Today we’re joined by Justin Branch, Director of Publishing Strategy at Greenleaf Book Group. Justin plays a pivotal role in guiding authors through the early stages of publishing by customizing proposal tailored to their books' unique needs. In this episode, he tackles the most common questions and misconceptions he encounters from authors in the early stages of publishing. This interview will equip authors with the information they need to navigate the publishing world, talk to professionals, and make informed decisions about publishing contracts.

Have a question about Greenleaf or the publishing process? Email us at contact@greenleafbookgroup.com and we’re happy to chat!

More about Greenleaf:

Brochure: greenleafbookgroup.com/brochure

Have a book you want to publish? Submit your book to Greenleaf for review: greenleafbookgroup.com/submissions

You can find information about publishing in Tanya Hall's book, Ideas, Influence, and Income.

Automatically generated transcript:

Welcome to Published, a podcast by Greenleaf Book Group, where we'll discuss the ins and outs of the publishing industry, from writing a book and finding the right publisher, to gearing up for a book launch. And now here's your host, Greenleaf Book Group CEO, Tanya Hall.

Welcome back to Published. Today we're joined by Justin Branch, Director of Publishing Strategy at Greenleaf Book Group. Justin plays a pivotal role in guiding authors through the early stages of their publishing journey. He meets with them after their book has been reviewed and accepted and crafts a personalized publishing proposal tailored to their goals and their book's unique needs. In this episode, he tackles the most common questions and misconceptions he encounters from authors in the early stages of publishing. This interview will equip authors with the information they need to navigate the publishing world, talk to professionals and make informed decisions about publishing contracts. Please take a moment to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. It means a lot to have your feedback and it helps us to make sure we are answering your publishing questions. Now let's dive into the interview. All right, Justin, welcome back to Published.

Hey, good morning. Good to be back.

Great to have you. All right. So let's jump in and start by telling folks who you are and what you do.

Sure. Yeah. So my name is Justin Branch and I'm the Director of Publishing Strategy for Greenleaf Book Group. So my universe is kind of identifying the authors in the books that we feel have potential in the market, so potential in kind of the mainstream retail channels, chains like Barnes and Noble, independent bookstores, airport bookstores, of course, the online retailers. And we're trying to get a sense of what do we feel this book, do we feel this book could compete in retail and where is it now and where do we think it could be? So my role is kind of identifying those books on the front end and then developing the strategies to get them from where they are to where we all want them to be.

Awesome. And obviously, when people come to us with a book or any publisher, really, there are many moving parts. The book is often serving a few different functions. So how do you start to put together a plan when you're working with an author that meets all of these goals?

I typically like to start with the why. Why did you write this book? Or why do you want to write this book? Because that can be very revealing in understanding the motivations and what's really going to be driving this. And then the next question is going to be, what do you hope to accomplish with this book? And what I'm asking that is, is generally beyond book sales, because we all have a shared interest in selling lots of books. Like that is across the board.

We all want that.

But there's often motivations beyond that. And the more I can understand that on the front end, the more we can really start to bake that into the plan going forward to help the author realize not only their goals in terms of retail, but also realize their goals beyond retail.

Well, I know many of the authors we're speaking with are looking at us and other hybrid publishers, or they're looking at other publishing options period, whether they're weighing a traditional approach or a self-publishing approach. So how do you guide them through those choices that they're making and help them vet, I suppose, their publishing options?

So I've been with Greenleaf for 20 years now, and the publishing industry has changed dramatically over those 20 years. And really, even over the last five years, it's just been seismic moves. And a lot of them have been really good moves and pro author moves. The authors are more empowered than they've ever been before. They have more options to reach their audience than ever before. There's more targeted marketing approaches. So that's been great. The challenge that comes with that is it's also flooded the market with a lot of mediocre and quite frankly, not not so good books. And now the new challenge is cutting through the noise. And when I'm looking at a book and when an author is considering a publisher, I think they want to be thinking about, okay, what level can this publisher potentially bring this book to? When I look at the quality of the production of their books, is it on par with what I would want to see from a major house, random house, something like that? When I read reviews of the books or when I read the books, is it on par with what I would want my book to be and what I would expect out of there? Do they have access to retail? Do they have distribution? Do they have access to these stores that give me an opportunity to be in front of my audience so my customer can discover me and buy me however they like to discover and buy the book? So I'd start kind of to whittle it down from there. And then, of course, in the back end, on the marketing side, do they have access to market my book as a product? Do they have the ability to get me in front of my potential audience through things like podcast and digital media, outreach, that sort of thing? And then, can they help me build my brand? And that's probably one of the most important components because that's the hub of the wheel. You as an author and a thought leader, your brand at the center of this needs to be really clearly defined. And that way, it doesn't matter how someone finds you, whether it's through the book, which is often kind of the front door to your brand. But there's other ways people will find you through a podcast interview, or through your social media, whatever it is. We want to make sure it doesn't matter which door that person enters. Once they walk through that door, there's more ways to engage with you, and there's more ways to hopefully spend with you and keep the conversation going. So having that branding as kind of part of the overall strategy is really, really important. So I would look to see which teams can handle all of those pieces in-house. I'd look at their success rate. I'd look and see their best sellers, not just Amazon best sellers. There's a place for those, and they can have value. But I'd want to see New York Times best sellers. I'd want to see Wall Street Journal best sellers. USA Today best sellers, the big lists in terms of that, to make sure that they have a track record of having performed at a high level. And this is a relatively new phenomenon, that there's a lot of what I would consider to be good enough publishers out there. So publishers that can do an adequate job, and it's a very competitive space in that space. And for maybe some books, if you're not trying to use the book to raise your profile, and retail is not that important, you just want to put it out there, then good enough may be good enough. But if you're trying to really accomplish something with this book, if you're really trying to use this book as both a product that can resonate with an audience and grab their attention, and then a book is sold and royalty is generated, but you also want this book to be a tool to drive other things, whether it's in the nonfiction side, coaching or speaking or consulting, any of kind of the higher margin pieces of your business, or the visibility required to try to sell film rights on the fiction side, or foreign rights. Good enough is just simply not good enough. So I would be looking for a publisher that can really kind of take it to that highest level so you can separate yourself from all of that noise out there. And now you have a seat at the table with all of the other great books. And that's a very good place to start.

Yeah. And to your point, good enough often is not just applying to the publisher, it's applying to how they're going to bring your book to market and the product itself. So I think what alarms me and I think requires a very special level of discipline from an author to be careful about on the front end is the publishers who will blow smoke up the authors, you know what, and say, yes, it's perfect. It's ready to go. And we're just going to proofread it. Well done versus, you know, sometimes we get a book in that the author thinks is pretty done and actually needs quite a bit more work before it goes to markets. I think again, it takes somebody has a certain level of vulnerability and open mindedness to come into the process, understanding that generally they're not writers by trade. And so there's probably going to be something that once an expert lays eyes on it, we can do to improve it.

If there's a problem with the manuscript, even if the content is rock solid, but maybe the way it's organized or the way it's presented, or maybe it doesn't have that hook that it needs to really grab an audience. If it's not addressed on the front end by your publisher, it'll be addressed on the back end by your reviewers. And you're going to see it in the form of Amazon reviews, Goodreads reviews, Publishers Weekly. These are very public things. And what we want to do is get ahead of that. We don't want you to find out that there's a problem after it comes out. If there's anything that needs to be addressed, we want to address it on the front end. And that way, when we do all this work to get the first round of sales, first round of book sales are really tied to great design, great marketing, great branding. That's what kind of gets the lift. But longevity is tied to great content. And if you're not delivering on that side, that's your payoff on the editorial side. If it's not delivering, you're not going to see much beyond that initial push.

Yeah. So that's a red flag, I suppose, for someone to watch out for. What are other red flags you would say that someone who's just getting started looking for a home for their work should be watching for?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think one of the first one, this is this is another one that's relatively new that we'll be talking to author and they'll like, Oh, I heard from several publishers the next day after I submitted to them or a couple of days later. And they were excited. They're so excited. I said, Wow, that's because I think about the amount of review that goes into it. We have our review team that are going through, and they're not just reading all the material and going through and getting comfortable with and understanding the message and material, but they're also looking at you and your brand, your positioning and where that is. And that helps us understand where we can take you and what's possible. And it takes time to do that right and to vet it and make sure that when you choose a publisher, not only are you choosing a great publisher, but the other books that they work with are going to be at your level. So you want other books. If you have a good book, you want other books that are good books as well. And if a publisher is accepting that a few days after you submit it, I would question maybe how deep that analysis was and maybe how just excited they were to maybe get a contract across the board.

Yeah, it's a good point. And some of the points you hit earlier in terms of vetting, a partner would also probably expose those red flags in terms of looking at their list in general. And one that I like to share with people is when you go to their website, do you see books? Because you'd be surprised. You start looking at some of these quote unquote publishers, and it's just you're probably 10, 12 pages in before you see a single book because they're using all of that real estate to push services. So that's one that I like to recommend.

Yeah. And once they're in goal as well, and I think you can ask them about that. Like what motivates you? And for every publisher, it might be a little bit different. And ours is so unique because we started as a book distributor. So our entire universe was built around, how do we give small presses access to retail? And then everything else was built around that to support that. We developed a design division to help support that, to help support retail and editorial, to help support retail and marketing and all these pieces. Because the goal was not to just sell publishing services. We have no interest in that being a business model. Our goal is to take the books that we believe in, and then do those services at a level that is exceptionally high. Because if we pick the right book, and then we do all these things that are very high level, now we have a book that has the potential to sell for us, and for our authors for years to come. And that's really when the big payoff comes on a book, because if a book can have that kind of longevity. And it's not just great when you kind of zoom in and say, well, of course, that's great for the author because they're making money. It's great for Greenleaf because we're making money. Of course, that's great. We love that. For the author, it sets the stage if they want to write more books. How the first book perform will kind of determine where the next book goes. But when we zoom out and we look at it, it's great for the industry to have more good books out there. And it's great for us in terms of serving our authors because we know that when we're taking books to these retailers, if it's coming from us because we build a reputation around this, it's going to be a great book from a credible source with proper marketing support. And then the safety for the author is knowing that again, they'll be around authors that are at their level and they'll be treated that way.

I like to point out that the services are important, but when you look at a hybrid publisher in particular, book sales are the scalable part of our business, right? So we can ship a hundred books and a thousand books with reasonably the same amount of effort. So of course, we'd rather be shipping a thousand versus, you know, adding on a lot of editorial and so forth. We have to add a lot of people. So we're very much focused on finding the books that we can sell a lot of units, even if that's not always the primary goal.

So I think that's a great point on the red flag side that if your partner doesn't have a vested interest in selling the book, that's probably a pretty big red flag. You want them to be rewarded for selling the book. That's kind of the motivating factor for everybody involved. You want it to be something that's worth their time and their energy. So that's just another thing to kind of keep an eye out for on the front end.

Yeah, good point. So authors sometimes make mistakes. We know this as they're going through this journey, because it can be complicated. Every publisher has different requirements when you're submitting. But what are some of the common mistakes you see people make when they initially bring a book to you?

It's heartbreaking when we see mistakes, especially when they're like really, really difficult ones to fix. But what makes it really difficult to fix is if it's publicly available. So if there's issues that happened during the product creation, but the book was never put into retail, those issues are easy for us to fix because there's no sales history associated with the author, with the book or anything like that. So if they went and they had someone else design it and it's like, OK, even if the design was good, is it really on par? Is it appropriate for the genre? When we take this to the business buyer, when we take this to an airport, would they look at it and say, oh yeah, I could see this doing well in a terminal. And of course, when we put it on the shelf, let's stand out and attract people as these millions of people are walking through and walking by. So if those mistakes were made early in the process, before the book's available, no problem. We can address it. We can fix it. Editorial, we can address it. We can fix it. Even platform, we'll have authors that have, maybe they have great credentials through what they've done, but they don't really have a brand yet. We can build that. These are all things that can be addressed, and that's why we surround ourselves with really talented people to address and fix these things. I'd say the biggest challenge that's hard to fix is if the book is released before it's out or before it's ready, because once a book is out there, it's out there. Even if you take it out of print, generally Amazon will keep that product listing page live on Amazon, and when that happens, anyone can go in and when they search, it'll pull up with you. If the reviews aren't good, you can't make those go away. If the sales history is not good, you can't make that go away. So there's kind of the consumer-facing visible issue that comes with that. But even behind the scenes, once you start selling a book, there's a service called BookScan that monitors all of retail and all of your retail sales are logged in this database. And every publisher and every retailer who has access to the service can look in and see it. And when we're taking a book to a bookstore, if it's a debut author, we're talking about the vision, why this is great and why this is going to be exciting and how this can be promoted, all that kind of stuff. If we're doing that, but there's a version of this book that existed and it had sold 15 copies, it's really hard for those retailers to see, okay, it's going to be different this time. It can be done. We've done it, but we just have to really address it. We're kind of digging ourselves out of a hole right there, which is not the best place to start. It can be done, but you have to have a really good story for why it's going to be different this time around. So I would suggest that even if you want to try some things on your own, I would say talk to some pretty seasoned professionals in this space before allowing anything to be consumer facing. From a retail perspective, if you want to try out some things and share it on social media, stuff like that, that's fine. But I would stay out of retail until it's really time to go.

Yes, agreed. I use the analogy of credit when I talk about this to say that no credit is better than bad credit. So if you're a data author and you come in with no credit, it's like, okay, there are a lot of you with no credit, and we're going to give you a chance to establish some credit. But when you come in with bad credit, you've got to mark against you. And like you said, there are ways to try to explain it away as a limited release, whatever the case is, but they're not stupid either.

They've heard all the stories.

All right, they're wise to us. That's great. You mentioned credentials earlier as something that you're looking at. You're evaluating the strength of the overall project. So can you speak to specifically what you're looking for there? And then those are not easy to come by often. So what does one do if they don't have the right credentials?

We're looking at the message and the messenger. So the message is the book, the product, the positioning, all of that. The messenger is, of course, the author. So we're looking to see, do you have the authority to talk on this? It doesn't always have to be that everyone in the universe knows that you're the authority on this topic. Again, that's branding and that's platform building. That's what you have a team around you that does. But when you kind of dig back and you peel the layers back, does this person have the authority to talk on this? And I would say that generally, if you have enough to say to fill up 200 pages of a book, you probably do. And a lot of it could be the positioning of it to help, because sometimes it's very clear, you're a doctor writing on this topic and you've been practicing in this area. So it's very easy to connect the dots there. Some authors, they may be one of these people that do a million things really well. God bless them. It's really impressive, but it can also be hard for a consumer to know where to grab on when there's so many things. That's where it comes back to that initial brand strategy work, to get that clarity and say, okay, let us tie these pieces together for you, so you can clearly understand why this person is the right messenger for you, why you should be paying attention to that. So I found that it's generally not an issue of you don't have the authority to write on it. It's more of an issue of explaining clearly and concisely why you have the authority to talk on this and why they should get your attention. Because at the end of the day, it's competing for attention, and it's not just competing with other books, it's competing with every other platform that's out there. And people are looking for a reason to say no and move on more than they're looking for a reason to say yes. And if they're confused about why they should pay attention to you, they probably won't dig much deeper. They'll just move on to the next thing. There's just too many choices out there. So the more we can make these decision points along the way easy for them, then the better chance we have of advancing that book in the sales process.

Right. And I'll add that it's nuanced by genre, too. Like, for instance, you mentioned a doctor. If we have a health title, we really need a medical doctor attached to that. But if that's not you as the author, you can maybe bring in a co-writer or sometimes it's adding a forward from someone who has the proper credentials, can kind of beef up our chances of getting past our reader's screening process. So all is not lost. We can get creative.

Indeed. And we see this a lot, like with parenting books. Like, if you're a parent, you've kind of been through a process of parenting and you learn a lot in that process. And that might be enough, but you're right. A forward could be the thing that just pushes it over the level. And in business, again, because we do so many business books, you can look and see, okay, all these experiences you've had throughout your career, whether you're an entrepreneur and you've worked for a huge company, all of those things have given you little pieces and little credentials along the way that can really tie together to make you authority. And again, it's just about tying those pieces together and serving it up clearly.

Yeah, well said. On Authors Network and Authors Platform, I feel like I beat this drum constantly and I can never stress it enough. And I see it over and over again where somebody is just shocked at how hard it is to build this, mobilize it, engage them, and then keep them active. So how do you speak to authors about that? And when should they start that important work?

When? Yesterday is always the best time to start it. But if that's not available, then as soon as possible. So while writing is happening, generally we'd like to start building the platform. If we have a complete manuscript by the time it comes to us, then as soon as we're starting the production process, we'd like to start building, getting the clarity, thinking about the assets. So we'd like to think not just about the positioning for you, but other people who would be considered competitors in your space. How are they positioning themselves? How are they differentiating themselves? How are they engaging in their audience? Because that'll help with us determining with you, okay, how do we want to differentiate you from the other people talking to this audience about the same topic? What makes you unique? And then how do we engage with people? So which tools? You can't use all the tools. There's a million tools, and that's great. But only a handful of those, we have the actual time and the bandwidth to manage in a meaningful way and an ongoing basis. And then only a handful of those tools may be really the most strategic way to reach that audience. So kind of getting clear on the positioning, which tools we're going to use and how we're going to use them. And then it's give, give, give, give, give. So you have to give before you ask. You're not talking about giving value, because the book will have value, and there'll be a time to ask for that buy. But when you're building a platform, you want to be giving people value that's useful to them, that's relevant to them, that makes them want to pay attention when you say something. And if you do that long enough over a sustainment, and when people comment, comment back. Like engage with your audience in terms of social media. As much as you can speak and be in front of audiences, that's an art, and it's a skill, and it takes time to develop. That's better. And you can kind of chum the waters along the way. So we like to, we do what we call content chunking. We'll take little chunks of content from the book that are great standalone pieces, and use social media, get it out. Give them away. Give it away. Give it away. When the cover's finalized, show people, give that away. When it comes time for presales of the book, or when the book comes out, that's when the ask comes. And we like to kind of think about what's the ask for your audience. And for a lot of the audience, it may just be, buy a copy of the book and leave a review. It would mean everything to me. For other people, it might be ahead of that. Could you, would this person be great for the foreword? Or would this person be great for an endorsement? Or is there an opportunity for book sales here? Is this a company that might be able to buy 500, a thousand books before the book even comes out, and those books can run through retail. So they get you that kind of lift out of the gate that you really want to see to demonstrate traction. So building that platform, organizing that platform, and then really utilizing the platform is what takes that time. So the longer the runway, the better shot you have.

Right. And then don't stop when the book comes out thinking that because you did a hard thing, the universe rewards hard things.

It's like building a runway and then just stopping the plane before you take off.

It's like, no, you've built a runway.

Now we got to fly with it.

I talk about that a lot, too. There is this level of magical thinking that starts to kick in when you finish the book because it was such a big accomplishment. Right. And you're feeling great because that was a heavy lift. And little do you know, the heavier lift is ahead of you.

Yes, indeed. It's so true.

All right. Well, expectation setting, I know, is a big part of what you do as well. Books come to us in all different forms and stages, and there are some that we know right off the bat, just from our experience, are going to be more involved than others. And I think often we see authors are a little surprised by this. Can you think of situations like that? Is there a common thread you can pull through those, the types of books that authors may be surprised or a bit more involved than they might think?

Gosh, when I think about expectation, we can talk about so many different genres. But I think some of the more challenging ones are genres where you start to introduce like four color interiors, meaning a full color interior. So cookbooks, it could be yoga books where you need photography in there, coffee table books, illustrated children's books. One of the challenges of those formats is that they're just very expensive to produce. And historically, those would be printed overseas, although that's now presenting new challenges as well. But they cost a lot to produce, and you can only sell them for so much. So the margins tend to be tighter on those. So as a publisher, we have to just be that much more selective with those types of titles to really say, okay, does this book have something unique that would be compelling enough to in a very crowded space to get a retailer to support it and pay attention to it? And then to get a consumer to pay what's required to make that book profitable. They also tend to be more involved in the design process, of course, on the front end. So it takes a little bit longer to get those types of books out. And because they have a higher cover price, it is a bigger ask to the consumer. So those sales tend to be reflected in that. And it's not that case on the board. We have an incredible series of yoga books that have never stopped selling for many, many years, and some really successful cookbooks. So some really successful children's books. So it can work, but we still have to be a lot more careful on the front end with which ones we bring on. And then it just becomes that much more important to make sure that everything you can control is done at a very high level. So when we face those things that are outside of our control, we're best positioned to be successful with them.

Absolutely. Also earlier, you mentioned best sellers, expectation setting, of course, a critical part of that conversation, because these lists are nuanced. Listeners may not realize Wall Street Journal best seller list is no more, sadly. So we're really down to just a handful of major media best seller lists, let's call them. So how do you talk to authors who it's a goal of theirs to be a known best seller?

Yeah. I mean, I love that goal. We share that. That sounds wonderful. How do you get there? So as you mentioned, Wall Street Journal got rid of the list. Unfortunately, we actually had a book on the list the very last week that it existed and then it was gone. No one knew it was going to go away. It was just announced in the industry that it was gone just like that. The two big ones as far as kind of what I think in terms of just notoriety would be New York Times and USA Today. I think USA Today has kind of slid into the Wall Street Journal's position as being kind of the second most important best seller list. And the way those lists work is it's not cumulative. So it's not how many books did you sell over a year, two years, the long haul. It's a snapshot. So it's your sales versus other sales in this one week period. And because it's you versus others, it's a moving target. Sometimes book sales can be fantastic across the industry in a book that might have made it onto those lists any other week. Don't make it that particular week because sales just happen to be high and vice versa. It can just be a terrible week across the industry, and you just happen to be a little bit better than that, and it worked out to your favor. But I would say the books that tend to hit those bestseller lists are ones that come from authors with a platform that is organized in advance. So they have a group of people who care about what they have to say and are willing to engage. Leading up to the pub date, a lot of work has been done to kind of build excitement and momentum to pre-sale the book. So collect all these sales, pre-sales from the date the book is listed for pre-sale to the pub date to collect lots of sales, and then to push it out of the gate really strong. So you can get that first week or the first several week plop that you need to hit one of those lists. So in terms of hitting that goal, I'd say, okay, it's all about platform. A product is always going to be important, always the case across the board. The product has to be great or nothing else can work. But if hitting one of those bestseller lists is a real priority, then building and organizing that platform is going to be the key to it. And the other list that you just hear people talk a lot about is the Amazon bestseller list. And there's still value there. It's just a different kind of value. That list is a moving target constantly. So you can be on the bestseller list for an hour, and then it goes away. But I think that there's still value in hitting that. Most of our books hit that list at some point. And we can put the designation on the top of the book page that says Amazon bestseller. But the value there, long term, is more about algorithm. So Amazon as a company is always trying to figure out what are people buying? Of all the things we have for sale, what are the things people are looking for? And hitting that bestseller designation can be just a nice green flag for those algorithms that, oh, this is something that people are looking for. So I still put value on it, but in terms of kind of big talking points, it's New York Times and USA Today right now. Yeah.

And I think people are surprised to learn that the New York Times is, I would call it largely an editorial list, right? Like there's a lot of discretion and taste-making going on in the Times list. And I say that because we can jump into BookScan and look at the sales for a given title on the New York Times list and find a handful of titles that outsold it, but didn't make that list. So it's an interesting phenomenon.

It does seem to be curated. There's a curtain around it, so no one really knows what happens with all of that. But I would say that when we do the same to your point with Wall Street Journal when they had theirs or USA Today, it did seem to be a little bit more lined with unit sales in the category and that sort of thing. So that does just add a layer to New York Times that they want to see things beyond just straight book sales. And no one knows what they are, but it's there and it's something to just be aware of.

Yeah, certainly. And a follow up to this closely related, I'm curious how you answer the question, how many books am I going to sell?

Well, I just shoot straight with people because I think that this process is so complicated. There's so moving parts that if you can't have a honest and open relationship with your author, with your publisher out of the gate, that's just going to cause so many problems downstream. And I tell people that no one can answer that question. If anyone does, then run, because no one publishes a book or makes a movie or creates a TV show with the intention of it not being successful. All of those were invested in and worked on by a lot of people with the goal of doing everything they can to make it successful. And some will be successful. And we've been very fortunate to have lots of huge national hits over the years. And the reality is we've done some incredible books where everything was done exactly right, but they struggle to find an audience. And unfortunately, that's the nature of the business. And it does get back to what we always do at our core is make sure the things we can't control are great. So when we face those things, we're well positioned to be successful. But there are things to that point that are still outside of our control. So I would say that for me, there are books that we have that come out of the gate and it just takes off like a rocket. Everybody loves that. High fives all around. But generally, books tend to be more of a marathon. So as you continue to build a following, we'd continue to sell more books. We sell more books. It creates more opportunities. You're in front of more people. Then those people are fans. They tell other people, we sell more books. So we get that longevity. And the goal of every first print run is to get to a second print run, of course. And the goal of that second print run is to get to the third print run and to get that longevity going, because there's so much work that goes into creating a book and launching a book. If we can get years and years out of it, that is fantastic. And that's ultimately what we're looking for. The pace of it will kind of vary from project to project. So I would say that's kind of the first thing to look at, is we're looking at longevity. And the second thing is that alignment piece, because book sales and retail are so unpredictable, and we don't know how that's going to go, and nobody knows how that's going to go exactly. When we do know that there's alignment for a book with what the author does for a living. So if this book can really serve as a tool to drive higher margin pieces of whatever it is they're doing, speaking, coaching, consulting, whatever it takes to bring on one new piece of business. And that's what I'll ask them. I'll say, you know, what is one new piece of business worth to you? Then you can look and say, okay, well, okay, what happens if I get four new pieces of business, and I sell this many books in retail, and I can move this many directly, and this many e-books? You can look and say, oh, wow, I see how all these pieces really start to fit together. And it doesn't just lean all of the pressure on the one thing that is so difficult to predict. It puts more pressure on being super strategic on the front end to make sure all of these things support each other, so the book can really serve as that great tool with you when that's part of the plan for a book.

Right. And now, Justin, you've probably talked to thousands of authors, and you're 20 years of doing this. Is there one thing that you wish they all understood a little better before they got to you?

Gosh, that is a great question. I mean, I have done this for 20 years because I genuinely love doing. I love talking to interesting people who have an idea, and I get to be part of the amplification of that idea and the organization of that idea and the launch of that idea. So that's what really gets me excited. And so I talk with people who know nothing about publishing industry all the time. And I work with a lot of people that I think there's a lot of just misconceptions about publishing that comes into it, and the reality of publishing is just different. It's not so good or bad difference, it's just different and it's just important to really understand it. So I enjoy that part of the process as being a teacher and helping people learn the ropes, if you will, for all of this. I think that to your question about the thing that I wish that they knew, it's going to take a lot of effort. You're going to be surrounded by people who are really, really good at what you do. Hopefully, if you choose the right publisher, you're going to be surrounded by people who are really good at what they do, and they're going to be taking their piece of this big picture to the highest level. But it's still a lot of effort to create a manuscript. And then, like you said, once it comes time for that book to come out, no one's going to do a better job of being the face of this book than the author. And the more they're willing to put themselves out there, the more successful we have a shot of being in the long run. So I think kind of knowing that there's going to be some work that goes into it is going to be really helpful. And knowing that trust level that you establish out of the gate is going to be what really pays off on the road in spades because there's going to be so many different things happening at the same time. And a lot of people working on various components of all of that, and you want to trust that they're good and they know what they're doing and they have your best interests in mind because that allows you to relax, say, okay, they've got that covered. Now I can focus on spreading the word about this book and letting people know.

Yeah, beautifully said. Great. Well, Justin, you've been so helpful today. Are there any parting thoughts or advice that you want to share with our listeners?

Don't wait any longer in terms of writing a book or getting this process going. I don't think I've ever sat on a plane or been at a conference or restaurant. You tell people what I do. Almost 100%. I was thinking about writing a book. Everyone's thinking about writing a book, but it's so hard to take it to the next level. So if you're in a position where that's something that I could see benefiting me, or it's just something I've always wanted to do, I would encourage you to start thinking about it. And if you go to our website, we're big on education. There's just so many great resources. Not just this podcast. There's tons of episodes you can get, but just resources on how to write or how publishing works. I'd say go ahead and take some steps towards that goal. And you never know where to land you down the road a little bit.

Yes. And there's an important resource to mention here. There's a book called Ideas, Influence, and Income. My fan. You can also read. I don't mention it enough. Well, Justin, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate your time.

Of course. Thanks for having me.

That's all for today's episode with Justin. We hope you feel better prepared to have conversations with publishers and lay the groundwork for your book's success. For more information, visit greenleafbookgroup.com/episode98. You can also find advice for writing, publishing, and promoting your work in my book, Ideas, Influence, and Income, which you can learn more about at ideasinfluenceandincome.com. A big thank you to Madison Johnson, who produces the published podcast, and to our five star reviewers. We will be back with another episode on the last Tuesday of next month.