American Writers & Artists Inc.

* * * * *

June, 2006

Beyond Tradition: Hot New Publishing Options in Todays Market Call #2

Speakers Include: Denise Ford, Hostess Marcia King-Gamble, Co-Hostess Bob Bly, Moderator Gary Scott, Author Margaret Fraser, Author/Editor Jo Manning, Author Russell Davis, Author/Editor Robert Ringer, Author

DENISE:

Hello and welcome to American Writers My

and Artists Incorporated Teleconference series.

name is Denise Ford and I am very happy to welcome you to part 2 in our fiction/non-fiction publishing calls series. Todays call, Beyond Tradition is discussing

about new publishing options - those options that are available to writers both online and offline in todays market. We have a fascinating array of panelists

joining us for todays call from various places around the country. Gary Scott, are you calling up from the Is that what I understand?

Blue Ridge Mountains? GARY: DENISE: GARY: DENISE:

I am indeed. Welcome Gary. Thank you. Its good to be here. Gary is Some of

Thank you for being with us.

both a business entrepreneur and an author.

you may be familiar with 65th Octave, which is an economics thriller that hes written and hes written dozens of books and courses on investing and business and hes also the editor behind AWAIs new program that

3 Gary will talk a little bit about later. Gary. GARY: DENISE: Hello Margaret. MARGARET: DENISE: MARGARET: DENISE: at 16. Hello. Thank you and good morning. Good morning. And I understand that you began writing Its a pleasure to be here. Also joining Gary is Margaret Fraser. So welcome

Is that true? Yes. And then youve worked for a

MARGARET: DENISE: newspaper. MARGARET:

Yes, I worked for a newspaper for a That was back in the 60s

couple of years in my teens. so it was an opinion column. DENISE:

Well, I think your opinions have

turned into quite a skill at writing novels, particularly romance novels. Margaret has completed

two romance suspense manuscripts and has won various contest awards including the Orange Rose award and first place in the Emerald City Opener and the prestigious Golden Heart Award and today Margaret works as both a writer and an editor for Biography for

4 Everyone which she will tell us about later. you for joining us again Margaret. MARGARET: DENISE: morning Jo. JO: DENISE: Good morning to you all. Jo is the author of Seducing Mr Thank you. Also on the panel is Jo Manning. Good So thank

Haywood, which was named one of the top 10 novels of the year by Booklist in 2002. She is working on a novel called Courting Chloe Brown, which is a sequel, and she founded the Readers Digest General Books Library and has been Publishing Division President for many years. So were very happy to have Jo with us this morning. And the last panelist on todays call is Russell Davis. Hello Russell. RUSSELL: DENISE: RUSSELL: DENISE: Good morning. And where are you calling up from? My truck. Im calling from Arizona. Is that because its

In your truck?

cooler in your truck? RUSSELL: Most days, yes. Actually Im just

coming back from dropping my kids to school. DENISE: Thats so nice for you to stop and

take time to join us and share some information.

5 RUSSELL: DENISE: Happy to do so. Russell is an author, editor and a

part-time agent and he has a publishing house called Foggy Windows Books that specializes in a variety of niches but also semi-erotic content for married couples and I know that has a broad appeal for writers and nonwriters alike. Russell was hired by Five Star

Publishing when he took over control of both lines and in the spring of 2004 he launched his own book packaging and editorial services company, which is Morning Star Books. us. RUSSELL: DENISE: Glad to help. My co-host on this romance series is Good morning Marcia. So thank you Russell for joining

Marcia King-Gamble. MARCIA: DENISE:

Good morning everyone. Thank you for lining up this very

interesting roster of writers. MARCIA: DENISE: My pleasure. And the gentleman who will guide us

through todays call where we are going to talk about the options in publishing today is our renowned and much loved moderator, Bob Bly. BOB: Good morning Bob.

Good morning Denise.

6 DENISE: Thank you so much Bob. Im going to

turn the mike over to you so you can manage all of these wonderful folks. BOB: Okay, weve got a lot of people on the

line and a lot of subjects so were through with part one of our call, which is our welcome and introductions so Im going to move swiftly onto part two which is called Discussion on the pros and cons of selfpublishing and print on demand and were going to talk with Gary Scott and Russell Davis about self-publishing and print on demand, so Gary, how many books have you written and are they all self-published? them self-published or only a few? GARY: Everything except for my novel has been If we talk about Are some of

self-published and Ive lost count.

books and reports other than our daily e-zine and our monthly newsletters and weekly newsletters, weve probably produced 40 or 50 books and reports about various aspects of international investing. We started

back in the late 1960s and really I started as a salesman trying to sell mutual funds in Hong Kong American mutual funds which was the wrong time to do that and I discovered over there that the Hong Kong stock market was the best place and I was trying to

7 figure out how to sell that idea to people back in the United States and it turned out that the best idea it seemed to me at that time was to write a book about it or a report. So that was my first report and Every

everythings just sort of kept going since then. place I travel I see something interesting in the

investment field mainly and so I write reports about it. BOB: Now, why do you choose to self-publish

these materials rather than go to a Charles Scribners, for example, Andrew Hacker I think you probably know who he is, who wrote Money I met him in a bar and he mentioned his publisher is Scribners and they do a lot of financial books, but youve chosen not to go that route. Whats the reason? Profitability mainly and my wife and I

GARY:

work very well together and she was editor of several award winning magazines in South Florida, Gulfshore Life being the main one, so we have most of the capability of doing the things we need to do at the editorial level and were recluses and we like to control our own destiny and we found that when we go to a publisher, as I try to do with my novels - I did with my novel, things get out of control, so we can really

8 maintain our own destiny and figure out how to reach the kinds of people who we want to reach, talking about interesting things from our point of view and delivering that information exactly to the kinds of people we want to do business with. BOB: I understand what youre saying. How

do you sell most of your books and reports?

Are they

sold in a bookstore, like a regular publisher would do or do you sell them to these people through different channels? GARY: No, not at all. Now weve totally

moved to electronic media so we dont personally publish anything at all. Now, we do have some publishers, AWAI - American Writers and Artists Institute weve worked with in developing the selfpublishing course and we have some other publishers that are publishing some of the reports that we used to print and we did start using the print media, but we shifted back in 1999 with the growth of the internet, just doing electronic things which suits us much more. We live up here in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Our

nearest printer of any sort now is probably close to an hour away and so Internet fits us very nicely. When we

began we always printed our reports what I called in a

9 Plain Jane style which was 8 x 11 with just regular typewriter fonts so we never got into graphics. just information that we focused on. BOB: So, Russell, are you in a similar type It was

of business or do you publish electronic stuff or do you publish physical paper books? RUSSELL: Well, now because Im a book packager,

my principal job is to bring concepts to publishers so what I do is I create a concept for a book series or a title and then I take it to the publishers and sell them on the concept and hire the writer to develop it, so the contractual relationship with the publisher is with me and the writers contract is with me so the writer isnt under contract with the publisher directly. BOB: Theyre under contract with me. So if Im a writer should I be looking

to sell my books or if I want to get a book published should I be looking to go to a publisher or should I look for what youre calling a book packager and where do I find them? RUSSELL: Well, I think theres a few different

issues there and one of the main ones is that different types of books or information lend themselves to different approaches. For example, what Gary was just

10 talking about, thats a great opportunity for someone to build a business because theyre able to provide a specific type of information and deliver it to a specific market in a self-publishing methodology. In

the case of what I do, its actually less conducive for a writer to come to me with a concept or a book when Im wearing my book packaging hat as it were because ideas are cheap. I havent run out of ideas yet and so

what I tend to do is maintain a database of writers who can do specific types of work and when I have a concept that Ive developed that fits a certain writers profile, Ill come to them. BOB: So let me ask go back to Gary. You

said you have all these books self-published, all these reports, except your novel. exception? GARY: Exactly what Russell was talking about The things that I usually come Why would that be the

fits in perfectly.

across from my travels, and for some reason I got a travel bug - I was born and raised in Portland Oregon and never traveled until I turned 21 and once I started traveling, Mary and I havent stopped in 40 years and so we get some place and we see something thats going on thats really interesting to us. We think it will

11 be really interesting to some of our readers but its not going to last for very long, so well write a report about that. We sell it at a pretty high price.

Our typical reports when they were printed were selling at $49, $79, $99 --BOB: GARY: And how many pages was that? Usually we calculated in marketing or

selling our product at about $1 a page. BOB: something? GARY: A 50-page report would be $49. A 100So itd be like a 50-page report or

page report would be $99.

But that report might not be

valid for 4 to 6 months of the year so we produce that product, got it out in the marketplace and if I sold 1000 of it, we made $100,000, which is not too bad if you do nine or 10 of those a year. With a little small

operation and no overheads you can actually start to accumulate some money, but a novel and one reason I decided I want to write the novel above and beyond it being fun, was that I kind of got tired of having to come up with stuff that had to keep being renewed or kept reviewed every time you went back to the printer and to me a novel was something, Hey, I can just write this once and itll be out there and well keep

12 working, so that was the big difference between the novel and those little short reports. As it turned out

we didnt make really very much money with the novel until the publisher that was publishing it went bankrupt and we took it back over and started selling it ourselves. But we came from a sales background and

thats why I think that kind of report has worked well for us. BOB: Now, for the novel, but you sell that

not as an electronic product, you sell it as a paper book? GARY: Its paper it was printed by a novel

and distributed through New Leaf Distributors and sold through bookstores and so forth, but our exercise at that level was not successful or very successful and really where we recaptured our publishing expense and made a profit was going out and selling it to our own readers. BOB: Now, did you sell it to them as a hard

book or an electronic book? GARY: No, I sold that to them as a hard book.

Its the only actual printed product that I have left that I market.

13 BOB: And if someones going to self-publish,

Gary, should they print it at the local print shop? Are there specialty book printers or what about this print on demand? GARY: Is that how you produce it today? Theres a variety of

Well, yes.

different approaches and that depends an awful lot on the product. For example, our product, which was meant

to be its important information thats viable right now, looked great printed as a report on 8 x 11 paper and it almost looked like a typewriter was printing it. We didnt worry about fonts; we didnt worry about graphics or color. If youre printing something that

has photography or something where the graphic form is a part of the function, then you may want a different kind of printer so we always use - not the quick print people but we use the printer who just did plain Jane type of work. BOB: Got it. But you can if its a

traditional book find printers that specialize in printing books. GARY: Yes. You can get printers that

specialize in printing books and the print on demand is really attractive if a person has a limited budget of theyre just getting started and one of the

14 recommendations in our self-publishing program is to start small and learn. Theres the old saying that an

educations learning all the rules and experience is learning all the exceptions to the rules and every persons book and marketplace is going to be a little bit different. In AWAIs self-publishing program we

tried to show people how to get started small and then use what we call the evolutionary publishing cycle which is that you have an idea that leads to enthusiasm, enthusiasm leads to education, the education leads to action and that action will give you a profit and experience and then you go through that cycle again in a bigger way. So print on demand is

very attractive because you dont have a great big inventory. Most printers the problem with the printing process is that the price drops enormously as the number of copies that are printed increase so you go to a printer and you say, Well, heres my book, its 120 pages. Whats the cost? and he says, Well, if you

want me to print 500 itll be $9 a piece, if you want me to print $1000 itll be $7.50, if you want me to print $10,000 itll be $4 a copy. And so the

temptation is to print 10,000 copies and then you have

15 a storage situation, you have a delivery situation, you have a marketing situation and if you get your marketing wrong to begin, you have a big outlay and very often you might expend all your capital in printing the book and have no money left to correctly market your product. RUSSELL: said? BOB: RUSSELL: Sure, absolutely. Which is that really whether the person Can I bounce off of something Gary

is looking at self-publishing versus print on demand versus traditional publishing, its a really important question that Gary brought up that they need to ask themselves, which is when you self-publish youre not just a writer anymore. You are also a sales and

marketing guru, you are a publisher, you are a distributor, you are wearing a great many different hats all of which require a different skill set, and it sounds to me like Garys been very fortunate between he and his wife, they had a great many of those bases covered, but an aspiring writer whos coming into this for the first time really needs to ask themselves Do they or someone in their immediate circle that they can

16 help them have the skill set to handle the different tasks? BOB: they do? RUSSELL: Well, again, I think first and foremost If this is So what if they dont? What should

the question is what are they publishing?

an aspiring novelist they need to ask themselves what do they want out of their novel. In traditional

publishing virtually hundreds of books are published and released by various publishers of various sizes every month. Very few are moneymakers. For most

writers the advance that they receive when they sign the contract is going to be the money they make. Its

just mathematically very difficult to make a lot of money as a novelist. I remember when I first started

publishing regularly that my family was surprised that I wasnt a millionaire already and the math doesnt work that way. On the other hand I havent had to go

out and hand sell everything and as a writer when I consider what my time is and my return on investment and so on I didnt want to spend my time dealing with sales and dealing with distribution and dealing with those things so I chose a traditional publishing route for my novels. If somebody else is willing to, and

17 there are people right here in Arizona that I see at every fair and County event and so on, theyre willing to go out and invest in the time and the money to hand sell their books to as many people as they can and so the question I think that an aspiring writer would need to ask themselves is very simple. Its Where do I

want to spend my time and my money? BOB: I think thats a good point and its a

good segue into our next part of the call, which you gentlemen will continue with me, alternative genres you may not have considered and why you might be interested. And Gary, they with you as having your

alternative market being the non-fiction market and specifically reports, but you never go out and hand sell as Russells describing your reports. on the Internet, dont you? GARY: Yeah, now we do it on the Internet and You do it

prior to that we never hand sold either. We always marketed and thats why with this self-publishing program that were coming out with, we call it a selfpublishing rather than a self-writing or a writers course and it approaches it as a sales and marketing person first and a writer second. And what Russell was saying is absolutely right. Theres three elements in a

18 successful publication. Youve got the writer who is

the creator who wants to get a message out, youve got the editor who then has to take that and protect the readers interest and say, Well, you know, writer youre crazy or youre not communicating. What youre

trying to say the reader will never understand it and then you have the publisher whos on the other hand looking at the whole thing and protecting the bankers interest, if you want to call it that or the financial interest and hes saying, Well, you guys are a great editor, youve protected the reader or writer, youre giving this nice story but how are we going to make a buck from it and that publishing course is aimed at that and we normally look at non-fiction. I recommend

people start with non-fiction because you can tie a concrete benefit to most non-fictional things. Its

about something that can help people improve their lives where with a novel theres a tendency towards moving into entertainment and its much harder to put a specific price on entertainment. If I write a book

about how to buy a house inexpensively in Ecuador, I can show people how they can save tens of thousands of dollars and so $99 is not so much for a hundred-page report. But my novel, which was an economic spiritual

19 adventure, it was much harder to give people a specific benefit that you can sell from. BOB: Let me ask you another key question.

In the non-fiction market where youre talking about reports, books. You dont seem to differentiate greatly between whether its a report or a book. In other

words it seems like the format should follow the function. a report. If its 50 pages worth of stuff it should be If its 200 it should maybe be a book, but In other

is any topic fair game for non-fiction?

words, if I want to write a special report on raising three-legged chickens and theres only 12 people in the United States interested in that, how can I make a living at it? GARY: Well, okay. First of all I rarely I Everything

think I guess Ive written two books.

else is a report. There is a perception of a book being worth less money than a report. BOB: GARY: $10 to $20. Yeah, for a book, so a report could be

worth a lot more and theres an implication in a report that it is useful, current information thats really up to date and really vital and something a person can use to impact their life in a very, very specific way,

20 rather than a little bit broader type of situation in an entertainment type of situation. Although some

books will have information that can change a persons life dramatically, its harder to pinpoint a specific dollar amount if you want to use that. that. And we even do

Weve shifted a lot now into also sharing global

health secrets in our reports but we try and tie those health benefits back to specific dollar savings so a person can still see why theyll be ahead financially by paying this ridiculous price for pieces of paper. So its that information in there thats really vital. The way we try and help people do this so that they can market correctly and what the self-publishing program is all about is showing a person how to use their own we call it turning your passion into profit, how to see your own wants, needs and desires and things that interest you represent a market and then you follow that desire back through the marketplace. In other

words, if you go fishing someplace and you really enjoy that fishing and you want to write a report about the 10 best fishing holes in the world, you would then start to look and say, Well, where do I engage in fishing? I go to sporting goods stores, I buy Outdoor

Life Magazine, I do this and do that and those are the

21 places you would start looking at as the places where you would actually do your marketing. BOB: the best place. Got it. So a bookstore is not always If Im selling a report on scuba

diving Id probably want to be in a dive shop. GARY: You want to be in the dive shop or

advertise in the Marketing and Dive magazines or advertise in diver related websites and from a marketing point of view we do three different things. One we place advertisements in publications that would have an interest. For example, not so long ago

now, about 10 years ago, we decided to write a report on shamanism in Ecuador and that was very, very different than what wed been publishing about but wed been to Ecuador looking for investments to write about and we found these enormous health benefits and spiritual benefits in shamanism and so we tried to figure out how are we going to do this? We cant go to

our normal readers who are interested in international investing and sell them a report on shamanism, so I started thinking about, Where do I engage in my health things? and it was a health food store. So I went to

the health food stores, looked, saw magazines that were given away in the health food store and were sold and

22 those were the places where we advertised and sold our reports. The second place we advertise is in websites

that are similar that have some sort of similar focus. So, if we were doing the shamanism thing today wed go into the search engines and type in shamanism and start looking for websites that had advertisements that might fit into that area of focus. Then the third thing we

do is we start writing articles and sending them off to magazines, to newsletters, to anybody we can who might write or produce what weve written. Something thats

short, something thats interesting and mention our website or mention our product. BOB: Got it. Now Russell, your market is

not non-fiction, its fiction and specifically erotica. Is erotica porn or is it something different? RUSSELL: Well, you know, thats a good question.

A lot of people will have trouble differentiating between the two but I think that maybe the best way to think of it is that erotica is a storyline where the sex serves the storyline. In the case of porn, theres When youre

no storyline except to produce the sex.

dealing with relationships a natural outgrowth of intimate relationships between people is sex and theres a rapidly growing marketplace there both in

23 traditional publishing and in what Ill call nontraditional publishing for stories that are explicit in terms of the sexual content but also that are still good stories. BOB: So, are these novels? Are these short

stories and where do I find these markets, because I dont even know what you really mean by a nontraditional market. So, if I want to write erotica, am

I writing a long format or short format, novel or short story and who am I selling this to? RUSSELL: Well, first of all, for the sake of our

conversation lets differentiate how I would deem traditional versus non-traditional publishing. When I

say traditional publishing, what Im referring to are the vast majority of large and mid-sized publishers whose books go out to the bookstores. When I say non-

traditional Im referring to a rather large umbrella of possibilities ranging from electronic books to smaller houses and regional presses and even self-publishing and avenues of that sort. A couple of years ago a really amazing thing happened with a company called Elloras Cave. Cave is an erotica publisher. Elloras

They started out doing

e-books and they rapidly built a huge market of people

24 who are willing to pay a significant premium to read erotica, both short stories and novels and more recently theyve branched out now so that their books are available as trade paperbacks and a number of their authors have even made the leap from doing publishing with Elloras Cave to publishing with traditional publishers in New York. And more and more traditional

publishers in New York are starting lines of books that publish erotica. BOB: So, in 30 seconds or less, the best way

to break into erotica? RUSSELL: BOB: Read a lot. Write it well. Okay and is there a directory of

erotica publishers or a literary agent that specializes in erotica? RUSSELL: thing. Actually, the Internet is an amazing

You can go to Google and type in erotic

literature or erotica and find virtually hundreds of resources, publishers, agents, electronic publishers, all of whom do that. BOB: Terrific. Let me move to Margaret now.

Margaret, welcome. MARGARET: Hello.

25 BOB: And you Margaret specialize in

biographies? Is that it? MARGARET: Yes, I work as a writer and an editor

called Biography for Everyone. Its www.biographyforeveryone.com and we, were a full service company and we put out books for people basically who are just really trying to leave a legacy for their family and friends, not a huge print run on these books. Theyre just usually buying a few hundred to give out as gifts to their family and friends and leave a legacy of their life. BOB: Is that it? MARGARET: Yes, the company does. I work as a So you produce the whole book for them.

writer and an editor and we have professional interviewers, transcribers, writers, editors, graphic design artists, proofreaders, formats, its a whole full service company. I dont think a lot of the

vanity presses in general are this way, but weve been in business for 18 years and offer quite a credible service. BOB: Now, can you define for the listeners

what a vanity press is?

26 MARGARET: My understanding of a vanity press is a

publisher that publishes a book at the expense of the author. BOB: So why would I want to go to a vanity

press rather than lets say McGraw Hill or Random House? MARGARET: Well, I think in the case of what Im

doing with someone who is not wanting distribution or a large print run, that a vanity press works really well, particularly if they need a lot of help with what theyre doing for a memoir or a biographer or something like that. Actually personally also as a romance

writer and a novelist I would not suggest vanity press for that sort of a book because you want the distribution and the marketing and you want to be in the bookstore. BOB: So a vanity press is good for a book

that a traditional publisher may not or probably would not take and one that is not written primarily for profit as a motive. MARGARET: BOB: MARGARET: Correct. And has a limited distribution. Right.

27 BOB: Got it. Now, moving on. Jo, you also

do biographies. Is that it? JO: This is a new thing for me. I started

out writing fiction.

I wrote a book called The She soon

Reluctant Guardian for a private publisher.

went out of business unfortunately but I got good reviews on the book and I did a sequel called Seducing Mr Haywood which did really well for me, and I did that through Five Star which was a company that Russell was once associated with and thats had several incarnations. It came out in hard cover, trade paper

from Five Star, both of them and then it was marketed as mass market last year by NAL so its had a good life and Im very happy with it. Im currently working on a sequel to that so this will be a trilogy of stories about the same family in England in the 18th Century, around the time of the Regency. My interest in the

Regency period led me to writing a biography, which is a real departure for me. BOB: JO: Of whom? Her name was Grace Dalrymple Elliott

which means nothing to most people but when I tell them that she was a subject of at least two paintings by Gainsborough, then some of them say, Oh yes, that

28 beautiful lady in the yellow silk dress. This is a

painting thats owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Its a full-length portrait. Its absolutely gorgeous. Its now gracing a show at the Costume Institute there. Theyre doing a show called

AngloMania about British fashion design and theyre going back as far as the 18th Century and as I said shes in this gorgeous, gorgeous silk gown and shes turned in a way that Van Dyke posed his sitters and its just a wonderful effect. The problem with that

painting is it didnt show her face very well but I found that she was painted four years later by Gainsborough and it was a portrait bust and this is at the Frick Collection in New York and this is a gorgeous painting. She looks right out at you and

people do remember this. The reason I got interested in her was that I saw a review of a movie called a The Lady and the Duke and this movie, which was produced by Eric Rohmer, whos a French Director who does mostly contemporary relationship films, and very few historical dramas, was based on a memoir she did. She was a survivor of the

French Revolution and she wrote a book called Journal of my Life during the French Revolution. This little

29 book has never been out of print. posthumously. It was published

She died in 1823 but the book was

published 35 years later, in 1858/59 and this was a book that a filmmaker based his story on and the more I read about her the more fascinated I was because she was never more than a footnote or a sentence in other peoples biographies and I thought, Wow, why hasnt anyone done a full-length biography? why. BOB: If someone wants to write a biography I soon found out

and theyre listening to this call, do you write the biography and then take it to a publisher or do you call them up and say, Id like to write a biography on this person. JO: Are you interested? How does that work? I, at the

Its an interesting process.

time was supposed to be writing my third Regency and my very wonderful editor/agent in New York, I queried her and I said, Look, Ive gotten this idea for a biography. No one has done this woman. I think shes

fascinating. She was a royal courtesan, she led a glamorous life, she was a beautiful creature and she lived through the French Revolution and my agent at first was not that enthusiastic but she is an agent who handles fiction and non-fiction and she said, If

30 youre going to do it, do it right and she gave me an example of a winning proposal for a biography and I looked at it and it was 50 pages long and I was completely overwhelmed because when youre writing this proposal mine eventually turned out to be 47 pages youre outlining it, youre saying why you are the perfect person to write it, you are actually saying what the book will contain chapter by chapter or by section and so its a very intense and very detailed proposal and it took me six months to write. BOB: So, yeah, Ive heard that. So it took

you six months to write the proposal. JO: ever done. BOB: Yeah, for a serious book a proposal can It was one of the hardest things Ive

be very involved, but why do you think, and I throw this out to Russell as well who is also an editor. Why

do publishers of non-fiction prefer to get a proposal rather than have you write this whole book and send it to them? Wouldnt it be easier to judge it once the

book is done? JO: I think in writing the proposal it will

give them a pretty good idea on how to judge it and especially its that detailed and you have to say where

31 youre going to get your information, where youre going to do your research and primary to all this is research. You have to be able to do the research. I took a hard task because the research was difficult for this woman. In a lot of biographies it wouldnt be

that intense. BOB: this? Why would it be more difficult for

Theres not that much published? She didnt leave that much of a trail.

JO:

Her letters had disappeared so I had to find out about her from other people and by reading the newspapers of the time. the book. BOB: And did your contract give you that It took me 3 years to research and write

time or did the publisher say, We want it in a year and then you came back and said, Hey folks, its going to take a lot longer? JO: I told them I could do it in two years.

And I was a month late, so thats pretty good. BOB: ask Russell. Yeah, that sounds pretty good. Let me

When you were an editor, and for fiction

or non-fiction, should the author write the book or should they just write a proposal or an outline?

32 RUSSELL: I think Jo has the right of it as far Having edited it as well as

as non-fiction goes.

having written some of it, in non-fiction the proposal is really the proof of the pudding because a good nonfiction proposal - everything is there. If its a good

one you know the person by on large can write the book. On the fiction side of things a first time novelist trying to break into any kind of really traditional publishing needs to have the whole book done first because in that case and Gary mentioned this earlier and I think its a valid point nonfiction is information. Fiction is entertainment and

everybodys had the experience of going to the movies and coming out disappointed or buying a book and coming back disappointed and the proof of the pudding in fiction is the whole book. The language of a proposal

is different than the language of a novel itself so for an aspiring writer in fiction Id say if theyve never been published before theyre going to need to write the whole book and thats probably going to be true for a while. Down the road once theyve published a number

of books they wont have to do that anymore because theyll have a track record that supports their ability to tell entertaining stories.

33 BOB: Got it. Lets move on to part four of

our call which is Marketing Strategies for the SelfPublished and Royalties and Advances in Non-Traditional Markets. So, Gary, you started to talk about this, You

but lets say you write a special report.

mentioned advertising on websites and in magazines and so on, but how do you market a product? a report and it costs $50. Lets say its

How do you market a product

so that you make more from the sale of it than your marketing course or do you? Do you break even? Do you

lose money on selling a single product? product line to be a self-publisher? GARY:

Do you need a

Hopefully youll make a lot of money.

Sometimes and its always difficult to judge exactly what the market is and how the market will accept whatever product it is that you have out there. Sometimes you hit a home run, other times you hit a single and once in a while you strike out, but the main idea is to try and limit your focus. This is why we

take this idea of turning your passion into profit because if you look at exactly how you are involved, youre most likely to put your advertising dollars into the place thats most likely to bring the best sort of results back for you. And that you gain a lot through

34 experience, and one of the keys for self-publishers and again our product is how to be a self-publisher rather than a writer is to build your list of people. that you excite them and then you insight them. We say You

excite them by offering a product and showing specific benefits that theyre going to gain from reading that product and then the next thing that you do is that you deliver that product to them and really give them a benefit. If you do that then theyre very receptive to

the next time around so weve reached the stage in our business of course weve been doing it now for almost 40 years where we just market to our existing clients but in the beginning I would go back and for example in this shamanism report that we decided to market we went into the health food stores, looked around and said, Okay, this is where were involved in health. The reason people are going to be interested in shamanism is because they want to be healthier and this is a different way. People are fed up with the traditional forms of medicine and wellness and so forth, so theyd be interested in shamanism. We looked around and saw

these magazines that were there and then we went into the magazine and looked to see if there was anybody advertising things like that and thats really one of

35 the keys, is to find publications in places that you think will be well involved and then from there to try and focus on those particular readers and so keep your advertising dollars to a minimum. thing. Thats the best

Thats why we recommend to start small. Lets say I want to self-publish a How much of a budget do I realistically have Can I test it

BOB: report.

to have to even test the waters on this? for under $100? For under $1000?

Do I need $10,000?

Obviously if I only have three-and-a-half dollars, I cant do this. GARY: Right. It depends a lot on the product

and if you have a very limited amount of money to begin with, then what you do is you try and write things and get other publishers to publish about them, rather than paying for advertising. BOB: GARY: You mean free publicity? You try and get publicity or you go to

small magazines and offer them what we call PI deals, per insertion deals - where they will get a commission. Theyll place the advertisement at no upfront cost and then youll pay them a percentage of any sales that come in.

36 BOB: Got it. Russell, what youre doing

with publishers you mentioned that for the writer that works with you as a youre a book packager for the writer, they dont have a contract with the publisher, they have a contract with you, the book packager and the publisher has a book contract with you, so how does the writer get paid? If I get

approached by a book packager, do I set the fee or are they going to tell me what theyre going to pay? How does that work? RUSSELL: Well, its pretty much like any other

writing and negotiation. If I come to somebody and I say, I have this book series that I want you to write for me and Im going to offer them a fee, now, they or their agent, if theyre agented, they come back and say, Well, we can do it for this and well settle on an agreeable price. And typically in that regard the

contract is just about like any other traditional publishing contract in that Im going to pay that writer a set amount on signing the contract and a set amount on delivery of the manuscript, on acceptance of the manuscript. The editorial process is going to be

very similar except that again Im going to be the editor, not the publisher.

37 BOB: Got it. Now Margaret, in your company

you mentioned that you have writers, youre a writer and they have other writers and proofreaders. How do

writers get paid if theyre working for a vanity press type publication? MARGARET: Well, in this situation I think with a

lot of vanity presses the authors are actually paying to have their work published so therefore its there and not being paid themselves, but in this kind of a job I get paid either on an hourly wage or I contract for a flat fee for the actual project. BOB: MARGARET: BOB: So its not royalty-based. Its not royalty-based. Now Jo, for your books though, your

biographies and your novels, it is royalty-based, right? JO: Yes it is. What you get you contract

for in advance for the book, for whatever it is, X thousands of dollars and then you have to earn it out. In other words the books have to sell enough so that the publishers advance to you is covered. When thats

taken care of then you begin to get royalties, which is a percentage of each subsequent sale from then on.

38 BOB: listeners. Lets work through this for the Lets say Jo was getting Im making this So the

up $1 a book and she got a $10,000 advance.

advance is an advance against that royalty, right? Its not in addition to that royalty so if she got a $10,000 advance from a publisher and shes getting $1 a book royalty, when she sells $10,000 she will have paid back what did you say? Earned out? JO: BOB: Yes. She will have earned that royalty, that

advance. Therefore, for copy 10,001 she gets $1. If they sell 800 more after that she gets $800. What typically if Im writing a non-fiction book like a biography or a romance novel or a mainstream novel, what kind of advances are we looking at, nowadays? $100,000, $1,000,000, $100? JO: GARY: BOB: JO: I love it. So Jo would have figure eights. Yes. This is what Russell said that everyone

thinks youre a millionaire. You know, when you do these. I got between my advance was in the double

digits for the biography. BOB: Right.

39 JO: And I hate to tell people this but in

romance writing its sometimes in the single digits, but it all goes towards the next book. If you have a

good sell through, youve earned your advance, youre getting the royalties, you know, when you do the next book for this publisher you have something to go for and you can get a higher advance and maybe a higher rate of royalties. the 10% range. BOB: Is that of the gross price of the book Ive gotten royalties that are in

or the net price to the bookstore? JO: Russell? You know I never knew that. Do you know? It varies. Most of the time in what What is it

RUSSELL:

they call mass-market paperback your percentage which dependent on the publisher runs anywhere from six to eight for mass market. the cover price. JO: BOB: Yeah. Thats gross. When a publisher pays a Sometimes its as high as 10 of

royalty based on the cover price thats the gross sales? JO: Yes.

40 BOB: Now, when you say mass market he means,

just for the listeners, the kind of paperback you buy in a supermarket or a drugstore. The pocketsize. A

trade paperback is a paperback that is the same size and shape as a hardcover book except the covers paper instead of hard. JO: RUSSELL: Right. Its kind of classier.

The royalty percentage on those tends

to be a little higher. BOB: Yes. Now lets just throw out this to

the group. Does anyone know, what are publishers like these erotica publishers that are online? Do they pay

the same rates for e-books, e-publishing or is it completely different Russell? RUSSELL: Its completely different. Most of the

time in e-publishing what youll get is no advance and a very large percentage of the royalties. get 40%, 50% of net sales. BOB: So you get a much bigger royalty and You might

nothing up front? RUSSELL: BOB: RUSSELL: Thats correct. Yeah, thats what Ive heard too. And in reality, for traditional

publishing youre probably looking at a range of

41 advances anywhere on the low end from small regional houses of $750 to $1000 and even some of the larger New York houses are now going to average advances ranging for a first time novelist ranging from $1000 to $3000 -BOB: And yet that woman from Harvard who

plagiarized that book who was 17 years old, got a half a million-dollar advance. RUSSELL: Well she got a half a million-dollar

advance for three books and beyond that she wasnt the only contract holder. That book was packaged and I

actually its worth mentioning this just in passing only because its come up I actually feel somewhat sorry for that young lady. BOB: RUSSELL: Its funny you do. I actually dont.

The publisher did her a horrible

disservice in that one of the problems with hiring or contracting with a young person who is 16/17 years old is that they havent found their own voice yet and its very clear that shes a bright talented young lady but when youre 16 or 17 years old youre writing tends to automatically mimic those who youve been reading a lot of and who youre impressed with, and Im not defending the fact that she plagiarized anything. What I am

42 saying is you dont give a 17-year-old a half a million dollar --BOB: RUSSELL: I agree with that. --- book contract and expect that

youre not going to have problems because the chances are youre going to have problems. prepared for that. BOB: Ill agree with that. Denise, Id like Theyre not

to if Robert Ringers on the line, move on to part five and introduce our special guest. us? ROBERT: BOB: Yes I am Bob. So Robert Ringer is the only person in Robert, are you with

history to self-publish three number one best sellers. I know your books. Which ones were the three best It was Looking Out for

sellers that you published?

Number One was one of them, right? ROBERT: BOB: them, right? ROBERT: BOB: ROBERT: American Dream. Right. And what was the third? The third one was Restoring the Right, that was my second book. Winning through Intimidation was one of

43 BOB: So he had three books self-published

that are best sellers and no-one else has done that, so what I want to ask him since a lot of us on this call are interested in self-publishing, is what was the reason, what was the number one factor in making this happen, that you have three self-published books that are number one best sellers when most self-published books or a lot of them as one of the other guests had mentioned, you get 10,000 copies and they sit in a garage? ROBERT: Well Bob, Ive been asked that question

a lot over the years and actually Im going to give you two answers because there are two reasons and I always give the same reasons. They may sound a little bit

corny but I have to give them because theyre true. The two biggest reasons I think for my success in taking especially my first book which was rejected by 23 publishers and it took three years to self-publish it and market it into a number one best seller, when people ask me I always say that number one was my willingness to take action and number two was my persistence. Interestingly, 25 years later Alan Kahn

who is now the President of Barnes & Noble who at that time was the head of marketing at B. Dalton and I had

44 tried and tried to get into B. Dalton stores and they wouldnt take it and how the story played out we dont have time to tell that now, but 25 years later when I talked to him which is I guess a couple of years ago on the phone for the first time during all those years and he said, The one thing that I remember about you is that you were really persistent. So even he

remembered that all those years later and no matter what else you know about the technicalities of writing and publishing self-publishing, youve got to take action and youve got to be persistent because youre going to get endless negative comments from people and you have to just be able to let them run off your back and just keep forging ahead if you believe in your book. BOB: So to sell these books did you

publish them as hardcover or paperback? ROBERT: BOB: I published them as hardcover. So to sell them, what kind of marketing Did you run infomercials; did How did you make this

strategy did you use?

you run ads in the LA Times? happen?

Did you sell them directly or in a bookstore? I sold the first 60,000 copies

ROBERT: directly.

It would be much easier and infinitely less

45 expensive today because you have the Internet, but in those days I did it through publications. I never was

able to run a successful magazine ad, but I started running ads in local newspapers and lost a lot of money and again, to make a long story short, I eventually stepped up to the Wall Street Journal which was a better target market and I used what I call today a perception preceding reality strategy where my headlines were so some people would say audacious and my ad copy was so bold that I made people think that both myself and the book were bigger than they were at the time and ultimately when the book became a number one best seller the reality caught up with the perception. I just got ahead of what the reality was

and it worked like a charm and I did it on all three of my books. BOB: Im still doing it today. What size ad did you run? Did you run

a little 2 display ad? ROBERT: No, I never ran small ads. I started

out with about a quarter of a page ad in the Wall Street Journal. Now at that time the price was for

about one-sixth of what they are today and I very quickly moved up to full-page ads so I attracted enormous amounts of attention because ultimately I was

46 running a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal every single week. BOB: Wow. Give us one of those, if you

wouldnt mind Ive seen them, but give us one of those audacious headlines thats one of your favorites that worked really well. ROBERT: Yeah, the one that really put it over

the top and sent things into the stratosphere was a headline that said, Whats all the commotion about? and I always said that was the ultimate perception preceding reality headline because when a person saw it the idea was to make them feel like, Gee, I dont know about this, Im kind of embarrassed because whats all the commotion about. I dont know what the commotions

about but I figure Im missing out on something and it worked like a charm. The ads were pulling, pulling. I

made money on every single ad I ran in the Wall Street Journal but the return was going down, down, down and I came back with that Whats all the commotion about? ad and the sales, just by changing the headline of course Bob you know this better than anyone and we all learned this from Ogilvy and Claude Hopkins and all the great ad writers that the headline can dramatically

47 increase sales at any point and that just sent the sales right back up to the roof. BOB: Now are you still self-publishing

hardcover books today or are you just going directly to a regular publisher because Action, your latest book which is terrific, that was done at least the copy I have was done by a mainstream publishing house. ROBERT: Right, and that again is a long story,

but I did that because it was a small house and I was working on a lot of other things and the gentleman who was the publisher of that house and was running things happened to it just turned out by coincidence to be a big fan of mine, had read all my books and he wanted me to come up to New York right away. We made a quick deal because he said that a small house like theirs and by the way theyve been in business for 50 years, but a small house like theirs would really put everything behind my book. Unfortunately circumstances changed

and after I went with them the owner of the company had died of terminal cancer about three or four months before I made the deal and what ended up happening is that the guy who signed me ended up leaving the company, the company got sold and is now part of another company but thankfully I got the rights and

48 this is a very unusual deal I got the rights to print and market the book myself in any kind of direct marketing venue like the Internet for example. BOB: ROBERT: Just not in bookstores. Anything but bookstores so it was a I get everything I want and

win/win situation.

whatever they sell in bookstores is a bonus. BOB: If someone listening to this call has a

burning desire to write a non-fiction book, booklength, not like a report like Gary suggested, but a 250 page book and wants a traditional book, a hardcover or paperback, would you tell them today to go to a small house, go to a big Random House or a Simon & Schuster or self-publish it or does it depend? ROBERT: Well, Ive got to give you my honest

opinion, and maybe Im biased but I got to tell you, its not that I see all big publishers and mainstream publishers as evil - I have a lot of friends in the publishing industry, but in all honesty I would never if I were just starting out I would never go to any mainstream publisher. I would definitely self-publish

because what the Internet has done today it has enabled the little guy to do things that Random House could only do in the past Simon & Schuster, Random House,

49 Harper Collins and so forth. With all the options that

are available on the Internet using an e-letter or RSS and all kind of direct mail, you can have all of the profits yourself and very, very low cost on your advertising so I wouldnt do it because first of all to even get to talk to a major publisher you have to use an agent and I am very, very prejudiced against agents. Ive never had a good experience with an agent. Im

sure there are good ones but Ive never had a good experience and what you do is you just keep putting layers between you and the customers so I wouldnt want to go through an agent or a through a major publisher if I was just starting out. The chances are just to

be very blunt about it unless you are a very important person, youre on television all the time, youve done something extraordinary, you went over and got your legs blown off in Iraq or whatever it is, the chances of you even getting your manuscript read by even a medium sized publisher are very remote. BOB: So, how can we learn from you your Do you have a program we

secrets of self-publishing? can buy? you?

Youre going to do some teleseminars arent

50 ROBERT: Yes. Myself and Dan Poynter, who is

arguably the number one publishing consultant in the world hes been at it about almost 40 years - and were going to do a three-part teleseminar beginning May 30th. May 30th, June 6th and June 8th, 5.00 pm

Eastern Standard Time and anybody can sign up for it by going to www.robertringer.com which is my website and youll see on the left there one of the links is teleseminars and you can go there and sign up if youre interested. Were going to go into all the facets of

self-publishing starting with the organization and the actual Im going to share my actual techniques for writing books. Ive written a total of eight and were

going to go right through the actual publishing process, typesetting, printing, everything, book layout, design and finally the last call marketing your book when you self-publish it. BOB: Now Ill do something that may These two guys I

embarrass you but Ill do it.

didnt remember you were doing this with Dan I think that Robert Ringer is the most certainly if not the most I think hes the most - one of the most successful self-publishers of all time. Dan is

certainly one of the best teachers of self-publishing

51 so this combination is terrific. I know for example,

youre an idea man and youre great at writing, youre a terrific copywriter and a great marketer. Dan

happens to be very good at the details knowing where to find the best print on demand printer, how to get your ISBN number and all of that stuff while some people might think its niggling, its very important, right? ROBERT: It is and I agree with you totally. I

think hes probably by far the number one nuts and bolts guy in the world when it comes to really understanding. As you said, all these things about you do have to get a copyright, you do have to get an ISBN number, Library of Congress and all these horrible details but if you get the information from somebody thats already been there and I know these things also, but Dan deals with them probably a lot more than I do. If you get that information from someone you

dont have to theres a lot of work that you can avoid. Its kind of like a computer or an Ipod or

whatever. Its a lot easier to have somebody who already knows how to do it, show you how rather read a 100-page instruction manual. BOB: I remember hearing his talks and Im

sure hell talk about this on your teleseminar where he

52 gave some tip. It seemed like a small thing but he said, Well, if youre going to be a self-publisher dont buy one ISBN number, buy a block and its cheaper. You know, little things like that that can really I mean one of those tips could save you the whole cost of the program. ROBERT: Absolutely. I think you hit it right

on the head and I can think of an endless list of those kinds of things and understanding whats involved in typesetting and who to go to and what cost you can expect to pay and wheres it efficient and wheres it not efficient as far as numbers when it comes to print runs. Theres just an endless amount of material that you need to know if youre going to self-publish. I can tell you this and I realize that I was very fortunate to have the success that Ive had, but people will find that not only is there a chance to make an enormous amount of money when you self-publish, but its an enormously fulfilling project as well. Its really something that you really feel good about when youve done it all yourself and controlled it all yourself. In fact, one quick anecdote itll take But

about 20 seconds here --BOB: Sure.

53 ROBERT: The great Joe Carbo who was, as you

know, a legendary ad copywriter not many people know this but when I was trying to get my book published and it had been turned down by 23 publishers, I went to him. He lived down south of Los Angeles, like in one

of those beach towns and Ive forgot which one it was, and I went to see him and I wanted him to publish my book because he was selling a zillion copies of The Lazy Mans Way to Riches. He had this big headline.

He said, Most people are too busy earning a living to make any money. BOB: ROBERT: Thats right. I was just a young kid and I was trying

real hard to get him to publish it and he said, No, I wouldnt do it and if I did Id want to take 90%. He said, Youre better off to do it yourself. Let me tell you. He said,

Read two books Scientific

Advertising by Claude Hopkins and Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy and I read those books and thats when I got into advertising myself. You

know he was such a sweet guy. Unfortunately he passed away a few years after that from a massive heart attack but after my first book became a number one best seller and ultimately became one of the 15th best selling

54 books of all time as listed by the New York Times, we got together and he said, You know what I like best about your success? He said, What I like best is you

did it all by yourself. BOB: ROBERT: Thats a great story. And thats what I was talking about, it And anyone whos on this call

being very fulfilling.

who does go ahead and self-publishes and makes it a success I cannot tell you how rewarding it is, the feeling of self-esteem and just feeling good about what youve done. BOB: Thats terrific. So Id like to, as we

start to wrap up, Im going to turn it over to Marcia in a minute, but Id like everyone whos on the call who has more help for the listeners, Robert give us that URL again where we can sign up for the teleseminar. ROBERT: Yes, its www.robertringer.com and then

thatll take you to my website and on the left side youll see a bunch of links. One of them says teleseminars and if you click on that link itll take you to the ad and sign up page. BOB: Terrific. Now, Marcia, I know we want

to get the info how we can get our hands on the romance

55 course and Garys course so let me turn it over to you to give all that. MARCIA: excellent job. Well thanks Bob. I think you did an

Thank you to all of our panelists. Its

been actually a very, very good learning experience for me as well too. Ive been taking notes but I wanted to

say, for those of you listening out there who are interested in our writing programs, we have a number of programs that might be of interest to you. We have our

Ultimate Travel Writers Program for those of you who yearn to perhaps write travel articles. My personal

favorite of course is the romance program, Writing for Love and Money because of course Im a romance writer and then we have our childrens writing program, How to successfully write and publish childrens books, so for those of you who are interested in writing for the childrens market its an excellent, excellent program and of course we have our self-publishing program and our contributors have been on and youve heard their honest feedback, so again, I just want to say, if you log onto www.awaionline.com and if you click on our products and services you will be able to see details of all of these programs. appreciate your time. Thank you all and I do

Denise?

56 DENISE: and gentlemen. Bob and Robert. Thank you Marcia and thank you ladies Thank you Russell, Jo, Margaret, Gary, We really appreciate your input today.

So wishing you all great writing. (Whereupon this concludes the teleconference.)