Episode 075 - Key Book Publishing Paths with Jane Friedman
April 20, 2021
Jane Friedman reviews Key Book Publishing Paths, and describes considerations for fitting the path to your desired destination. We talk about how publishing isn’t indy or traditional—it’s a spectrum—and how hybrid authors aren’t necessarily authors who are using hybrid publishers. We talk about lessons one model can learn from another, and red flags to watch out for when you are assessing companies to do business with.
Jane Friedman has 20 years of experience in the publishing industry, with expertise in business strategy for authors and publishers. She’s the editor of The Hot Sheet, the essential industry newsletter for authors, and has previously worked for F+W Media and the Virginia Quarterly Review. In 2019, Jane was awarded Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World; her newsletter was awarded Media Outlet of the Year in 2020.
"Traditional publishing is still valid. There are simply good decisions based on the project, where you're at in your career, and what you want to see come out of it. Each project is another decision point. Each book is another decision point. You have to decide which path best suits this book." —Jane Friedman
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Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast today. My guest is Jane Friedman. Hey Jane, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Jane: Hi, Matty. I'm doing well. Thank you.
[00:00:08] Matty: Just to give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Jane Friedman has 20 years of experience in the publishing industry with expertise in business strategy for authors and publishers. She's the editor of The Hot Sheet, which I can highly recommend. I'm a happy subscriber to The Hot Sheet, the essential industry newsletter for authors and has previously worked for F and W Media and the Virginia Quarterly Review. In 2019, Jane was awarded the Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World, and her newsletter was awarded Media Outlet of the Year in 2020.
[00:00:38] And so you can tell that Jane has many, many things she could talk about, many, many resources to offer authors, but the specific reason that I asked Jane to be on the podcast is that every year or two years, she publishes a one-pager called Key Book Publishing Paths, and that's really going to be the topic of our conversation today.
[00:00:58] And Jane, I thought that maybe a good way of introducing our readers to this, because I will include a link to the PDF in the show notes so we don't have to cover it exhaustively, but can you just describe in general what it is, when you started doing it, and what was the trigger that led you to put that together?
[00:01:15] Jane: I started doing that chart I believe in 2013, give or take a year. And it was because there was an emerging model of publisher or, I'm going to be referring to it as a marketing term at times, of hybrid publisher. So you've got traditional publishing, which I'm sure everyone is pretty familiar with. Your HarperCollins, your Penguin Random House and so on. And then you have self-publishing. So this could be do it yourself independent publishing. It could be getting a company to help you, but ultimately your book is self-published and not from one of the big companies.
[00:01:54] And so in the middle of this came all sorts of companies who felt like they were disrupting both sides. Some of them call themselves partner publishers, some called themselves subsidy publishers. Meanwhile, you've got digital imprint opening from the major houses, which aren't offering advances. You've got print on demand picking up. You've got eBooks rising. And so you just started having all of these different ways to publish and things started to splinter. So I got more and more questions about what's a hybrid publisher? What does it mean if someone's offering me a publishing contract without an advance? What if it's print on demand only? So that's essentially what sparked me to create that.
[00:02:39] Matty: One of the things that I think is very interesting is that I think many people, and I count myself among them, talk about indy versus traditional and sort of forget that there's a spectrum. Can you give an example of something that's in that spectrum between very traditional and completely indy, just to give the listeners a flavor of that? ...
[00:00:06] Jane: Hi, Matty. I'm doing well. Thank you.
[00:00:08] Matty: Just to give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Jane Friedman has 20 years of experience in the publishing industry with expertise in business strategy for authors and publishers. She's the editor of The Hot Sheet, which I can highly recommend. I'm a happy subscriber to The Hot Sheet, the essential industry newsletter for authors and has previously worked for F and W Media and the Virginia Quarterly Review. In 2019, Jane was awarded the Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World, and her newsletter was awarded Media Outlet of the Year in 2020.
[00:00:38] And so you can tell that Jane has many, many things she could talk about, many, many resources to offer authors, but the specific reason that I asked Jane to be on the podcast is that every year or two years, she publishes a one-pager called Key Book Publishing Paths, and that's really going to be the topic of our conversation today.
[00:00:58] And Jane, I thought that maybe a good way of introducing our readers to this, because I will include a link to the PDF in the show notes so we don't have to cover it exhaustively, but can you just describe in general what it is, when you started doing it, and what was the trigger that led you to put that together?
[00:01:15] Jane: I started doing that chart I believe in 2013, give or take a year. And it was because there was an emerging model of publisher or, I'm going to be referring to it as a marketing term at times, of hybrid publisher. So you've got traditional publishing, which I'm sure everyone is pretty familiar with. Your HarperCollins, your Penguin Random House and so on. And then you have self-publishing. So this could be do it yourself independent publishing. It could be getting a company to help you, but ultimately your book is self-published and not from one of the big companies.
[00:01:54] And so in the middle of this came all sorts of companies who felt like they were disrupting both sides. Some of them call themselves partner publishers, some called themselves subsidy publishers. Meanwhile, you've got digital imprint opening from the major houses, which aren't offering advances. You've got print on demand picking up. You've got eBooks rising. And so you just started having all of these different ways to publish and things started to splinter. So I got more and more questions about what's a hybrid publisher? What does it mean if someone's offering me a publishing contract without an advance? What if it's print on demand only? So that's essentially what sparked me to create that.
[00:02:39] Matty: One of the things that I think is very interesting is that I think many people, and I count myself among them, talk about indy versus traditional and sort of forget that there's a spectrum. Can you give an example of something that's in that spectrum between very traditional and completely indy, just to give the listeners a flavor of that? ...
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[00:03:00] Jane: So I might point to, let's say, Berrett-Koehler, which I would consider a traditional publisher, but they don't offer an advance. And in some regard, you see the sort of authors going to Berrett-Koehler who once upon a time may have gone to an outfit like Greenleaf. So Greenleaf Book Group calls itself a hybrid publisher. You might call it an assisted publisher or a publishing services company, but you know with Greenleaf you might pay $20,000. Even you could easily probably get into the six figures in your packages with Greenleaf, whereas with Berrett-Koehler and you pay nothing. But neither are they paying you an advance and then you basically do what would be considered a revenue share in any other business, but it's an author earning royalties. So Berrett-Koehler is, I won't call them necessarily a one of a kind, because you will find other publishers that don't offer advances, but otherwise operate in a traditional manner. So that's one point on the spectrum.
[00:04:03] Then you have small presses like Belt, which runs out of Cleveland. They started off very traditionally. They still have a traditional list and catalog, but then they splintered off something called Parafine, which is a pay for play service. But they also have a royalty contract that you're signing. So these are the sorts of things that you find in between those two points.
[00:04:28] Matty: You had talked about hybrid publishers, and I think people have gotten used to the idea of hybrid authors, where they're distributing their book distribution across these different paths that they can take. But what do you mean by a hybrid publisher?
[00:04:44] Jane: So this is another area of great confusion because when we talk about hybrid authors, we're talking not about authors who use hybrid publishers. So hybrid publishers doesn't equate to hybrid authors. Hybrid publishers, I think of it as a marketing term that has been used since roughly 2010, 2012, to refer to these publishers that don't want to be considered like the old vanity presses of, you know, anything prior to print on demand or ebook. So anything in the eighties or much of the nineties, these sorts of houses that helped you publish, and you would write them a big check. And then today they tend to get called vanity presses and they got associated with bad business, with stealing money from authors, or giving them a bunch of books that they had to store in the garage until the end of their life.
[00:05:39] So I think "hybrid," that term came about in part not just because of the technological development that publishing has seen over the last 20 years. But actually, I guess it's like 20 to 25 years at this point. And it came about not just because of technology, but because there was this desire to distance from those yesteryear service companies that maybe weren't seen as very desirable.
[00:06:05] But in my mind, a hybrid is simply another publishing service that you have to pay in order to see your book come out. I think that some very entrepreneurial authors will use them because they have more money than time, or they don't want to be completely undertaking the publishing process alone.
[00:06:26] You'll often see people in the nonfiction categories using them. Business people in particular. That's not to say that novelists and memoirists don't use them, but it's really hard to make a living or to have a professional career as an author using these companies for every single book. You would never earn your money back.
[00:06:44] Matty: You had mentioned vanity publishers, and I think we've gotten past the idea that self-publishing equates to vanity publishing. So how do you distinguish legitimate companies who are offering services to help an author get their book out into the world from those companies that have gotten a bad reputation because they are just stealing the money and not stepping up to what their responsibility as a publisher is.
[00:07:10] Jane: Well, this is where you get into some really gray area. And then I don't know that someone who's totally outside the industry can make that assessment without a lot of research and assistance. But there are a couple red flags. So one red flag is a lot of discussion on their website of how they're better than all the other publishing options. Like you can feel the hard sell. They talk about how dumb traditional publishing is, or you'd have to be really stupid to be taken in by a traditional publishing deal, and that's nonsense. Okay. Traditional publishing is still valid. It is not stupid. There are simply good decisions based on the project, where you're at in your career, and what you want to see come out of it.
[00:07:58] Like I often say, each project is another decision point. Each book is another decision point. You have to decide which path best suits this book. So that red flag of really badmouthing traditional publishers, I consider that a red flag. And then going back to that hard sell. So if you feel really pressured to make a deal quickly with them, if they give you a lot of hard deadlines -- Oh, we can't give you this offer for much longer. It's going to be gone -- or they're trying to upsell you on stuff that maybe you couldn't really afford, but they're telling you, Oh, this is really essential, I think you can usually feel when you're trying to be pressured into something. And if you feel that pressure, you should probably pause and think about why are they pressuring you in this way? They tend to have a salesforce that's targeted on selling you, not selling your book, and that's how they make their money.
[00:08:54] Now both the good and the not so good companies make their money off the fees that authors pay, for the most part, they couldn't stay in business otherwise. So if you do want marketing and promotion support that's meaningful are going to have to either do it yourself, have the company help you, or get a third party to assist you.
[00:09:12] So this is where they expenses can just run up into the thousands and thousands of dollars. It's also where you find marketing and promotion packages that have little value but may put stars in your eyes. So like some of these companies will offer legitimate marketing and promotion packages, but they don't make a difference to your sales. So they say, Oh, we'll advertise your book in the New York Times, or, We'll do a $10,000 movie trailer for your book. And someone who's not in the industry may not realize those things don't move books. It's just to stroke your ego.
[00:09:46] Matty: When I was first getting into publishing and I was doing the research, one of those red flags was that you had to purchase the books. So this is going back a way so that once the disreputable publisher had convinced you to buy a thousand copies of your print book, then you might never hear from them again. And it seems as if with print on demand becoming even more popular among publishers that are more on the traditional end, that that wouldn't necessarily be a red flag anymore. How is the increase in print on demand affecting publishers across the spectrum, and the authors who use them?
[00:10:23] Jane: This is an interesting time to be asking the question because we're in a pandemic where the supply chain is under a lot of stress. So the printing market is tight. The paper market is tight. Publishers of all kinds are seeing increased turnaround for getting their books printed. And so print on demand has played a really critical role and keeping books in stock.
[00:10:46] There are two big providers of print on demand in the US: Amazon KDP and then also Ingram. So Ingram services the biggest publishers and the smallest publishers. They also service authors. So what's interesting about POD is that it really made it possible to self-publish in a way for your print edition that didn't require one of these companies.
[00:11:10] So this was a really significant, monumental change in the industry. So the vanity publisher, they could make their money off selling you the copies of the book off the print run that would cost significant amount of money. They would mark it up on a per copy basis, and they could get away with it because, Look, you have to buy your books, if you're going to self-publish, you're going to have to have a print run, but the books weren't distributed. Now that you've got your thousand books, how are you going to get them into the hands of readers? So that became a really big problem, and people walked into that without realizing what would happen.
[00:11:43] But today with print on demand, companies can say the book is only going to be printed when there is an order placed. And furthermore, if you're using print on demand, it gives you automatic distribution globally. So you're automatically distributed into Amazon. You're automatically distributed through Ingram, which reaches thousands of retail outlets across the world. And so this has really changed things for whether you're using a company to help you, whether you're going independent. And of course it also reduces costs for any type of publisher who doesn't want to keep a whole lot of inventory. Inventory presents risk. It's obviously it represents cost. So print-on-demand helps fill in the gaps for everyone.
[00:12:26] Matty: It seems as if a real bonus for print on demand for those publishers more at the traditional end is the same as it would be for the individual author -- that you're not warehousing, in the case of the individual author, in your garage or in the case of the publisher, in an actual warehouse these copies that may never sell and then having to pulp them if you don't. And there are certainly books that publishers know are going to be huge, huge sellers, and you don't want to be selling Barack and Michelle Obama's books on a print on demand basis. But are more traditional publishers moving toward using a print on demand model more for their authors as well?
[00:13:04] Jane: You definitely see it come into play when you get to reprint stage or when you're what's called demand planning, where you're looking at, okay, how many copies did it sell in the last year? How many do we think we need to have around? Is it time to move this title to print on demand status, because it just doesn't merit getting a full print run or that maybe demand will slow over time?
[00:13:29] The wrinkle in all this is that for lots of different reasons, and maybe we'll end up talking about some of them, the industry is becoming more backlist dominant, which means older titles sell better than newer titles. And so for instance, in 2020 with Black Lives Matter, we saw anti-racism books and social justice books get up on the bestseller lists. They're still selling and higher quantities than they ever have before. And so that caught some publishers flat-footed. They were not expecting this skyrocketing demand for these older titles. And print on demand definitely helped fill in the gap there as they went back to press and then got the shelves restocked with actual print run.
[00:14:10] I think where print on demand quality hasn't really met the market demand is whenever you get into the coffee table sorts of books or things that are four color that require color accuracy, anything with special sorts of features. When you see some of those beautiful hard covers with the spot gloss or the foil stamping, some of these things, you can't really do that well on print on demand. And so depending on the title, it may not be an option, or the publisher has to do an edition that's just a print on demand edition.
[00:14:43] Matty: I know that size is another consideration. My husband has a book of photography and he ended up having to go to a non-print on demand service provider to get that done because it wasn't something that fit within the parameters of KDP or IngramSpark size-wise.
[00:14:58] Jane: Yep. So certainly Ingram, I'll just add, is pushing print on demand for all its publisher clients as just a way to ensure that you're never out of stock on a book. So even if you are doing print runs, they're encouraging publishers to keep all titles stocked so that they can be fulfilled through print on demand should the need arise.
[00:15:20] Matty: It is very disappointing and also feels very old fashioned, if you go to look for a book and you see that it's no longer in print and the only way to get it is to start scanning the used bookstore sites, because it just feels like nothing should ever be out of print. That shouldn't be a concept anymore.
[00:15:39] Jane: Well, part of this is authors and their agents. It's actually not great for an author who's with a traditional publisher anyway to always have their books perpetually in print if they want to get the rights back. So some of the things that caused books to go out of print are contracts that have lapsed, or the authors requested a rights reversion, but they haven't reissued the book. So, yeah, print on demand has caused a lot of weird things to occur with books that were published within a certain timeframe where the author just hasn't either decided what to do or the books have become orphaned.
[00:16:13] Matty: One of the things I think is interesting is that in the traditional publishing world, for a while, it was the Big Six and then it was the Big Five, and now it’s sort of becoming the Big Four with Penguin Random House having bought Simon and Schuster, so what do you see if any impact of that on independent authors.
[00:16:33] Jane: It's still early. I'll add that caveat. But I think it probably means more for small publishers and there are some independent authors who act as small publishers in that they produce a lot of titles, something that would equate to a small press, or they might be helping other authors to get their books out. But I think that the reason it opens up an opportunity for small publishers is that usually the bigger the house, the more of a conglomerate it is, the more risk averse they are, the less willing they are to take on titles that don't fit a certain mold or a certain track that they know how to produce.
[00:17:16] I think that independent authors are really good at getting into subcategories or niches that might represent too small of an opportunity or too big of a risk for a big publisher to get into. I've seen authors who are really good at using some of these data mining tools like K-lytics or Publisher Rocket, which will show you the categories where there's a lot of sales happening or a lot of Kindle Unlimited activity happening. And publishers are not doing that. They're still very traditional in how they acquire books. It's still very subjective and based on taste. I think independent authors, the professional ones, tend to look at what genres are experiencing demand. You know, is it the billionaire romance category? Is it time to jump on that trend? And so they can be more nimble. I just don't see traditional publishers doing that, especially as they get bigger. I could be wrong, but it's rare to find a data-driven imprint at these houses.
[00:18:15] Matty: Earlier in the independent publishing evolution, I think that indy publishers were trying to mimic what the traditional publishers were doing as much as possible. And now I feel like, in some cases, the traditional publishers are mimicking things that the indy authors have been doing, like BookBub, I'll throw out as a possibility. What legitimate lessons do you think that indy authors now should be taking from traditional publishing that you see being underutilized?
[00:18:45] Jane: I think traditional publishers have started to get really serious about direct-to-consumer marketing and email marketing. And I'm not saying that independent authors weren't doing that already. However, I do see that there's a segment of the authorship that's really focused on advertising through Amazon and Kindle Unlimited, you know, relying on some exclusivity to keep visibility and rank high, and that's putting all your eggs in one basket.
[00:19:14] I think that independent authors are starting to see some of the merits of being wide, especially right now with the audio. I think everyone's seeing that going wide with your audio is probably preferable. How and when that happens with the books is hard to say, but there are definitely some categories and genres where there's so much reliance on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited that it does make me concerned that there isn't going to be this market strength or this foundational strength that's required to sell wide, should Amazon rejigger things, change the rules, whatever. You never know what they're going to do next.
[00:19:51] I think publishers are a little better insulated from those kinds of changes. Not to say that they're not affected by what Amazon does, they are, but I think they're much more supportive of all of the channels and platforms for books rather than being Amazon focused.
[00:20:07] Matty: Do you see lessons other than the BookBub one that I threw out of where traditional publishers are starting to emulate indies more?
[00:20:15] Jane: I don't know if they got this from indies, because I keep hearing the same drum beat from the smart people in publishing, and sometimes their advice has taken and sometimes it's not, but pricing flexibility. I think indies are much better with pricing flexibility, with price testing, with discounts and promotions, promo stacking. I think publishers, some publishers, have been just very flat with their pricing. Like this is what we always price. It doesn't matter who the author is. It doesn't matter if they're debut or established, this is what we price this sort of book. End of story. And they don't experiment. Maybe they do BookBubs on occasion for first in series, but it's just a very kind of rigid attitude.
[00:21:01] Part of it is their perspective that they want to preserve the brand of the author or the value, and they think it maybe is devaluing the book to price it lower, but I think that's a very kind of crude or simplistic attitude toward pricing. You want to use prices as a strategic tool. It's not something where it's always one price. So I think the ability to employ dynamic pricing based on the situation. I think that's something that publishers need to do better at.
[00:21:32] I think that they're also just terrible from that perspective of launching new novelists. I wouldn't want to be a new novelist in 2020 or 2021, at least not in the US, if I were with a traditional publisher, because I think that that rigidity really hurts.
[00:21:49] Matty: If someone is at the point where they're just finishing up their first book and they are trying to decide what route they want to take, what are some key questions they should be asking themselves that might point them to pursue one or the other.
[00:22:03] Jane: If you're writing genre fiction, so romance, crime, thriller, suspense, science fiction, fantasy, those really key commercial genres, I think that's where the harder decision comes into play because it's possible to be quite successful as an author in those categories as a self-published independent author.
[00:22:26] Now does that mean that's the path that you would definitely want to choose? No, because you also have to look at frequency, how prolific are you? Can you write really fast? I think right now, independent authors are under a lot of pressure to produce a lot of books very quickly. Just look at the 20 Books to 50K group and you see it right there in the name. Produce 20 books so you can earn a living. Most traditionally published authors would faint at the thought of trying to produce 20 books in, say, five years, if that. So you have to look at, partly, what do you want out of this? What's your motivation? Are you going to be okay with that sort of pressure to produce?
[00:23:06] And then you have to have something of an entrepreneurial spirit. You're going to have to learn a lot of systems, not just the distribution systems and retail systems, but how to handle advertising on places like Amazon or Facebook and learning things like pricing strategy and learning how to package your books for a readership. All of these things are skills that you will practice and acquire over a long period of time. It's not something you're probably going to get it right the first time out of the gate. There needs to be some appetite for messing up and then going back and getting it right and trial and error. And I think it's also really hard to hire someone to take care of that for you. Because again, we talked about this earlier, once you hire, you're hurting your ability to actually make a profit off what you're producing, especially if you start getting into the five figures.
[00:23:57] So I guess I offered a partial answer to that question. I think once you get into some of the non-fiction lifestyle categories, if you're a memoirist, if you're writing what I would call book club fiction, I think it's really hard to get those books out there in a way where influencers and the media will pay attention, unless you already have a brand, or you're already established in some way that would allow you to get the attention of those people.
[00:24:21] Matty: What do you think are benefits that traditional publishers would be able to offer authors that an independent path would make it harder for the author to achieve?
[00:24:31] Jane: I think experience combined with access to certain markets. Just this weekend, I sent out a little story in my email newsletter about a publisher, Sourcebooks, that was working with a memoirist, a Muslim woman, and a doctor who went to Saudi Arabia for a brief time. And it's what happened when she was there and what surprised her. When Sourcebooks first packaged that book with a title and a cover, they didn't release it. They put it to a focus group and the results were really bad. No one really wanted to read the book.
[00:25:05] If you look at the cover, it's a kind of stern, somber kind of black and white cover. It's not terribly dynamic. And so they decided to go back to the drawing board, and when you look at the comparison cover, it looks like a book club pick, which is what it ended up being. It was read by many book clubs. It's sold in the six figures. And this case study that was brought forth by the publisher was an example of what publishers do.
[00:25:33] Dominique Raccah, the CEO, said, We put the reader in the book, which I think is a really interesting way of thinking about it because often self-published authors, some of them end up self-publishing because it's their book and they want to do it their way. Nothing wrong with that, but if you don't put the reader in the book, are you going to be able to market and promote it effectively?
[00:25:55] I think this is where we get into the packaging issue again. You have to know how to package the book for the market in a way that makes readers say, Hey, that looks like a book I would enjoy. So I think publishers are still really expert at that. It does make them kind of maybe cookie cutter in their approach, but sometimes that's what you want when you're publishing in a commercial genre. You want a book that looks like more of the thing that this person will enjoy.
[00:26:22] Publishers provide that experience. Most of them have been in business now for more than a hundred years, the big ones. They have reams and reams and reams of sales history and data and market insights that go to work with your book, not just the cover and the title, but all sorts of other decisions about positioning and which retailers to approach and how to do the merchandising.
[00:26:45] And so then the other piece of this I mentioned is access. So I think it's just hard for a new independent author, especially with no sales track record, how are you going to get anyone to take a risk or to give you the time of day? How are you going to get access and to certain markets? How are you going to approach Reese Witherspoon if you think your book is right for her club? There are certain things you just can't do as an individual. You need the person with the key to turn the locks for certain types of books. It's not to say an independent author with a good platform can't get there. It's just a lot harder.
[00:27:17] Matty: It is interesting, just the idea of having that third party view of your book, because the two things that I find most difficult to do for my books are to write the blurb and to find comp authors. Because I just think that I'm too close to it. And some of the other things that I think require that distance, I feel like I can do okay. Like book covers. I feel pretty comfortable. I make a study of what other book covers and my genres are showing and make intentional decisions of whether to match them or not match them. But those things I'm certain that I've slaved for many times more hours over who my comp authors are. And if I were to go to a traditional publisher, they would say, Oh, of course it's these six people. That impartial third-party perspective is really valuable.
[00:28:08] Jane: Yeah. There's a former VP of marketing at Penguin, Pete McCarthy, who I'll never forget him saying on a marketing panel at a publishing conference of industry people, this wasn't for authors, he said, I do not have to read the book in order to market it. In fact, reading the book hurts my ability to market it. Which is something of a sacrilege in book publishing to say, you can market a book without reading it, because everyone's much more precious about these things. And how would you know the spirit of the book without reading it. But from a marketing perspective, the comps, as you say, are important, and sometimes reading the book or knowing too much about it interferes with your ability to see it as a product to be sold.
[00:28:52] Matty: I think the other thing that makes it tough is that one of my driving considerations for those types of things is am I setting the wrong expectation for the reader? Because I would rather reach a small group of readers who know what they're getting and then are more likely to be happy than a large group of readers that gets something they don't want, but I don't know, maybe it's worth pissing off a small group of readers to expose it to people who might not think it's what they want, but it turns out to be what they want. Those kinds of questions are just so difficult for someone who's not in the publishing industry as a publisher, not an author, to understand.
[00:29:29] Jane: Yeah. It gets challenging. Absolutely.
[00:29:32] Matty: Is there a model that you think, if someone has a goal of being a full-time author, is that a consideration for if they came to you and said, I have this book and let's say it's a book that would genre wise would fit several of these paths. Is there one of these that's a better path for them to take.
[00:29:52] Jane: It's going to depend on the person's strengths and just how they prefer to operate in the world. I have clients I meet with who, it's really clear to me from the first five minutes of talking to them, that they shouldn't be operating independently. They need to be bouncing ideas off people. They need to be part of a team. They need to be working with an editor, or I'm not saying that they need to be taken care of or that they need hand holding, but they just wouldn't feel good operating in isolation.
[00:30:19] And there are authors who fit that and are very prolific. And they work with lots of different publishers. I'm thinking of someone like Eric Maisel at the moment. He works in a nonfiction category. I think he's done maybe 30 or 40 books at this point. And because he so prolific, he was always working with a different publisher. And I often wondered, why don't you just self-publish, but that's just not how he likes to operate. And so he's an interesting figure to look at from that perspective that, if you are someone who likes to be producing, producing, producing, it's possible to do that through traditional publishing.
[00:30:54] And then there are other authors who ... I want to say they're bullheaded but that might not be very kind, who they just want control, and they really feel like publishers are getting in the way of them doing what's best. I think for authors who really understand their readership, however they've come to that understanding, but they really understand their market, and they just don't want to compromise some things like title, editing, design, pacing, pricing, self-publishing is the way to go. I mean, you can't work with a publisher and expect to call all the shots unless maybe your Stephen King.
[00:31:30] Matty: Yes. Stephen King is always the exception to the rule.
[00:31:33] So one thing I was very interested in concluding our conversation on was the idea of subsidiary or foreign rights. One of the recent podcast episodes was with Orna Ross of the Alliance of Independent Authors. We were talking about COPYRIGHT FOR AUTHORS, and I've got to believe that these subsidiary or foreign rights are things that the traditional publishing world has whole mechanisms surrounding it, and indies are very new to it.
[00:31:59] So if an author wants to capitalize on those rights, what advice would you have for them, based on the different paths they could follow to pursue that?
[00:32:10] Jane: So once you get into subsidiary rights, licensing, all of that, I feel like you're getting into one of the more advanced, complicated areas of publishing, whether you're on the traditional side or on the self-publishing side. There are lots of publishers that don't do these sorts of deals because they don't have the staffing. They don't have the contacts. It takes a lot of time and energy and often the rewards are small. It's not to say it's not worth it, but the US is the biggest book market on the planet.
[00:32:42] And so once you decide to go outside of it, especially into another language, the numbers start getting minuscule. And I really mean minuscule. We're talking like low four figures at most, for a bestselling sort of author or title. So you have to really start to ask as an independent author, is this really worth the time and energy of learning the ins and outs of foreign rights sales or subsidiary rights, or am I a big enough author where there's a big enough opportunity that maybe an agent would represent me for these sorts of deals?
[00:33:16] There are a handful of agents out there who help with this sort of thing and who represent independent authors for all those sub right sales. Kristin Nelson has been one of those agents. I don't know if she's actively taking on new clients, but she's done it. I know that the Alliance of Independent Authors, they had a program, I think they launched it last year, to help authors understand better how to do this on their own. For instance, how to go to some place like London Book Fair or Frankfurt Book Fair. Who are you looking for? How do you set up the appointments? How do you present your book?
[00:33:47] I think you can have more success with that when you're not an author with just one or two titles. Certainly you could try, if it's been a really successful title, but usually you want to have a body of work, a series or some sort of bigger brand that would help you merit that meeting with someone who represents another publisher.
[00:34:09] Even I haven't been that exposed to this side of the industry. It's where you get into people who are scouts and specialize in trends in certain countries and in certain languages, because each country and territory has certain quirks to it. Like if you were trying to sell your memoir into the French market, even if it's about France, they wouldn't want it. They don't like memoir. So, how do you know that, unless you're talking to an inside expert whose business it is to know what the French like to read?
[00:34:42] So, yeah, I think it's certainly, I know clients often tell me, this book would be great in German or it would be great in Europe or it would be great in China, and they have these dreams, and it's totally fine to have those dreams, but I think it's something that comes as like the exclamation point at the end of a sentence, a really well-crafted sentence that's done really well. And then hopefully someone's approaching you with an offer rather than you having to go out.
[00:35:11] Matty: Yeah. The whole foreign rights thing or translations is something that I'm definitely taking a wait and see attitude about because that is a big investment. And if I have that money, I just, as soon invest in audio books, honestly, that's my, that would be my next platform and audience I'd want to go for.
[00:35:27] Jane: Yeah. And we didn't even talk about how you know if you have a good translation, which I know is some people got burned early, this is going back some years, hiring translators and they didn't realize that the quality was garbage. They didn't know until the reviews started coming in where people are saying, this isn't worth the money I paid.
[00:35:44] Matty: Yeah. Emma Prince's interview was really interesting because she has both the translator, and then she also has a native speaker QA person who reads it for her. But we got into this conversation about, if you're writing Scottish romance, there's probably a lot of wee lassie and dinna ken and things like that, and I was like, what does the translator do with that? What's the German equivalent of that kind of when people are trying to represent foreign words or foreign accents, how did they do that? And she was like, I have no idea. That's an interesting consideration.
[00:36:18] Well, this has been so great, Jane, thank you so much for agreeing to be a guest on the podcast. I will, as I said, put a link up to the full Publishing Pathways document that you put out. So please let the listeners know where they can find out more about you and all your offerings online.
[00:36:35] Jane: Best place to go is JaneFriedman.com. That's where you can find my classes and books and newsletters that you can subscribe to.
[00:36:44] Matty: Great. Well, thank you again, Jane. This has been great.
[00:36:46] Jane: Thank you.
[00:04:03] Then you have small presses like Belt, which runs out of Cleveland. They started off very traditionally. They still have a traditional list and catalog, but then they splintered off something called Parafine, which is a pay for play service. But they also have a royalty contract that you're signing. So these are the sorts of things that you find in between those two points.
[00:04:28] Matty: You had talked about hybrid publishers, and I think people have gotten used to the idea of hybrid authors, where they're distributing their book distribution across these different paths that they can take. But what do you mean by a hybrid publisher?
[00:04:44] Jane: So this is another area of great confusion because when we talk about hybrid authors, we're talking not about authors who use hybrid publishers. So hybrid publishers doesn't equate to hybrid authors. Hybrid publishers, I think of it as a marketing term that has been used since roughly 2010, 2012, to refer to these publishers that don't want to be considered like the old vanity presses of, you know, anything prior to print on demand or ebook. So anything in the eighties or much of the nineties, these sorts of houses that helped you publish, and you would write them a big check. And then today they tend to get called vanity presses and they got associated with bad business, with stealing money from authors, or giving them a bunch of books that they had to store in the garage until the end of their life.
[00:05:39] So I think "hybrid," that term came about in part not just because of the technological development that publishing has seen over the last 20 years. But actually, I guess it's like 20 to 25 years at this point. And it came about not just because of technology, but because there was this desire to distance from those yesteryear service companies that maybe weren't seen as very desirable.
[00:06:05] But in my mind, a hybrid is simply another publishing service that you have to pay in order to see your book come out. I think that some very entrepreneurial authors will use them because they have more money than time, or they don't want to be completely undertaking the publishing process alone.
[00:06:26] You'll often see people in the nonfiction categories using them. Business people in particular. That's not to say that novelists and memoirists don't use them, but it's really hard to make a living or to have a professional career as an author using these companies for every single book. You would never earn your money back.
[00:06:44] Matty: You had mentioned vanity publishers, and I think we've gotten past the idea that self-publishing equates to vanity publishing. So how do you distinguish legitimate companies who are offering services to help an author get their book out into the world from those companies that have gotten a bad reputation because they are just stealing the money and not stepping up to what their responsibility as a publisher is.
[00:07:10] Jane: Well, this is where you get into some really gray area. And then I don't know that someone who's totally outside the industry can make that assessment without a lot of research and assistance. But there are a couple red flags. So one red flag is a lot of discussion on their website of how they're better than all the other publishing options. Like you can feel the hard sell. They talk about how dumb traditional publishing is, or you'd have to be really stupid to be taken in by a traditional publishing deal, and that's nonsense. Okay. Traditional publishing is still valid. It is not stupid. There are simply good decisions based on the project, where you're at in your career, and what you want to see come out of it.
[00:07:58] Like I often say, each project is another decision point. Each book is another decision point. You have to decide which path best suits this book. So that red flag of really badmouthing traditional publishers, I consider that a red flag. And then going back to that hard sell. So if you feel really pressured to make a deal quickly with them, if they give you a lot of hard deadlines -- Oh, we can't give you this offer for much longer. It's going to be gone -- or they're trying to upsell you on stuff that maybe you couldn't really afford, but they're telling you, Oh, this is really essential, I think you can usually feel when you're trying to be pressured into something. And if you feel that pressure, you should probably pause and think about why are they pressuring you in this way? They tend to have a salesforce that's targeted on selling you, not selling your book, and that's how they make their money.
[00:08:54] Now both the good and the not so good companies make their money off the fees that authors pay, for the most part, they couldn't stay in business otherwise. So if you do want marketing and promotion support that's meaningful are going to have to either do it yourself, have the company help you, or get a third party to assist you.
[00:09:12] So this is where they expenses can just run up into the thousands and thousands of dollars. It's also where you find marketing and promotion packages that have little value but may put stars in your eyes. So like some of these companies will offer legitimate marketing and promotion packages, but they don't make a difference to your sales. So they say, Oh, we'll advertise your book in the New York Times, or, We'll do a $10,000 movie trailer for your book. And someone who's not in the industry may not realize those things don't move books. It's just to stroke your ego.
[00:09:46] Matty: When I was first getting into publishing and I was doing the research, one of those red flags was that you had to purchase the books. So this is going back a way so that once the disreputable publisher had convinced you to buy a thousand copies of your print book, then you might never hear from them again. And it seems as if with print on demand becoming even more popular among publishers that are more on the traditional end, that that wouldn't necessarily be a red flag anymore. How is the increase in print on demand affecting publishers across the spectrum, and the authors who use them?
[00:10:23] Jane: This is an interesting time to be asking the question because we're in a pandemic where the supply chain is under a lot of stress. So the printing market is tight. The paper market is tight. Publishers of all kinds are seeing increased turnaround for getting their books printed. And so print on demand has played a really critical role and keeping books in stock.
[00:10:46] There are two big providers of print on demand in the US: Amazon KDP and then also Ingram. So Ingram services the biggest publishers and the smallest publishers. They also service authors. So what's interesting about POD is that it really made it possible to self-publish in a way for your print edition that didn't require one of these companies.
[00:11:10] So this was a really significant, monumental change in the industry. So the vanity publisher, they could make their money off selling you the copies of the book off the print run that would cost significant amount of money. They would mark it up on a per copy basis, and they could get away with it because, Look, you have to buy your books, if you're going to self-publish, you're going to have to have a print run, but the books weren't distributed. Now that you've got your thousand books, how are you going to get them into the hands of readers? So that became a really big problem, and people walked into that without realizing what would happen.
[00:11:43] But today with print on demand, companies can say the book is only going to be printed when there is an order placed. And furthermore, if you're using print on demand, it gives you automatic distribution globally. So you're automatically distributed into Amazon. You're automatically distributed through Ingram, which reaches thousands of retail outlets across the world. And so this has really changed things for whether you're using a company to help you, whether you're going independent. And of course it also reduces costs for any type of publisher who doesn't want to keep a whole lot of inventory. Inventory presents risk. It's obviously it represents cost. So print-on-demand helps fill in the gaps for everyone.
[00:12:26] Matty: It seems as if a real bonus for print on demand for those publishers more at the traditional end is the same as it would be for the individual author -- that you're not warehousing, in the case of the individual author, in your garage or in the case of the publisher, in an actual warehouse these copies that may never sell and then having to pulp them if you don't. And there are certainly books that publishers know are going to be huge, huge sellers, and you don't want to be selling Barack and Michelle Obama's books on a print on demand basis. But are more traditional publishers moving toward using a print on demand model more for their authors as well?
[00:13:04] Jane: You definitely see it come into play when you get to reprint stage or when you're what's called demand planning, where you're looking at, okay, how many copies did it sell in the last year? How many do we think we need to have around? Is it time to move this title to print on demand status, because it just doesn't merit getting a full print run or that maybe demand will slow over time?
[00:13:29] The wrinkle in all this is that for lots of different reasons, and maybe we'll end up talking about some of them, the industry is becoming more backlist dominant, which means older titles sell better than newer titles. And so for instance, in 2020 with Black Lives Matter, we saw anti-racism books and social justice books get up on the bestseller lists. They're still selling and higher quantities than they ever have before. And so that caught some publishers flat-footed. They were not expecting this skyrocketing demand for these older titles. And print on demand definitely helped fill in the gap there as they went back to press and then got the shelves restocked with actual print run.
[00:14:10] I think where print on demand quality hasn't really met the market demand is whenever you get into the coffee table sorts of books or things that are four color that require color accuracy, anything with special sorts of features. When you see some of those beautiful hard covers with the spot gloss or the foil stamping, some of these things, you can't really do that well on print on demand. And so depending on the title, it may not be an option, or the publisher has to do an edition that's just a print on demand edition.
[00:14:43] Matty: I know that size is another consideration. My husband has a book of photography and he ended up having to go to a non-print on demand service provider to get that done because it wasn't something that fit within the parameters of KDP or IngramSpark size-wise.
[00:14:58] Jane: Yep. So certainly Ingram, I'll just add, is pushing print on demand for all its publisher clients as just a way to ensure that you're never out of stock on a book. So even if you are doing print runs, they're encouraging publishers to keep all titles stocked so that they can be fulfilled through print on demand should the need arise.
[00:15:20] Matty: It is very disappointing and also feels very old fashioned, if you go to look for a book and you see that it's no longer in print and the only way to get it is to start scanning the used bookstore sites, because it just feels like nothing should ever be out of print. That shouldn't be a concept anymore.
[00:15:39] Jane: Well, part of this is authors and their agents. It's actually not great for an author who's with a traditional publisher anyway to always have their books perpetually in print if they want to get the rights back. So some of the things that caused books to go out of print are contracts that have lapsed, or the authors requested a rights reversion, but they haven't reissued the book. So, yeah, print on demand has caused a lot of weird things to occur with books that were published within a certain timeframe where the author just hasn't either decided what to do or the books have become orphaned.
[00:16:13] Matty: One of the things I think is interesting is that in the traditional publishing world, for a while, it was the Big Six and then it was the Big Five, and now it’s sort of becoming the Big Four with Penguin Random House having bought Simon and Schuster, so what do you see if any impact of that on independent authors.
[00:16:33] Jane: It's still early. I'll add that caveat. But I think it probably means more for small publishers and there are some independent authors who act as small publishers in that they produce a lot of titles, something that would equate to a small press, or they might be helping other authors to get their books out. But I think that the reason it opens up an opportunity for small publishers is that usually the bigger the house, the more of a conglomerate it is, the more risk averse they are, the less willing they are to take on titles that don't fit a certain mold or a certain track that they know how to produce.
[00:17:16] I think that independent authors are really good at getting into subcategories or niches that might represent too small of an opportunity or too big of a risk for a big publisher to get into. I've seen authors who are really good at using some of these data mining tools like K-lytics or Publisher Rocket, which will show you the categories where there's a lot of sales happening or a lot of Kindle Unlimited activity happening. And publishers are not doing that. They're still very traditional in how they acquire books. It's still very subjective and based on taste. I think independent authors, the professional ones, tend to look at what genres are experiencing demand. You know, is it the billionaire romance category? Is it time to jump on that trend? And so they can be more nimble. I just don't see traditional publishers doing that, especially as they get bigger. I could be wrong, but it's rare to find a data-driven imprint at these houses.
[00:18:15] Matty: Earlier in the independent publishing evolution, I think that indy publishers were trying to mimic what the traditional publishers were doing as much as possible. And now I feel like, in some cases, the traditional publishers are mimicking things that the indy authors have been doing, like BookBub, I'll throw out as a possibility. What legitimate lessons do you think that indy authors now should be taking from traditional publishing that you see being underutilized?
[00:18:45] Jane: I think traditional publishers have started to get really serious about direct-to-consumer marketing and email marketing. And I'm not saying that independent authors weren't doing that already. However, I do see that there's a segment of the authorship that's really focused on advertising through Amazon and Kindle Unlimited, you know, relying on some exclusivity to keep visibility and rank high, and that's putting all your eggs in one basket.
[00:19:14] I think that independent authors are starting to see some of the merits of being wide, especially right now with the audio. I think everyone's seeing that going wide with your audio is probably preferable. How and when that happens with the books is hard to say, but there are definitely some categories and genres where there's so much reliance on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited that it does make me concerned that there isn't going to be this market strength or this foundational strength that's required to sell wide, should Amazon rejigger things, change the rules, whatever. You never know what they're going to do next.
[00:19:51] I think publishers are a little better insulated from those kinds of changes. Not to say that they're not affected by what Amazon does, they are, but I think they're much more supportive of all of the channels and platforms for books rather than being Amazon focused.
[00:20:07] Matty: Do you see lessons other than the BookBub one that I threw out of where traditional publishers are starting to emulate indies more?
[00:20:15] Jane: I don't know if they got this from indies, because I keep hearing the same drum beat from the smart people in publishing, and sometimes their advice has taken and sometimes it's not, but pricing flexibility. I think indies are much better with pricing flexibility, with price testing, with discounts and promotions, promo stacking. I think publishers, some publishers, have been just very flat with their pricing. Like this is what we always price. It doesn't matter who the author is. It doesn't matter if they're debut or established, this is what we price this sort of book. End of story. And they don't experiment. Maybe they do BookBubs on occasion for first in series, but it's just a very kind of rigid attitude.
[00:21:01] Part of it is their perspective that they want to preserve the brand of the author or the value, and they think it maybe is devaluing the book to price it lower, but I think that's a very kind of crude or simplistic attitude toward pricing. You want to use prices as a strategic tool. It's not something where it's always one price. So I think the ability to employ dynamic pricing based on the situation. I think that's something that publishers need to do better at.
[00:21:32] I think that they're also just terrible from that perspective of launching new novelists. I wouldn't want to be a new novelist in 2020 or 2021, at least not in the US, if I were with a traditional publisher, because I think that that rigidity really hurts.
[00:21:49] Matty: If someone is at the point where they're just finishing up their first book and they are trying to decide what route they want to take, what are some key questions they should be asking themselves that might point them to pursue one or the other.
[00:22:03] Jane: If you're writing genre fiction, so romance, crime, thriller, suspense, science fiction, fantasy, those really key commercial genres, I think that's where the harder decision comes into play because it's possible to be quite successful as an author in those categories as a self-published independent author.
[00:22:26] Now does that mean that's the path that you would definitely want to choose? No, because you also have to look at frequency, how prolific are you? Can you write really fast? I think right now, independent authors are under a lot of pressure to produce a lot of books very quickly. Just look at the 20 Books to 50K group and you see it right there in the name. Produce 20 books so you can earn a living. Most traditionally published authors would faint at the thought of trying to produce 20 books in, say, five years, if that. So you have to look at, partly, what do you want out of this? What's your motivation? Are you going to be okay with that sort of pressure to produce?
[00:23:06] And then you have to have something of an entrepreneurial spirit. You're going to have to learn a lot of systems, not just the distribution systems and retail systems, but how to handle advertising on places like Amazon or Facebook and learning things like pricing strategy and learning how to package your books for a readership. All of these things are skills that you will practice and acquire over a long period of time. It's not something you're probably going to get it right the first time out of the gate. There needs to be some appetite for messing up and then going back and getting it right and trial and error. And I think it's also really hard to hire someone to take care of that for you. Because again, we talked about this earlier, once you hire, you're hurting your ability to actually make a profit off what you're producing, especially if you start getting into the five figures.
[00:23:57] So I guess I offered a partial answer to that question. I think once you get into some of the non-fiction lifestyle categories, if you're a memoirist, if you're writing what I would call book club fiction, I think it's really hard to get those books out there in a way where influencers and the media will pay attention, unless you already have a brand, or you're already established in some way that would allow you to get the attention of those people.
[00:24:21] Matty: What do you think are benefits that traditional publishers would be able to offer authors that an independent path would make it harder for the author to achieve?
[00:24:31] Jane: I think experience combined with access to certain markets. Just this weekend, I sent out a little story in my email newsletter about a publisher, Sourcebooks, that was working with a memoirist, a Muslim woman, and a doctor who went to Saudi Arabia for a brief time. And it's what happened when she was there and what surprised her. When Sourcebooks first packaged that book with a title and a cover, they didn't release it. They put it to a focus group and the results were really bad. No one really wanted to read the book.
[00:25:05] If you look at the cover, it's a kind of stern, somber kind of black and white cover. It's not terribly dynamic. And so they decided to go back to the drawing board, and when you look at the comparison cover, it looks like a book club pick, which is what it ended up being. It was read by many book clubs. It's sold in the six figures. And this case study that was brought forth by the publisher was an example of what publishers do.
[00:25:33] Dominique Raccah, the CEO, said, We put the reader in the book, which I think is a really interesting way of thinking about it because often self-published authors, some of them end up self-publishing because it's their book and they want to do it their way. Nothing wrong with that, but if you don't put the reader in the book, are you going to be able to market and promote it effectively?
[00:25:55] I think this is where we get into the packaging issue again. You have to know how to package the book for the market in a way that makes readers say, Hey, that looks like a book I would enjoy. So I think publishers are still really expert at that. It does make them kind of maybe cookie cutter in their approach, but sometimes that's what you want when you're publishing in a commercial genre. You want a book that looks like more of the thing that this person will enjoy.
[00:26:22] Publishers provide that experience. Most of them have been in business now for more than a hundred years, the big ones. They have reams and reams and reams of sales history and data and market insights that go to work with your book, not just the cover and the title, but all sorts of other decisions about positioning and which retailers to approach and how to do the merchandising.
[00:26:45] And so then the other piece of this I mentioned is access. So I think it's just hard for a new independent author, especially with no sales track record, how are you going to get anyone to take a risk or to give you the time of day? How are you going to get access and to certain markets? How are you going to approach Reese Witherspoon if you think your book is right for her club? There are certain things you just can't do as an individual. You need the person with the key to turn the locks for certain types of books. It's not to say an independent author with a good platform can't get there. It's just a lot harder.
[00:27:17] Matty: It is interesting, just the idea of having that third party view of your book, because the two things that I find most difficult to do for my books are to write the blurb and to find comp authors. Because I just think that I'm too close to it. And some of the other things that I think require that distance, I feel like I can do okay. Like book covers. I feel pretty comfortable. I make a study of what other book covers and my genres are showing and make intentional decisions of whether to match them or not match them. But those things I'm certain that I've slaved for many times more hours over who my comp authors are. And if I were to go to a traditional publisher, they would say, Oh, of course it's these six people. That impartial third-party perspective is really valuable.
[00:28:08] Jane: Yeah. There's a former VP of marketing at Penguin, Pete McCarthy, who I'll never forget him saying on a marketing panel at a publishing conference of industry people, this wasn't for authors, he said, I do not have to read the book in order to market it. In fact, reading the book hurts my ability to market it. Which is something of a sacrilege in book publishing to say, you can market a book without reading it, because everyone's much more precious about these things. And how would you know the spirit of the book without reading it. But from a marketing perspective, the comps, as you say, are important, and sometimes reading the book or knowing too much about it interferes with your ability to see it as a product to be sold.
[00:28:52] Matty: I think the other thing that makes it tough is that one of my driving considerations for those types of things is am I setting the wrong expectation for the reader? Because I would rather reach a small group of readers who know what they're getting and then are more likely to be happy than a large group of readers that gets something they don't want, but I don't know, maybe it's worth pissing off a small group of readers to expose it to people who might not think it's what they want, but it turns out to be what they want. Those kinds of questions are just so difficult for someone who's not in the publishing industry as a publisher, not an author, to understand.
[00:29:29] Jane: Yeah. It gets challenging. Absolutely.
[00:29:32] Matty: Is there a model that you think, if someone has a goal of being a full-time author, is that a consideration for if they came to you and said, I have this book and let's say it's a book that would genre wise would fit several of these paths. Is there one of these that's a better path for them to take.
[00:29:52] Jane: It's going to depend on the person's strengths and just how they prefer to operate in the world. I have clients I meet with who, it's really clear to me from the first five minutes of talking to them, that they shouldn't be operating independently. They need to be bouncing ideas off people. They need to be part of a team. They need to be working with an editor, or I'm not saying that they need to be taken care of or that they need hand holding, but they just wouldn't feel good operating in isolation.
[00:30:19] And there are authors who fit that and are very prolific. And they work with lots of different publishers. I'm thinking of someone like Eric Maisel at the moment. He works in a nonfiction category. I think he's done maybe 30 or 40 books at this point. And because he so prolific, he was always working with a different publisher. And I often wondered, why don't you just self-publish, but that's just not how he likes to operate. And so he's an interesting figure to look at from that perspective that, if you are someone who likes to be producing, producing, producing, it's possible to do that through traditional publishing.
[00:30:54] And then there are other authors who ... I want to say they're bullheaded but that might not be very kind, who they just want control, and they really feel like publishers are getting in the way of them doing what's best. I think for authors who really understand their readership, however they've come to that understanding, but they really understand their market, and they just don't want to compromise some things like title, editing, design, pacing, pricing, self-publishing is the way to go. I mean, you can't work with a publisher and expect to call all the shots unless maybe your Stephen King.
[00:31:30] Matty: Yes. Stephen King is always the exception to the rule.
[00:31:33] So one thing I was very interested in concluding our conversation on was the idea of subsidiary or foreign rights. One of the recent podcast episodes was with Orna Ross of the Alliance of Independent Authors. We were talking about COPYRIGHT FOR AUTHORS, and I've got to believe that these subsidiary or foreign rights are things that the traditional publishing world has whole mechanisms surrounding it, and indies are very new to it.
[00:31:59] So if an author wants to capitalize on those rights, what advice would you have for them, based on the different paths they could follow to pursue that?
[00:32:10] Jane: So once you get into subsidiary rights, licensing, all of that, I feel like you're getting into one of the more advanced, complicated areas of publishing, whether you're on the traditional side or on the self-publishing side. There are lots of publishers that don't do these sorts of deals because they don't have the staffing. They don't have the contacts. It takes a lot of time and energy and often the rewards are small. It's not to say it's not worth it, but the US is the biggest book market on the planet.
[00:32:42] And so once you decide to go outside of it, especially into another language, the numbers start getting minuscule. And I really mean minuscule. We're talking like low four figures at most, for a bestselling sort of author or title. So you have to really start to ask as an independent author, is this really worth the time and energy of learning the ins and outs of foreign rights sales or subsidiary rights, or am I a big enough author where there's a big enough opportunity that maybe an agent would represent me for these sorts of deals?
[00:33:16] There are a handful of agents out there who help with this sort of thing and who represent independent authors for all those sub right sales. Kristin Nelson has been one of those agents. I don't know if she's actively taking on new clients, but she's done it. I know that the Alliance of Independent Authors, they had a program, I think they launched it last year, to help authors understand better how to do this on their own. For instance, how to go to some place like London Book Fair or Frankfurt Book Fair. Who are you looking for? How do you set up the appointments? How do you present your book?
[00:33:47] I think you can have more success with that when you're not an author with just one or two titles. Certainly you could try, if it's been a really successful title, but usually you want to have a body of work, a series or some sort of bigger brand that would help you merit that meeting with someone who represents another publisher.
[00:34:09] Even I haven't been that exposed to this side of the industry. It's where you get into people who are scouts and specialize in trends in certain countries and in certain languages, because each country and territory has certain quirks to it. Like if you were trying to sell your memoir into the French market, even if it's about France, they wouldn't want it. They don't like memoir. So, how do you know that, unless you're talking to an inside expert whose business it is to know what the French like to read?
[00:34:42] So, yeah, I think it's certainly, I know clients often tell me, this book would be great in German or it would be great in Europe or it would be great in China, and they have these dreams, and it's totally fine to have those dreams, but I think it's something that comes as like the exclamation point at the end of a sentence, a really well-crafted sentence that's done really well. And then hopefully someone's approaching you with an offer rather than you having to go out.
[00:35:11] Matty: Yeah. The whole foreign rights thing or translations is something that I'm definitely taking a wait and see attitude about because that is a big investment. And if I have that money, I just, as soon invest in audio books, honestly, that's my, that would be my next platform and audience I'd want to go for.
[00:35:27] Jane: Yeah. And we didn't even talk about how you know if you have a good translation, which I know is some people got burned early, this is going back some years, hiring translators and they didn't realize that the quality was garbage. They didn't know until the reviews started coming in where people are saying, this isn't worth the money I paid.
[00:35:44] Matty: Yeah. Emma Prince's interview was really interesting because she has both the translator, and then she also has a native speaker QA person who reads it for her. But we got into this conversation about, if you're writing Scottish romance, there's probably a lot of wee lassie and dinna ken and things like that, and I was like, what does the translator do with that? What's the German equivalent of that kind of when people are trying to represent foreign words or foreign accents, how did they do that? And she was like, I have no idea. That's an interesting consideration.
[00:36:18] Well, this has been so great, Jane, thank you so much for agreeing to be a guest on the podcast. I will, as I said, put a link up to the full Publishing Pathways document that you put out. So please let the listeners know where they can find out more about you and all your offerings online.
[00:36:35] Jane: Best place to go is JaneFriedman.com. That's where you can find my classes and books and newsletters that you can subscribe to.
[00:36:44] Matty: Great. Well, thank you again, Jane. This has been great.
[00:36:46] Jane: Thank you.
Links
Below are links to some other episodes where guests have discussed the various publishing paths:
Click here for the information I shared in the introductory segment about the results of my 2021 04 18 BookBub Featured Deal.
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