How should you get your book published? The traditional route or by self publishing? The Octo Interview with Lee Robertson

Books Build Brands, Episode 5. From an interview between Lee Robertson, CEO of Octo, the app for financial planners and advisers, and Steven Sonsino, a business school professor who also publishes bestselling books.

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Episode 5: How can you get your book published?

Steven: So if you want a powerful way to build trust and transparency, share your stories, share your case studies, and your book will be so much better than 99 per cent of the other texts out there for your audience, the ones just with bulletpoints and platitudes.

And your ideal clients are trawling through these books, desperately trying to find the answer they’re looking for, trying to find the person that they trust. So I would say in answer to your question?‘Absolutely.’ It is well worth writing another business book right now.

Lee: Okay, thank you. As you say, this plays really well to the Financial Planner Stories initiative Alan Smith’s been driving, with a bit of support from us. People forget, but we know inside just what a profound good, good financial planning does.

And sometimes at the most difficult and the most intimate moments in people’s lives, you know, deaths and disablement and long-term illness. All the things that advisors do, that pastoral bit we do. So I take that point really well. And I think that’s why we’re so keen to be behind the FP Stories project that Alan has been driving. So thank you for all of that.

So we’re going to talk, if we may move on a little bit, to the mechanics of it, perhaps. So let’s say you’ve got your first book written. You’ve used your checklist. You’ve used your app, perhaps. You’ve had all that support. You’ve done your interviews. You’ve got it all down into one place. You’re beginning to move towards looking to get it published. Do you want to talk through the various ways and the mechanics there?

First, consider mainstream publishing

Steven: Yeah, it’s an important part of the puzzle. And it’s probably one you should tackle in parallel with writing the book, right. Rather than write your manuscript and then think, what do I do with this? Because how you publish, how you get your book out there, actually has an impact on how you write and prepare your book for publication.

In days gone by – I’m sounding so old, so last century – you’d go to the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook and it is humongous. It lists all the publishers that exist in your country, and they have various versions of this.

If you’re in the United States, there’s a similar publication from Bowker’s. But you can choose your publisher from this – or start to identify the ones of interest, at least.

And you can identify publishers who will accept proposals. So you don’t always have to have an agent. That’s not really the case for fiction. For fiction you will pretty much always need an agent. But the Yearbook will actually tell you that Penguin Random House, for example, won’t take a proposal from you without an agentthat, but Bloomsbury Press, for example, will accept a proposal.

So have a look at the publishers in professional areas that have an interest for you. You could pull a book off your shelf that’s in a similar area to the one you propose to write and see who publishes it. Then check that out in something like the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook… do they accept proposals? And then you’ve got to craft a proposal, which is a whole other challenge, but we’ll look at that another time.

Be prepared to search and pitch for a mainstream publisher

So to get a book published by a traditional publisher is going to take you some effort, partly because… well, I mentioned Berrett-Koehler Publishers and Steve Piersanti, he gets something like a thousand proposals a year. But they can only handle 40 a year. So it’s a pretty stiff selection process.

And the selection process includes the question how big is your community? How many people are you regularly in touch with? So for me as a professor, I have a number of students or executives in my community. I will actually come across 6,000 or so people a year in workshops and on stages around the world, which is an amazing opportunity to sell them my book, whether it’s a textbook or a general management book.

Consider what size is the community you are writing for

Another community you might have is a community on LinkedIn that is very engaged with you. It’s possible that you could sell copies there.

Because the business model of the publisher is they want your book as part of their portfolio. And they will invest in it if they think it’s a good idea and – most importantly – if you have your own audience. Then they will pay to print it for you. Because they get their money on the backend when you sell copies to your audience.

Publishers deduct 90 per cent of sales – you only receive 10 per cent royalties

People have this idea that you don’t pay to give your book to a traditional publisher. That’s not true. You just pay when it’s published. They deduct the fee as a massive commission –?90 per cent – from your sales. So that’s one of the reasons why you won’t make any money from the direct sales of your book by a publisher. The publisher benefits – to the tune of 90 per cent of sales – from all your hard work.

So the biggest advantage of going with a traditional publisher is they will handle all the technical publishing side for you. You don’t have to learn how to publish. You don’t have to learn typography. You don’t have to find a printer. You don’t have to find a designer. However, the disadvantage of that, or one of the disadvantages, is that you will have no control over the design. You won’t be able to influence the cover, the way the thing looks, in any way.

You will have to buy your own book for workshops/conferences

Worse still, you won’t be able to get copies of your book, except by buying them from the publisher. You will be the publisher’s biggest single customer. And they will charge you at least 50 per cent and maybe 60, 70, or even 75 per cent of the cover price so you can get copies of your own book, to give away at a seminar or for PR purposes. So be clear – you pay in arrears with a traditional publisher.

Here’s a quick summary of the pros and cons of traditional publishing.

Now look seriously at self-publishing – it's a gamechanger

If you want to self-publish your book it is now totally possible for you to do so – and it’s easier and quicker than you imagine. David Meerman Scott has done this with Standout Virtual Events, which we talked about in Episode 4.

How that works is you write your book in Word, to go onto the Amazon platform in the Kindle format, and there’s also a process called print-on-demand, where your paperback is only printed when somebody buys it. So self publishing can be very straightforward.

With Standout Virtual Events, once they’d finished their manuscript, it took David and his co-author Michelle Manafy about 10 days to make it available on Amazon – both as Kindle and print-on-demand. You can tell if you’ve got a print-on-demand book in your collection because on the very last page it says printed in… whatever country you’re in... by Amazon.

This is a pretty cool situation because it means that you, as an author, don’t have to print 200 or a thousand copies and have them sitting under your bed until you sell them. So print on demand is an extremely fast and a good way to get your work out there, but you have to understand the process.

Here's a summary of the pros and cons of self-publishing.

Does traditional publishing ‘look better’ than self-publishing?

Lee: Just to help the audience, is there a hierarchy in terms of, if you got a publisher, does that look better than if you self-publish or is that an old fashioned kind of viewpoint?

Steven: It seems to me to be a weird myth that just keeps going. I think in the business community, unless you’re published by Harvard Business Press, I don’t think it really matters, right. You have probably come across From Good to Great by Jim Collins?

Lee: Yeah.

Steven: My guess is you don’t know who published that, which means that you really don’t care.

Or think of Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Pat Lencioni… who published that? Even ask yourself who published Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People? We don’t know the names of these publishers.

In theory, if you’re published, it means that somebody has had a degree of quality control over your book. And it’s kind of got the rubber stamp of approval. Somebody, somewhere took that book and got it into print.

Publishers today are stretched – quality may be falling

But you know what? The quality of some of these things we’ve seen in our own experience has not been so good. We talked a few moments ago about rubbish books that still get through. Where were the commissioning editors? Why do publishers still accept rubbish books? Is it because if the author can shift them publishers will make a lot of money for little effort on their part?

But also I want to ask where are the editors? So many things are slipping through.

The last book that we ran with a publisher was Leadership Unplugged in 2003. That was with Palgrave Macmillan. And the reason it’s the last book that we gave to a publisher was when we discovered in the same season that there was a book called Redefining Financial Services... that had the same subtitle as ours, The New Renaissance of Value Propositions. And our book came out second.

What happened is that somebody had basically had pretty much the same cover, copied and pasted the strapline, and both books had gone out. So it’s a myth that mainstream publishers are always pretty good on the design side.

In fact, marketing was also general problem for Leadership Unplugged. On all books there’s a barcode at the back. But in the days when they still had price labels, someone allowed a price label to be put over the barcode. So WH Smith rejected it – or at least that's the story as I understand it.

So it’s a myth that traditional publishers have high quality all the time. To be honest I’m sure we were just very unlucky. But it has changed the way we publish ever since 2003 –?and I'm glad.

Self-publishing gives you complete control

I think that the way you can control quality completely, is if you take charge. Self publishing is the answer to all the challenges of traditional publishing.

Our most recent book, which came out this week, is called cunningly, You Should Write a Book. I think it has a good design – smiling faces on the cover, strong colours. We did the design ourselves.

You have someone do it in Photoshop, you pay someone to do a really good design for you, you pay someone to get really nice typography inside, and you can produce something that is really quite smart, if not better than a traditional publisher. It just depends what quality standards you have and what your budget is for that. You can do it all yourself, if you know what you’re doing, but you don’t want to look DIY.

So hire someone who understands the process, and you can do something where the quality is as good, if not better than a mainstream publisher.

So to your question, ‘is traditional publishing somehow better than self-publishing’, I think it’s a hang up from the old days when we had this phrase ‘vanity publishing’, when somebody would have their poems published, ‘I’ll pay no matter how rubbish my poems are. I just want to see them in a book.’

Be clear: self publishing is not vanity publishing. The effort that you have to go to, to put a book out there today, is quite something. That is not vanity publishing. That is something very special and very satisfying when you get to hold your book in your hands.

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