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So You Want to Publish a Book?
First Decide Why... Then Choose the Right Option
When considering the challenge of writing and publishing a book, three options for ultimate publication must be explored, only one of which will likely make sense. Typically, the option that comes to mind for most of us is “go out and find a publisher,” hopefully a top publisher based in New York City who will help us market, promote and sell our book and of course get it on the shelves of bookstores. Yet if you are a business expert, consultant, company executive or other professional and your goal is to use your book to leverage your business, this traditionally most common approach may NOT be the best route for you
In this interview with Ken Lizotte, CIO (Chief Imaginative Officer) of emerson consulting group inc., the three options available today are spelled out including reasons why your particular situation might point you toward one of these options vs. the two others.
Interviewer is Curtis Bingham, President, The Predictive Consulting Group (www.predictiveconsulting.com), a published thought leader whose extensive research into the concept of executive-level customer champions will soon be the focus of his own forthcoming book.
Curtis
Given there is more than one option for publishing a book today, what are these three options and how can you tell which one is for you?
Ken
In order for you to know which of the options makes sense for you, you first have to decide what you want the book for. Typically business people who are would-be authors sense that they need a book for a couple of reasons. One is credibility, so they can finally be seen as a true expert, what’s called a thought leader. Two is to market their business and use the book as a business development leverage tool. They want greater visibility and they want to attract prospects that they didn’t know were out there. They want to put it on their website, in their bio, have it available for sale at speaking engagements, even give it away free to clients and prospects.
Those are certainly great ways to leverage a book and typically what a smart business leader wants out of a book. But what’s misunderstood is how those goals often clash with the very different goals of a book publisher. The author in this case wants to use the book primarily to drive sales of his/her company’s services and products. The publisher on the other hand couldn't care less about that. The publisher only wants to sell books.
Curtis
Why would that be at odds with the author’s goals?
Ken
It’s not at odds IF the author is OK with taking a three-month working “vacation” from her real business, or potentially giving it up altogether, in favor of a career change. But if the goal is to continue with the business, consulting practice, company operations etc. during and following the book’s publication, the author needs to know that a publisher is going to be entirely uninterested in that. If the author is NOT OK with that, the other options—all self-publishing options—make far more sense.
Curtis
But wouldn’t a best seller, for example, be a good thing no matter what, thus worth the possible conflict? Having a best-seller is the best credibility and visibility an author could have, right?
Ken
Yes, it would deliver tremendous credibility and visibility but the question to answer beforehand is “at what price?” At first glance, we would all say, “I should have such ‘troubles.’” But in fact, consider the lifestyle change that will come your way automatically with your best seller. You will be expected to do countless media interviews, dozens perhaps in a single day. You will be sent on a multi-city promotional tour, lasting possibly for many weeks. You will have absolutely no time each day to conduct any other business but that of endlessly talking about your new book.
Then speaking engagements will come your way. You will get well paid for them but they will nonetheless require you to travel, to spend time developing a presentation, to deliver that presentation again ad again, to once again have no time whatsoever for the business that got you here in the first place. If that’s OK with you, if that new career appeals to you, that’s totally fine.
But next, because your first book has sold so well, you will be asked to write a second book. The pressure in fact will be on you to do this fairly soon, given that there’s always a long lead time between writing and editing of a book and actual publication date. Your publisher will also want this book to closely relate to your first book. Try straying too far afield and your publisher will get nervous, resist, put the hammer down. Jim Champy, co-author of the mega-best seller Reengineering the Corporation, reports that his publisher insisted that his second book MUST contain the word “reengineering” in the title. The result was Reengineering Management.
Obviously all this means you are not going to have any time any longer for your original business or consulting practice. The mere writing of a book, let alone all the subsequent promotion, requires hours upon hours upon hours of focused solitude. That’s why it often occurs that a book penned by a well-known CEO or company founder is often their first and last. Bill Gates, whose first book The Road Ahead was a best-seller, did go on to do a sequel (there’s that publisher pressure for you!) but no more than that. He admits that he originally believed he could work on book #1 at his Microsoft office but gave up within the first few weeks because there were just too many distractions and interruptions. He had to go home and stay there for the next few months in order to bang out a first draft. Effectively, for that period of time, he “retired” from his job as Microsoft's top gun.
Curtis
What if this scenario appeals to you? What if a would-be author hears what you have to say here and thinks, “That would be great! I wouldn’t mind switching my career life.”
Ken
In that case, option #1, the traditional route, makes sense for that author. It’s not a bad thing by any means, it’s just a possible development that needs to be understood. And of course getting a book published by a New York publisher does not obviously guarantee a best seller but the pressure will nonetheless be on sell those books! If the book doesn't sell that well on its own, the pressure may be even greater for you to get out there and promote and hawk your books. You simply should know that your goals and your publisher’s may by nature be at odds.
Curtis
So that brings us to the other options. These options are for the budding author who does NOT want to give up his business, who sees a book as a calling card, as a credibility tool and as a high-value advertisement of sorts. But you say these are all self-publishing options. That notion turns off many of us who see that as a cop-out or an admission that without paying to have my book published, it wouldn’t otherwise happen.
Ken
Those are understandable reactions because particularly in the last 50-60 years, the vanity press industry has made a bad name for self-published authors by churning out poor quality books that are badly written, unedited, adorned with unattractive covers and book jackets and costing a small fortune. The “author” typically ends up with cartons of books that are not available in bookstores, leaving the author to find a way to distribute them all by himself. It’s not a pretty sight and such stories have left many potential authors feeling all dressed up with nowhere to go. Under this decidedly unattractive scenario, it’s no wonder book dreams point only to the Mecca of New York publishers, that you make it there or you don’t make it anywhere.
But in the past ten years that scenario has ceased to be the only self-publishing option. A radical new-style self-publisher has spring up and with it the elimination of the need for the vanity scenario to ever take shape again. Called POD or print-on-demand publishers, this new approach solves all the old problems: With a POD publisher a book can look as good as any produced by Wiley or McGraw Hill, it can be produced quickly (MORE quickly than Wiley or McGraw Hill!), it will actually be available for sale in bookstores and on-line (Amazon, Barnesandnoble.com, Waldenbooks.com, etc., etc.). Also, because of the technology involved, i.e., requiring only ONE book to be actually printed at a time (as they are requested, purchased, “demanded”), rather than an initial print run of, say, 5000, the cost to author drops down to a fraction of the old vanity press price. Where vanity self-publishing might cost 5, 10, even 20,000 dollars, the cost of a POD book publishing project could actually run as low as $200.
Curtis
You sound like you own stock in a POD company!
Ken
I should because I see it as a revolutionary development in publishing, an opportunity for everyone to get their book published, for the very small clique of “real” publishers to no longer hold all the cards. In fact, I was offered a finder’s fee by one POD because they noticed I was promoting the hell out of them but I turned them down because I didn’t want people to feel that was the reason I was so supportive. I’ve been published three times myself in the traditional way, and then I tried this method, so that I could at least know what it was like. It was the easiest, fastest, most stress-free process and also, for the first time in my publishing career, I finally received an actual royalty check!
Curtis
As freeing as this all sounds, we still have the matter of feeling as though there’s less credibility given a self-published book than one that’s been evaluated and accepted by a New York publisher.
Ken
Yes, and people should by and large get over that! Look at many of the great popular and classic books that started out as self-published books, because no publisher would have published them: What Color Is Your Parachute?,Chicken Soup for the Soul, Thoreau's Walden… Walden! How can we assume that only those books accepted by a “real” publisher can have any worth when books like these could not pass muster, and when 80-90% of the books that are accepted and published each and every year, do not sell!
Maybe it’s time to fight back and say, “Look I have something valuable to say here, I get paid to say it each and every day by my customers, and the decision of a 24-year-old English major ‘first reader’ just out of Bryn Mawr that my book idea shouldn’t survive her slush pile simply should not be the deciding factor in whether my customers or potential customers get to learn from my ideas in book form.
The truth is that simply writing a book manuscript, let alone publishing it, whether by self-publishing or the traditional method, is enormously impressive to most people, because most people will themselves never, ever publish a book. They know this instinctively and so they will gush over your new book, when they hear about it or when you plop it into their hands. It will raise the author’s esteem in their eyes, no matter what method got it there, and thus it will have achieved its goal: to elevate your credibility, your visibility and to act as a distinctive, impressive, high-value “brochure” for your product or service.
Curtis
Well you certainly make a great case for this new POD approach. What about the other self-publishing option that you alluded to? How is that one different, and who is it for?
Ken
The last option is the do-it-all-yourself option, where you go out and take care of all the details yourself, which can be horrendous and, along with vanity press (which I don’t even want to include as a viable option), is one that people identify with self-publishing. Here you go and shop for a printer, you get your ISBN number yourself, you register with the Library of Congress, you hire an illustrator for your cover art, you take care of every single detail that comes your way. Since the POD takes care of all these matters for you, one might wonder why anyone would select this detail-laden approach. But if your goal for your book is to produce a new income stream, i.e., that you want your book itself to be a money-making product, as opposed to a marketing tool to generate revenue for your original business, then this do-it-all-yourself approach would be the way to go.
Curtis
Is there a particular type of professional that would fit this profile?
Ken
Professional speakers come to mind immediately. For them, selling books at the “back of the room” after a talk is a great way to boost their overall income. By doing-it-themselves, the profit per book unit goes up, whereas with a POD, the author gets a royalty, usually 10-20% and that’s it. Again, the POD author should be most interested in using the book as a tool not as a product in and of itself. But the professional speaker wants to use books as products as well as credibility/leverage tool, so it may be worth it to invest the extra time and money into the process so that in the end the payoff per book will be greater.
Curtis
Any other benefits to this approach?
Ken
One big one with both self-publishing options is that your book stays around for as long as you want it, and that if you want to update it or modify it in any way, you don’t need permission. With a “real” (commercial) publisher, you book stays in print only as long as it sells, and if that doesn’t happen in the first 3-6 months of its life, it may very well be sentenced to the “remainder” bin within the first year, effectively ending its production. At that point the author is back where he or she started.
Also, with New York publishers, they have to agree to updates or revisions of your book, because they are reluctant to pay the freight to do so. So if your industry goes thru some changes, or as your own concepts evolve, making your original text out-of-date or in error, your commercial publisher must be persuaded to help you, while in a self-publishing option you call the shots and thus can make the needed changes whenever you please.
Curtis
It does make one wonder.
Ken
And it should!
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