Welcome to Episode 62 of Published. Today, we're doing a special episode for you. Our in-house publishing consultant David Endris has compiled some of the most common questions we get from authors. Today, he's interviewing me. We'll talk about a range of topics in today's episode and attempt to best answer your most burning publishing questions.

Welcome back! This episode is unique in that you'll be hearing from me today.

• You'll also be introduced to David, one of our in-house publishing consultants who will come out from behind his desk to chat with me about some of the common questions he gets from authors.
• These topics will span from protecting your manuscript to becoming a bestseller, so if these are things you have asked about before, be sure to stay tuned.
• If you like this episode, please leave a comment and send us more questions. If we get enough responses, we’ll probably do another one of these in the future.
• For now, let's get into the interview!

1:16 – Hi, I'm David Endris. I am a full time, in-house consultant with Greenleaf Book Group. I’ve been with Greenleaf for about two and a half years, and what I do is help authors strategize their book projects from the early stages through the entire process up to and including publication date and beyond. Tanya, hello and welcome to Published. Can you start by just telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do here at Greenleaf Book Group?

• In addition to hosting this podcast, I'm the CEO at Greenleaf Book Group. I've been here for eighteen years so I kind of hopscotched around the company quite a bit before landing in the CEO role. Therefore, I’ve built a wealth of experience in everything from distribution to marketing.
• Prior to that, I worked in broadcast TV, so I have been a media person my entire career.

2:24 – First question, and this is one that we get quite a bit when speaking with authors, is they are worried about their page count, whether it’s too long or too short. What kind of advice would you give those authors?

• My advice, initially, will be related to a traditionally distributed book, one that is intended to go in brick-and-mortar retail. That's when this really becomes important for merchandising reasons.
• The magic number, to give you the short answer, is 60,000 words, give or take. That will give you a book that is around 200 pages with a standard six-inch by nine-inch trim size. The reason we want at least that many pages is because in bookstores the books are usually spine out and we need some real estate for that book to be noticed. If it's any smaller than 200 pages, it starts to really shrink the dimensions of the spine to where the book literally gets lost on the shelf.
• At the same time nobody wants to read a book that should really be an article and has been fluffed up to meet 60,000 words.
• For that reason, designers can do some amazing things if we’re short on words. They can play with a smaller trim size; we can do fun things with the layout to introduce some graphic elements that can give us more room to play with as we're working to get to that optimal dimension for merchandising purposes.
• As is always the case in publishing, it just depends, because we’ve certainly done books that are double that, if not more. We have books that are way more than 60,000 words, and we have books that are less. It really depends on what the content demands.

• If we're looking at a print on demand publishing model this doesn't really matter as much. We have a lot more leeway because we don't have to deal with things like merchandising or what the retail buyers are looking at in their modeling system.
• That's another reason why we try to target that 200-page length because retail buyers have systems that say, this type of book when it is this length and this price point sells this number of units, so it gives them some knowledge to make more informed purchases. When we move away from that we start to see results waver as we're trying to get books into retail.
• But none of that matters when you're doing print on demand, so we can be a lot more flexible on that front.
• We have to think about reader expectations too. We all have some assumptions about the length of a book, and you can look at something and think, that book is tiny there's nothing to it, or might you think that's a relief. You might look at something that's 600 pages and think, I don’t know if I can get through that. So, we also have to think about the reader experience when considering length.

6:11 – I know that a lot of authors with whom I speak have multiple books in their queue that they’d like to publish. What would you say to an author who's undecided on which to go with first if they're in different genres, for example, or they're on different topics?

• That is a common one, especially when those genres are sort of parallel to each other or the content can be complementary. We see this especially with business and self-help.
• Think long and hard about the audience you're trying to reach. There may be more than one, but what is the primary audience you're trying to reach, and which genre are they in?
• Also, where's your platform? We have business leaders who are experts in strategy, and they might feel passionately that ideas and strategy can be brought to self-help readers. It's a bit of a difficult leap to make because that business leader’s platform is in the business community. It's difficult to go into a genre where you don't have any brand.
• Think about where your support is, and if that circle of support aligns with a certain area of content that best serves your audience, then that's the magic formula.

7:47 – Another thing that I hear from time to time, is authors ask if it’s dangerous to submit their book to a publisher. Will somebody steal it, and how do you protect it? What do you usually say to those authors?

• I understand where the concern is coming from, but really the risk is quite low.
• Most publishers are used to hearing this concern and a decent publisher will readily give you an NDA, a non-disclosure agreement, so that you can feel protected on the front end as your book goes through these review processes.
• The reason I say it is fairly low risk is publishers are publishers, not writers. For a publisher to make any use of the work that they might allegedly steal, they'd have to be passing it to another author, and that author is not you. They don't have your experience that led to the voice that comes through in the book and things would fall apart in the promotional period because there wouldn’t be any alignment between the original author and whoever this new person is that's representing it.
• I think probably what is more common is that an idea could be iterated upon in such a way that someone who submitted a manuscript to a publisher could say that's awfully close to what I submitted. They may be worried that they have something so fresh that someone else is going to run off with their fresh ideas.
• You need to really make sure that your unique voice and whatever makes you the person to write this book shines through in that manuscript. That makes it pretty difficult for someone else to come in and hijack it.
• Once you've got the work written, just by virtue of writing it, you have copyright protection, but for that to be enforceable and for you to have legal remedy if an infraction were to occur, you need to have your copyright registered with the copyright office. Quite often your publisher will take care of that for you, but you need to register it for it to really be enforceable.

• I will also add this notion of a poor man’s copyright where you ship your manuscript in the mail to yourself, it's only going to cost you some postage. You're not going to get anything out of it. That’s a myth, you cannot actually copyright your book that way.

10:37 – Because we are a hybrid publisher, another thing that comes up when I'm talking to authors is what hybrid publishing means. There certainly seems to be a bit of confusion in the industry about the various publishing options. What are the differences between self-publishing, vanity presses, hybrid, and the traditional model?

• There is a lot of confusion around these terms, partly because there are different iterations of the hybrid publishing model. The word itself has only started to regularly be used in the last ten years.
• The way that I frame it is that we are literally a hybrid between self-publishing and traditional publishing. Like the self-publishing side of things, our authors invest in the production of their work, they maintain creative control and their intellectual property rights; drawing from the traditional side we bring a team of experts to the table, and we bring distribution muscle on par with the traditional publishing houses.
• The difference between hybrid publishing and self-publishing in my mind is quality and distribution. Hybrid publishers have a selective process by which they screen incoming material because they have quality standards because they have to sell the book. If you have a reputation of bringing on low-quality books, you very quickly lose your selling power.
• Greenleaf Book Group is unique in that we are a publisher and a distributor. We keep distribution in-house. Other hybrid publishers have distribution they just use third parties and that’s fine if there is a proactive salesforce championing the book.
• IBPA, the Independent Book Publishers Association, has a wonderful list of criteria by which to qualify a hybrid publisher. If you're looking at a potential deal with a hybrid publisher and you're wondering, are they actually a hybrid publisher, it's a very good idea to just check out that list from IBPA and see if they meet those standards.

• As far as the other areas that you described, a vanity press would be like Author House or Lulu, any of those publishing companies where you can literally just upload a manuscript and click some buttons and it's published. It's called vanity because they're appealing to an author’s vanity or ego to just publish whatever.
• There is no real expectation to sell it to the retail market so there's no screening for quality. Typically, those books sell very few copies because of that.
• Generally, you want to stay away from vanity publishing. There are some crooked vanity publishers who will charge the author for publishing services and retain the rights, which should never happen. If you’re paying for services, the flipside of that is that you retain some rights.
• Be careful with vanity publishers. There's a great website called Writer Beware where you can do some research if you’re starting to suspect that’s what you’re dealing with.

• On the self-publishing side, I would say that it can be the most grey. You can start with a true self-publishing approach where you are the general contractor and you are hiring the designer, editors, and probably the marketing support, and you are tackling distribution on your own, but that's probably where you're going to hit a wall. Most retail accounts won't deal with an author who just has one book.
• At that point you may turn into a self-publisher who is working with a distributor, in which case you're sort of like your own independent publishing company.

15:09 – Another common question that comes up is how do I get a publisher to notice my book? What do you look for as a publisher in a book by a debut author?

• Of course, we're looking for quality content supported by an author who we legitimately believe is going to do their part in promoting their book.
• I often tell people that the best books that we have published here at Greenleaf are not our top selling books. You can have an amazing book and if the author doesn't do their part to promote it, it's not going to be a strong seller. We really need the author to come to the table and understand the commitment involved in getting out there and selling the book.
• Quality content and content that's differentiated is obviously super appealing. There's so much competition in publishing with thousands of books being published every day. When something comes along and it’s a fresh take or maybe even something a little controversial, those are the types of things that people will notice when the book comes out. Therefore, it's going to probably have a stronger selling power for us.
• We’re looking for authors who work well within our business model which does require collaboration. We need their input on a lot of creative decisions, we need their sign off on things.
• We expect our authors to respect that we are experts, having done this for twenty-five years. We have to turn around and sell the book into the retail market, so our suggestions are coming from that angle.
• We’re often in a situation where we have to find a middle of the road approach. We may have an author who insists on a certain color palette for the cover because it’s in line with company branding and so we work with that and come up with something that's also compelling for the market that we have to serve. Those compromises can be made if the right spirit is behind those conversations.
• In terms of author expectations if somebody comes in with a book and they're expecting to sell hundreds of millions of copies and win a Pulitzer Prize, we're probably going to have a talk about expectations. It's not that we don't want that too, we would love that, but history says that's potentially a long shot and ultimately, we don’t want to disappoint an author.

17:53 – Book publishing, though a form of art, is a business. How do you go about determining cover prices for books?

• Like everything in the world right now, prices are going up because paper prices are going up.
• In general, I would say you could compare it to the process that a realtor would use when coming up with the price for a house that they're going to sell. They look at comparable homes that have recently sold in the area and that's usually how they come up with a range.
• We do the same thing. We look at comparable books that are in an author’s genre that have a similar page count, the same binding, whether hard cover or paperback, and are fairly recent, and then we'll get a sampling of what those price ranges are and present that range to the author.
• It might be like we could do $26.95 to $29.95, and we'd be fine anywhere in that range. Now if you are a first-time author, we're going to gently nudge you towards the $26.95 end simply because it increases your chances of buyer’s taking a chance on the book.
• The retail buyers at the corporate level make the decision about what goes into the store. Also, readers who don't know you and haven’t read your work before may be put off by a price point that’s too high, it could be too much of a risk for them to take.
• So very often you can start at that lower end of the range and then as you move into new editions and additional printings you can raise the price once demand warrants it. It's very much supply and demand.

19:42 – Let’s switch gears now to a big one for you, and a question that I field on a regular basis: how do I become a bestseller and what does it take?

• I used to turn my nose up at the notion of working to become an Amazon bestseller and in fact even in my book, Ideas, Influence, and Income, I think I took that position. To be an Amazon bestseller you have to push a certain velocity of sales within a one-hour period.
• You may think, as I did back in the day, who cares if you're an Amazon bestseller? Especially when people in the industry know it can be so easily gained. The answer is the search engine behind Amazon cares. Its algorithm takes into consideration many things including visits to a page and clicks and reviews when determining what to surface to a user when they search for certain terms.
• Amazon is a giant search engine, so we want to make sure that we increase our authors chances of turning up high in those search results. Achieving that bestseller strategy is one element that contributes to that.
• So, as I said earlier it's really a matter of looking at your network and figuring out who in your network you can mobilize to buy the book all within a one-hour period. There are strategists who do this, and we do it in-house at Greenleaf for our authors to make sure that we've got all those moving parts buttoned up for them. They can usually then achieve the best seller status in a few categories if done well.

• Then there's the question of becoming a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, or USA Today bestseller. These are also a measure of velocity of sales but in a one-week period. Each of those publications comes up with their lists in their own unique way.
• Authors who muster up preorders and rally a lot of support usually in the first week or so of their book’s launch can be well positioned to hit one of those lists. How many books does it take? It depends on when your book is coming out and the kind of competition, since it is a ranking. If there’s a whole bunch of books that are selling like Harry Potter type numbers, you may be in trouble.
• There are certain times of the year when you have better chances because there aren't as many big books coming out as say the Fall or Spring. Again, there are strategists in the industry who work on these types of things. It's something that really takes a lot of preparation and advanced strategy to do right but we've got I believe over fifty New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers here at Greenleaf, so it can be done.
• When authors start to sort of dig around on this topic with me, I frequently will turn it back on them to ask why it matters. If you're a speaker, yes having Wall Street Journal, New York Times bestseller behind your name is a huge differentiator. It actually can bump up your speaking fees quite a bit and just makes you stand out. It gives this third-party verification to the validity of your ideas.
• On the other side, if you're someone who thinks that hitting that list is going to immediately transfer into sustained sales, I can tell you that doesn't happen. If all that effort went into week one, but there was no effort towards sustaining it and continuing to engage and build your platform after that, those sales are just going to drop off.
• People don't typically hunt for the next book they want on the bestsellers list. That's not a pattern that you should expect to see.

25:00 – Tanya, thank you so much for your insight. If there are authors out there that have more questions about the writing and publishing process, could you recommend some resources for them to turn to?

• Of course, and at the risk of sounding self-promotional, I swear to you everything I know about publishing is in my book and all the questions that we talked about today are in there as well. That's Ideas, Influence, and Income.
• I will say this podcast is a wealth of information. We've had tons of guests on all different topics that have shared really fascinating insights.
• The Learning Center on Greenleaf Book Group’s website at https://greenleafbookgroup.com/learning-center. There’s so much information and it's organized by categories so you can deep dive on editorial, marketing, design, audience building, all kinds of stuff.
• In general, especially for our authors, the team here at Greenleaf. We are all word nerds and publishing geeks, and we always encourage our authors to lean on us to see if we can help you with whatever is on your mind.

26:09 – David, I wonder, since you are one of those people receiving these questions all day long, is there something that our listeners might benefit from that you are frequently answering?

• Something that we didn’t really touch on is timelines, which varies as greatly as the variety of publishing options. On one hand an author can self-publish fairly quickly. It could be weeks; it could be a couple of months.
• At the other end of the spectrum, via the traditional model, there are more gatekeepers involved from a literary agent, through an acquisition’s editor, all the way up the chain to the actual publisher of any given imprint. It could be anywhere from two to three years from the start of the process until the book’s publication date.
• Greenleaf tends to publish books within six to twelve months. It tends to be on the higher end just by virtue of the buying timeline of our book buyers, who typically will be shopping for titles six or seven months before the book's publication date. That's when they're deciding what books to take and how many copies. But that's a sort of a rough time frame.
• I think one of the preconceived notions a lot of authors have is that it's a much quicker process. But if done well and correctly it takes a bit of time for it to be done.