Emily Einolander 0:21
Welcome to the hybrid pub Scout podcast helping you navigate the publishing landscape. I’m M Einolander, and I explore resources and services so authors can be successful and safe as they pursue publishing. Fun fact, when I first started this podcast, I quickly realized that the actual name was a little bit not what I meant. I had set out to talk to publishing professionals and writers about their experiences working with traditional and indie publishing, especially people who had done both what I quickly and too late realized was that when people hear hybrid a lot of them think of hybrid presses. Well, good news for me. Since I went on hiatus, hybrid publishing has proliferated, and there’s a lot more to explore. Seven years later, I’ve finally aligned more with the name of my business. I’m sure some would say there’s something cosmic about that, but maybe hybrid publishing has a bit of a nebulous definition at the moment, but as authors are becoming more disenchanted with traditional publishing and discovering how grueling self publishing can be, they’re becoming more relevant. Since it’s been the standard for such a long time. People are used to the traditional publishing model. They expect that one publishers pay for everything. Two authors get advances in royalties, three publishers take care of book promotion and marketing, but there’s a few problems with that. Number one, the everything that publishers pay for has a big asterisk attached to it. Two, advances in royalties are more underwhelming than ever. And three, book promotion and marketing mostly falls on the author. Now, regardless of how they’re publishing, I’ve seen a lot of talk about hybrid publishing being predatory under every circumstances, and I want to push back on that, even though in some cases they are predatory. But when you don’t have a major corporation paying all the upfront costs, there are some practicalities to consider, namely, who is going to pay for all these professionals to do the work of making a book? If you listened to the show before, hopefully you’ve gotten the message of how hard ghost writers, editors, designers, marketers and other publishing professionals work to create the best book possible, and that work needs to be compensated, and authors obviously should get the best deal possible for their work too. So where does that leave us? How do we bring books into the world while making sure it’s fair to everyone, especially when everyone who isn’t a CEO of a major corporation has such a tight budget? And how do you as an author, know the money and effort you spend on the publishing side is going to get you to your goal. The Independent book Publishers Association, or ibpa, has tried to set up some standards for hybrid presses in the last several years at last look. These are what they say a good hybrid publisher should do, and I’m just going to run through the list, rather than read every single part of it. I’ll include the link in the show notes, so you can go check out what they have there yourself. And maybe it’s changed since I looked who knows. Number one, define a mission and vision for its publishing program. Two, vet submissions. Three, commit to truth and transparency in business practices. Four, provide a negotiable, easy to understand contract for each book published. Five, publish under its own imprint and ISBNs. Six, publish to industry standards. Seven, ensure editorial design and production quality. Eight, pursue and manage a range of publishing rights. Nine, provide distribution services. 10, demonstrate respectable sales and 11, pay authors a higher than standard royalty. As you may have noticed, there’s considerable wiggle room in there for these definitions. For example, you as the author are responsible for deciding how to define things like respectable sales, and the definitions are constantly evolving. So that’s a big part of what we’ll be looking at in this and upcoming episodes. In today’s interview, I’m talking with David Morris, founder and publisher of like drive books, a conventional publishing company with an unconventional financial model, full disclosure, in case it isn’t obvious, I do work with like drive in a managing editor position, and I’m having a pretty good time, too. David has 30 years of experience in editing, marketing and corporate leadership with major publishing brands like HarperCollins, sondern. In where he served as vice president and publisher and worked on numerous best sellers. His sole focus is working with spiritually progressive and personal growth authors, leveraging his experience to help them achieve publishing success. David is also a literary agent at hyponomist literary co host of the publishing disrupted podcast an author and holds a doctorate in psychology and religion. Lake Drive books vision is to serve authors and readers who want to break the mold and ask honest questions about religion, spirituality and personal growth. These books aim to help readers understand the past and move forward in a life where they can be real and feel seen. We’ll get more details on Lake drive’s mission and model. David also offers takes on how to determine what works for you when it comes to choosing a publishing path, and gives some platform building insights for authors.

David Morris 5:54
And here we go. Hi, Emily.

Emily Einolander 5:58
Thanks for coming and talking with me. Yeah, thanks for inviting me. David and I work together at David’s press Lake, drive books. And would you tell us a little bit about that, please?

David Morris 6:13
Well, you’re a really great worker. I know, I know, I know. I knew you meant talk about, like, drive books, but you, technically, from an editor’s point of view, the logic of your paragraph there meant you were referring to our working relationship. So I wanted to comment on that.

Emily Einolander 6:34
Well, yeah, okay, yeah, I totally meant to do that. That was on purpose.

David Morris 6:38
Anybody out there is listening hire Emily without a doubt. You know when you get those, when you’re when you’re a boss, you former employees will they apply to other jobs and you, I’m maybe it says good things about me, but I get used as a reference. And they always ask you, or they will often ask you, would you rehire this person? And I would absolutely say yes, I am honored if you ever, if you ever left and needed to come back or whatever. But okay, anyway, yeah, so there’s, there are, I’m already plugging you. You don’t have to plug me.

Emily Einolander 7:11
You’re here. Nope, I just got here. Well, I mean, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t have, I mean, we met when I walked up to you and said, What do you do? And like, this looks cool.

David Morris 7:20
So, yeah, at a conference, yeah, well, okay, so answering your question, yeah, I mean, you’re, you’re the, you’re the production. I’m sorry, managing editor, managing editor. Sorry for, for Lake Drive books. We’re a small, independent publishing company. We use the hybrid model, as you know. But what I like the my my favorite definition of that is it’s conventional publishing with an unconventional financial model. Because I think a lot of people don’t realize just how much they’re used to a certain financial model in book publishing and and it’s as if that’s the only model that is reputable, and I think that’s what’s changed so much in recent years. But we’re going to get into that. I mean, Lake Drive books. I started it when I exited the corporate publishing world after being in it for many, many years, and I wanted to do my own kind of books. I’ve always been really fascinated with how we identify who we are, how culturally, spiritually, Faith wise. I’ve always been very interested in people who are struggling with figuring that out for one reason or another. And there are a lot of reasons, and there’s a lot of change going on, and people need more authors helping them write this stuff out, put words to it. So like, where are we going? What? What is it that we call spiritual in our lives to come? Not, I don’t mean that in, like, the the great beyond life to come, but no, our lives right now is what I’m talking about, and that’s the kind of spirituality we need to be talking about more so. So yeah, and it’s not strictly religious. It’s, it’s very much with a self help bent. I have a psychology background, and I, you know, at least academically, and I think that’s really the new spirituality in many ways, we just haven’t called it that, which is also a whole sort of philosophical discussion about how we name religion and spirituality and psychology. It’s a whole philosophical discussion about what, what is, what when you’re talking about those things. So we do, we do memoir. We’ve done a lot of memoir because, you know, we’re trying to tell stories that are gritty, that are on the margins, and storytelling is a great way to affect change in attitudes and mindsets. Sharing the experiences we have a few we have a few queer stories, and one of my favorite lines about them is you might know. Someone who’s gay or trans or intersex, but have you ever really heard their story from their point of view? And I think, I think that a lot of us haven’t, and I certainly have friends in most of those categories. And I had no idea once I started reading these books what I learned, just the just the difficulty, you know, just the sheer emotional difficulty that goes on. But there’s things like that. There’s also just people who are, you know, struggling with Christianity, or there’s a book about not denying our emotions like grief, which is something we’re trained to do in many religious cultures. We’re supposed to just be happy that, you know, we have our faith, and that doesn’t always help in real life, emotional circumstances. And I’m really thrilled about a book like that, because that’s, that’s, that’s up my alley, for sure. Got a book on spiritual abuse, got a book on sexual abuse and clergy sex abuse. It’s all the real light topics,

Emily Einolander 11:05
yeah, all of those things that are very easy to process, you know, digestible books here, yeah?

David Morris 11:12
But it’s been it’s been fun. It’s been some of the hardest work I’ve ever done in my entire professional career, the learning curve in the last few years for someone who’s in his probably last third of his professional life, I’ve had the hardest learning curve of my professional life and my final third and but also it’s been, without question, the most gratifying work I’ve ever done in publishing. I’m so much because it’s grassroots, and I’m doing all kinds wearing all kinds of hats. In in the business, I’m much closer to the authors. I mean, when you’re an editor, you’re closer to an author. When you’re when you’re marketer, you’re closer to the author. My last job, I was publisher, and I wasn’t as close to the authors, but now I’m all those things, and it’s, it’s just a delight. I was talking to an author the other day, and I’ve said this more than once where, like, another author was talking to me, and she said, You know, I haven’t talked to you in a while. I miss you. We used to talk so much when we were working on the book. I was like, oh, that’s, that’s very nice. Thank you. And I miss them too. I miss them too. It’s fun to become a part of someone’s life for a while and there, and for them to become part of my life for a while and but also it’s gratifying, mainly because of the kind of work we’re doing. You know, we’re publishing stories that wouldn’t otherwise get told, partly because of cultural norms being what they are, and just the the great crush of media in our in our marketplace today, not having much room for alternative voices unless, you know, just, just in terms of the mainstream and the economics of it, so that that that’s very, very gratifying to be telling some of those stories. It’s also, you know, I have, I’m a I’m a PhD in religion and psychology and society, and I and I want to affect. I want to try to be an agent of change with with what I’ve learned and what I know about how the world works, and I feel like the books I’m doing, instead of kind of living in the ivory tower, I’m actually on the street. I’m actually doing stuff that is making a difference in that way, not that I’m trying to, you know, put put off academic the value of academic contribution, scholarly contribution. But especially in religious studies, though there’s a lot of scholarly contribution that goes on, it’s not really helping, and I don’t. And those who are helping, you know who you are, but those who aren’t helping, they actually don’t know who they are.

Emily Einolander 13:52
So, oh, that’s true. Yeah, that’s absolutely true. Yeah, you’re you’re applying, you’re applying all of those learnings that you’ve had to be able to help other people tell their stories in less academic way, and

David Morris 14:04
that’s what I’m doing, too. Publishing wise, I’m taking, like, all these years of experience, and I’m trying to apply it to a different audience, at a different readership, a different author, a different author group. I mean, the irony of it is, I’m I’m having to learn things about this group, you know, I thought I knew, or just how to, how to create networks, and how to market books on this level, and what is, what is the content really like on this level? Is it’s, it’s actually different. I’ve had to, that’s part of the that’s been part of the learning curve, just because I was an executive at a major publishing company, it doesn’t mean I know all that stuff, even though I thought I did right?

Emily Einolander 14:46
Well, let’s talk a little bit about how this model differs from, you know, the unconventional model that differs from what traditional publishing does. Like, how does Lake Drive sort of divert from that? You know, it’s. Hybrid publisher, but you do things your own way. Because that’s sort of the the territory we’re in right now is, like, we’re defining what works for us and what doesn’t.

David Morris 15:10
Yep, yep, high, yeah, yeah. I would say Lake Drive is a version of hybrid publishing. And there’s, the thing is, like in publishing, there’s, there’s definitely a spectrum of businesses and publishing identities that go on in within any one sort of nomenclature, you know, or labels, yeah. I mean, like I said, it’s un it’s conventional publishing, but with an unconventional financial model, I think the thing to do is to do is to back up just a little bit and say the way publishing works is that it’s a very speculative business. On the whole. There’s exceptions, of course, but when you’re publishing to a general readership, every every publisher is looking for what we call breakaway title. And why you want that breakaway title is because it pays for the rest of the business Exactly. So. So you could have I heard, I once heard the Random House CEO. It’s a different CEO now, but I heard the Random House CEO the time when all that antitrust stuff was going on in publishing business, there was a there was court proceedings that were recorded, and a lot of us publishing people, went and looked at that transcript. I didn’t look at it firsthand, but I read about it, and he was quoted as saying that, I think I’m not going to get it right, but it was something like 4% of our books drive 65% of our business, you know. And for me, and I would feel, I would say that in publishing in general, like it’s more like maybe five to 10% of your books actually pays for the other 90 to 95% of what you do. So you’re putting a lot of books out every year as a publisher and on especially when you’re working at higher levels, you’re paying some big advances that never earn out. And sometimes they aren’t they, they do so badly you actually lose money on them because you paid a half a million dollar advance to somebody like like a musical artist. That happens. That happens. A lot publishers fall into this trap. I’m kind of going down rabbit trails, but yeah, but my the whole point is that that that publishers have to establish, like, this deep bank account so that they can go out and do all this speculating. Well, when you’re starting out a new or when you’re working on the grassroots level, and you’re not, it’s, I mean, I’m not, I’m not in a business that it makes a lot of sense to just go out and find financers, you know, because, you know, even still, my books aren’t going to perform in a huge way. It’s not going to be a big payoff for investors. So it’s sort of a more of a slow build kind of business, no matter what I do, and honestly, it can last things up when all that money gets involved. Granted, I wouldn’t mind having a nice a nice angel investor to help out with some things. It would certainly be nice if we could do it responsibly, absolutely. But But, but, because publishers have those those those big bank accounts, they can go out and do all that speculating when you’re starting out or when you’re working at the grassroots level, you’ve got to figure out a way to pay for those books up front. And I didn’t even quite understand this when I first started a few years ago. But if you’re talking about paying for freelancers, you know when it comes to developmental editing, copy editing, design of the cover, design and composition of the interior, proofreading, two passes of proofreading. You know, that’s, that’s easily, that’s easily $7,500 if not $10,000 right? Yeah, we’re talking about professionals to to, I mean, you can, you can find ways to make it work a little bit less cheaply, but, but it’s like anything in this world, you’ll find that the quality goes down when you start spending less money than five to 7500 to $10,000 I get by with five too, because we will handle the developmental edit in house, meaning, meaning me, but it’s worth it. It. I think I’m worth my my weight in developmental editing, especially at this point, but, but, yeah, that’s the thing. It’s, it’s, it’s expensive up front to pay for it. So the hybrid, what the hybrid model does, basically, is it just says you’re going to fund those upfront costs, and then you since. Since the publisher has no risk involved, they should also reward you with a higher royalty rate, right? So that’s that’s what we do as well. Our royalty rates are 50% higher than conventional publishing, and I’m committed to that because publishers rely on authors now more than ever to market books with their with their online platforms in particular. So I, you know, I think that authors should be paid better by publishers, but they still pay the same that they’ve been paying for the last 100 years, or whatever it’s been at least last 20 or 15 years,

Emily Einolander 20:36
the methods of doing it or art, yeah, yeah, so,

David Morris 20:39
but you but I say it’s conventional publishing with unconventional financial model. So I sort of explained the financial model. What’s what’s conventional about it is, and I guess I said that it’s, it’s professional editing and design, you know, strong production disciplinary practices, which you can attest for, yes,

Emily Einolander 21:00
especially like the last couple of weeks. Yeah.

David Morris 21:03
And then also, also, I mean, we punch way above our way in terms of marketing and publicity. I mean, I do something that I think all publishers should do, but they don’t, on the whole and I get into the weeds with my authors on their platforming and how they’re getting the word out about their book. How’s it going with their social media? How’s it going with their email list? Most publishers don’t ask those kinds of questions, and then they don’t have, they might have a newsletter, you know, that they send out to everybody, but I give, I give one on one, attention to that, both with with dedicated meetings about that early in the contract signing stage. But then that becomes a, you know, a part of the conversation going forward. It’s built in that we’re always going to be talking about platform. So when it comes time to actually market the book where the publisher is relying on the author’s platform, more than ever, I’m already really familiar with that platform, and I can go and I can really dig in with them and customize and say, here’s, here’s where your strengths are. Here’s where my strengths are in terms of marketing. And, you know, we do a great job with launch teams. You know, which, which is a known quantity. It’s, it’s one of the, to me, it’s one of the most powerful ways, one of the most powerful ways that authors can directly affect their upfront sales when they put their book out. It’s a known quantity, but we’re also really good with publicity. Got a good sized publicity list, one that really suits well for the kind of books we do as well, and so I feel like we’re punching, we’re punching way above our weight, our weight there. And you also have to, you also have to have a sense of perspective about publicity these days. You know, we live in such a segmented market, a digitally segmented market. So, so what you know, if you got yourself in your local newspaper. Let’s say you even live in a big city, and you got yourself a book review in the look in the big city newspaper. Well, number one, nobody reads print newspapers anymore. They’re not even delivered. You know, hard

Emily Einolander 23:14
they always have paywalls. The

David Morris 23:17
most, the online ones have paywalls. Exactly which, which, which baffles me, because, you know, if they’re also running ads at, you know, on a lot of those newspaper sites, and they have paywalls, and then a publisher like me wants to promote my author’s book in Virginia and at the local paper there, and, oh, I can’t promote it, because everybody’s going to hit a paywall to go see the article, even though they would see the ads, I never it’s just that has not caught up with the times yet in my mind, plus all those ads are just overwhelming these days, X out of like five things before you can even read the article.

Emily Einolander 23:55
Yeah, for sure, I actually in the same vein that you’re talking about with the like collaborating on marketing and publicity, I would like to ask a question that I think a lot of authors have about the value of having someone else shepherd that process versus doing it on their own, because at this point, authors are able to, like at least have the breakdown Of all of the processes and the things they might need. They can access those things on their own in a sort of rudimentary way, and if they’re paying for the editing and the design and all of that stuff, what’s, what’s the value of having a company logo on their book if they’re paying for so much of it.

David Morris 24:46
I do think that when you’re if you’re an author and you want to publish your book, whether it’s even like some of the more like lower level self publishing services, will offer marketing services, I don’t really think they do a whole lot. Uh, they maybe have an email list, and they send out an email blast, but I think it’s pretty mass emailing, which is not, which is, which is a very standard tactic. But I don’t think they’re curating it very well. I don’t, I doubt there’s much nudging and following up going on. I doubt there’s any leveraging of a personal relationship with a media outlet, which can happen from varying publishers with varying types of books. But so I think, because you can easily spend like they can add on, you know, I don’t know what they do, but you know, 10,000 $15,000 for a marketing a publicity package at a hybrid publisher or even a self publisher. And I, I would caution most of the time, you probably shouldn’t

Emily Einolander 25:51
do that. So the marketing ones are the most tenuous. You would say, like those, those types of services

David Morris 26:00
that add on? Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, every I think there’s exceptions where there’s good stuff going on, depending on the kind of book it is, again, and the kind of author we’re talking about. That’s the thing about publishing. You know, it’s always like, what’s the context here? People use the same terms, but they mean different things, or they’re in different contexts. And so you kind of have to define those things, you know, because there are hybrid publishers, and you’ve you’ve mentioned this is that are working really well for affluent folks who are business people who want to have sort of a calling card, and maybe they even get their book on a bestseller list for a week or something like that, but, or maybe they’d even do better, but most the time, they don’t, most the time, it’s like 250 initial books, and then they sell copies every time they go speaking or something like that.

Emily Einolander 26:54
And there can be value if they don’t expect to make a ton of money on the actual book,

David Morris 26:59
and if it gets them what they want, they may have a big enough bank account where spending 2530, or even $50,000 is some high rep publishers charge is, you know, that’s, that’s enough, that’s okay for them, because otherwise they wouldn’t get it right. Exactly it’s, it’s supply and demand. And so, you know, if you want a reputable hybrid publisher that does a really good job with with editing and production and design, it might be worth $50,000 to you, but for the average aspiring author, no, ain’t, no way that’s a really dumb idea.

Emily Einolander 27:37
Yeah, that’s that’s too much.

David Morris 27:41
Yeah, yeah. And I think there’s some authors where it’s where they even have the money that they could spend on that. But, and they’re not the affluent business person trying to create a calling card. They actually just want to create a book that people are going to read and and they still could get enticed to some of those big, big package publishers, service oriented, hybrid publishers. And that feels exploitative to me. It does. I, you know, like spending that much money on a book hardly anybody’s going to read. Just tell the person to go, you know, write it into a Word file and send it to your best friends and leave it at that. You know?

Emily Einolander 28:23
Well, I mean, when someone does have a book that they either want to write, and like, I’m specifying, they want to do it themselves. They don’t want to hire a ghost writer if they want to do it, do their own book. They want to sell their own book and get a decent amount of sales. How do they look at it? And just like, decide which path to go to, like, either, Should I, should I spend a lot of time sending this in traditional publishers? Should I look for a hybrid publisher, or should I just try to do everything myself? Right? What criteria would you say someone should use to decide?

David Morris 28:59
I think, I think the first thing to realize is that going into being being an author, consider it a part time job, if not a full time job. And is, you know, so it means educating yourself about publishing. It means getting involved in every aspect of it. I don’t mean control in terms of things like design and, you know, editing and so on. I mean, learn about how the business works. Learn about the different options. I think that strict self publishing, total DIY, through Amazon, KDP or Ingram Spark is, is great. Actually, it’s, it’s, it’s not that difficult to use. However, there is a big learning curve, and it takes time, and it can be frustrating, and there’s a lot of unknowns, and will you get the kind of result that you want? I know of an author right now who is looking to publish it on KDP, and this author realized, oh, you can’t do. Pre orders through KDP for the print book. So I’ve got a how do I how do I deal with that? That’s a weird bugaboo about Amazon KDP. Well, you know, there’s a lot of hair pulling moments like that. I think when you start out DIYing it. I did that with my own, my own dissertation. I polished it up, and it was the guinea pig book for, like, drive books. I mean, I was said I was using it in a process to learn about, you know, setting up a small book business. But it was, you know, it’s challenging to, you know, even if you’re going to typeset it in Word, if you’re going to DIY everything, it is a long time consuming process. And again, it depends. Is it nonfiction? Is it fiction? You know, what are we talking about? Are there illustrations? Are there tables? Are there endnotes? It can get really detailed fast on you, depending on what it is, or maybe you’re publishing something pretty simple. And no worries, you know,

Emily Einolander 30:57
editor that isn’t just going to put your stuff into chat, GPT, like, yeah, yeah. Like, how do you find people that you can trust to do all this stuff?

David Morris 31:05
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you can, I mean, there’s services like reeds, which has a lot of great freelancers, and they vet them pretty carefully, but so that’s DIY in it. Then there’s self publishing, which is much more like assembly line, mass market publishing. I don’t want to name too many names, but like, author house is known as one that sort of like, is a it’s a white label brand for other self publishing services that are out there.

Emily Einolander 31:36
I think there’s Hay House has one also, but I can’t, yep,

David Morris 31:39
a lot of the major publishers actually have a brand, have a brand like that. And then there’s hybrid publishing, and that can be a whole spectrum of like, you know, mom and pop, one person setups, which is kind of what Lake Drive is, although we’re really, like a one plus plus two part time setup, plus, we use a lot of great freelancers, so we’re not doing it all here to larger operations that do a lot more titles. They have the big ticket invoices for their services. They break them down. And so, yeah, I mean, there’s, there’s those different options. What you know, you can go on to the independent book Publishers Association website, and they have criteria for hybrid publishers. A lot of times in the past, they’ve identified that criteria. As to me, one of the things that stands out is that you have what’s called distribution, full distribution of your books, which is kind of lingo, e term for you have some access to a sales team that’s pitching your book to bookstores. But that’s a bit, that’s a bit of an antiquated notion. Yeah, there’s, there’s, you know, book bookstores have just faded. They, they still aren’t what they were 25 years ago, and maybe there’s more of them out there now. Barnes and Noble has been on a comeback, doing making smaller footprint stores finally, which is really smart. Good of good for them, but it’s still under 700 stores nationwide, in the US. I mean, that’s not that many you know. Think of all the Walgreens there are out there. It’s not even close. And and, you know, they’re still carrying just sort of the top listed titles, you know, by and large, by and large, I or even think of like an independent bookstore in your local community. We’ve got one here where I live in Michigan, and we’ve got several actually, and some are new. It’s really cool, but I work in religion and spirituality titles. They’ve got 18 inches of shelf space for that, and they’re carrying CS Lewis,

Emily Einolander 33:54
yes, bunch of Enneagram stuff.

David Morris 33:58
They’re carrying all this. I mean, there’s I went this last time. Was like, Okay, I didn’t expect them to have that shelf there. That’s nice, but they still had a lot of other things taking up most of that shelf space. Nothing from an independent publisher,

Emily Einolander 34:09
20 copies of The Purpose Driven Life, exactly.

David Morris 34:15
So does that really matter? Do you need a sales team for your your especially if you’re a one person Author, Publisher, do you really need a sales team? Or even if you’re a hybrid publisher that’s putting out five to six titles a year, like like Lake derived books, do you really need a sales team? It’s a great question. You know, books are arguably marketed more by the author platform. Then, see the thing is, sales teams used to also be the functional equivalent of marketing. They pushed your book out into the marketplace. The bookstores were a marketing mechanism, but that was when, that was when the only way you could get a book was by going to a bookstore. Now books are a click away, and you’ve got it in maybe even 24 hours or less. So that just changed things. All the all the foot traffic is now online, and the way to market is online. And so with online author platforms, that’s that’s arguably more where you should be putting your money and not setting up a whole distribution feature of your hybrid publisher now, and honestly, with if you’re using some of these platforms for publishing, especially Ingram Spark or Ingram Lightning Source, they get the book everywhere in books in English language are sold. I mean, that’s global. Yeah, yeah, Amazon arguably does that too, but, but with Amazon bookstores, or I don’t know, most people are not using Amazon to to distribute exclusively throughout the world. They just use Amazon for the Amazon ecosystem, and they’re using room spark to get to the rest of the world. That’s what we do at Lake Drive. And that’s distribution. I mean, that’s, that’s worldwide distribution for a little, tiny publisher.

Emily Einolander 36:11
Yeah, it’s amazing. And I know that there’s a lot of just with my experience with booksellers, if, if they have an account with someone, that’s when they’re going to order it. So if someone doesn’t have an account with Ingram, right, then they’re just like, Nope, we’re just not going to do that. Because there’s all these, like, application processes that bookstores have to do to be able to, like, work with different distributors. So most of them just don’t bother going with something different. Also, I think the brick and with the brick and mortars, there’s a little bit of animosity in there too, which, yes, fair enough

David Morris 36:47
with Amazon. Yeah, yeah. The other thing to mention about hybrid publishers that I think stands out in terms of what makes them different from a self publisher, or, you know, like, like we were mentioning before, not the DIY level, where you’re doing it all yourself, but the self publishing service and and maybe even across the spectrum of different hybrid publishers, is the question of, how much do they actually curate the books that they do, or are they just publishing whatever comes their way because someone is paying them? And I think, I think that there are plenty of hybrid publishers where you can look at their you can look at their titles and go, I don’t really see an identity here. And why is that identity important? I think it’s important because it shows you that you work with editors who understand your content, the genre that you’re in. It means you’re working with a publisher who understands the right media outlets, the right professional and cultural networks, and especially in the area of nonfiction, spirituality, books, that stuff matters a lot. It’s not like publishing, you know, a really classic category like romance. So, yeah, I think, I think that’s something, that’s something to look out for. I don’t mean to be ungracious about publishers that the highway publishers that are not being that discerning about or they’re not. I mean, because it’s different, it’s different from different again, it’s different contexts for different situation.

Emily Einolander 38:13
There’s a lot of traditional publishers who like, if you just take a look at their catalog, and you don’t already know who they are, they might seem like they’re all over the map as well, right?

David Morris 38:22
There’s that too, right? That’s true. That’s very fair. I think that’s one of the other big criteria there. And then there’s, you know, then there’s the big question of, should I just try to get to a conventional publisher? Should I work through an agent that I get that I actually illiterate agent as well? So I’m working on the grassroots level. I’m not trying to, you know this is not, this is not toxic capitalism by any means. I’ll show you my bank account if you’re if you don’t believe me, I have people coming to me all the time who want me. They think they need me as a litter agent for them, what they’re really looking for, I’m finding out, though, what they really need is more of a publishing coach, writing coach, publishing coach. You know, they, they, especially when you’re talking about nonfiction books, the part of platform starts to really matter. I mean, it matters no matter what you do. But in nonfiction publishing, where you have, like a where you’re an expert on a topic, or you’ve got a great memoir, especially if you’ve got a great memoir, you also really need a good platform to sell it. There’s this idea that I just need to find a publisher, and then they’ll pitch the book to the world for me. Well, yeah, there is still value to that, and it for certain contexts that can make a lot of sense, and that still goes on a very high level. But for the average person you know, are you really, do you really have that interesting of a story that’s really going to, you know, break through, even if you do, you might get that big public book, big publisher, book publishing deal. But remember, again, they’re speculating. On you. You know, there you might be one of those books that they plan on losing money, that they’re they’re willing to risk losing money on. It’s not a done deal. It’s not like you’ve gotten the golden ticket at the will to the Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory by any means they you. You mean, you mean as much to them as a speculating for gold at the Gold Rush. Think about that sometimes, when you want to go with a big publisher and get an agent and so on, think about that. There’s still some of those publishers are still looking for 50,000 Instagram followers or 100,000 Tiktok followers, or 10,000 member email list or substack e newsletter. They they really go gaga over those things, depending on the publisher. And I’ve seen it, they go, you know, they go that because that’s, that’s known quantity for them. And they can, they can make things happen. They can work with that. So I don’t, so a lot of times I have to tell folks, you just, you’re just not quite ready. They’re ready yet. But oftentimes I get people pitching me with a book, with a book, they’ve a manuscript, even that they’ve written, and there’s no like, there’s not much in the way of, like a professional network. They’re not out there speaking or creating content already that where they’ve become known, even on a small scale. And that’s what I say, is like, start looking at some of these other mediums, like social media and E newsletters, as just another medium to get your ideas out there, and start building an audience, and then they’re going to want the more immersive, 60,000 word book from you.

Emily Einolander 41:39
Yeah, that’s a that’s a tough truth for a lot of people to deal with, I think, is just they, they look at the sheer amount of followers that most people who are getting published right now have, and just think, well, why should I even bother like, yeah, there’s no

David Morris 41:56
hope here. And that can be discouraging. That’s true.

Emily Einolander 41:59
Yeah, exactly so as a small press like, what, what kind of platform would you look for, and what would, what would play into your decision if you decide to go for smaller versus bigger?

David Morris 42:16
Yeah, that’s a that’s a hard question to answer. Sometimes I think, I think, let’s just say 5000 followers on a platform like Instagram, Tiktok usually means you need to have more because of just the way that it’s more ephemeral. I guess is that the right word?

Emily Einolander 42:34
I think so, yeah, sure, it’ll work,

David Morris 42:39
but it’s not so much that number as it is also, are you growing? Are you still attracting new people, new followers? And then also, are people engaging with your social, with your are they? Are they? Are they liking, and are they commenting and are they sharing? I think you can come. You can like, line up 10 authors who have 5000 Instagram followers, and you’ll find or five or 10 people with 5000 Instagram followings, and you’ll find a great variety of how many people are actually commenting on their their posts. And so I look for that when I mean, so you could have maybe just 1000 but if you, if you’ve got, like, a really, you know, active following, and you’re growing at the same time, you could be worth more than somebody with 5000 at least, for the future. And publishing is a long play, so I want to set up long term relationships to authors. I don’t want to just be like a one off service. No way. That’s That’s not what I’m here for Yeah, so I’d say that, and then and then with email, it’s, it’s probably like at least 1500 would be ideal. But, you know, I’ve published authors with neither of those things, but they had incredible professional networks. And they they connected with their professional again, there’s an academic I’ve published, a professor who is really well connected in his academic community, and he’s out speaking quite often, and he’s in front of people. And I was really surprised. I thought, Oh, this is not going to sell. But then, you know, his his institution actually took the launch team recruitment email and published it in their own blog, and suddenly this author that I just I loved I loved it, I loved him, and I wanted to publish it absolutely, but I wasn’t sure, you know, I wasn’t sure how it was going to do, didn’t think, didn’t have a high expectation. And then all of a sudden, he’s generated the biggest launch team of any of my authors, and we sold a lot of books up front, and the book continues to sell nicely. I’m very happy with it, and I hope he is too.

Emily Einolander 44:46
This is a little off book, but do you have any like recommendations for marketing for introverts? Because, I mean, I know most writers probably are to a certain extent, but the need to. Reach out to people on social media and, like, have some kind of presence in the world that isn’t just their book. Like, is really daunting.

David Morris 45:06
Sometimes, I’d say number one, don’t, don’t read all of the marketing advice that’s out there, because it can be pretty shallow. And, you know, read some of it, but then that’s enough. Start. Try to go deeper, try to understand it in a deeper way. I always single out this one sub stack guy named Dan blank, spelled just like it sounds, and his his substack is called the creative shift. And what I haven’t listened or I haven’t watched read one of his posts in a while, but he is pretty consistent with helping you just get into the right mindset for what social media marketing or what talking about yourself. Basically, he says it’s about relationships. Yeah, it’s not about marketing. It’s about relationships. And he’s not just saying that to make a euphemism out of marketing. He’s not. It’s about genuine connection and authenticity. And if you get into his stuff and you read it consistently, you’ll start getting it, you’ll start understanding and you’ll start seeing some of these mediums, even as introverts, and I’m one, you’ll start seeing them as a way to create connection. Maybe you don’t want connection as an introvert, yeah. But if you want to be an author, you’ve got to be putting yourself out there. What you’ve got to do is find the right kind of guidance and advice and start coming up with your own sort of philosophy about how to use it. And because there’s, you know, there’s as many ways of using social media as there are people out there, I guess. And yeah, I think that, I think that that’s possibility. I do think that there are experts out there who can help, and Dan, Dan does that with authors. There’s a lot of people, though, who are kind of like mass marketing their services in that way. And that that’s okay, I think, to an extent, but I think it’s worthwhile doing those kinds of webinars or short term studies, but, but I think it again, it kind of gets back to context, you know, like I’ve seen a lot. I’ve seen I know someone who does that stuff for people who are doing mostly business books, and if you’re writing fiction or you’re doing a memoir, it’s a different game. And when it comes to getting yourself out there and establishing an audience, you know, and I wish there was more people out there helping people do this and teaching them how to do it, I actually think publishers have some have a lot of responsibility in this, and I don’t see them doing that. I think it’s worthwhile to get help. This is not a speech you have to give most people who are under 30 to go out, to go out and find a way to promote yourself on social

Emily Einolander 47:48
media like they already know is what you’re saying.

David Morris 47:50
Yeah, yeah. The greatest thing about social media is, especially as an author, is that you can more than ever. You can have a direct connection to your readers, and you can get direct feedback right away. You can you can create online community that can lead to real community. And I think that’s actually pretty exciting, if you can kind of get into that mental space and find a way of using it that works for you, but getting help, getting help from what’s reputable people are really taking the time to sort of customize what it is you need. I think that would be really valuable. If you can find, if you can find instructions on that customize to who you are, that would be very valuable.

Emily Einolander 48:36
Big thanks to David for coming on the show and providing all of these insights about hybrid publishing and ways to improve your platform as an author. And I’ll include the link to the Lake Drive website so you can check out all of the wonderful books we’ve got there. You can find both me, M Einolander and hybrid pub scout on LinkedIn, my website, hybridpubscout.com or you can find me on blue sky at Emily, I know you can also email me emily@hybridpubscout.com and be sure to check the show notes for links referenced in the episode, as well as ones to sign up for plotter with the HPS affiliate code And to visit HPs bookshop.org shop. Thanks for listening.