Episode 083 - The Six Rs of Maximizing the Value of Your Content with Abe Ogden
June 15, 2021
Abe Ogden discusses the six Rs of maximizing the value of your content: repackage, repurpose, revise, repository, rights, and resources. We talk about how the democratization of formats like hardcover books and outlets like branded merchandise open opportunities for the indy author. "If you're going to be developing this content, squeeze it for everything that you possibly can and hit every channel as much as you possibly can." We also discuss the issue of the most constrained resource of an indy author--time--and how to weigh which items on Abe's a la carte list of options you decide to pursue.
With more than 20 years in non-profit publishing and professional experience in editorial, production, acquisitions, and sales and marketing strategy, Abe Ogden is passionate about helping organizations with limited resources but an important mandate to deliver essential content to constituents and beyond.
When he’s not polishing a manuscript draft or putting the final touches on a marketing plan, he’s either playing his guitar or tramping through the outdoors and hiking, camping, or fly fishing with his family.
When he’s not polishing a manuscript draft or putting the final touches on a marketing plan, he’s either playing his guitar or tramping through the outdoors and hiking, camping, or fly fishing with his family.
"If you're going to be developing this content, squeeze it for everything that you possibly can and hit every channel as much as you possibly can." —Abe Ogden
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Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Abe Ogden. Hey, Abe, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Abe: I am well. How are you?
[00:00:07] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you ...
[00:00:11] With more than 20 years in nonprofit publishing and professional experience in editorial, production, acquisitions, and sales and marketing strategy, Abe Ogden is passionate about helping organizations with limited resources but an important mandate to deliver essential content to constituents and beyond. When he's not polishing a manuscript draft or putting the final touches on a marketing plan, he's either playing his guitar, which people who are watching on video will be able to see in the background, or tramping through the outdoors and hiking, camping, or fly fishing with his family.
[00:00:41] And I became aware of Abe's work when I read an article he had published in the January / February issue of IBPA INDEPENDENT, which is the magazine of the Independent Book Publishers Association. And the article was titled "Renewable Resources." And in it, he described what's going to be the topic of our conversation today, which is The Six R's of Maximizing the Value of Your Content.
[00:01:04] This is something I feel very strongly about. Back when I was in the online retail world, it was referred to as COPE, create once, publish everywhere. And so we're going to be talking about how that applies in the author world.
[00:01:17] So Abe, when I invite people on to talk about a particular topic, I always enjoy asking, what did you see in your professional or your personal environment that led you to want to share this information about maximizing the value of your content?
[00:01:32] Abe: Yeah, sure. So as you mentioned, I've spent most of my publishing career in the nonprofit and association publishing world. So nonprofits are interesting because in a lot of ways the mandate is a little bit different than a for-profit publisher, but in a lot of ways they operate like a large media corporation. You have various verticals, you have a number of different channels that you're trying to reach out to your constituents. And so as part of that you're creating content for a number of different channels, so that can be monthly magazines, books, online platforms, even scholarly journals. So as part of that, as part of the original thinking behind every project that you're going into, you're trying to figure out how you can get as much mileage out of your content as you possibly can ...
[00:00:06] Abe: I am well. How are you?
[00:00:07] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you ...
[00:00:11] With more than 20 years in nonprofit publishing and professional experience in editorial, production, acquisitions, and sales and marketing strategy, Abe Ogden is passionate about helping organizations with limited resources but an important mandate to deliver essential content to constituents and beyond. When he's not polishing a manuscript draft or putting the final touches on a marketing plan, he's either playing his guitar, which people who are watching on video will be able to see in the background, or tramping through the outdoors and hiking, camping, or fly fishing with his family.
[00:00:41] And I became aware of Abe's work when I read an article he had published in the January / February issue of IBPA INDEPENDENT, which is the magazine of the Independent Book Publishers Association. And the article was titled "Renewable Resources." And in it, he described what's going to be the topic of our conversation today, which is The Six R's of Maximizing the Value of Your Content.
[00:01:04] This is something I feel very strongly about. Back when I was in the online retail world, it was referred to as COPE, create once, publish everywhere. And so we're going to be talking about how that applies in the author world.
[00:01:17] So Abe, when I invite people on to talk about a particular topic, I always enjoy asking, what did you see in your professional or your personal environment that led you to want to share this information about maximizing the value of your content?
[00:01:32] Abe: Yeah, sure. So as you mentioned, I've spent most of my publishing career in the nonprofit and association publishing world. So nonprofits are interesting because in a lot of ways the mandate is a little bit different than a for-profit publisher, but in a lot of ways they operate like a large media corporation. You have various verticals, you have a number of different channels that you're trying to reach out to your constituents. And so as part of that you're creating content for a number of different channels, so that can be monthly magazines, books, online platforms, even scholarly journals. So as part of that, as part of the original thinking behind every project that you're going into, you're trying to figure out how you can get as much mileage out of your content as you possibly can ...
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[00:02:19] And I began working with a number of smaller publishers a little over a year ago when I started my own company. And as I was talking to a lot of these publishers, I recognized that sometimes this focus wasn't always there. A lot of times they were thinking in terms of a single project. And then once the project was out the door, it was done. So I originally started at talking to Alexa at the INDEPENDENT magazine about doing an article on re-purposing, which was really trying to focus on creating brand new products from the same content.
[00:02:55] And then as I began to talk to more small publishers, I realized it could probably be a little bit more broad than that because there are a number of different ways that you can repurpose your content to reach different channels in different markets and different audiences. So it grew from there into a hit list of the ways that you can take your content and bring it to different people.
[00:03:18] In a lot of ways, none of this is new. This is what major publishers have been doing for a number of years. But now we have so many different options to get different formats, different versions, different IP out to different customers and reach them where they are and affordable and democratized ways. That was the genesis of the article.
[00:03:40] And I tried to cover at a high level many of the different ways that small, independent, resource-constrained publishers can find ways to get extra life out of their content. Because at the end of the day, as an author or as a creator, you're really thinking about the project. As a publisher, it's really about how do I get as many SKUs as possible, how do I get as many revenue streams as possible, so that it becomes additive? And so I’m asking self-published authors and smaller publishers to put on that publisher hat and figure out how you can have revenue coming from three and four different areas from the same content.
[00:04:20] Matty: I love the article. I also liked that they all start with R. It's always fun when there's something like that. And some of them are things that I'm doing. Some of them were things that were just great reminders that I've got to keep in mind, and some of them are completely new to me. So what I wanted to do is just throw out the six R's one at a time, and have you comment on some of the options that they offer.
[00:04:43] So the first one was repackage. Talk a little bit about repackage.
[00:04:47] Abe: Yeah, so repackage, this one, I believe, most people are already thinking this way. Even if it's just, I need to do a print version and an ebook, a digital version, I think that this comes pretty naturally. And it's something that publishers have been doing for almost a hundred years now, where you start with a hardcover version to hit your very dedicated book people who are excited about books.
[00:05:10] And then once the tail on that starts to lengthen, then you move on to paperback and then it used to be mass markets, but now you're doing digital versions, audio books. So it's really the exact same content, just making sure that however anybody wants to consume it, you're making that available.
[00:05:27] And now it's interesting because 30 years ago, I doubt very many people bought a hardback version of a book and then the paperback version, but now somebody might want a digital, a print, and an audio book version of the same content. that one, I think most people are thinking that way.
[00:05:43] But then at the same time, you don't want to limit yourself to just print and digital. As I mentioned in the article, digital now can also be print. So for instance, I'm working with a small publisher that does middle grade fiction. And so they've historically done everything in print but they're trying to reach the library market, and they know that librarians like hardcover. They had never considered hardcover because it was just something that was out of their price range. Now when you look at something like Lightning Source and some of the print on demand vendors, you could look at packaging the book as a hardcover, price it in a way that gives you a little bit of margin, but you're only printing a few of them at the time, or even doing actual true one-offs, depending on how you're fulfilling the orders.
[00:06:25] Think outside of the box. Try and think of all the ways that you could reach these people because every reader is going to be coming to the content a little bit differently and don't limit yourself. Because I think we have this feeling, especially in the online world, that once the book is available, everybody who wants it has the opportunity to discover it.
[00:06:45] And that's not necessarily the case. We'd love it. That would be great if we could get the book in front of everybody that wants it, but people are going to be coming to it through a number of different ways. So make sure that you're hitting each one of those ways. And again, you've got people now who are buying multiple formats, so you're having somebody purchase the same book a couple of different times. Make sure that option is available.
[00:07:05] Matty: For my own books, I'm doing what I think are the most common platforms currently, which is print on demand print, ebook, and audio. And the one thing that I periodically think about and so far I've said no to is hardcover. And part of it is just because I don't really want to spend the money for a tweak to the cover from my cover designer to get it done, although it probably wouldn't be that expensive, but the thing that stands in my way is when I see the pictures they put up to illustrate what your book would look like if it were in hardcover, they almost looked like textbooks to me. And it actually took me a while to realize that it's because I'm always used to seeing a hardcover with a jacket and so hardcover without a jacket just looks like a textbook to me and was not appealing. But I guess you can now get jackets as well on a print on demand basis.
[00:08:01] Abe: That's true. And so the technology there has just gotten phenomenally better. When I started looking at print on demand, even just seven or eight years ago, when somebody handed you the book, you knew instantly that was a digital print on demand product.
[00:08:16] And again, the technology has gotten so much better that it's almost indistinguishable. So you can get a case bound, which is the cover printed onto the hardcover, like a textbook. But yeah, you can also get glossy jackets. You can get matte jackets. You can have it look any way that you would like. Not long ago, they just pushed out a cloth bound version. So it will look like a traditional cloth bound book under it under a dust jacket. You pay for each of those. Each of those features doesn't come free.
[00:08:43] But at the same time, if you're targeting a specific market like librarians who from an individual book price point tend to be a little bit less price conscious than your end consumers, then you can price it so that the margin then covers the additional cost to do that. And when you're talking about maybe printing as little as five to 10 copies of the book, your initial investment is relatively low. But you have an opportunity to get into a market that could then lead to further discovery.
[00:09:11] Especially if you're working on a series, take that first book in the series, do that as a hardcover book. See if you can get that into those library markets. And then you have the potential to introduce people to the series and that could lead to further sales down the line. And I imagine the quality and the price, the quality will get better than the price will continue to come down. It seems every year or two, there are better and better options available.
[00:09:33] Matty: That's why I keep putting off translations, because I feel like if I translate my books in five years, I can probably just feed the text into a machine and spit out a perfectly lovely version.
[00:09:43] It's actually an interesting consideration about you were saying try the first in your series. And my concern there would be if you put the first in a series out and people love it and they're the hardcover buying public, are they going to be disappointed when they get to book two while you're assessing whether the investment is worth the time, just so many things.
[00:10:05] Abe: And yeah, and I know that makes a ton of sense. At the same time, because the investment is so low and if you start to see demand or you get comments from your readers that, Hey, I'd like all of these in hardcover book for the, I think it's $50 to $60 to set up the book with a hardcover on demand printer, you can turn that around relatively quickly, as opposed to looking to, say, having to print overseas to get a few hundred to a thousand copies of your book. It's a good way to test and because the investment is relatively low, the risk is relatively low as well.
[00:10:39] Matty: Do you have a general estimate of what the cost would be if I have a paperback book and I want to create a print on demand hardcover, where I would go to do that and how much that would cost me?
[00:10:51] Abe: It will depend on the vendor. I have a lot of experience working directly with Lightening Source, which is the division of Ingram that does print on demand. They have a number of options available if you happen to be lucky enough to be working with one of the Ingram-owned distributors, you'll get a little bit of a price break, but anybody's available to go in and test it out. You can go to IngramSpark and they have a calculator there.
[00:11:15] Typically, for a one-color interior, four color cover with the dust jacket, you're probably looking at between $12 and $13 a book as a one-off. However, it wouldn't be unreasonable to price a books that would be $17 in paperback at $30 for a hardcover book, again, depending on the market. And if you do work with IngramSpark, they have distribution capabilities as well for the print on demand clients.
[00:11:43] It's very easy to use. You can go in, you can put in all the specs for your book, you can choose what you would like. And then it will give you a calculator. And it'll give you a calculator for what your costs would be, and then what your margin would be at the price point that you had set if it were to be distributed through Spark.
[00:11:59] And I know there are a number of digital printers out there, but if you're looking at a short run of just a few books, you're probably going to spend between $12 and $15 a book. You just have to price it appropriately. And for something like this, I think it's almost a marketing and discovery tool than it is necessarily an opportunity to generate a ton of income.
[00:12:20] Matty: I'm always plugging the Alliance of Independent Authors because if you're a member you can upload initial and revision files to IngramSpark for free. I think the same is true of IBPA.
[00:12:29] So I'm going to move on to the second R, which is repurpose.
[00:12:35] Abe: Yeah, so repurpose, this was the original thrust of the article, this is what I was looking to create and really talk about because it does seem to be something that is the bread and butter for large media companies, but for most smaller and self-published authors, either because of resources or just the investment required, it doesn't seem to really be part of the current workflow. Again, if you're working for what used to be Meredith, I don't know what Meredith will be anytime soon, or Time or somebody like that, with a number of different verticals, who've got magazine publishing, bookazine publishing, book publishing, web publishing. Again, anytime you acquire content, you want it pushing out to as many different places as you possibly can. So that's built into the workflow and the acquisitions process.
[00:13:20] So in the article I use the example of America's Test Kitchen and their approach. So America's Test Kitchen publishes dozens of books. They do bookazine, they have a television show, they have a website with a subscription model. All of that is coming from a base of around 600 to 700 total recipes. So they're publishing thousands of recipes a year, but it's the same 600 or 700 recipes.
[00:13:46] Now they have a reason that they do that, and that's because the recipe development process is so arduous. I was talking to one of the editors there and he said it can take five to six years for a recipe to come from sort of idea to finished product. So when you're spending five years on a recipe, you want to make sure that you're maximizing how you use that recipe. But I think it does point to the concept that if you're going to be developing this content, squeeze it for everything that you possibly can and hit every channel as much as you possibly can.
[00:14:18] Now for somebody like a self-published fiction author, your opportunities for repurposing are a little bit more limited than they would be say for a cookbook author or even a nonfiction author who could spin things off into articles and other pieces of content. But even then, I think the way you want to approach it is if there's an opportunity to license your content to someone else, consider re-purposing it. Think of repurposing as licensing your content to yourself. If you've got maybe some children's fiction and you would consider maybe licensing it to somebody to do a graphic novel, or even like a young reader version, sit down and do a P&L and see what it would cost to do that yourself.
[00:15:03] Look at creating other pieces of content from your intellectual property, or not even content. Look at other products. Look at things like creating merchandise, like doing things like gifts. Exactly. Right there.
[00:15:17] Matty: I'm holding up by my branded Indy Author water bottle as an example.
[00:15:22] Abe: Yeah. And that's a perfect example. And a lot like print on demand, a lot of that has been democratized because you can go into Cafe Press and you can have somebody come up with a character from one of your novels, have a quote from one of your books of poetry, and come up with a t-shirt or a tote bag, or think about getting the idea and the concept of the content into as many places as you possibly can.
[00:15:49] And again, if you can license it, now you have the capability to probably create that on your own without a huge initial investment.
[00:15:57] Matty: I always liked the opportunities to reference other episodes, and an interesting one was Episode 72, which was "Mentoring and Collaborating with Interns with Robert Blake Whitehill." And one of the things he talked about is the fact that he got some interns from the Parsons School of Design, I think, and they did fan art of his characters that he would put out on social media. I don't believe he sold any of it, but it was more a social media outreach. So that was a neat thinking out of the box kind of use.
[00:16:26] Abe: Absolutely. And, look, if you've got a built-in audience, I'm working with it with another publisher that did a writing contest and a fan art contest. They do books on geography, and so they had students submit maps and drawings and those types of things. And all of that can be repurposed.
[00:16:42] Now, again, there you're not looking at necessarily creating a ton of revenue. That's a marketing activity. Again it's trying to get as much possible life as you can out of that original product to maybe drive discovery or awareness.
[00:16:55] Matty: Another recommendation that I think I read in your article was the idea that you should never have to search for promotional material, if you have any content, because as an example, in the lead up to the publication of my most recent novel, after I did the cover reveal and all that kind of stuff, every day leading up to the launch I posted a branded image that I created in Canva and the book was called " A Furnace for Your Foe," so I had a graphic that had a little ring of fire, and then in the middle of it, I would put just a line or two of dialogue from the book.
[00:17:28] And I love it when other people do that. I never want to be skewed by only going after what is appealing to me, but I always stop when I'm scrolling through Facebook, I always stop if I see a post that includes a snippet of text from a book. And so if you're searching for what to put out there, that's a nice, painless way to find some content.
[00:17:46] Abe: Absolutely. Yeah. You should never have to hire a copywriter. You have all of the materials for a full-fledged content marketing campaign around your product. So yeah, absolutely repurpose that. Look at things like scheduling talks, I think, especially if you're doing non-fiction books, take that same concept, put it into a webinar or a seminar, talk about doing panels. Find as many ways to get that content out there as you possibly can.
[00:18:11] Matty: Do you have any insight into the extent to which things like panel discussions or talks at libraries or local organizations are strictly marketing and reader outreach, or is there a way to monetize that?
[00:18:26] Abe: You know, I think if you go into it thinking of it as marketing efforts, that's probably the right approach. That said, you can certainly be paid as a speaker. And obviously if you're well known, you'll probably make more from your speaker fees than you will from selling books. You can always look at book signings. I know that sometimes you can work with local libraries, they'd be happy to do a book signing where people could purchase copies of the books. You're again probably not going to make a ton of money on that. But you're creating relationship with your audience that could lead to further things down the line.
[00:19:00] And I think it really goes back to a concept that I do talk about with a lot of smaller publishers who are looking for ways to grow. And I think a lot of self-published authors and smaller publishers are looking for, we all want that grand slam. We all want something to take off and it's going to become a huge hit.
[00:19:19] And what I tried to focus on is that if you're going to hit a grand slam, I apologize for the sports analogy, but if you're going to hit a grand slam, you got to have people on base. So you've got to get singles and doubles and the singles and doubles will move runners across the plate, just like a grand slam will. So if you've got an opportunity to hit three singles with licensing your content, repurposing your content, maybe trying to appear on a panel, doing a book signing, yeah, none of those are necessarily going to have a huge margin, but they become additive and that's when things start to snowball. And what you will find as you're engaging in all these activities, that's going to set you up for that grand slam.
[00:20:03] Very rarely do you push out a book even with a major publisher and it suddenly takes off. There's usually a lot of smaller activities that are becoming additive that then lead to a bigger break.
[00:20:13] So it's work and sometimes the margin isn't great, but if you're focusing on those singles and doubles, you give yourself an opportunity for something larger to happen. Do everything that you possibly can.
[00:20:25] Matty: I'm going to move on to number three, which is revise.
[00:20:29] Abe: Yeah. So this is something that's very typical for publishers of flagship books and for people who are doing topical projects. But I would recommend, always look at doing a revision after a few years, mostly because it's a way to reintroduce your topic to a new audience in a new sales cycle.
[00:20:48] And this is sort of a crutch of the acquisitions world, as a new acquisitions editor if you're coming in on an imprint typically the first thing you will do to fill your pipeline is start identifying some products that could be revised. Again, that's sort of par for the course when you're talking about technical materials or even topical materials. But I'd say even if you're doing a cookbook or even if you've got a novel and it's been eight years since you've done the cover, look at doing a revision add a little bit of additional content, add an excerpt from the next book in the series or another book that you have.
[00:21:23] But just give yourself the opportunity to be in front of buyers over and over again, because five years ago maybe there was a conversation with a bookseller that didn't land, and now they get somebody else buying their books. A new cover might land with them. So again, it's just giving yourself an opportunity to restart that discussion.
[00:21:43] So if the contents been sitting around there for five or six years, I strongly recommend revising it to see if you can get some new life out of it.
[00:21:50] Matty: An example where I can imagine this playing out for my own book is I have two nonfiction books. The most recent one is THE INDY AUTHOR'S GUIDE TO PODCASTING FOR AUTHORS. And as my podcasting career goes on, I'm already thinking of other things I could add in there. So as an indy author, it would be easy for me to just go in, plug that data in, and upload the new content. But how do you position that? First of all, how do you position it so that you're taking advantage of that appealing new content while also not maybe accidentally making people who bought the first one buy the second one, if it's not that different? You know, setting the right expectation, both for new readers and existing readers.
[00:22:29] Abe: Yeah, that's a fine line that you have to walk. Typically making it very clear that this is a new edition of the book, especially on the cover, will typically let somebody who had bought the previous edition know that some of the content might be the same, but at the same time, I would take the opportunity to add as much new content as you can without rewriting the book or having to do a bunch of work to create new content.
[00:22:53] But add enough that there's enough value that somebody might consider it. I think I have three or four editions of PUBLISHING FOR PROFIT, which, by the way, I will always use any opportunity to plug that book. So if anybody who's listening to, this has not purchased that book, please go ahead and buy it right now. But each new edition has got some piece of content that I feel completely justifies the new $17, $18 a unit price. And for something like podcasting, that landscape changes so quickly over two to three years, I think that you would probably have plenty of people who'd be more than interested in getting the most recent and up-to-date version of the book.
[00:23:30] So when I say revise, I don't necessarily mean just slap a new cover. Make sure that you're adding some value in there. But at the same time it gives you an opportunity to treat it like a new book and push it out and do the marketing efforts that you would for a new book and potentially reach new readers and new book buyers and create new opportunities around the content.
[00:23:52] Matty: Do you have any guidelines for when it's legitimate to plug something as a new edition, and if there are any other logistical considerations , like do you need a new ISBN if you're publishing something you're labeling as second edition?
[00:24:05] Abe: So with the new revision, you're almost going to treat it like a new book. So it's going to be the same process. You'll want to add a new ISBN. You'll certainly want to take advantage of doing some updated cover artwork, just because that's the best way to get it out there and to start the new conversation. Depending on what you're adding to the material, there's no legal requirement for the amount of new content that you're putting in to call it a new edition. And you can go in and adjust a couple of things on the interior page. Now that's potentially going to have effects with your consumers. Obviously if they're buying a second edition and they bought the first edition and it's identical, that's a marketing and a sales issue. But in terms of doing a new edition, add enough to where it's going to be interesting and intriguing to your consumers, but you will want to treat it like a new book.
[00:24:52] For instance, if you're working with a distributor, you're going to reannounce that book. You're going to treat that book like a new book that you're talking to the sales reps about. And you will do all of the things like apply for a CIP or a Library of Congress control number, you'll get a new ISBN, you'll start your imprint series all over again. You're basically starting from scratch. You're just not rewriting the book.
[00:25:14] Matty: And then do you take the older edition down on all the marketing platforms or ask your distributor to take it down?
[00:25:20] Abe: You will try. So you'll give them an out-of-print notification. Amazon is notoriously bad about pulling old titles off. If anybody is willing to sell that old edition, it's probably still going to live on Amazon. But that new edition should take precedence in terms of the search and discovery tools that Amazon has in there.
[00:25:42] So that's why you want to work on your timing. You don't want to do a new edition of a book if you've got hundreds of thousands of copies sitting in your warehouse. You'll want to time it so that it's timed for the old edition to go away and this new edition will replace it.
[00:25:57] But you can't ever fully erase the first edition off of the digital platforms. Unfortunately they just don't work that way. With Amazon, we went through this where we had a previous edition that actually had an error in it and we talked to them and they said, you're going to need a legal injunction for us to pull it.
[00:26:14] Yeah. Yeah. They take it very seriously because so much of what they do is automated, so that's just not part of their process. But in terms of working with the distributor or wholesaler, you will say this new edition will replace the previous edition.
[00:26:26] Matty: I guess another possible tack to take, and I don't know if this is good marketing or just laziness, but I suppose you could put a new cover on a book that said second edition or something, but use the same ISBN, just upload new files. You upload the new cover, you upload the new content. And then I would think that the benefit is you carry forward the reviews.
[00:26:50] Abe: That's a good question. Typically, whenever you do a new edition or any kind of redesign, you typically want to add an ISBN, but you can put it in the metadata that it is a new edition.
[00:27:04] And so if you handle your metadata correctly and I apologize, I don't know how to do this directly with say somebody like Amazon, but if you're working with the distributor you can have that new edition become linked with the old edition. Now, sometimes those reviews will follow and sometimes they won't.
[00:27:25] But you do want to be careful about doing sort of a new format with the same ISBN because that can gum up the works in some other areas where you've got like returns, you've got old editions coming back with the same ISBN and then a new one going out. Or if you've got the old edition in the warehouse and it's got the same ISBN, a lot of warehouses will use that as the SKU. And so you may have an older version of the book that accidentally gets shipped out. So it's typically best practice, but there are ways to migrate a lot of that stuff. And you'll see this a lot on Amazon. It'll say like a newer edition of this book is available and you can go there.
[00:27:58] Matty: One thing that I liked, and again I think this came from your article, is for people who are writing fiction, the idea of a new foreword or a new intro as part of that revise strategy.
[00:28:08] Abe: Yeah, absolutely. Create a little perspective, have somebody come in and write a foreword based on their experience with the previous version or even you can have an extensive introduction and that alone could be worth somebody looking to get that new edition. Yeah, that's a good way to add some additional content that's got value.
[00:28:25] Matty: Yeah. I had never thought about asking, once maybe you're later on your career, you're more established and you could get a foreword from a better known author in your genre. I hadn't thought of that. That's a cool idea.
[00:28:35] Abe: Yeah. Yeah. Because that's a great way to get their name on that cover. And that's a great way to get their name in the metadata. And so that becomes a very powerful discovery tool. So yeah, if you've got somebody who's well known, you suddenly become associated with them. And so anybody who's familiar with them, then all of a sudden you've got a link there.
[00:28:51] Matty: Yep. Very cool. I'm going to move on to number four, which is repository. And I'm going to ask you to give a little background on this in general and how it would apply to an indy author.
[00:29:02] Abe: So this one is interesting and it gets very complex. And it can be as simple or as complex as you either would like or need it to be. So this is the repository approach is the domain of a lot of science, technical, and medical publishers. So scholarly technical materials, the approach there is that every piece of content that you are going to publish is marked up in a similar way. It goes into a content management system that can then be in a lot of ways automated in terms of what we were talking about with like re-purposing.
[00:29:36] So there's a very interesting flow chart that's floating around out there. It shows what they consider the new professional book publishing process, and it starts with content and then it goes to a markup editor, and then from there almost every step is automated. You have the design of it, the distribution of it, the format of it is automated in a lot of ways.
[00:30:00] I think for most of us when we're doing a book project, it starts with the writer and then the editor goes through it and then it goes to a typesetter and a compositor and they're going into InDesign or some of the other layout software, and then you go back and forth. When you're talking about a lot of this technical material, a lot of that's completely streamlined. So it will take the instructions from the text that is put into the CMS and then you can push it out into a number of different ways simultaneously.
[00:30:27] So that model probably doesn't apply to a lot of smaller publishers. But I would say, if you've got five or six different books or projects, it would be in your interest to go through and really do a good job tagging and marking that content. And whether or not that you're just sitting in a Google file in Google Drive so that you can then take advantage of the indexing capabilities of Google, or if it's a folder on your hard drive and your indexing is just what you remember from it, I do highly recommend going in there, marking up and tagging all of that content because that's going to make every process that follows after that so much easier.
[00:31:16] So for instance, if you're working with tagged content, I'm sure every small publisher has gone through the process of getting their book ready to go for ebook, and you push it out and it's a mess. And you got to go in and you've got to fix all these things and the headings aren't right. The hyperlinks aren't right. If all of that content is tagged on the front end then that process becomes much smoother because you're not undoing a lot of the stuff that word processors are going to be doing.
[00:31:40] So while you're probably as a small, independent publisher are not going to be investing tens of thousands of dollars in a CMS that allows you to push this out to aggregators and digital readers, take that mindset, because I think then what you've got as opposed to individual projects, is you've got a reservoir of content that you can then put into as many different vessels as you would like, and it simplifies all of those processes and it makes things like revisions, repackaging, licensing, if you're looking to license some of your content for like foreign translation rights, if you send them a finished PDF or InDesign files, they have to go through and undo all of that. If you've got pure, marked up text content, then that process is a lot easier.
[00:32:26] And I think as we move forward these types of things are going to become a lot more automated. And if you're looking to work with on-demand printers and some of these distribution partners, having that content in a way that doesn't have a bunch of embedded code in there and looking at it in terms of marking things up so that you can finding it will just really make your life easier.
[00:32:49] The benefits are a little bit vague, but it's one of those things that if you start doing it, you recognize why you would want to do it that way. And it makes your life a lot easier in the future. You become sort of software and version proof, so you don't ever have to worry about, oh, I've got an old InDesign file or a Quark file for those of us who remember Quark back in the bad old days, but it's just sitting there as a Quark file and either to buy a $300 plugin, if all your content is marked up and all those instructions are living in your content, you avoid those types of issues.
[00:33:18] Matty: The baby version that I thought of when I read the repository section is, and this would be more marketing and promotion oriented, but I can imagine having lists of all your content, in my case, it would be my novels, my short stories, my fiction books, and then every way you'd want to slice and dice that in a spreadsheet.
[00:33:38] So it might be every fiction story that takes place in Maine, every fiction story that takes place in Philadelphia. These would each be columns in my mental spreadsheet. Every book in the series that has this particular popular secondary character, all the ones that have magic in them. I don't know, whatever it makes sense for your books, because then if you're coming up dry on promotion or marketing material, you could say, I'm going to put out a Facebook ad to people who live in the Philadelphia area. And I want to make sure I remember to mention all my books that take place in Philadelphia. And so it's your own way of slicing and dicing it. It doesn't address those technical issues obviously that you mentioned, but it's a repository mindset that could help people in other ways.
[00:34:25] Abe: Absolutely. Absolutely. So yeah, the more you can tag that content and make it easier for you to find it, so that it's not, ah, man, what was the story? Where did I save that file? You know, when you think about it that way, and it also helps you organize it, it helps you keep track of all your content so that you know what you have.
[00:34:43] But yeah, I'm a big pivot table guy. And if you have a cell that covers all of these different areas, you can pull up a query and then that's going to pop right up. you can even do that in Google Drive. You wouldn't even necessarily need to create a separate spreadsheet. You can add tags to an individual file in Google Drive, and then when you do a search, it will surface that based on those tags.
[00:35:02] So it can be as sophisticated as you want. You can go in there and put XML tags in there if you want. If you want to just save it and add a couple of keywords in your file, it'll make your life a lot easier. It's a lot better to do that work up front.
[00:35:16] Matty: Yeah. It would be tedious to have to go back and find all the material.
[00:35:20] Abe: Absolutely, a reference to some specific thing. Yep.
[00:35:24] Matty: So number five is rights, and we could obviously do an entire episode on this. And in fact, I have, so I'm going to reference Episode 70, which was COPYRIGHT FOR AUTHORS WITH ORNA ROSS. So if people have rights questions, that's a great resource. So I wanted to focus our conversation on, are there any particular things you came across as you were working on the article related to rights that were specifically tied into the idea of maximizing the value of your content?
[00:35:55] Abe: Yeah, I won't dive into the host of legal issues. You could do a university course on copyright and you are surprised at how many people are still very muddy on that. But I think in this particular context, you want to think about rights in that singles and doubles analogy that I used earlier. If you're looking to sell your rights, that would be great if you can sell off the movie rights and then you buy yourself a very nice house in the Caribbean. Probably not going to happen. It could, but probably not going to happen. The way you really want look at it is this is an easy way to generate additional income at very low resource cost to you.
[00:36:32] So if you're looking at something like foreign translation rights, you may get a couple of thousand dollars to do the foreign translation rights. But if you got seven or eight of those going on to where you've done different formats, maybe you've licensed it to somebody else to do the audio book format, maybe licensed to somebody to do the graphic novel version of the book.
[00:36:51] Each one of those is going to be small, but it requires very little on your end. And again, it's singles and doubles and it starts to add up. In this context, I think that's how you want to look at it is how you get a few small wins that doesn't require a lot of effort on your part, but then also leads some to some additive revenue and it saves time as a discovery tool. Somebody may come across the graphic novel version of your book and then say, oh, I'd like to read the additional novel, so then you're getting two sales. You get your rights and your royalties from the graphic novel version, but then you could potentially lead to a sell for the full version as well.
[00:37:26] And so I would say, look at as many different formats, different regions, different areas. It all goes back to making sure that you've got full rights, that you haven't signed those over. If you're acting in a publisher capacity, that you've secured all those rights. But look at every single opportunity that there is out there to potentially sell the rights.
[00:37:44] Matty: I'm going to use that as a segue to number six, which is resources, which I thought was a very valuable item to wrap up your article with. And let's start out specific to rights. If someone is intrigued by the idea of rights, but in the scheme of things, either they don't have the time to invest in investigating it, or they don't have the knowledge to really pursue it, do you have recommendations for resources that are available to people that would help them with that?
[00:38:12] Abe: So there are a number of rights brokers that you can work with. A lot of them will deal with specific regions or specific types of content. So I know that there are people who focus specifically on children's literature. There are people who focus on medical and wellness books. A lot of that tended to happen at conference settings. For many years, that's where most of my rights deals happen is you would meet with somebody, and they always have a rights room where you go from table to table and it's like speed dating. With everything moving online, naturally and then over the past year and a half by force, a lot of those opportunities are a Google search a way.
[00:38:52] You could also look at Copyright Clearance Center, which is a great resource that gives you a lot of background, but you can also then put all of your content up in Copyright Clearance Center and then it's become available to anybody who would like to and it automates a lot of those processes.
[00:39:08] So if you're somebody that's created either artwork or figures and tables, and you would like to generate some rights off offer each of those components, you can do that through the Copyright Clearance Center. I recommend that as a resource.
[00:39:20] Matty: I had briefly looked into PubMatch, which I think is a similar kind of service. And the advice I got was that, it'll take you seven and a half minutes to load something onto PubMatch, but nobody's going to find it unless you're actively pursuing it. Like you're doing a marketing push or a promotional push to the people who are looking for those kinds of things. So it's two aspects that authors need to weigh -- that mechanical process of making it available and then how you let people know what's out there, kind of like publishing a book.
[00:39:49] Abe: Exactly. I was going to say, you can put up a blog post, but nobody's going to read it unless you're finding ways to drive people to the content. And so that's something that you need to keep in mind with this as well.
[00:39:58] That is one of the nice things about trying to find a rights broker and, working with the rights brokers a lot like working with an agent. There are the same sort of hurdles and the same sort of benefits that you would get from them. They're going to take a cut of the royalties. But they are going to get it in front of people and they're going to know the people to talk to. There are a few of those out there, but yes, if you're putting something up on PubMatch or Copyright Clearance Center, you've got to do some marketing around that so that people know that it's there and it's available. Because you, along with hundreds of thousands of other publishers, are living in that same repository.
[00:40:27] Matty: Yeah. So sticking with this topic of resources in the sense of resources that are available to help you maximize the value of your content. If we think through the other aspects, repackaging, repurposing, revising, let's put repository to the side for a moment. Are there resources available to help authors with those aspects?
[00:40:48] Abe: There are. And obviously I think we're both fans of IBPA. So if you are an independent author, a self-published author, they have a number of resources available either through educational articles or member benefits or direct access. So that's always a good place to start, to look there.
[00:41:07] A lot of this is a couple of Google searches away. And when I was talking about resources in the article, it was more of a cautionary approach, because you have to do your risk and benefit analysis and make sure that you've got the capability to do all of this. Because like I said, if you're looking at revising your new edition, maybe that upfront work isn't a whole lot of work, but you've got to be sure that you're putting in as much effort as you would on a new book.
[00:41:35] So it's really for planning and allocation purposes, making sure that as you approach these new products that like you said with PubMatch, you're not just pushing it out there and then crossing your fingers. You have to treat each one of these products as something new and give it the support that it needs to be successful.
[00:41:53] Matty: Yeah, I think that this aspect that you just mentioned is so important and it would be so easy for this to become a sort of shiny object syndrome. I like using nautical analogy, so my SOS for authors is shiny object syndrome because if I had to make a general statement about this, it would be, you're probably always going to benefit more from an hour spent on creating new content. You know, if I'm writing a book in a series, I could spend a week pursuing getting a new foreword from a well-known author, or I could spend the week working on the new book. And I think in most cases, working on the new book would be beneficial.
[00:42:31] And the other caution I think is that let's say you put something up on PubMatch and you think I'm just going to spend the seven and a half minutes to put it up there. I recognize that my chances of anything happening are low unless I do the marketing, but why not? But there's also this ongoing maintenance aspect, which is if in a year you have a new version of your book, then you need to go make sure that you update it on PubMatch. Like it's always just hanging out there.
[00:42:58] And so I'm wondering if you can talk more generally about tips that people should apply when they're weighing whether they should pursue these repurposing approaches.
[00:43:09] Abe: Yeah, that's an excellent consideration and that's why I think when you're looking at these new products, some of the processes are a little bit more streamlined. Some of them are a little bit easier to pursue. But if you can't support them, if you can't treat it like a new product, so if you're doing a revised version of your book, if you can't give it the same amount of effort and support that you would say with a new novel, then you've got to figure out is this worth my time?
[00:43:36] And so each of these, there are now hundreds of possibilities for creating and extending your content. But it really is, you want to sit down and, do a P & L. Do a risk / benefit analysis. And just because you can slap a logo onto some merchandise and create a Cafe Press store, if all you're going to do is just create that store and you don't have the capability to support it, then that's wasted time.
[00:43:59] So you need to make sure that anything that you're doing to extend your content or to repurpose your content or to create new content from existing content, that you have the capabilities and the resource allocation to make sure that it can be successful. Because now that so many of the distribution channels have been democratized, anybody can get on there, so it's a very crowded marketplace. What you do after the product is created is now doubly as important as what goes into it beforehand. So just because you can doesn't mean you should.
[00:44:31] At the same time, there's a balance. Don't just publish the book and then think that's all that there is to it. There are a number of things and it's just up to each individual author and each individual publisher to see which of those make the most sense in which they feel they can support for the long term.
[00:44:46] Matty: I think there's a nice analogy to choosing the social media platforms you're on because I think for a while, this was a while ago now, but the advice was get on every social media platform and be active.
[00:45:00] And I tried to do that and it was ridiculous because I never spent enough time on nine tenths of them to understand them enough to make good use of them. And then eventually the message evolved to pick the one or maybe two that you actually enjoy and understand and focus on those, which has worked much better for me.
[00:45:19] And I can imagine that as we were talking through these things, someone might have heard the revising thing really grabbed their attention, but the repository thing was like, argh! And so don't burn brain cells on trying to understand the repository part of it if it just freaks you out right out of the gate, because it's not going to get better.
[00:45:37] So you might end up finding that one of these things works great for you. Like merchandise is fun for you to do, and you're making some extra cash and you're enjoying showing up at a conference and seeing someone in your t-shirt or whatever. But don't feel like you have to slog through it like a checklist.
[00:45:55] And I just did an episode called BEHIND THE SCENES OF MY BOOK LAUNCH in Episode 77, and one of the things that I talked about was the idea that to me, coming from a project management background, I want everything proceduralized. And so now after having done seven book launches, seven novel launches, I have the things that I want to do and the things that I don't want to do, but in every upcoming launch, I always want to reserve a little bit of time to try the thing that I haven't tried before.
[00:46:24] So I don't want to get in too much of a rut. Like I've never really been successful at promo codes, but I still have a tickler item in my task list that says, try to figure out these promo codes better. And I would think it would be the same for this repurposing approach. Does that make sense to you?
[00:46:38] Abe: That makes a ton of sense. Yeah. I think you look at this like a restaurant menu. you're going to sit down at your restaurant but you're not going to order everything on the menu. You're going to order what you're hungry for and what you feel you can handle. So I think that's the approach that you want to take. If you're a publisher with 300 employees, then yeah, try and do every single one of these things. You've got the resources to do that. If you don't and if you're not comfortable with it, don't do something just because you can. See what aligns with what you're doing and, yeah, maybe revising isn't right for you, but licensing is. And then maybe you don't want to deal with doing a bunch of sub licenses and keeping tracks of royalties and working with an agent, so you want to find a different way to extend your content. You don't have to do it all.
[00:47:23] I think more than anything, it's just a mindset. It's just coming into it as saying, what I'm publishing, this isn't the only thing I can do. That there are a number of different options. There's a number of different ways that you can reach new readers and new audiences.
[00:47:38] Matty: Well, that's great. Abe, thank you so much. This has been so interesting and so helpful. Please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and all your work online.
[00:47:48] Abe: Absolutely. So you can visit my website at www.paperdoor.net. There I have a slightly neglected blog. It's been a little bit busy recently, but I'll be getting back to publishing new content there. And then you can also find me on LinkedIn as well, at LinkedIn/AbeOgden where I try to publish as much as I can. You know, you were talking about social media channels and I had to do the same thing. I had to narrow it down and it turned out LinkedIn was the one that was best for me. And then I have a couple of additional articles coming out in forthcoming issues of THE INDEPENDENT, so hopefully you guys will be able to read more there.
[00:48:25] Matty: Very good. Thank you so much.
[00:48:26] Abe: Thank you for having me.
[00:02:55] And then as I began to talk to more small publishers, I realized it could probably be a little bit more broad than that because there are a number of different ways that you can repurpose your content to reach different channels in different markets and different audiences. So it grew from there into a hit list of the ways that you can take your content and bring it to different people.
[00:03:18] In a lot of ways, none of this is new. This is what major publishers have been doing for a number of years. But now we have so many different options to get different formats, different versions, different IP out to different customers and reach them where they are and affordable and democratized ways. That was the genesis of the article.
[00:03:40] And I tried to cover at a high level many of the different ways that small, independent, resource-constrained publishers can find ways to get extra life out of their content. Because at the end of the day, as an author or as a creator, you're really thinking about the project. As a publisher, it's really about how do I get as many SKUs as possible, how do I get as many revenue streams as possible, so that it becomes additive? And so I’m asking self-published authors and smaller publishers to put on that publisher hat and figure out how you can have revenue coming from three and four different areas from the same content.
[00:04:20] Matty: I love the article. I also liked that they all start with R. It's always fun when there's something like that. And some of them are things that I'm doing. Some of them were things that were just great reminders that I've got to keep in mind, and some of them are completely new to me. So what I wanted to do is just throw out the six R's one at a time, and have you comment on some of the options that they offer.
[00:04:43] So the first one was repackage. Talk a little bit about repackage.
[00:04:47] Abe: Yeah, so repackage, this one, I believe, most people are already thinking this way. Even if it's just, I need to do a print version and an ebook, a digital version, I think that this comes pretty naturally. And it's something that publishers have been doing for almost a hundred years now, where you start with a hardcover version to hit your very dedicated book people who are excited about books.
[00:05:10] And then once the tail on that starts to lengthen, then you move on to paperback and then it used to be mass markets, but now you're doing digital versions, audio books. So it's really the exact same content, just making sure that however anybody wants to consume it, you're making that available.
[00:05:27] And now it's interesting because 30 years ago, I doubt very many people bought a hardback version of a book and then the paperback version, but now somebody might want a digital, a print, and an audio book version of the same content. that one, I think most people are thinking that way.
[00:05:43] But then at the same time, you don't want to limit yourself to just print and digital. As I mentioned in the article, digital now can also be print. So for instance, I'm working with a small publisher that does middle grade fiction. And so they've historically done everything in print but they're trying to reach the library market, and they know that librarians like hardcover. They had never considered hardcover because it was just something that was out of their price range. Now when you look at something like Lightning Source and some of the print on demand vendors, you could look at packaging the book as a hardcover, price it in a way that gives you a little bit of margin, but you're only printing a few of them at the time, or even doing actual true one-offs, depending on how you're fulfilling the orders.
[00:06:25] Think outside of the box. Try and think of all the ways that you could reach these people because every reader is going to be coming to the content a little bit differently and don't limit yourself. Because I think we have this feeling, especially in the online world, that once the book is available, everybody who wants it has the opportunity to discover it.
[00:06:45] And that's not necessarily the case. We'd love it. That would be great if we could get the book in front of everybody that wants it, but people are going to be coming to it through a number of different ways. So make sure that you're hitting each one of those ways. And again, you've got people now who are buying multiple formats, so you're having somebody purchase the same book a couple of different times. Make sure that option is available.
[00:07:05] Matty: For my own books, I'm doing what I think are the most common platforms currently, which is print on demand print, ebook, and audio. And the one thing that I periodically think about and so far I've said no to is hardcover. And part of it is just because I don't really want to spend the money for a tweak to the cover from my cover designer to get it done, although it probably wouldn't be that expensive, but the thing that stands in my way is when I see the pictures they put up to illustrate what your book would look like if it were in hardcover, they almost looked like textbooks to me. And it actually took me a while to realize that it's because I'm always used to seeing a hardcover with a jacket and so hardcover without a jacket just looks like a textbook to me and was not appealing. But I guess you can now get jackets as well on a print on demand basis.
[00:08:01] Abe: That's true. And so the technology there has just gotten phenomenally better. When I started looking at print on demand, even just seven or eight years ago, when somebody handed you the book, you knew instantly that was a digital print on demand product.
[00:08:16] And again, the technology has gotten so much better that it's almost indistinguishable. So you can get a case bound, which is the cover printed onto the hardcover, like a textbook. But yeah, you can also get glossy jackets. You can get matte jackets. You can have it look any way that you would like. Not long ago, they just pushed out a cloth bound version. So it will look like a traditional cloth bound book under it under a dust jacket. You pay for each of those. Each of those features doesn't come free.
[00:08:43] But at the same time, if you're targeting a specific market like librarians who from an individual book price point tend to be a little bit less price conscious than your end consumers, then you can price it so that the margin then covers the additional cost to do that. And when you're talking about maybe printing as little as five to 10 copies of the book, your initial investment is relatively low. But you have an opportunity to get into a market that could then lead to further discovery.
[00:09:11] Especially if you're working on a series, take that first book in the series, do that as a hardcover book. See if you can get that into those library markets. And then you have the potential to introduce people to the series and that could lead to further sales down the line. And I imagine the quality and the price, the quality will get better than the price will continue to come down. It seems every year or two, there are better and better options available.
[00:09:33] Matty: That's why I keep putting off translations, because I feel like if I translate my books in five years, I can probably just feed the text into a machine and spit out a perfectly lovely version.
[00:09:43] It's actually an interesting consideration about you were saying try the first in your series. And my concern there would be if you put the first in a series out and people love it and they're the hardcover buying public, are they going to be disappointed when they get to book two while you're assessing whether the investment is worth the time, just so many things.
[00:10:05] Abe: And yeah, and I know that makes a ton of sense. At the same time, because the investment is so low and if you start to see demand or you get comments from your readers that, Hey, I'd like all of these in hardcover book for the, I think it's $50 to $60 to set up the book with a hardcover on demand printer, you can turn that around relatively quickly, as opposed to looking to, say, having to print overseas to get a few hundred to a thousand copies of your book. It's a good way to test and because the investment is relatively low, the risk is relatively low as well.
[00:10:39] Matty: Do you have a general estimate of what the cost would be if I have a paperback book and I want to create a print on demand hardcover, where I would go to do that and how much that would cost me?
[00:10:51] Abe: It will depend on the vendor. I have a lot of experience working directly with Lightening Source, which is the division of Ingram that does print on demand. They have a number of options available if you happen to be lucky enough to be working with one of the Ingram-owned distributors, you'll get a little bit of a price break, but anybody's available to go in and test it out. You can go to IngramSpark and they have a calculator there.
[00:11:15] Typically, for a one-color interior, four color cover with the dust jacket, you're probably looking at between $12 and $13 a book as a one-off. However, it wouldn't be unreasonable to price a books that would be $17 in paperback at $30 for a hardcover book, again, depending on the market. And if you do work with IngramSpark, they have distribution capabilities as well for the print on demand clients.
[00:11:43] It's very easy to use. You can go in, you can put in all the specs for your book, you can choose what you would like. And then it will give you a calculator. And it'll give you a calculator for what your costs would be, and then what your margin would be at the price point that you had set if it were to be distributed through Spark.
[00:11:59] And I know there are a number of digital printers out there, but if you're looking at a short run of just a few books, you're probably going to spend between $12 and $15 a book. You just have to price it appropriately. And for something like this, I think it's almost a marketing and discovery tool than it is necessarily an opportunity to generate a ton of income.
[00:12:20] Matty: I'm always plugging the Alliance of Independent Authors because if you're a member you can upload initial and revision files to IngramSpark for free. I think the same is true of IBPA.
[00:12:29] So I'm going to move on to the second R, which is repurpose.
[00:12:35] Abe: Yeah, so repurpose, this was the original thrust of the article, this is what I was looking to create and really talk about because it does seem to be something that is the bread and butter for large media companies, but for most smaller and self-published authors, either because of resources or just the investment required, it doesn't seem to really be part of the current workflow. Again, if you're working for what used to be Meredith, I don't know what Meredith will be anytime soon, or Time or somebody like that, with a number of different verticals, who've got magazine publishing, bookazine publishing, book publishing, web publishing. Again, anytime you acquire content, you want it pushing out to as many different places as you possibly can. So that's built into the workflow and the acquisitions process.
[00:13:20] So in the article I use the example of America's Test Kitchen and their approach. So America's Test Kitchen publishes dozens of books. They do bookazine, they have a television show, they have a website with a subscription model. All of that is coming from a base of around 600 to 700 total recipes. So they're publishing thousands of recipes a year, but it's the same 600 or 700 recipes.
[00:13:46] Now they have a reason that they do that, and that's because the recipe development process is so arduous. I was talking to one of the editors there and he said it can take five to six years for a recipe to come from sort of idea to finished product. So when you're spending five years on a recipe, you want to make sure that you're maximizing how you use that recipe. But I think it does point to the concept that if you're going to be developing this content, squeeze it for everything that you possibly can and hit every channel as much as you possibly can.
[00:14:18] Now for somebody like a self-published fiction author, your opportunities for repurposing are a little bit more limited than they would be say for a cookbook author or even a nonfiction author who could spin things off into articles and other pieces of content. But even then, I think the way you want to approach it is if there's an opportunity to license your content to someone else, consider re-purposing it. Think of repurposing as licensing your content to yourself. If you've got maybe some children's fiction and you would consider maybe licensing it to somebody to do a graphic novel, or even like a young reader version, sit down and do a P&L and see what it would cost to do that yourself.
[00:15:03] Look at creating other pieces of content from your intellectual property, or not even content. Look at other products. Look at things like creating merchandise, like doing things like gifts. Exactly. Right there.
[00:15:17] Matty: I'm holding up by my branded Indy Author water bottle as an example.
[00:15:22] Abe: Yeah. And that's a perfect example. And a lot like print on demand, a lot of that has been democratized because you can go into Cafe Press and you can have somebody come up with a character from one of your novels, have a quote from one of your books of poetry, and come up with a t-shirt or a tote bag, or think about getting the idea and the concept of the content into as many places as you possibly can.
[00:15:49] And again, if you can license it, now you have the capability to probably create that on your own without a huge initial investment.
[00:15:57] Matty: I always liked the opportunities to reference other episodes, and an interesting one was Episode 72, which was "Mentoring and Collaborating with Interns with Robert Blake Whitehill." And one of the things he talked about is the fact that he got some interns from the Parsons School of Design, I think, and they did fan art of his characters that he would put out on social media. I don't believe he sold any of it, but it was more a social media outreach. So that was a neat thinking out of the box kind of use.
[00:16:26] Abe: Absolutely. And, look, if you've got a built-in audience, I'm working with it with another publisher that did a writing contest and a fan art contest. They do books on geography, and so they had students submit maps and drawings and those types of things. And all of that can be repurposed.
[00:16:42] Now, again, there you're not looking at necessarily creating a ton of revenue. That's a marketing activity. Again it's trying to get as much possible life as you can out of that original product to maybe drive discovery or awareness.
[00:16:55] Matty: Another recommendation that I think I read in your article was the idea that you should never have to search for promotional material, if you have any content, because as an example, in the lead up to the publication of my most recent novel, after I did the cover reveal and all that kind of stuff, every day leading up to the launch I posted a branded image that I created in Canva and the book was called " A Furnace for Your Foe," so I had a graphic that had a little ring of fire, and then in the middle of it, I would put just a line or two of dialogue from the book.
[00:17:28] And I love it when other people do that. I never want to be skewed by only going after what is appealing to me, but I always stop when I'm scrolling through Facebook, I always stop if I see a post that includes a snippet of text from a book. And so if you're searching for what to put out there, that's a nice, painless way to find some content.
[00:17:46] Abe: Absolutely. Yeah. You should never have to hire a copywriter. You have all of the materials for a full-fledged content marketing campaign around your product. So yeah, absolutely repurpose that. Look at things like scheduling talks, I think, especially if you're doing non-fiction books, take that same concept, put it into a webinar or a seminar, talk about doing panels. Find as many ways to get that content out there as you possibly can.
[00:18:11] Matty: Do you have any insight into the extent to which things like panel discussions or talks at libraries or local organizations are strictly marketing and reader outreach, or is there a way to monetize that?
[00:18:26] Abe: You know, I think if you go into it thinking of it as marketing efforts, that's probably the right approach. That said, you can certainly be paid as a speaker. And obviously if you're well known, you'll probably make more from your speaker fees than you will from selling books. You can always look at book signings. I know that sometimes you can work with local libraries, they'd be happy to do a book signing where people could purchase copies of the books. You're again probably not going to make a ton of money on that. But you're creating relationship with your audience that could lead to further things down the line.
[00:19:00] And I think it really goes back to a concept that I do talk about with a lot of smaller publishers who are looking for ways to grow. And I think a lot of self-published authors and smaller publishers are looking for, we all want that grand slam. We all want something to take off and it's going to become a huge hit.
[00:19:19] And what I tried to focus on is that if you're going to hit a grand slam, I apologize for the sports analogy, but if you're going to hit a grand slam, you got to have people on base. So you've got to get singles and doubles and the singles and doubles will move runners across the plate, just like a grand slam will. So if you've got an opportunity to hit three singles with licensing your content, repurposing your content, maybe trying to appear on a panel, doing a book signing, yeah, none of those are necessarily going to have a huge margin, but they become additive and that's when things start to snowball. And what you will find as you're engaging in all these activities, that's going to set you up for that grand slam.
[00:20:03] Very rarely do you push out a book even with a major publisher and it suddenly takes off. There's usually a lot of smaller activities that are becoming additive that then lead to a bigger break.
[00:20:13] So it's work and sometimes the margin isn't great, but if you're focusing on those singles and doubles, you give yourself an opportunity for something larger to happen. Do everything that you possibly can.
[00:20:25] Matty: I'm going to move on to number three, which is revise.
[00:20:29] Abe: Yeah. So this is something that's very typical for publishers of flagship books and for people who are doing topical projects. But I would recommend, always look at doing a revision after a few years, mostly because it's a way to reintroduce your topic to a new audience in a new sales cycle.
[00:20:48] And this is sort of a crutch of the acquisitions world, as a new acquisitions editor if you're coming in on an imprint typically the first thing you will do to fill your pipeline is start identifying some products that could be revised. Again, that's sort of par for the course when you're talking about technical materials or even topical materials. But I'd say even if you're doing a cookbook or even if you've got a novel and it's been eight years since you've done the cover, look at doing a revision add a little bit of additional content, add an excerpt from the next book in the series or another book that you have.
[00:21:23] But just give yourself the opportunity to be in front of buyers over and over again, because five years ago maybe there was a conversation with a bookseller that didn't land, and now they get somebody else buying their books. A new cover might land with them. So again, it's just giving yourself an opportunity to restart that discussion.
[00:21:43] So if the contents been sitting around there for five or six years, I strongly recommend revising it to see if you can get some new life out of it.
[00:21:50] Matty: An example where I can imagine this playing out for my own book is I have two nonfiction books. The most recent one is THE INDY AUTHOR'S GUIDE TO PODCASTING FOR AUTHORS. And as my podcasting career goes on, I'm already thinking of other things I could add in there. So as an indy author, it would be easy for me to just go in, plug that data in, and upload the new content. But how do you position that? First of all, how do you position it so that you're taking advantage of that appealing new content while also not maybe accidentally making people who bought the first one buy the second one, if it's not that different? You know, setting the right expectation, both for new readers and existing readers.
[00:22:29] Abe: Yeah, that's a fine line that you have to walk. Typically making it very clear that this is a new edition of the book, especially on the cover, will typically let somebody who had bought the previous edition know that some of the content might be the same, but at the same time, I would take the opportunity to add as much new content as you can without rewriting the book or having to do a bunch of work to create new content.
[00:22:53] But add enough that there's enough value that somebody might consider it. I think I have three or four editions of PUBLISHING FOR PROFIT, which, by the way, I will always use any opportunity to plug that book. So if anybody who's listening to, this has not purchased that book, please go ahead and buy it right now. But each new edition has got some piece of content that I feel completely justifies the new $17, $18 a unit price. And for something like podcasting, that landscape changes so quickly over two to three years, I think that you would probably have plenty of people who'd be more than interested in getting the most recent and up-to-date version of the book.
[00:23:30] So when I say revise, I don't necessarily mean just slap a new cover. Make sure that you're adding some value in there. But at the same time it gives you an opportunity to treat it like a new book and push it out and do the marketing efforts that you would for a new book and potentially reach new readers and new book buyers and create new opportunities around the content.
[00:23:52] Matty: Do you have any guidelines for when it's legitimate to plug something as a new edition, and if there are any other logistical considerations , like do you need a new ISBN if you're publishing something you're labeling as second edition?
[00:24:05] Abe: So with the new revision, you're almost going to treat it like a new book. So it's going to be the same process. You'll want to add a new ISBN. You'll certainly want to take advantage of doing some updated cover artwork, just because that's the best way to get it out there and to start the new conversation. Depending on what you're adding to the material, there's no legal requirement for the amount of new content that you're putting in to call it a new edition. And you can go in and adjust a couple of things on the interior page. Now that's potentially going to have effects with your consumers. Obviously if they're buying a second edition and they bought the first edition and it's identical, that's a marketing and a sales issue. But in terms of doing a new edition, add enough to where it's going to be interesting and intriguing to your consumers, but you will want to treat it like a new book.
[00:24:52] For instance, if you're working with a distributor, you're going to reannounce that book. You're going to treat that book like a new book that you're talking to the sales reps about. And you will do all of the things like apply for a CIP or a Library of Congress control number, you'll get a new ISBN, you'll start your imprint series all over again. You're basically starting from scratch. You're just not rewriting the book.
[00:25:14] Matty: And then do you take the older edition down on all the marketing platforms or ask your distributor to take it down?
[00:25:20] Abe: You will try. So you'll give them an out-of-print notification. Amazon is notoriously bad about pulling old titles off. If anybody is willing to sell that old edition, it's probably still going to live on Amazon. But that new edition should take precedence in terms of the search and discovery tools that Amazon has in there.
[00:25:42] So that's why you want to work on your timing. You don't want to do a new edition of a book if you've got hundreds of thousands of copies sitting in your warehouse. You'll want to time it so that it's timed for the old edition to go away and this new edition will replace it.
[00:25:57] But you can't ever fully erase the first edition off of the digital platforms. Unfortunately they just don't work that way. With Amazon, we went through this where we had a previous edition that actually had an error in it and we talked to them and they said, you're going to need a legal injunction for us to pull it.
[00:26:14] Yeah. Yeah. They take it very seriously because so much of what they do is automated, so that's just not part of their process. But in terms of working with the distributor or wholesaler, you will say this new edition will replace the previous edition.
[00:26:26] Matty: I guess another possible tack to take, and I don't know if this is good marketing or just laziness, but I suppose you could put a new cover on a book that said second edition or something, but use the same ISBN, just upload new files. You upload the new cover, you upload the new content. And then I would think that the benefit is you carry forward the reviews.
[00:26:50] Abe: That's a good question. Typically, whenever you do a new edition or any kind of redesign, you typically want to add an ISBN, but you can put it in the metadata that it is a new edition.
[00:27:04] And so if you handle your metadata correctly and I apologize, I don't know how to do this directly with say somebody like Amazon, but if you're working with the distributor you can have that new edition become linked with the old edition. Now, sometimes those reviews will follow and sometimes they won't.
[00:27:25] But you do want to be careful about doing sort of a new format with the same ISBN because that can gum up the works in some other areas where you've got like returns, you've got old editions coming back with the same ISBN and then a new one going out. Or if you've got the old edition in the warehouse and it's got the same ISBN, a lot of warehouses will use that as the SKU. And so you may have an older version of the book that accidentally gets shipped out. So it's typically best practice, but there are ways to migrate a lot of that stuff. And you'll see this a lot on Amazon. It'll say like a newer edition of this book is available and you can go there.
[00:27:58] Matty: One thing that I liked, and again I think this came from your article, is for people who are writing fiction, the idea of a new foreword or a new intro as part of that revise strategy.
[00:28:08] Abe: Yeah, absolutely. Create a little perspective, have somebody come in and write a foreword based on their experience with the previous version or even you can have an extensive introduction and that alone could be worth somebody looking to get that new edition. Yeah, that's a good way to add some additional content that's got value.
[00:28:25] Matty: Yeah. I had never thought about asking, once maybe you're later on your career, you're more established and you could get a foreword from a better known author in your genre. I hadn't thought of that. That's a cool idea.
[00:28:35] Abe: Yeah. Yeah. Because that's a great way to get their name on that cover. And that's a great way to get their name in the metadata. And so that becomes a very powerful discovery tool. So yeah, if you've got somebody who's well known, you suddenly become associated with them. And so anybody who's familiar with them, then all of a sudden you've got a link there.
[00:28:51] Matty: Yep. Very cool. I'm going to move on to number four, which is repository. And I'm going to ask you to give a little background on this in general and how it would apply to an indy author.
[00:29:02] Abe: So this one is interesting and it gets very complex. And it can be as simple or as complex as you either would like or need it to be. So this is the repository approach is the domain of a lot of science, technical, and medical publishers. So scholarly technical materials, the approach there is that every piece of content that you are going to publish is marked up in a similar way. It goes into a content management system that can then be in a lot of ways automated in terms of what we were talking about with like re-purposing.
[00:29:36] So there's a very interesting flow chart that's floating around out there. It shows what they consider the new professional book publishing process, and it starts with content and then it goes to a markup editor, and then from there almost every step is automated. You have the design of it, the distribution of it, the format of it is automated in a lot of ways.
[00:30:00] I think for most of us when we're doing a book project, it starts with the writer and then the editor goes through it and then it goes to a typesetter and a compositor and they're going into InDesign or some of the other layout software, and then you go back and forth. When you're talking about a lot of this technical material, a lot of that's completely streamlined. So it will take the instructions from the text that is put into the CMS and then you can push it out into a number of different ways simultaneously.
[00:30:27] So that model probably doesn't apply to a lot of smaller publishers. But I would say, if you've got five or six different books or projects, it would be in your interest to go through and really do a good job tagging and marking that content. And whether or not that you're just sitting in a Google file in Google Drive so that you can then take advantage of the indexing capabilities of Google, or if it's a folder on your hard drive and your indexing is just what you remember from it, I do highly recommend going in there, marking up and tagging all of that content because that's going to make every process that follows after that so much easier.
[00:31:16] So for instance, if you're working with tagged content, I'm sure every small publisher has gone through the process of getting their book ready to go for ebook, and you push it out and it's a mess. And you got to go in and you've got to fix all these things and the headings aren't right. The hyperlinks aren't right. If all of that content is tagged on the front end then that process becomes much smoother because you're not undoing a lot of the stuff that word processors are going to be doing.
[00:31:40] So while you're probably as a small, independent publisher are not going to be investing tens of thousands of dollars in a CMS that allows you to push this out to aggregators and digital readers, take that mindset, because I think then what you've got as opposed to individual projects, is you've got a reservoir of content that you can then put into as many different vessels as you would like, and it simplifies all of those processes and it makes things like revisions, repackaging, licensing, if you're looking to license some of your content for like foreign translation rights, if you send them a finished PDF or InDesign files, they have to go through and undo all of that. If you've got pure, marked up text content, then that process is a lot easier.
[00:32:26] And I think as we move forward these types of things are going to become a lot more automated. And if you're looking to work with on-demand printers and some of these distribution partners, having that content in a way that doesn't have a bunch of embedded code in there and looking at it in terms of marking things up so that you can finding it will just really make your life easier.
[00:32:49] The benefits are a little bit vague, but it's one of those things that if you start doing it, you recognize why you would want to do it that way. And it makes your life a lot easier in the future. You become sort of software and version proof, so you don't ever have to worry about, oh, I've got an old InDesign file or a Quark file for those of us who remember Quark back in the bad old days, but it's just sitting there as a Quark file and either to buy a $300 plugin, if all your content is marked up and all those instructions are living in your content, you avoid those types of issues.
[00:33:18] Matty: The baby version that I thought of when I read the repository section is, and this would be more marketing and promotion oriented, but I can imagine having lists of all your content, in my case, it would be my novels, my short stories, my fiction books, and then every way you'd want to slice and dice that in a spreadsheet.
[00:33:38] So it might be every fiction story that takes place in Maine, every fiction story that takes place in Philadelphia. These would each be columns in my mental spreadsheet. Every book in the series that has this particular popular secondary character, all the ones that have magic in them. I don't know, whatever it makes sense for your books, because then if you're coming up dry on promotion or marketing material, you could say, I'm going to put out a Facebook ad to people who live in the Philadelphia area. And I want to make sure I remember to mention all my books that take place in Philadelphia. And so it's your own way of slicing and dicing it. It doesn't address those technical issues obviously that you mentioned, but it's a repository mindset that could help people in other ways.
[00:34:25] Abe: Absolutely. Absolutely. So yeah, the more you can tag that content and make it easier for you to find it, so that it's not, ah, man, what was the story? Where did I save that file? You know, when you think about it that way, and it also helps you organize it, it helps you keep track of all your content so that you know what you have.
[00:34:43] But yeah, I'm a big pivot table guy. And if you have a cell that covers all of these different areas, you can pull up a query and then that's going to pop right up. you can even do that in Google Drive. You wouldn't even necessarily need to create a separate spreadsheet. You can add tags to an individual file in Google Drive, and then when you do a search, it will surface that based on those tags.
[00:35:02] So it can be as sophisticated as you want. You can go in there and put XML tags in there if you want. If you want to just save it and add a couple of keywords in your file, it'll make your life a lot easier. It's a lot better to do that work up front.
[00:35:16] Matty: Yeah. It would be tedious to have to go back and find all the material.
[00:35:20] Abe: Absolutely, a reference to some specific thing. Yep.
[00:35:24] Matty: So number five is rights, and we could obviously do an entire episode on this. And in fact, I have, so I'm going to reference Episode 70, which was COPYRIGHT FOR AUTHORS WITH ORNA ROSS. So if people have rights questions, that's a great resource. So I wanted to focus our conversation on, are there any particular things you came across as you were working on the article related to rights that were specifically tied into the idea of maximizing the value of your content?
[00:35:55] Abe: Yeah, I won't dive into the host of legal issues. You could do a university course on copyright and you are surprised at how many people are still very muddy on that. But I think in this particular context, you want to think about rights in that singles and doubles analogy that I used earlier. If you're looking to sell your rights, that would be great if you can sell off the movie rights and then you buy yourself a very nice house in the Caribbean. Probably not going to happen. It could, but probably not going to happen. The way you really want look at it is this is an easy way to generate additional income at very low resource cost to you.
[00:36:32] So if you're looking at something like foreign translation rights, you may get a couple of thousand dollars to do the foreign translation rights. But if you got seven or eight of those going on to where you've done different formats, maybe you've licensed it to somebody else to do the audio book format, maybe licensed to somebody to do the graphic novel version of the book.
[00:36:51] Each one of those is going to be small, but it requires very little on your end. And again, it's singles and doubles and it starts to add up. In this context, I think that's how you want to look at it is how you get a few small wins that doesn't require a lot of effort on your part, but then also leads some to some additive revenue and it saves time as a discovery tool. Somebody may come across the graphic novel version of your book and then say, oh, I'd like to read the additional novel, so then you're getting two sales. You get your rights and your royalties from the graphic novel version, but then you could potentially lead to a sell for the full version as well.
[00:37:26] And so I would say, look at as many different formats, different regions, different areas. It all goes back to making sure that you've got full rights, that you haven't signed those over. If you're acting in a publisher capacity, that you've secured all those rights. But look at every single opportunity that there is out there to potentially sell the rights.
[00:37:44] Matty: I'm going to use that as a segue to number six, which is resources, which I thought was a very valuable item to wrap up your article with. And let's start out specific to rights. If someone is intrigued by the idea of rights, but in the scheme of things, either they don't have the time to invest in investigating it, or they don't have the knowledge to really pursue it, do you have recommendations for resources that are available to people that would help them with that?
[00:38:12] Abe: So there are a number of rights brokers that you can work with. A lot of them will deal with specific regions or specific types of content. So I know that there are people who focus specifically on children's literature. There are people who focus on medical and wellness books. A lot of that tended to happen at conference settings. For many years, that's where most of my rights deals happen is you would meet with somebody, and they always have a rights room where you go from table to table and it's like speed dating. With everything moving online, naturally and then over the past year and a half by force, a lot of those opportunities are a Google search a way.
[00:38:52] You could also look at Copyright Clearance Center, which is a great resource that gives you a lot of background, but you can also then put all of your content up in Copyright Clearance Center and then it's become available to anybody who would like to and it automates a lot of those processes.
[00:39:08] So if you're somebody that's created either artwork or figures and tables, and you would like to generate some rights off offer each of those components, you can do that through the Copyright Clearance Center. I recommend that as a resource.
[00:39:20] Matty: I had briefly looked into PubMatch, which I think is a similar kind of service. And the advice I got was that, it'll take you seven and a half minutes to load something onto PubMatch, but nobody's going to find it unless you're actively pursuing it. Like you're doing a marketing push or a promotional push to the people who are looking for those kinds of things. So it's two aspects that authors need to weigh -- that mechanical process of making it available and then how you let people know what's out there, kind of like publishing a book.
[00:39:49] Abe: Exactly. I was going to say, you can put up a blog post, but nobody's going to read it unless you're finding ways to drive people to the content. And so that's something that you need to keep in mind with this as well.
[00:39:58] That is one of the nice things about trying to find a rights broker and, working with the rights brokers a lot like working with an agent. There are the same sort of hurdles and the same sort of benefits that you would get from them. They're going to take a cut of the royalties. But they are going to get it in front of people and they're going to know the people to talk to. There are a few of those out there, but yes, if you're putting something up on PubMatch or Copyright Clearance Center, you've got to do some marketing around that so that people know that it's there and it's available. Because you, along with hundreds of thousands of other publishers, are living in that same repository.
[00:40:27] Matty: Yeah. So sticking with this topic of resources in the sense of resources that are available to help you maximize the value of your content. If we think through the other aspects, repackaging, repurposing, revising, let's put repository to the side for a moment. Are there resources available to help authors with those aspects?
[00:40:48] Abe: There are. And obviously I think we're both fans of IBPA. So if you are an independent author, a self-published author, they have a number of resources available either through educational articles or member benefits or direct access. So that's always a good place to start, to look there.
[00:41:07] A lot of this is a couple of Google searches away. And when I was talking about resources in the article, it was more of a cautionary approach, because you have to do your risk and benefit analysis and make sure that you've got the capability to do all of this. Because like I said, if you're looking at revising your new edition, maybe that upfront work isn't a whole lot of work, but you've got to be sure that you're putting in as much effort as you would on a new book.
[00:41:35] So it's really for planning and allocation purposes, making sure that as you approach these new products that like you said with PubMatch, you're not just pushing it out there and then crossing your fingers. You have to treat each one of these products as something new and give it the support that it needs to be successful.
[00:41:53] Matty: Yeah, I think that this aspect that you just mentioned is so important and it would be so easy for this to become a sort of shiny object syndrome. I like using nautical analogy, so my SOS for authors is shiny object syndrome because if I had to make a general statement about this, it would be, you're probably always going to benefit more from an hour spent on creating new content. You know, if I'm writing a book in a series, I could spend a week pursuing getting a new foreword from a well-known author, or I could spend the week working on the new book. And I think in most cases, working on the new book would be beneficial.
[00:42:31] And the other caution I think is that let's say you put something up on PubMatch and you think I'm just going to spend the seven and a half minutes to put it up there. I recognize that my chances of anything happening are low unless I do the marketing, but why not? But there's also this ongoing maintenance aspect, which is if in a year you have a new version of your book, then you need to go make sure that you update it on PubMatch. Like it's always just hanging out there.
[00:42:58] And so I'm wondering if you can talk more generally about tips that people should apply when they're weighing whether they should pursue these repurposing approaches.
[00:43:09] Abe: Yeah, that's an excellent consideration and that's why I think when you're looking at these new products, some of the processes are a little bit more streamlined. Some of them are a little bit easier to pursue. But if you can't support them, if you can't treat it like a new product, so if you're doing a revised version of your book, if you can't give it the same amount of effort and support that you would say with a new novel, then you've got to figure out is this worth my time?
[00:43:36] And so each of these, there are now hundreds of possibilities for creating and extending your content. But it really is, you want to sit down and, do a P & L. Do a risk / benefit analysis. And just because you can slap a logo onto some merchandise and create a Cafe Press store, if all you're going to do is just create that store and you don't have the capability to support it, then that's wasted time.
[00:43:59] So you need to make sure that anything that you're doing to extend your content or to repurpose your content or to create new content from existing content, that you have the capabilities and the resource allocation to make sure that it can be successful. Because now that so many of the distribution channels have been democratized, anybody can get on there, so it's a very crowded marketplace. What you do after the product is created is now doubly as important as what goes into it beforehand. So just because you can doesn't mean you should.
[00:44:31] At the same time, there's a balance. Don't just publish the book and then think that's all that there is to it. There are a number of things and it's just up to each individual author and each individual publisher to see which of those make the most sense in which they feel they can support for the long term.
[00:44:46] Matty: I think there's a nice analogy to choosing the social media platforms you're on because I think for a while, this was a while ago now, but the advice was get on every social media platform and be active.
[00:45:00] And I tried to do that and it was ridiculous because I never spent enough time on nine tenths of them to understand them enough to make good use of them. And then eventually the message evolved to pick the one or maybe two that you actually enjoy and understand and focus on those, which has worked much better for me.
[00:45:19] And I can imagine that as we were talking through these things, someone might have heard the revising thing really grabbed their attention, but the repository thing was like, argh! And so don't burn brain cells on trying to understand the repository part of it if it just freaks you out right out of the gate, because it's not going to get better.
[00:45:37] So you might end up finding that one of these things works great for you. Like merchandise is fun for you to do, and you're making some extra cash and you're enjoying showing up at a conference and seeing someone in your t-shirt or whatever. But don't feel like you have to slog through it like a checklist.
[00:45:55] And I just did an episode called BEHIND THE SCENES OF MY BOOK LAUNCH in Episode 77, and one of the things that I talked about was the idea that to me, coming from a project management background, I want everything proceduralized. And so now after having done seven book launches, seven novel launches, I have the things that I want to do and the things that I don't want to do, but in every upcoming launch, I always want to reserve a little bit of time to try the thing that I haven't tried before.
[00:46:24] So I don't want to get in too much of a rut. Like I've never really been successful at promo codes, but I still have a tickler item in my task list that says, try to figure out these promo codes better. And I would think it would be the same for this repurposing approach. Does that make sense to you?
[00:46:38] Abe: That makes a ton of sense. Yeah. I think you look at this like a restaurant menu. you're going to sit down at your restaurant but you're not going to order everything on the menu. You're going to order what you're hungry for and what you feel you can handle. So I think that's the approach that you want to take. If you're a publisher with 300 employees, then yeah, try and do every single one of these things. You've got the resources to do that. If you don't and if you're not comfortable with it, don't do something just because you can. See what aligns with what you're doing and, yeah, maybe revising isn't right for you, but licensing is. And then maybe you don't want to deal with doing a bunch of sub licenses and keeping tracks of royalties and working with an agent, so you want to find a different way to extend your content. You don't have to do it all.
[00:47:23] I think more than anything, it's just a mindset. It's just coming into it as saying, what I'm publishing, this isn't the only thing I can do. That there are a number of different options. There's a number of different ways that you can reach new readers and new audiences.
[00:47:38] Matty: Well, that's great. Abe, thank you so much. This has been so interesting and so helpful. Please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and all your work online.
[00:47:48] Abe: Absolutely. So you can visit my website at www.paperdoor.net. There I have a slightly neglected blog. It's been a little bit busy recently, but I'll be getting back to publishing new content there. And then you can also find me on LinkedIn as well, at LinkedIn/AbeOgden where I try to publish as much as I can. You know, you were talking about social media channels and I had to do the same thing. I had to narrow it down and it turned out LinkedIn was the one that was best for me. And then I have a couple of additional articles coming out in forthcoming issues of THE INDEPENDENT, so hopefully you guys will be able to read more there.
[00:48:25] Matty: Very good. Thank you so much.
[00:48:26] Abe: Thank you for having me.
Links
From personal update:
ALL DEATHS ENDURE Audio Performance by Eric Bryan Moore on the Pocket Pulp Podcast
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