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Tricia Publishers there trash. Find out why on today's episode,
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today's episode is brought to you by Design Pickle. Every custom
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drawing on my website came from the most affordable designers in the world that serve master dot com slash pickle. Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast where you'll learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host guy stay. We have a very special episode. We have guest host Paris, who shut off his intern and now runs the majority of serving a master and is taking a bigger and bigger bullets first time stepping in front of microphones. So please bear with us. We have a really exciting episode. We're gonna talk about traditional publishing we met and Paris first discovery because she's an independent publishers. Well, she's written some very wonderful fantasy novels, and she's continued to build your audience in that plate while she helps me and helps you find your success as a publisher and independent mature as well. So maybe Paris. You could start by telling us, Why did you decide to self publish? How did your journey begin?
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Hey, as it's Paris here I was really into a traditional publishing in the beginning because I thought that that was the only way to go. I thought, You know, that's how you got your books published. You had to go get an agent. Then they pitched a publisher. And then you go through that whole process and books out everywhere, and it's just like J. K. Rowling, and you know, it's all magical and wonderful. And that was self publishing was kind of the second choice or something that you didn't like. Only the people that couldn't get traditionally published went through, so that was kind of my whole idea, starting to write a book. And then, as I did a lot more research, I really found that, you know, it's not as cracked up today. Um, I really didn't like that the way that traditional publishers work nowadays. It worked many years ago, I think. But now they don't have as much pull in the book will. Now that Amazon is a huge publishing giant, you can have all the control that you want. You know how traditional publishers can change the name of your book. They can change how how the story goes with the covers, like they take all of the control on the rightful away from you. And I was really not into that. So as I did more research in true self publishing, I thought, Oh, this isn't as illegitimate as I thought it wa ce And I think I can do this. And I have not regretted the decision.
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That's awesome to hear. I come from exactly the same kind of place, you know, I started out and I tried to go with the Dust Repubblica. I tried to get an agent. I flew to New York to meet my agents, and the day I was supposed to meet them, they wouldn't take any of my calls. And finally I got an email back from like the assistant goes, Oh, he's decided not to meet with you. And I was in the middle of signing a publishing deal with my first book, which actually was Girl gets. Ring, which was not officially public and ended up, has since then done $2 million sales, and it's like they're gonna look at these guys are idiots. That's kind of what I realized. And I had a second experience a couple of years ago when my book was number one Amazon. I was ahead for just a few hours of J. K. Rowling had every Harry Potter book and my phone started ringing off the hook. Amazon called me and said, We noticed you're doing so well. We want to do some problems with you And I got a call for a big by publisher. And during that call, one of things you said that blew my body was OPR is dead. It doesn't work because it's a total waste of time. I was like, Wait, appearing on television, doing radio. None of those things matter anymore. Yeah, I know that works, and I was like, I don't think that's right. And further on our conversation, I discovered that really all just publishing companies do is they go from the factory or books or printed. They drive those books to the bookstores, and that's it. They don't do anything else that he was like, Oh, you have to generate all of the sales. I was like So I jetted all the sales. I did all the work. I write the book, I do everything and you guys keep 85% of the money for driving it to the store. My mom could put books in the trunk of her car and drive into the store. You guys must do something else like No, that's all we d'oh!
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Yeah, exactly. Now that I'm, like, kind of going on this park, I'm doing so much working in A ll the marketing areas and building my audience. And I would have to do the exact same work if I was trying to go traditional. But they would just take the majority of the profits and, like, what do they add on top of that? Doesn't seem like a whole lot.
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Yeah, I feel like they're caught up in the 18 hundreds as though people are still writing their books by hand using a quill. And one thing that I was thinking about was last week or two weeks ago. You e mailed me. Remember you message me and said, Oh, there's this open promotion right now. You can get your book on this promotion. Remember that. I would think it was free book, see, or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. And they had a free promotion and they said, You have to sign up in a certain amount of time and we'll generate a whole bunch of Dallas. How did that brush and go for
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you? I think I got about 90 female subscribers just from that. And it was afraid, sir. It's pretty good.
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Okay, so here's what's really crazy. If you go in with the traditional publisher and you wanted to join that promotion, you'd have had to get their permission first. And do you think they would have responded? Crime? Exactly. So the biggest proposition of publishers is their lack of agility. They don't know it. Adapt to the market. They're still living in the past. And everyone talks about J. K. Rowling, like O. C. Describe social public works. But 12 different publishers read Harry Potter and goes, This is garbage. We don't want to publish this. Yeah, it's like and and none of them got fired. Each of them cost their company billions of dollars in revenue. Everything from toys to movies to seem parks and their boss goes Man, we all make mistakes and that, like ambience Paris you work for me if you lose me a $1,000,000,000 your God, that's that's my role for any employee. And you know, this is me. A 1,000,000,000. They're gone because it's but yet in traditional publishers to go, it happens and those people are still working. And that's kind of the the two biggest things I've noticed. You have worked with several clients in the past, helping with launches, and every time someone has the book with the publisher, no matter how small. The thing I noticed is that there's no decision making authority. You know, we run those promotions all the time. We do book, give ways. I love, give away books I love during promotions and helping authors to build their audiences. And how many times that we had one of those and turns out someone has a publisher and they go, Oh, my publisher decides what I'm allowed to do. All my publisher says, I'm not allowed to go by audience. My publisher says, I'm not allowed to do this, and I said, What is your publisher done to grow your business in the last year? And the answer's always nothing. And the publishers get all this control, but they don't do what they used to do. They don't print the books themselves. That's done by Ingram. Every single paperback book in the world is basically printed by Increments. One company, even if you think it's create space or K to be print printing it, no matter who you print with, it goes back to them, and all of these companies take credit for that, and then they don't even get you booked on any television shows. You have to hire your own PR company and then they sell you. OPR doesn't work, so those are kind of the reasons why I've really felt like traditional publishing is going by the wayside and this we've seen this in other industries. If you can't adapt and when you lose agility than small people can come in and push you out the side.
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Yeah, and I really notices in in wearing stuff like I've just I've built my list from 0 to 1500 lost like three months. And that's mostly I do, too. Promotions and newsletter of swamps. And that means I have to be booking there is like a ll the time and that's that's for me giving my giving my book away. And then if I had to, if I was tired, traditional publisher, I would never get anywhere because they would never. You'd have to, like, go through them every single time. You wanted to do something, and so many of these are time sensitive.
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That's exactly what I was kind of thinking about next. You know the most important thing. This is something everyone asked about. Every new author says. I got my book. I published my book, I got an Amazon. How do I get reviews? And that's that The big elephant room, right? And the big way to get reviews is you've got to give away free copies to people that are good reviewers. But guess what you're not allowed to do without your publishers permission.
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It's give away books.
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Yeah, and so it's amazing to me how people can get official. Publisher and Fisher publishers always turned me down. You never want to work with me, even though I have an audience of all these things, because all they say to me is, How many Twitter followers do you have that I don't really not use Twitter? Not really good. I have a Twitter account. I definitely have one but haven't logged in in a few years. And they're only measurement, I say. But I have a mailing list of this size and they said, Oh, mailing lists. Don't do anything I said. Hold, huh? Hold hold on. Twitter followers by stuff, Way more than mailing list, I realized they don't have any understanding of digital marketing of our industry of how important is to form a relationship with your following. How people pay a lot more attention the email than Twitter Twitter. When you're on Twitter, you're seeing hundreds of little tweets, and you correspond to any different one. But when you read an email, it's the only email, your reading. You get that private time that one on one conversation and this guy had no understanding of that, and I was like, How do you still have a job? How is your recruit? People like me when you have no idea how anything works. And one thing I also learned is that publishers hate New York Times best seller list. Everyone's dream right is to get on that list, but the problem with that is that it's caused by a sales spike. So it's not. How many books have you sold since your book launch is? How many books have you sold this week at the 3000 stores that The New York Times gets data from? And I don't know if you saw this in the news about a year and 1/2 ago. Someone was a Children's book author put other Children's book, and they called all 3000 stores heads, You guys reports The New York Times. Oh, yeah, we d'oh okay, could have 87 copies of the book, and they did it in all 3000 stores, and none of the stores figure out what was going on because, hey, they're just happy to sell 87 copies, right? So if you had done no promotion and no one had ever heard off and there were no ads, anywhere was like number seven on the Children's book for New York Times best seller list and only because other authors started investigating. Did they realize that this person got in the list, which is supposed to be a big secret, but it's not. A lot of people have that list, and they managed to manipulate to get on that list. What's crazy is that official publishers will actually try to stop you. Everyone's dream right is to get more recognition more credibility, because when you could say your New York Times bestselling author, whether you're not fiction or fiction, you get better speaking gigs. It's easier sell books, all those things. What official publishers want is steady sales over a long time because if you have a massive spike, they print the next books because of that spike. And if the spike drops off now they've printed about your books. They can't sell because they don't understand how marketing works. There are always two steps behind, So in my conversation with social publishers, they go, Oh, no, we don't want you to do that. We don't like sales specs. We'd like you to do the cell 1000 copies a week for the next two years, but do not sell 10,000 in a single week. Don't do that it will mess up our numbers so you're not allowed to do advance review copies. You're not allowed to do promotions. You can't drop the price of your book. Oh, my gosh. If you want to drop your book 799 cents, you better get ready to sacrifice a pig because otherwise I'm not gonna let you do it. You have to call to the ancient Greek gods. They will not let you do that stuff because they go No, we're gonna lose money. And I'm like, Right there was a game I played as a kid. The first computer game ever played was cold lemonade stands. And here's how it worked. Every day you would choose how much ingredients you bought. Any price, your lemonade and you could charge as low as a penny or as much as $100 for a glass of lemonade. And if you charge $100 a glass, you might sell one. But you probably wouldn't be charged a penny glass itself, times and tons and tons. You would make any profit. So you were trying to learn how to balance it to where you made the most profit, not about some of the most lemonade. It's not about charging the highest price. It's about the Prophet times, how many units you sell. But I brought that up to my traditional publisher. When you recruited me, he goes, Well, I don't like the sound of that. I said, I don't want to make more money that way. Nobody per book And I said, Okay, that's why I said, This is a really good You're really doing a good job making you wanna work with you. And he was, you know, all the things they recommended Constant went back to you do all the work. We keep all the money. We don't understand how marketing works. PR doesn't work. Email lists don't work. I was like, What works? He was like, You should get speaking engagements. We speak in a public event and you tell them it's part of your speaking fee. Instead of paying you, they should buy ah copy of the book for every single person audience to put under their chair. And I was like, Wait, that sounds like that. Sounds like I buying the books now. What I heard was I pay $10 a book or a $20 book, whatever. They're gonna charge me fending off its hardback paperback for everyone, the audience out of what would have been a speaking fee. I said, That doesn't It doesn't really appeal to me. I don't want to buy it if we want to sell a 1,000,000 copies. The book I was like, I gotta buy a 1,000,000 books for other people. Can you do anything? And it kind of as I went through this process, it was so, so crazy. So when I left to give away our books for free, we can't drop the prices. We can't be agile. We can't make adjustments to the market. One of the biggest opportunities right is to create a book that's timely there. Things happening better in the moment all the time. One of the first big success. I had a line what I was doing. Essie Oh, I bought a website. Ashton Kutcher divorce dot com. First thing I did and guess what it ranked number one for This was right when I was in the news. This is when he's married to Demi Moore, and it was like a news story actually. Cut your scene with another girl and I go well, everyone's going to search this term. And I was right. I got a ton of traffic, didn't make any money from the website, but is that website is proof of concept? People hired me to teach them how to rank the Web sites. I was a very first big success that I had, and I earned that because I did it in the right moment. Now, obviously, if you bought that website right now, no one would care, right? The values disappeared on Lee was valuable for about two weeks. We'll ever was wondering. Are they? Are they? People really care about celebrity stuff in the same way things trend. So imagine right now, like ever right now is interested in a new election. And so if you say, Hey, let's write a book about the next American election and then you publish the book. The additional publisher. It will come out about a year after the election. Yeah, with reporters 18 to 24 months cycle between when you start the book and when they release it because they have seasons, they have up front. They have a whole complicated publishing process, plus getting unusual. Agent. Yeah, even you already have a lit stuff in place. And what's even crazier is you can have a really good idea. Like let's say right after twilight. Cute, You go. I've got my own book about teenage sexy, angsty vampires. By the time it gets released by traditional publisher, the trend is over. No one's into that anymore, right? Right. Post apocalyptic teenagers have changed. Oh, no, Vampires is so five years ago. Now it's about zombies and you go, Oh, my gosh, I wrote a book that would have I would have made so much money if I publish it in a timely fashion. So this is fiction and nonfiction, and the worst part is that when you're with official publisher, if your book is a massive success like we did it, we picked a winner. And if your book fails like was author sucks, it's not our fault. So you don't You don't get credit if you win and you get punished. If they fail, it will do anything to help your book success E. That's why my belief is that when it comes traditional publishers, it's not worth work with them. it's not worth the effort, and we should just let their corpses rot. What do you think?
spk_1: 14:41
I agree. I don't think that this and unless they're able to pivot and find some sort of way to Dr Older sales or do something for the oldest, it's just there's just no point in going with them and this dump back to that point about Price I Do you remember when I was a kid? Like, You know, you go to the bookstore and buy a book and at least $2025 sometimes 30 if it's like a hot cover. But nowadays you can price the medulla nine isn't 99 cents, and they just can't compete with that anymore. You, you can change arises. You can be flexible. You cannot go to the money. You can put you what people want. You can do promotions and lower the price. So raise the price to find out what the sweet spot and do all those things. And you can't do that with publisher
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what some people don't know, and this is how just publishing stopped working and independent publishing was basically invented by Amazon about 10 years ago. Amazon put out the Kindle and they said, Let's start releasing lots of e books That's where your books went from, like idea and kind of something that was on the edges to the mainstream. So it came, published the masses. Even it wasn't the first reader. There were other tablets himself before that, and additional publisher said, Well, the paperback is 13 99 and the E book is 13 99 and it was on said, That doesn't make any sense. You can't charge the same price for the two different products. One you have cost. You have the cost of printing the cost of ink, the cost of shipping the book, the other one. There is no cost. You could sell it a 1,000,000 times in, doesn't cost anything. All you're doing is increasing your profits and additional book book publishers all said, Hey, look, we're not lowering our prices. And so all the books were still 30 99 14 99 so you would pay the same price for a paperback book or Kindle book. And so the only reason someone to do a digital book, which, of course, is more proper for Amazon is Amazon doesn't have to pay to ship it to your house. Amazon wants to sell digital books so they have lower costs, have a higher profit margin. So they said, you know what? We're gonna work direct with the authors, and that's when they opened up the Kindle dashboard because they said, Hey, I bet if we get people who are independent writing their own books, they'll be willing to charge less than $10 for digital book. And so it's actually the only reason independent publishing world even exists is because traditional publishers dug in their feet, and this is a mistake that cost him. I don't know how many billions of dollars, but it's a lot, and they still haven't learned 10 years later. So all of those and more reasons why none of my books will ever be traditionally published. Why don't work with special publishers? Why don't care if my book is in the airport? That's not going to find my best customers anyways. And that's why Paris and I both agree that traditional publishers are passed and I wanna thank you guys for listening to our first special episode, part of Season two with Paris on board is our first time trying to do a little bit of digital technology. We're excited to see the recording come out really good. And, guys, if you're watching this on YouTube, please give us a thumbs up Blow. Let Paris. No. They appreciated hearing her so you could bring on more episodes of trying to convince her to be my partner on every episode going forward because she could share more opinions. Paris is a master copywriter. She knows how to do S O. P. S and build a business and do structure and all those amazing topics that are part of building a business and hope you hear about the more and more in the future. And if you're listening on a traditional vice, make sure you subscribe because you have a lot more amazing things coming. I sort of serve no master podcast. Season two. Thanks for being here. Paris. This was awesome. Thanks. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve. No, Master. Make sure you subscribe. So you never miss another episode. We'll be back next Tuesday with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race. Head over to serve no master dot com forward slash podcasts Now for your chance to win a free coffee of Jonathan's bestseller Serve No master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you Tuesday.
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