Top Tips from Michelle DeFilippo
1. Beware of Royalty Promises:
“The first tip is, if you go to some publishers website and they promise to pay you a royalty, that is a tip off. That means that they’re publishing the book under their name, they are getting the money first, and they’re paying you less than the full compensation that that book has earned.”
2. Watch Out for Free ISBNs:
“The second tip is, if they offer you a free ISBN, that’s another red flag. It means they’re giving you one of their ISBNs, which means that they are registered as the publisher of your book, not you, and they control your book.”
3. Distribution Claims:
“The third thing is that these companies will often say, we will distribute your book to bookstores worldwide. It does not mean your book is going to be on the shelf of bookstores worldwide. It means they’re uploading your book to their Ingram Spark account and your book will be in the Ingram database.”
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
book, author, people, write, ebook, print, publishing, self publishing, good, manuscript, business, cover, editor, publish, work, publisher, design, share, bookstore, typesetting
Debra Chantry-Taylor 00:42
Welcome, to another episode of Better Business, Better Life. I’m your host, Debra Chantry Taylor, Taylor and I’m passionate about helping entrepreneurs lead their ideal lives by creating better businesses.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 01:00
I’m a certified EOS implementer and FBA accredited family business advisor and a business owner myself with several business interests. I work with established business owners and their leadership teams to help them live their ideal entrepreneurial life using EOS The Entrepreneurial Operating System, my guests come onto the show to authentically share the highs and lows of operating a successful business and how they’ve turned things around in their business to create a better business and better life. I also invite experts on the show to share their expertise.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 01:33
Now today’s guest has been in the publishing business for 52 years. She got put out of her typesetting business by Steve Jobs back in the 80s, and she’s an expert in what I would call true self-publishing. She helps businesses and individuals to self-publish their books, and today she’s going to share what self-publishing actually is, some of the pitfalls in self-publishing and how you can ensure that you keep control of your publishing and create a book or booklet that delivers true return on investment for you. Michelle DeFilippo is the owner of 1106 design. Michelle, welcome to the show. It’s great to have you on here.
Michelle DeFilippo 02:08
Thank you so much, Debra, it’s a pleasure to be here with you.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 02:11
Yeah, so, we’ve just been speaking a little bit before the podcast and learning a bit about your history. I wonder if you would share that with, for me, with the listeners, because you’ve got a very strong history in terms of publishing, haven’t you.
Michelle DeFilippo 02:23
Sure, I started working in the publishing industry way back in 1972 when I was 19 years old. So I’ve seen just about everything that’s happened in publishing in today’s world, and have experienced a lot of up and downs, as you might have imagined. But it’s it’s really good to be here on podcasts and give so many people are publishing books now that it’s a great opportunity for me to share what I know and also help authors avoid some of the pitfalls that exist in today’s self publishing or independent publishing arena.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 02:56
Oh that sounds good. So tell us a little bit about that sort of history. Says 19 years old, so that was pretty much straight from school. What, what made you go into publishing?
Michelle DeFilippo 03:04
It was actually an accident. I wish I had told you I had a plan, but, but I didn’t. I went out on a bunch of job interviews, and Crown Publishing in New York City was the first one that said, yes, it wanted me. And so I began, and it was I loved it from the very beginning, because every, every project we worked on was different and new, and every author was different and new. So there was no boredom in the industry, as you might expect from some other jobs.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 03:30
And so have you worked with anybody really famous in terms of publishing books?
Michelle DeFilippo 03:35
No, I can’t say I have, although, when I was living in New York and working in New York, it wasn’t uncommon to walk up and down the street and see movie stars all the time.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 03:45
Excellent. So these days, I mean, obviously 52 years, isn’t it? That’s a long time in terms of publishing, and things have changed because of just technology. And we’re talking about this before technology has changed the way we do a lot of things. What kind of impact do you think that’s had on the publishing industry.
Michelle DeFilippo 04:02
Well, its it’s today we have authors have more opportunity than ever in history to publish the book that they want to publish without anybody else telling them what to do or directing the process. And that is great. But back in the day, it on in the traditional publishing model that we’re all familiar with, major publishers would take great care to produce a quality book. They would hire the experts to produce the book, and you could be assured, if you went and published a book and purchased a book in a bookstore, that it was a quality product. You didn’t have to worry about whether or not it would be a good book. So with opportunity and with all the changes that have occurred in the publishing industry since then, it has now become possible for anybody to produce a book, but a lot of the people who are producing books are either not aware of or are choosing to ignore the traditional publishing standards. So now there’s. Risk for the buyer when they purchase a book, they really don’t know until they get it in their hands or on their device, whether or not it’s going to be any good. So I’m here to remind people that there are still companies like mine that produce good books and can help them put out a good book that they’re proud to market and sell.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 05:19
It is interesting, because when we talked about self-publishing, I think for a lot of people, they think that that means that you’re going to do everything yourself, don’t they? It’s like a complete DIY. But that’s not really what self-publishing is, is it?
Michelle DeFilippo 05:33
No, and that’s the misunderstanding that has crept into the process, that there’s the technology has played a role in that. Technology now exists for you to dump your manuscript into an automated system and something that looks kind of like a book pops out the other end, and it’s free, and so a lot of people are taking advantage of that. But the problem is it’s not a real book. That’s not how a real good book is produced. The process is much more involved, much more technical than that. A lot of research when it’s done the right way, a lot of research goes into the cover before cover designs are or created. It’s not done with a template, and even on the way the interior pages are types and it’s a craft all its own, called typesetting that people are forgetting or had never even heard that word, and it’s a very meticulous adjustment of all the spacing of the words and the lines and the letters on the page so that reading comprehension is enhanced and readers are not distracted by poor spacing or other oddities that that interrupt the brain, right? So, so that’s, that’s the level we work at the traditional publisher level.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 06:50
And what that means for and as an outcome is you actually have a book that is more likely to engage with the reader and present information in a more usable format.
Michelle DeFilippo 07:01
I guess. Well, yes, a good cover first of all makes people stop when they see it on Amazon or even in a bookstore. And so they’ll if we get them to stop, that’s the job of the cover, then they can read about the book’s content and decide for themselves whether or not they’re interested. We can’t control that, but our job is to make them stop, and we do that with a compelling cover, with beautiful imagery, beautiful typography, all balanced and coordinated, so that it looks like a book from a major publisher.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 07:32
Okay, and so, so self publishing. So what it really is is, yes, you get to write the content, but you’re still engaging with an expert who can ensure that content is produced in a way that people actually want to to read it.
Michelle DeFilippo 07:47
Ideally. Yes, and it’s surprising to any of us who have been in the industry for a long time. How? How can writers who theoretically love books, and that’s why they’re publishing one themselves, how can they not see the difference between a book that’s been formatted in Microsoft Word or a cover that’s been designed with a template? A certain kind of blindness creeps in. I can’t quite put my finger on it. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, because everybody knows what a good book looks like, and that author’s customers also know what a good book looks like. So if the intent is to save money, you know, I hear that a lot, I can’t afford to do it, except to do it myself. You’re really kind of cutting off your chances to succeed before you even begin.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 08:33
Yeah, you got everything else to bite your face. Okay, so why? Why do people decide to write books? I know there’s a lot of people writing books out there, but what are the main reasons you might sort of think about writing a book?
Michelle DeFilippo 08:45
Oh gosh, all kinds of reasons. Sometimes it’s someone who is getting on in years and they want to write down the events of their life and describe their life and share their thoughts with with the people, their children and grandchildren and so forth, so that they have something to hold in their hands after after Grandma or Grandpa passes, right? That’s one reason other people are writing memoirs. They they’ve had an interesting life, and they they also want to write it down to maybe inspire people or help other people get through a difficult situation, or or or help them in some other way. Right?
Business people write books to establish a brand and to tell people about their company and what they’ve accomplished and where they are in their business life. And then finally, and I’ve done this myself, some small businesses can write a booklet. It doesn’t have to be a full-length book, but write a booklet, give it away on their website and tell people about their business so that they can learn about you in a non-threatening way before they’re ready to engage with a salesperson. So that works really well too, to bring in new business leads.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 09:58
Perfect, so it’s like a white paper on steroids, I guess.
Michelle DeFilippo 10:01
Yes, except it looks better. Okay,
Debra Chantry-Taylor 10:02
So let’s focus a little bit on the business area, because obviously that’s my area of specialty. So I think often people yes so they want to write a book to either share their experiences or to share their expertise, with the ultimate intention, I suppose, of creating some credibility and some expertise, but also potentially getting new clients. What are the biggest mistakes people make when they write books for a business purpose?
Michelle DeFilippo 10:28
Oh, gosh, I probably making a book that’s too long, right? Sometimes, you know, because if you look, authors should start before they even begin writing. First of all, they should know who they’re writing for. What problem are they solving? You know, try to find a burning problem in the world and offer your take on what the solution is, and you’ll have a better chance of selling that book to people who need your advice. The next bit of advice would be, don’t make your book too long. If you notice what major publishers are doing, books are much shorter than they were even 20 years ago, right? People, the internet has trained us to want information in small chunks. Nobody has the patience to read a 400 or 500 page book anymore. So those, those are two things we usually see. The other mistake I see a lot is that someone who is very competent in their career, what you know, whether it’s an attorney or a PhD or something like that, they think they don’t need editing, and they do. Everyone needs an editor. Even the Pope has an editor. So he you really do need to have unbiased eyes on your manuscript before it’s published, so that someone other than yourself can see what you didn’t notice.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 11:48
I think it’s true, isn’t it? Because we tend to, I do this all the time in business. Is because I’m an expert in a number of things. I kind of assume that everybody else has that same expertise, and you realize that they don’t. And so we explain it in a way that make perfect sense to ourselves. But it does not mean that it actually makes sense for somebody who doesn’t have the same knowledge, skills, background, experience, qualifications that we do. So for the editor’s role is to actually look at it from an outsider’s perspective and go, does this actually make sense? Does it speak to me? I mean, what? Tell me what the role of the editor is. What do they really do for that book?
Michelle DeFilippo 12:19
Well they do quite a lot, but mostly they’re a stand in for your eventual reader, right? So if they read a paragraph and it doesn’t click for them, or they don’t understand what you’re saying, and they don’t have to be an expert in your subject matter, but the writing has to be clear, and so they would be more likely, like you just said, when we talk about our own area of specialty. We know what we mean to say, and so it seems perfect, but if you’re trying to reach people who are not experts in your area, you have to explain yourself a little differently. And that’s what editors do, in addition to correcting grammar and and syntax and, you know, redundancy and all of that kind of thing.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 13:01
I’m sitting here thinking, I’m thinking with the invent of AI and chat GPT and all these various different tools out there, from a lot of people, thinking about, I can just run it through chat GPT and that will kind of do the same job. I know that’s not the right answer, but I just wanted to get your kind of, your your feeling on that, and how you would respond to that?
Michelle DeFilippo 13:20
Well, yeah, I think we’ve all seen AI writing, and it makes mistakes, doesn’t it? And you have to know how to spot, you know, you know, I remember.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 13:30
I think it makes more than mistakes. I think it also, I mean, it tends to have, you know, you I can always tell when something has been written by AI because it has this sort of language. And it’s not even language that I think we use naturally as humans, so it feels like it’s been written by AI. But, yeah, yeah, tell me more. And what, what is the difference? What sort of things do you see the editor really adding value, as opposed to just going through an AI bot?
Michelle DeFilippo 13:57
Oh, well, an editor is a human being. That’s that’s number one. So they know how texts can be made better. That’s their special thing, right? So they’re going to smooth out the bumps that are in your manuscripts that you didn’t see. I’ll date myself here, and I’ll tell you when I was, when I was young, is when calculators first came out, right? Oh, yes. And so, of course, at that time, a lot of people were against them. No, no, no. You have to do the math by, you know, manually, right
Debra Chantry-Taylor 14:24
With that because I remember this. I’ve got abacus in a house.
Michelle DeFilippo 14:29
but, but the but even with a calculator we now, I mean, there’s a parallel there, right? Because you do calculation and you’ve done something wrong, you recognize what it’s wrong, because you know math, so that’s what the that’s what the editor does. You’ve said something, whatever it is, and the editor will recognize where you’re trying to go with it and smooth it out for you.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 14:53
Okay, so let’s just say that I decided that I wanted to write a book. Where on earth would you start? I think you already mentioned this at the beginning. Don’t know who you know what pain point you’re solving, who you’re going after, but yeah, let’s go right the way back to basics. So I go, Hey, look, I’ve been around for 53 years. I’ve got all this experience that I want to share. I want to share some of the challenges I’ve been through and how I’ve overcome them, but I have no idea where to start. Where would I even think about starting?
Michelle DeFilippo 15:17
Well, the hardest part is starting, right? Once you make the commitment to start, then you can find your own method of how to proceed. Right? Some people like to make detailed outlines and sketch out the plot and everything if they’re writing a novel, but other people just like to go at it and see where where the impulse takes them. So that’s an individual choice, and that’s also why an editor is necessary, because maybe you thought it flowed well from point A to point B, but, but perhaps it didn’t if you were winging it. So yeah, you need the professionals, the people who specialize in words, to help you out.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 15:55
So if you’re working with a potential author, what do you what do you do? They come to you once they’ve finished what they’re thinking over, they come to you beforehand. What’s the best way?
Michelle DeFilippo 16:04
Most, most of them come to us when they have a completed manuscript. I occasionally get a call for someone who’s looking for writing help, and I tell them, we don’t do that but, but I can recommend to them writing coaches or ghost writers, depending on what it is they need, what stage they’re at. So we can take a finished manuscript, and the first thing we do is an editorial evaluation, so that the editor can, usually, within the first 75 pages or so, tell if the author what level of skill the author has in writing the text, and that lets the editor see how much time may be needed to get the text into shape, and we’ll send that evaluation to the editor. Sometimes the author can correct a whole bunch of things that the editor pointed out and come back with a much cleaner, much tighter manuscript. And then we’ll go into the copy editing stage for them.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 17:01
Okay, I’m really keen to hear a bit about the booklets that you described. So that’s a little bit different to writing a book, right? Because a book, it could be a could be fiction, could be nonfiction, and you’ve obviously got a sense of what you want to do. It’s really interesting. Couple of my friends have actually got into writing nonfiction books, and they really come from a business background, but just really wanted to get into writing and now write the most amazing book and do really well with them. But for a lot of us, we’re more business focused, and we’re going, Okay, I think it’d be really helpful to have a little mini booklet that would help the business. But where would you start with that? Is it something that you can take content that already exists and then develop something or what is the best way to look at that.
Michelle DeFilippo 17:41
I can say with confidence that any business owner already has their booklet in their head. It’s it’s the questions you answer all the time, it’s the things that people ask you all the time. And all you need to do is get started and just start typing it in, putting it in rough form, and then we could take it from there. My little book is called publish like the pros, and I offer this for free on my website in PDF form, and it just takes people through the stages of the self publishing process and offers advice and then gets a little technical into the details of how authors are paid and which is the best way to set up their publishing enterprise so that they make the most money.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 18:26
Okay, you’ve just raised a really interesting point for me. Now, of course, there is, if you think about we’ve pretty much all got ebook capability these days, so I’m a big fan. I’ve got a Kindle, I’ve also got a KOBO. I’ve always got one of them with me. But I also really like physical books as well. So I’ve got an entire library of physical books and and I think there’s pros and cons to both. I really sometimes, you know, because a how to book, I enjoy writing in the book, which I know is sacrilege, but it’s like, it’s actually good to have that and little tabs and things, whereas when you’re reading on a on a Kindle or a Cobo, it’s a little bit different. What is the main difference between an ebook versus or, you know, a Kindle book versus a printed book. Do you still go through the same type of type setting and looking at how it’s presented? What’s the main differences?
Michelle DeFilippo 19:09
Well, people, but when ebooks, ebooks have been through at least three generations now, and every time, they always predict the death of print books. And it never happens. People still love a real book. This just, well, first of all, for when you, when we’re producing a print book, we we can do far more esthetically with the text and the cover and the typesetting than you can do in an ebook. An ebook, by definition, looks generic because it has to be able to reflow on any device. So you can’t do nice design on an ebook, it has to be just kind of bland. And I think that’s why a lot of people don’t like ebooks, because they all look the same. Whereas a print book, you can open it and you can say, Oh, that looks nice, or Gee, I wouldn’t have thought of doing that. And it’s more of an experience, I think, than an ebook. Yeah.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 20:03
Yeah, okay, and so I’m just looking behind me. You can see I’ve got some of my favorite books there. I’ve got a whole library downstairs and in my session room, because I really do enjoy having the hard copies of books. So there’s nothing to stop so, but once you’ve got a really good printed book, it’s then easy to translate it into an ebook. Is that? Is that fair to say?
Michelle DeFilippo 20:20
Yes, we lay out our books in Adobe InDesign, and then we can export, export that file to ebook format, but it takes a lot of manipulation even after that, because there’s two kinds of ebooks creation. You’ll hear about ebook conversion and you’ll hear about EBOOK formatting. Now, ebook conversion is generally done by a machine. So a machine makes the decisions about how things should be coded. EBOOK formatting is done by a human being who knows how that text is going to display on different devices, and will enter codes accordingly that say something like, if this is opened on a Kindle, Kindle, do this. If this is opened on a nook, do this instead, and the result is a better experience for the reader no matter what device the ebook is opened on.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 21:10
Okay, I didn’t realize that there’s two different ways of doing it. Fabulous. Okay, so into a little bit about covers now, because it is interesting. So you go into a bookstore and there are definitely certain books that grab your attention and make you want to pick them up. What is it that, in general terms, makes a book cover attracted?
Michelle DeFilippo 21:28
Well, two things, imagery, right? The photograph, if you use photography or you buy an image of something else, an illustration, perhaps it has to be done well, executed, well. And then the next most important thing is the typography. You can I guarantee you can look at a book cover in the bookstore and it’s just plain words on a cover. Sometimes I can tell you that the designer went through 25 or 30 renditions of that to get it just so it wasn’t done. It wasn’t done in two minutes, by pick, by picking a font.
And, you know, a lot of work goes into it, but, but the result, it’s kind of like, I guess, I guess a parallel would be a man’s suit, or even a woman’s suit. You know, a good suit when you see it, even if you’re not a tailor. And so that craftsmanship also applies to a book cover. If you, if you’re if people are out looking for a designer on the Internet, what they should always do is compare that designer’s work to the books being put out currently by major publishers, just to make sure that that designer is working at the level of the major publisher. Because if you just look at the designer’s work alone, you might say, Oh, those covers are nice. I like them, but we don’t want you to like them necessarily, although that’s a plus. We want the buyer to like them. And so that takes a lot of research to to get it just right, to see what they are buying.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 23:00
And as you said, I mean, there’s so many different types of design, and they’re all very, very different, right? So they’ve got, obviously, people who design for websites, so completely different people who design book covers are completely different people who design adverts. And so just because they’re a designer doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily a book designer, that fairness, that’s a critical point. Yes, yeah, yeah. And I think, I mean, I know that in today’s what it’s so easy to jump onto Fiverr or any of those sort of places and get very kind of cheap designers. But at the end of the day, I always, I mean, I’m from a sales and marketing background. I’m a particularly strong on brand, and so I’m always very pedantic about the fonts that we use. And I, you know, often have specific fonts as opposed to generic fonts that are available. And so as a consequence, I’m very fussy about the way things are, but sometimes people, if you don’t understand design, you could look at a, you know, something that somebody’s done on a design, and kind of think, oh, yeah, that looks pretty, but it doesn’t mean it’s effective. The prettiness does not equal effectiveness. But I guess I’m trying to say.
Michelle DeFilippo 23:55
That’s correct, and color does not substitute for good design. A good design will hold up in black and white as well as in color.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 24:02
Of course, yeah, because it’s going to have to be black and white on many of the reading devices as well, isn’t it? Yes, yes, yeah. Okay, interesting. Okay. What else would you like to share with the readers, like, what else could you give them in terms of tips or tools if they’re thinking about wanting to write, whether it be, as you said, for a memoir, for a business, for a mini book. What are the three kind of key things that you see they should be thinking of?
Michelle DeFilippo 24:26
Well, if I may, I would love to talk a little bit about what happens after the manuscript is done. It’s it’s a very, it’s a very natural thing for an author to say to themselves, my manuscripts done, I need to go find a publisher. Well, you don’t actually need to find a publisher anymore, because Amazon changed all that. There are self publishing companies and hybrid publishers and and now companies that are calling themselves publishers, but what they do is they charge the author to produce the book, then they publish it in their name, and when a book. Sold, they get the revenue, they get the sales reports, and then they give the author some of the money. If they’re a good company, if they’re a bad company, the author may never see a dime, and the company may disappear overnight. That’s happened quite a bit.
Michelle DeFilippo 25:16
So, so how can an author know that there then there are companies like mine, that just sell author services. We help you produce the book, and then we do not. We are not your publisher. You can set up print on demand accounts in your own name, so that when books are sold, you get the sales reports, you get the money in your bank account, and nobody else is sharing your revenue. So that’s our key point. So how on earth can an author who’s maybe doing this for the first time identify the good guys from the bad guys? And I can give you three tips about that.
Michelle DeFilippo 25:53
The first tip is, if you go to some publishers website and they promise to pay you a royalty, that is a tip off. That means that they’re publishing the book under their name, they are getting the money first, and they’re paying you less than the full compensation that that book has earned. Okay? The second tip is, if they offer you a free ISBN, that’s another red flag. It means they’re giving you one of their ISBNs, which means that they are registered as the publisher of your book, not you, and they control your book. And even though they charged you to produce book files, they control those files, and you will never be able to get them back if you want to part ways with them for any reason. We get calls about this every week, right? This? The third thing is that these companies will often say, we will distribute your book to bookstores worldwide. Sounds great, right? It does not mean your book is going to be on the shelf of bookstores worldwide. It means they’re uploading your book to their Ingram Spark account and and your book will be in the Ingram database. And bookstores worldwide can order it if they wish. Right? You can open up an Ingram Spark account in your own name and keep full control of the whole process. So those three things are the main red flags that you should look at.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 27:21
Actually, it’s really interesting, because you’re right. I think that what people don’t understand is that if you do go through one of these type publishers, and they do take your main is theirs forever, right, you can never take it back, which means you have very little control over what you do in the future. Is that correct?
Michelle DeFilippo 27:39
Yes, they’ll still send you a PDF, but a PDF can’t be altered. If you want to change your book and publish it in a different way with a different either under your own name, or even take it to a different publisher. I don’t know why you would, but a PDF can’t be edited. And so what, what you would need to get is called the application files, or the native files, and they will never release them.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 28:01
Okay, interesting. I want to just go explore a little bit about print on demand, because obviously this is something that’s only really come it’s only really become truly available in the last few years. I’ve been around for a long, long time, but it was very, very expensive. So print on demand, if my understanding of it, and I would love you to correct me if I’m wrong, is that you upload all of the files into Amazon, and then if somebody orders it, it’s not you don’t hold a whole bunch of books sitting around, and they send one out. They literally produce it as it’s ordered, and it gets sent out to that person on demand.
Michelle DeFilippo 28:32
That’s correct, and it’s the best thing that’s happened to book publishing since ever. When I first started in this business, if you wanted to print a book, you had to print 5000 copies. And of course, as soon as those 5000 copies were delivered, you immediately found the typo that you missed. Right now, now, with print on demand, the book is not printed until it’s ordered and paid for by the customer. It’s printed shipped to the buyer. You don’t have to lift a finger, you don’t have to put money into inventory. You don’t have to store books in your garage or closet and hope to sell them. So it takes away that whole level of expense that used to exist.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 29:13
That’s right, because it was a huge investment, wasn’t it? We had to buy 5000 books. And like you said, I’ve got friends who’ve literally got books sitting in their garage from when they did their first print run.
Michelle DeFilippo 29:22
Yeah, early on, I had a customer who would print the a printer talked him into printing 10,000 books because the the unit cost would be lower, which is true. But you know, the real unit cost is, How many books do you sell? Right? If you print 10,000 and then you sell 100 now, what’s the unit cost? So, yeah, to print on demand is terrific.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 29:48
And so it’s only for soft back books, though, isn’t it? They can’t print it. Or can you print a hardback as well?
Michelle DeFilippo 29:54
No, we actually, for our customers, we set them up at kd.com, which is owned by Amazon, and we also set them up at ingramspark.com which feeds all of the other book retailers, Barnes and Noble books, a million, whoever, libraries, physical bookstores and so forth. So by using both of those platforms together, the customer can get the widest distribution at the lowest cost. IngramSpark prints beautiful hardcover books, and you have lots of choices in terms of paper and whether or not you have a jacket and what, what’s printed on the case. Underneath the jacket, it’s it’s beautiful. So when we have a customer who wants a hardcover and a soft cover, we set up the hardcover and the soft cover at ingramspark so that they feed their channels, those formats, and we let IngramSpark feed Amazon the hardcover.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 30:46
Wow. Okay, so it’s really good, because I remember that in the early days it was definitely only soft back. So that’s brilliant. So you can, pretty much, because I actually there are certain books you really want to have in a hardback cover, because, you know, you’re going to keep them for a long time, and you want to keep, you know, referring back to them. So it’s nice that there’s actually that option to do that.
Michelle DeFilippo 31:04
Yeah, yeah. I We, and I actually advise my customers, if they want to consider it, to publish a hardcover or soft cover and an ebook. Because when the buyer comes to your retailers page, your Amazon page, or Barnes and Noble page, and they see three formats, they automatically get this sense that you’re a serious publisher. You’re not a self publisher who’s only offering an ebook because that was the cheapest way to go. They have more confidence in you because you’ve done the work and you’re showing them you’ve done the work.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 31:34
Perfect, okay, well, this is really exciting, so things have really taken leaps and bounds forward in terms of what can be done as a self publisher, yeah, okay, great. So I’m not, I don’t want you to get specific here, but in terms of investment, you know, in terms of time frames, in terms of the cost to kind of get this, I’ve written a brilliant manuscript, in my opinion, I bring it to you, and obviously you were just gonna have a look at it, and they’re gonna say, Oh yes, we’re gonna change a few things here. What is the kind of the time frame generally from, let’s talk about a full book. So a full business book from you know idea, and here’s my manuscript through to being ready to be bought on print, on demand, on Amazon or through any bookstore.
Michelle DeFilippo 32:14
Well, our average completion time from getting the manuscript to uploading the files to the platforms is generally three to four months, but the turnaround time actually depends more on the author than on us. We need a couple of weeks for each service, editing, covered design, interior layout, proofreading and so forth. But if the if the author doesn’t respond timely, or if they make a lot of rounds of revisions, then of course, the completion date is extended, extended beyond that.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 32:43
Great. Okay, so it, and I think this is what I’m kind of learning as well as you can’t just go I’ve got this book I do, I’ll be out there in a couple of weeks. There is obviously some investment to make sure you do the best you possibly can. And just like any other piece of work that you would do, it’s about return on investment. So spend the time upfront, doing things properly means you’ll get a better result in the long run.
Michelle DeFilippo 33:05
Well, I will tell you, we don’t force people into packages. They can come to us and order a package of services a la carte based on what they want. Sometimes people come to us with their manuscript already having been edited, and that’s fine. We’ll start with the cover design, right? And we don’t, we don’t use templates to design. We do it the old fashioned way, real collaborative design, with the author having input at every stage of the process.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 33:32
And then from a return on investment. So if you think about when you actually publish a book, I mean, if you buy a book these days, I guess you’re spending some like $30 for a book. Well, how much generally gets to the author from that amount?
Michelle DeFilippo 33:44
Well, that’s a really good question I have. I have some numbers here based on a $20 book, okay. Well, the retailer, typically, Amazon, takes 40% and IngramSpark takes 55% of the cover price. But when, when you when you publish on your own, when you control your own publishing business, you can set the retail price. So of course, you should keep it competitive, but you set the retail price. The retailer takes 40 or 55% the print cost might be four or $5 so that’s also deducted. And then if you self publish the way we recommend the net $8 would go to your bank account. If you’re working with a hybrid publisher or a self publishing company, you might get $2 so the publisher has actually spent making more money on your book than you are.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 34:35
Yeah, but I suppose the final question from me is, it’s like, it’s already, well, having a book, but books don’t necessarily walk off the shelves themselves. You’ve still got to do a lot of work to actually get your book out there. So how do people what do you have to do to get your book out there and to get people wanting to pop to buy it?
Michelle DeFilippo 34:53
Well, like I said before, first, you should write a book that’s somebody that you know, that a lot of people want, and that that that. Sometimes miss the boat there. They write the book that they want to write without having checked whether anybody else would agree. So you know, you can’t just write the book you’re interested in. If you want to sell books, you can do it if you want, if you don’t care whether you sell books or not, then you can do whatever you want. But if you want to sell books, you should try to find your audience first and write to the audience and to the problem that they are facing. You know, then after that, you do have to market the book, and that is, it’s difficult, it’s time consuming. We have some resources that authors who want to roll up their sleeves and do it themselves can take advantage of and save money, or they can, and I will also introduce them to three book marketing professionals that I trust with my life. They will interview the author and see if it’s a good fit, and if it is, they will, you know, then the author can choose to work with them on their own, separate from our services.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 35:56
Okay, so I think it’s you gotta be realistic. It’s not it’s not easy to have a best selling book, because it has to be something that people want. That people want. It has to, yeah, you’ve got to sell quite a lot of books, actually, to make money, even if you’re talking about having $8 in your pocket, that’s still going to do the maths on that. If you want to become a millionaire, it’s not going to happen by selling your first round of 1000 books, right?
Michelle DeFilippo 36:15
Sure. Well, one of one of the early gurus in self publishing, who’s passed away. Now, Dan pointer, he used to joke that a bookstore is a lousy place to sell books, and it’s true, because you’re giving them 40 to 55% of your of your cover price right off the bat. So it’s also good if you can develop private channels to sell your book directly to the customers yourself. Now, ingramspark has a great new feature called shareable purchase links. You can go to ingramspark.com and type that in and get the details. Basically, you can generate a link that you put on your website, and the customer will click that link. They will purchase the book. Ingramspark will assess a 350 handling fee, and they’ll charge the printing, and then the customer will pay for shipping and handling, but you still wind up in a way better position than if you sold that same book through a retailer. So that’s something to look into too. Okay, nice. And you can take, you can, you can take that link and put it on your Facebook page and say, Here, my book is available and not go through a retailer at all.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 37:23
Perfect. Okay, that’s great. Hey, look, you give us some really, really good tips there. Thank you so much for that. We’re going to put a link in the podcast, so if you want to find out more about Michelle and her company, what she can do for you, you’ll find that link there in the in the podcast, any kind of final thoughts that you’d like to share with the audience, Michelle.
Michelle DeFilippo 37:40
I would just say, Please, please, please, do everything you can to release a quality book. Making a book is an art form. It’s important. It’s not a commodity. It’s not something to just be dashed together and hope you’re going to get good results. You know, be like publishers of old, put, put your heart you put your heart and soul into the writing. Now, put your heart and soul into the packaging and the typesetting and the cover so that the final product reflects all of the hard work and care you put into the writing.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 38:10
Flip. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Hey, look. Thank you so so much. Thank you for coming on the show, and thank you for sharing your knowledge and expertise. And I look forward to chatting again soon.
Michelle DeFilippo 38:19
Thank you for having me Debra.
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Debra Chantry-Taylor
Certified EOS Implementer | Entrepreneurial Leadership & Business Coach | Business Owner
#betterbusinessbetterlife #entrepreneur #leadership #eosimplementer #professionaleosimplementer #entrepreneurialbusinesscoach
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