud of me.”
In today's world of self-promotion, self-actualization, and self-mythologizing, everyone has a book out. And if you don't have a book, other professionals might assume you don't have a real message. Well, today we're talking about that message, or more specifically, we're talking about how to publish that message. It's safe to say our own publishing history is a bit odd. We're not publicists here at the re-engineered you, but Joe and I have stumbled into the same tiger pit on our way to the printing press. And on today's episode, we're going to point it out for you so you can avoid taking the same tumble. To get us started, we have three myths to debunk about publishing your first book.
Myth 1: Writing is simple. You write an interesting story, you sell it, and you reap the royalties. Why pretend the state of publishing is any more complicated?
But first, I want to tell Joe about another small-town writer who couldn't seem to get his first book off the ground. A barely known author by the name of Stephen King. We have talked to Stephen King on this podcast before, specifically our alcoholism episode. We're not going down into his drugs and alcoholism. But what we are talking about is his publishing rejection. His first book, Carrie, was rejected by 30 publishers. It was finally published in 1974, and it sold over a million copies in only 12 months. So, knowing that Stephen King went the traditional publishing route, meaning he got those rejections, he submitted until one of them finally accepted.
Publishing, even the biggest publishers, do a lot of their own sales nowadays due to editors and publishers taking a large cut of the profits. However, I know some published authors and what I've heard from them is that traditional publishing has an advantage over self-publishing. They have an investment in you and have proven marketing strategies ready. They have a structure that you can use to sell your book. Even if you're the most extraordinary writer, that does not mean you're going to get a monster check from the publisher. They save those for established writers who have proven to sell a certain number of books. Some fantastic writers don't sell anything, and some less than amazing writers sell millions. You have to put out a couple of books first and establish yourself, and then your paycheck gets higher and higher as you climb that mountain.
There are actually websites where people have gone and done the math on how long it takes to get good at writing and how many hours it takes to write a book versus how much you get paid. It is far less than minimum wage. You’re basically writing for free for your first few books. You're building up to a career, or you're using a book to promote your own career on the side. If it's regular publishing, not self-published, you're literally competing against a million books a quarter. We're shooting a book out into space at this point with how many there are out there, and it is because of what we talked about at the top of the episode. Everybody wants to be able to stand on that book and say I'm an expert. What is worse is that book sales are stagnant despite the explosion of books published. Brick and mortar stores have started declining by about 42%. It's getting harder and harder to sell new titles every year. Furthermore, today's new titles are being sold to the authors and publishing communities, meaning they are not selling to new people necessarily. They're selling to their Facebook and Twitter followers. They're selling to communities of people that are already buying their stuff and following them.
Resource to check out: 10 Awful Truths About Publishing.
Myth 2: Okay, already written my book, and it's a scorcher. If I don't want to go through the rejection process with a publishing house, surely, I can just hire someone to edit and print the thing.
For those that are out there looking to self-publish, you can totally do that. You can arrange it as Todd did (radios and podcasts). You can do relentless self-promotion to get yourself off the ground solo. In fact, Todd had Mrs. Brady herself, Florence Henderson, buy his book.
Having that in mind, we're going to move ahead and assume that people who are listening still want to publish. Let’s get into the pitfalls of publishing, the things that you should be avoiding while you are going down the publishing road. So, the first one I want to get into is scam publishers who charge reading fees. They flatter you, and they include a lot of flowery language to tell you it's going to be a hit but need a little money for their time. If they are charging a fee to read your stuff, that means they don't expect to sell it. They're not going to promote it. So, you are actually paying for their time to read what they consider probably something unsellable. They will also sometimes charge you royalties. Real publishers will want to talk about selling your future books. They will talk about selling what you have now and making it a hit and are looking at working with you in the future. Remember, agents don't usually invest if you are only going to write one book. They want to pair up with you only if you are going to be putting out material your whole life.
I'm going to quote Times Higher Education. Martin McQuillan said, “Walk away from anyone who asks you for money to publish your book. If you believe in your material, take it seriously and treat it well.” If you go traditional publishing, take your time to find an editor. Find one who's worked on other great books. You can find good sources by just looking through your favorite books (inside covers). And finally, I would recommend for anyone who is considering testing the waters out with short fiction, you can look up magazine shorts and see what is open. There are two sources: Duo Trope and Grinder are resources online and they show you the market. You just write in the genre of what you've written, and it will show you people looking for submissions. The most prominent name people in publishing right now (even ones with ghostwritten content) have had to do sick amounts of promotion, and I think the big key to that is they had an awesome book to promote. Regardless of what you do, just keep trying because trying is winning.
Myth 3: So, my first book didn't rake in the royalties and prestige I thought it might. What if I want to try again? What market or genre or market should I be writing in to improve my odds?
If you are actually going to take the time to get good at writing, even if your ghostwriting, you want to get a consistent grouping. You want to hit a bullseye every once in a while. I have seen in writing where you'll encounter an author who has one really fantastic book, and the rest are absolute garbage. I encounter a lot of short story writers where they have one really good one, and the rest are just so-so. What we're advocating here is don’t spend a lot of care and time on one book and not give much thought to the next one. Guess what? You can make a best seller from your first book by making a bullseye with the third one. Dan Brown wrote Angels and Demons. Most people didn't know about that until they read the Da Vinci Code and went back and read his other ones.
What genre sells the most? Statistically, what people are into are memoirs and biographies of people who are already wealthy or famous. Coming in at second are self-help books. The next one is religion and spirituality. The fourth biggest selling genre in hard books is health, fitness, and dieting. And then the final one is politics and social science. In eBooks, the order is religion and spirituality, memoirs and biographies, business and money, self-help, and cookbooks/food/vine. For subgenres, the list goes as romance and erotica ($1.44B), crime and mystery ($728M), religious and inspirational ($720M), So sci-fi and fantasy ($590M), children and young adult ($160M), and horror ($79M).
Overall, U.S. sales are projected to reach about $44B in 2020, which is an increase. We talked about how the book market is shrinking. However, that was print. We are now talking about digital eBooks and audiobooks. If you look at the book market in general, it is all audiobooks. Circle back to something that Stephen King said in his book about writing, “Only write what you love, and write what you read. If you read horror, don't try to write exotica.” I know we just went down that list, but you really should just write the one you love the most.
Final Thoughts
If you're ever at a cocktail party, and your best friend is toting his or her new novel, there's no need to run home and write your own just yet. Before you begin picking out cover art and who you're going to thank on the inside page, there are a few things to bear in mind. Book sales, especially books sold in traditional brick-and-mortar stores, are shrinking. Less than 1% of published books ever hit those shelves. New titles, even those by established authors, are getting harder and harder to sell. And the authors who do make sales end up selling to their own online communities without nearly as much help or marketing from the publishers.
In all likelihood, your braggart friend who's holding up his new book had itself published. If that's the case, he might have gotten scammed, swindled by reading and processing fees, and flattered by publishers who told him his memoir about being a boring middle manager was a guaranteed best-seller. In reality, if you choose to publish your book, do it for the love of writing because you should believe in the message you are putting out into the world. Furthermore, don't be afraid to try traditional gatekeepers like editors, take your time to find your market, and when your big hit is finally released, you can tell your friends. They won't find it in stores or collecting dust on your shelf. They'll find it on their phone, in an audiobook ready for them to listen to during their morning commute.