Publishing Industry Insider Secrets Every Indie Author Should Know

Boni:
Joining me today is David Morris. Hi David.

David Morris:
Hey there everybody.

Boni:
David is the former VP and publisher of Zondervan Publishers. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right. But that's a division of Harper Collins Christian. So David, how long were you inside the trenches of the publishing industry?

I've been in publishing for over 25 years. I was at Zondervan, which is part of Harper Collins, Harper Collins Christian, the faith division of Harper Collins for seven years. And I was at Guideposts Magazine the 17 years prior to that, it’s a little inspirational magazine that has a circulation of two or three million across the country.
It was, it's still a very popular magazine and one of the highest renewal rates and that was a direct mail book business. So, we use the names generated by the subscriptions to then introduce products, books, mostly to those customers. And it was a really, really, good high volume, but narrow publishing program.

Boni:
Well, I frequently talk about the dramatic changes in the publishing industry since about 2008. So what you have seen in terms of changes to the publishing industry must have a greater change trajectory. What would you say would be one or two of the biggest changes that you saw in the industry in, in the time that you were there?

David:
Obviously, it's the digital revolution that has, that has reshaped everything from retail distribution to how publishing happens, how books get created to marketing the books. You know, I, I think probably the toughest change in all of that has been what's gone on with retail stores. So, you know, who goes to a shopping mall anymore, like they used to? And remember B Dalton or Walden books? You know, those were some pretty cool chains way back in the day where you could just wander into while you were out, looking for jeans or something for Christmas. And those stores just aren't there anymore. So that has cut down the ability for people to browse and go into a bookstore and find a book that they may not have been planning on buying or going and planning on buying a book, but picking up other books or learning about authors that are out there.
Bookstores used to be for publishers, a marketing mechanism, my marketing tool. If we could work with and partner with the bookstores, we could get books in the stores and they’d help sell the books and help create access to consumers, to book buyers, to readers. And now publishers have had to find other ways of doing that. And that’s just the changes to the bookstore retail environment. I'm in the faith area, and what we've called Christian bookstores have gone from about 8,000 to about 2000 in a matter of ten years. And the volume at those stores is just very, very slim. And that was a big part for, for that audience, a big marketing tool for those publishers. And so that's created a lot of change.

Boni:
And there still is a hold over, maybe hold over is the wrong word. But in the indie author space, people still think it's the Holy grail to get their book into a brick-and-mortar bookstore, that if I can say that I've got my book on the bookshelves of whatever store it is, that that is going to be the thing that's going to propel my sales over the top. And I think, and maybe I'll ask if you agree, if that is kind of a holdover from those days when that was the main marketing tool for selling books and that it doesn’t consider the power that exists now in the digital marketplace.

David:
I think certainly it's not everything to have your book in a bookstore. I mean, especially during this pandemic time, I've ordered a ton of books. I've had more time to do some reading lately, and I'm not alone in that. And you know, my wife's getting tired of that truck that keeps pulling up to the front door as a new book arrives. And then I gotta figure out what to do with the plastic that it came in. But the other thing too is just think about publicity. It used to be, speaking of holdover, it used to be that if you got your book on a major national network show or other major publication, you could move a lot of books.

I can think of a radio show that used to move 20,000 books. If it was the right segment about the right book with the right audience, they could move books. It was a big deal. But nowadays there's just too much choice. People call it noise. I call it choice. Who listens to radio the way that they used to? There's Spotify, there's streaming music, there's satellite radio, there's podcasts and audio books all competing for our audio attention. Then just think about cable TV. You know, who's watching the major network shows the morning shows these days? I think those are still juggernauts and still very popular, but it's just doesn't mean the same thing. Stand in a room of a hundred people under age 30 and ask them who actually has a cable connection and gets network broadcast. You'll see very few hands. I don't think we've grappled with that change yet.

Boni:
No, in so many ways the owners of those cable companies haven't certainly grappled with whatever the new revenue model is going to be. But this leads us to something else that's happening that you and I've talked about a couple of times. There is more opportunity I think, and more choice for the author in terms of how they want to proceed to get their book to market. They can self-publish, they can work with a hybrid publisher. They can try to get a deal with a traditional publisher. And really those options didn't exist, at least in the way that they do now. And, for the last number of years, what's happening is that the traditional publishers are, by necessity, and I would argue that it's economic necessity, they are choosing to work more and more exclusively with the bestseller types, the big name authors, and they're no longer—either at all or not as much—developing those new authors and the mid-list authors. Which raises the question, what is happening with those new authors and where does the responsibility fall for the development of those voices?

David:
Yeah, that's a big question. I think with some different parts to it, but I think one of the ways of understanding what's happened lately is again, getting back to the digital revolution, what we've had is a winnowing of channels. There aren't as many channels through which you can distribute books that helps you get the word out about books. So, not as many bookstores, for example, so where books are still sold in hard copy are very limited. You've got Barnes and Noble, probably the biggest chain. I think it's still over 700 stores, but they're always reinventing themselves and they just have gone through that again in the last year or so. And they're certainly having to do it now during the pandemic.

A lot of talk, a lot of excitement still around what I think people in the business called the mass market channel or the big box stores, like Target, Walmart, Costco and so on. But those, I mean, picture the book section at a Walmart. It’s so small compared to a normal bookstore, and yet that's where a lot of book business happens. And let's just go pick one topic or one category of an interest area or genre within that, and go to Walmart and say, well, I want to see what kind of books they have about cooking. Well, cooking's probably pretty popular, but still there's going to be only so much space for those books. So that's put a lot of pressure on publishers to be hit-driven more than ever, and they're only looking for the cream of the crop the books that are the best.
And I think that's, that's part of a bigger picture of publishers consolidating, buying each other, and smaller publishers going out of, fading away. That's just the way of commerce in the United States.

I would say that what I've experienced is that actually as much as that sounds like bad news, there actually is a great opportunity there. If the big houses are only going for books that are going to make so much money for them in a year, and they're just ignoring everybody else, I mean, they're ignoring books that are going to sell five, 10, 15,000 units.

So, if you're an author with that kind of potential, you have an opportunity to strike out on your own and perhaps even have more control better revenue stream from the book. And I think that's where the challenge is now. Some people might say, well, okay, now you're just joining a whole big crowd of people who are all trying to vie for attention and get attention. And there's a lot of noise out there. I'm not a big fan of that argument, that there's a lot of noise. I'd say that there's a lot of choice. And if you can, if you can find your audience and really dial in to that audience, you're doing something that those big publishers who are putting books in Walmart, aren't doing.

You know, I'll just use an analogy from the music business. I'm an Americana, or they used to call it a country kind of fan. I love to listen to Williams and John Prine and I never, I never used to know about that music. I used to be a guy who listened to classic rock radio stations. And if I could find an alternative rock radio station, I'd listen to that, but it's the same stuff, over and over and over again, that a lot of other people are listening to. But I've got a little bit of a roots history to my family and you know, a little bit of a Southern history and I just got tuned into some of this Americana music when the whole digital revolution happened and Napster came along and, you know, I know, you know, say what you will for better, for worse about it, but Napster actually helped people discover things. It was very, very disruptive at the time that it was going on. And now I've got these playlists on Spotify where I'm just, I'm loving this music. I'm so dialed into some of these artists. In fact, I am a Patreon sponsor for one or two artists that I just really love. And they're local artists here in West Michigan, where I live.

And if you think of yourself as a book author, trying to reach that highly engaged reader who's just going to love your content. That's not something the bigger publishers are going to be good at as much as it used to be.

Boni:
That is very good insight and can lead to some good advice. So I'm going to, I was furiously making my notes here, as you started talking about the answer to that, that very long-winded question, which is how does an author know how to get connected to their audience?

David:
How does an author know? I think that's a really good question. You know, I myself am trying to develop my own voice as an author. I have a PhD in religious studies and I've kind of always [been thinking about that] in the background as I've been working through the publishing business and raising a family and developing a career. But you know, I know that the experience that I have, what I want to write about, is something I think that a lot of people share, but not everybody.

And I think that it just takes time to start working on your craft, work on your concept, start getting the words down on paper, start building a website, start figuring out how you describe yourself. I'm working on my own bio right now, and it's gone through various iterations and I'm still not happy with it, but every time I work on it, it keeps getting further and further. So, I think it's a question of identity and identity is sometimes defined as knowing who you are. It's a question of knowing who you are and putting yourself out there.

Boni:
Well, I totally lost my internet connection. I didn't mention at the beginning, but it I'm in Mexico and our internet can be, you know, it's wonderful in Mexico. The weather is fantastic. The view is fantastic and the internet not so much. So, I had to reconnect.

Let's go back because this is such an important question. Thank you for playing along and keeping talking in case people were able to hear you. So how does an author get themselves into that sweet spot of thinking that they can target to the right audience group? We talk about that at Ingenium Books, we use the language identifying your reader, singular, to be in that place where they're able to move 10,000 or 15,000 units.

David:
Probably a lot of it too is just learning about who you are and experimenting with describing yourself and putting yourself out there, whether it's through articles and or, or speaking, and, you know, your audience, when you find people gravitating to you, they will help you to find who you are. And I think as authors, as writers, it's very easy to be an introvert, a lot of them are introverts, and you can stay sort of within your own little space, but the more you can get yourself out there, the more you'll discover how people responding to you and how they describe you.

Boni:
What would you say would be, you know, the most important thing? Some people say the most important thing is the content [of your book] needs to be good. Some people say, well, it doesn't matter what the content is like, it doesn't matter if it's a good book inside, it needs to have a great cover. And then there's the copywriting. There's so many moving parts. You were in an entire organization that was built around all of the components of getting a book to market. Now we're talking about a single author, never having done it before, in many cases trying to go through those steps where there are normally, or have been traditionally, big teams. So, is that too long-winded a question for you to get in at what, what do you think is the most important place to start?

David:
I think that this is one of the things that was occurring to me earlier, too. It's also just a question of continuous self-education about your category. So if you, if your book is a certain kind of book, then you know, make sure that you have done some pretty good research on the other kinds of books that are just like it that are out there. Yeah. A good place to start would be to go into a physical bookstore. They have a way of aggregating books together that you don't necessarily see when you're online. I've always been frustrated when I try to go online and learn about what's going on in a category and Amazon just doesn't, doesn't do the trick for me. It just doesn't somehow it just doesn't aggregate things as well.

It's [Amazon] also not known as a great place for discovery of books, by the way. That's one of the sad things about not having bookstores or maybe as many libraries as we used to, or people in libraries. But I think that's a lot of it. Definitely the internet is definitely very helpful still though. I mean, it's extremely helpful. If you then look at that author online, what are they saying about themselves online? Who are they reaching who are there, like if they're on social media, look and see who's following them. And, and now you're starting to get an idea of who their audience is. A little trick that we do in publishing when we're looking for new authors is we go and we see, we look up authors that are exciting to us that maybe we've already acquired, or we just like them.

And we look and see who they're following, because sometimes they're following an intern, an interesting influencer who hasn't actually yet published. So I think don't just look at who is following someone else, but look at who they are following and see what you learn. It's a lot of, you know, it's a lot of hit or miss. But I think if you dedicate yourself to just continuing to explore it after a while, you'll build up on a fund of knowledge. Then go look at your jacket, the copy on your book. Is the description on Amazon right? What does it look like on your website? Go back and tweak that some more, look at how those other authors are positioning themselves. What kind of messages are they saying on their socials and how would I do that? And how could I package some content that can help grow awareness of my book and grow an audience around the content that I've offered?

Boni:
And that whole interface with Amazon? The, the positioning and how the potential buyer views and responds to a book you know, all the technical parts of figuring out what categories and what keywords, you know, all that stuff is a big chunk. And it represents a healthy learning curve for any indie author. n interface? How many people did you have just working at the Amazon interface when you were at Zondervan?

David:
Well, I probably shouldn’t be about saying too much about real specifics on a show like this. I would say that there was a team of people and they were, were deeply invested in what they were doing. There were custom analytical tools that were being built. So that tells you the sort of depth of the team that was there helping us analyze, you know, how strong an author's book page is on Amazon and giving us clues as to what we might work on to try to up the product purchases on that when people come to that book page and just a lot of really good data around the online presence of a book. But also, there was, from a sales side, people helping us understand the data that we're getting from Amazon, the sales data. I don't even know if I knew all that was going on, but I knew that it was like, wow, there's just so much in-depth study. I think sometimes the problem can be when there's all that data it's inside of a company that they have, it's a challenge sometimes to get it, to translate well to the publishing teams. And that's, that's just something that's sort of you know, characteristic of a timeline that we live in.

Boni:
And then one of the other big components, you and I talked about this offline as well, there's one kind of writing that you need to apply to develop the book and that takes a certain skill. And then it's a different kind of writing—copywriting writing—designed to encourage people to take action, which is to buy the book. And often that is a place where the indie author and often the indie publishers, like us, have a harder time because we've been invested, sometimes for decades, in a different kind of writing expertise. So, what's your recommendation there? Is that something that authors should be looking to develop, embracing the copywriting-marketing-sales writing component for their jacket copy and descriptions, or is there some other trick?

David:
Yeah. Well, gosh, I mean, I think maybe because of the way that the industry is, every author should try to become a generalist and learn as many disciplines about publishing as they can. It's funny. I worked with one author with our publishing house for quite a long time. And he said, I never, ever really realized that the publisher can't do everything for you. And so, yeah, he realized that even as successful as he is, he had to keep working, he had to keep working on it. And, you know, that's another thing too, I might say. I mean, being, being an author is something that you've got to take seriously. If you, if you want to, if you've got big goals, if you've got high expectations and, and obviously you can, you can measure your expectations and only invest as much as you really need to commensurate with those expectations.

But let's say you've got high aspirations. Well, let's say you hit them, you know, let's say you sell half a million copies of a book. Well, do you know how much work that is for an author once they hit that level? There are high expectations from the publisher, especially if they're getting big advances, there's high expectations from the readership and boy that's pressure to write another book. And you know, a lot of authors will get cagey about that. They'll hit a wall. So I think that educating yourself, like copywriting, for example, it really shouldn't be that different than how you structure your book. It should have a problem that you're trying to solve, an answer or a thesis on how you plan to solve it, and the supporting information for that. And hopefully you make it very informative. And I'm obviously thinking more nonfiction here. And then a very strong feeling-oriented benefit, a takeaway, and it can't just be intellectual. It's gotta be, how's this impacting me? How's this making me feel, hopefully it's making me feel inspired and it's making me feel better.

Reading can be a very personal process. So, you might say it's narcissistic or selfish, but when you're asking someone to spend 25 bucks on a book that you wrote, it's a very personal process. But I think that it's very important to be a well-rounded writer-slash-marketer-slash-business person when it comes to being an author.

Boni:
You touched on something that is often, at least in my experience, often misunderstood by authors and as they pursue the perceived Holy grail of a traditional publishing contract, which is that they won't have to do anything or much when it comes to doing the work of marketing the book. What's your experience with that? How active do authors need to be, even if they're in a traditional publishing relationship?

David:
Yeah. Even in a traditional publishing relationship you'll hear authors say that you know, writing the book and getting that manuscript done was like giving birth, but then when it came to actually launching the book, it was like having to do it all over again. It was just as hard and they had no idea how hard it would be. I mean, even for an author who's well-known, and everybody's clamoring for their attention to sort of schedule all those podcast interviews and really, really work your own platform. And it's changed. It's changed. I can think of an author that a lot of us publishers were pitching for. And the price of the advanced was going up and up and up. And we just, we just bailed because we said this author is just not willing to do the work for this kind of an advance. So I'm not sure I'm answering your question. I think I got a little bit off, off your question.

Boni:
You have to, you have to be ready to roll up sleeves regardless of which way you publish.

David:
Yeah. That's because your book is part of your message. It's part of who you are. You want it, you want what you're doing to be more than just your book is what you're trying to communicate. And I think that's, yes, that if you can see a more holistic approach to what you're doing, then it really is going to be worthwhile no matter what.

Boni:
Right. Just as we get ready to wrap up, what your top one, two, or three takeaways, biggest pieces of advice, from your experience, on what indie authors should be doing today?

David:
Certainly, just keep building your platform. Find the right group for you, find some really good resources that you enjoy digging into. You know, from just a purely marketing standpoint, you might look at Seth Godin's, This is Marketing. But that's more just a general, like how to tell good stories about your product and be empathetic in what you're doing and problem solving in your space. Mike Hyatt's book called Platform. It's actually been out for a while, but it's still very good on all the fundamentals. And then I think just do some research and find a good site, a good blogger who talks about social media and website promotion, and email list marketing and just continue to learn, just keep coming back at it and learn things. And it's consistency over time. That really seems to pay off in the world that we're in right now. And that's a good thing that you can use that to your advantage as long as there's consistency and you keep at it.

Boni:
David, this has been very informative and interesting and even a little embarrassing with my internet connection and disappearing from the conversation…

David:
It's the time we're in.

Boni:
Exactly. You know, stuff happens. That's right. So thank you so much for your time. And maybe one day we'll bring you back.

David:
Sounds good. I appreciate the opportunity. Thanks so much. Take care of you, Yvonne. Thanks for listening. Bye-Bye.