Publishing Unplugged: Navigating Myths and Realities With Terry Whalin

Hey creative, are you ready to discuss profits, the money, the ways to make it happen? The Profitable Creative Podcast is for you, the creative, how you define it. Videographers, photographers, entrepreneurs, marketing agencies, you get it. CEO of Core Group and author Christian Brim interviews industry experts, creative entrepreneurs, and professionals alike who strive to be creative and make money at the same time. Sound like you? Tune in now. It's time for profit. Welcome to another edition of The Profitable Creative, the only place on the interwebs where you will learn how to turn your passion into profit. I am your host, Christian Brim. Special shout out to our one listener in Rialto, California. Thanks for listening. Joining me today is Terry Whalen. Welcome to the show, Terry.

Christian, wonderful to be here with you.

So let's start with giving the audience your bona fides. So who is Terry?

I'm a writer, author. I've been in publishing for a long time. It was actually in high school. My high school English teacher noticed something in my writing, encouraged me to join the writing staff, put me on the sports as a sportswriter. And which is kind of hard for me because I'm, I'm not a guy that watches a lot of sports or even knows about sports. So I had to learn all that jargon in order to be able to write those stories. Uh, I ultimately became the editor of my high school newspaper. I, um, I went to Indiana University, studied journalism there. Um, I've actually written for more than 50 magazines at this point in my life. I've published more than 60 books. With traditional publishers. So the books are important to me.

Yeah. Yes, I can imagine so. Okay. So before we started the show, you said that you work with authors. So talk about like what capacity. So you are an author, but you also work with authors.

Yeah, I actually work for a New York publishing house, Morgan James Publishing. We've been around over 20 years. We're one of the top independent publishers in the country. We've published over 6,000 titles, 20 million books during that period, 29 New York Times bestsellers. So, I'm a part of their team that actually finds the books that we publish. We publish somewhere between 150-200 books a year.

Okay. Now, I'm curious. So, what do you look for in a book? What do you look for in an author? Good ones. Well, yeah, of course.

Yes. But we do a lot of trade nonfiction. We do some novels, very few picture books, maybe 10 of those. It's hard to find those. And then we do a series of Christian books as well. We have a line of those types of books that we sell into the general market stores, but also into Christian bookstores out there.

Okay, so what— I'm not going to let you off the hook. What qualifies as a good book?

Uh, you know, I've been doing this for a very long time. I've probably looked at thousands of submissions over the years. And so I can, um, it's, I like what David Hancock, our founder, says. It's, uh, probably 80% the author. So I'm looking for, for the right author that has the right kind of personality and such, but also, uh, their content. I can, you know, I can, I can read a few pages and, and see if, see if they've got the, got the goods or not. At the end of the day.

Okay. I'm not asking for trade secrets here. I understand. Okay. So let me ask this then. After you find them, do you do any work with them when they come on board or no?

I do. I'm always available to them and I help them at different points in the process, but the team actually helps them. Do the production part on their book and get the COVID designed and the interior and all that, all that part of the process. But I'm always game to help them if they get stuck or at any point people do reach out to me and I respond to those kinds of things as well. I like what David says, no publisher does enough, but I do believe we do more than most publishers to really help them get out there and be successful with their book.

Okay. So also, you mentioned before we started the show that a lot of times you're working with authors on their mindset. So what does that look like?

Well, what it looks like is helping them really manage their expectations about what's going to happen with the book. Part of the reason I wrote this book called 10 Publishing Myths is because authors have very unrealistic ideas about what should happen with their book. So for example, the very first myth is that I will make a lot of money with my book. And sure, that in fact is— you may make some money with your book, but that's not usually the primary reason why you write a book in the first place.

Yeah, I mean, I am a self-published author myself and knew nothing going into that. And after working through the process, realized that most authors don't make any money. I've interviewed several authors and publishers. And yeah, I mean, it's kind of crazy. How many people, how many books are published, right? And then, like, the expectation that you're going to make money is, in most cases, unrealistic. Like, I think— I don't know what your experience is, but like, you did say there needs to be another reason to to write the book rather than it just be your living. One author I interviewed, he's not self-published, J.V. Hillard. He was talking about he wanted to write a book and then the publisher's like, well, in this genre, you've got to write 3 books. You can't just write one. It's not going to work. So then all of a sudden, he's got to do more work than he had expected. But he talked about the process of building a fan base. So like going to Comic Cons. So he's a fantasy science fiction. So like, going out and meeting the public and like building the fan base. I also interviewed an actor, fairly successful actor, that talked about, like, he had gone from movies to TV. And like, the thing that he talked about was like, I have a brand as an actor. And so I have to work that brand with my fans. That's my business. It's not necessarily the product that I'm producing like that. The TV show or the film. It's about harnessing that. And so I'm going to say all of that to tie back into what I think you're talking about is setting expectations as an entrepreneur, whether you're an author or not. You know, most entrepreneurs fail at least once. And I don't know if that translates to authors, but like, you know, entrepreneurship is really hard, and we see success stories all over the place, right? That's right. Um, and, and so when we start out, we have this expectation that we should be like all of these success stories, and I think that's a bad place to be as an entrepreneur. Like, you're, you're setting yourself up for failure.

You are. You are. And, you know, we write a book for a number of really good reasons. For example, are to, you know, show that you're an authority in the topic that you're writing on, to open up other opportunities such as to speak and go to Comic-Con and meet your fans. All those kinds of things open up for you if you have a book and you're using it appropriately to get on podcasts like this, to get on radio shows. Right. That, that's the opportunity that you have if you're, if you're out there with, with your book at the end of the day. But, uh, yeah, your, your mindset and your expectations. And, and part of the reason I wrote 10 Publishing Myths is because there's so much of the publishing process that's really outside of anything that we as an author can control. And so what I really tried to emphasize in these different chapters was practical information that the author could take control over. So for example, I don't have any control over Facebook or LinkedIn or YouTube or any of those— we call them rented platforms in the business. But I do have control over my own website, my own blog, my own newsletter. Those are the kinds of things that are really under my domain and something I can do something about at the end of the day.

Well, it would seem to me that authors probably haven't considered all of those factors. I mean, first-time authors for sure. They don't know what the publishing process is, the editorial process, the promotion, the marketing process. And so do most of them come to you with this certain amount of naivety that there's a lot more to— you want to do this thing that you like. You like to write. You want to do this thing. But that's like 10%. You got a whole other 90% that you've got to do. Is that fair to say?

I would say that's fair. And Christian, even experienced authors sometimes don't understand what they need to do in order to be effective. I had really a wake-up moment in my own life, uh, in 2007, uh, Mark Victor Hansen, the co-author on Chicken Soup for the Soul, was having this big event out in Los Angeles called Mega Book Marketing University. Now, at that point in my life, I was a literary agent. I had a little literary agency in Scottsdale, Arizona. And so he invited me to come. And so I went out there and took pitches from people, uh, at that point in my life, I'd written about 50 books for traditional publishers. So publishers were making books. Uh, they were getting them in the bookstores. They were pretty books, all that kind of thing. Now, when you do that kind of publishing, maybe once a year, maybe 4 times a year, quarterly, a publisher will send you a financial statement about how your book is doing. They call that a royalty statement. And all of my statements back then were in the minus category.

Sure, that's not good, Jim.

That's not what you want to say. I'm not, I'm not making any money on my books. And so I knew I must be doing something wrong, but I couldn't figure out what in the world I was doing. So I, at Mega Book Marketing University, I sat there with all 400 people that were there. We had these big notebooks and we're— no, when, when was this? In 2007. Okay, and One of the speakers there was Jack Canfield, the other co-author on Chicken Soup for the Soul. And Jack has this book that I have on my shelf called The Success Principles, where Jack has really studied what does it take to be successful. And the very first success principle says that I will take 100% responsibility for my own success. Now, none of us want to take 100% responsibility. We want somebody else to do it for us. But while I was at that event, I suddenly realized how little I was doing myself in order to be able to promote my books. Sure, I had a TerryWhalen.com website, but I was doing hardly anything else to be telling people about my books. So I decided that I was going to change and I was going to take 100% responsibility for my own success. I was going to be out there. So, so blogging was new back then. So I started blogging. And, you know, I've been blogging every week since that period, and I have over 1,700 entries that are in my blog. There's a lot of content in that blog. Impressive. Um, actually, I have a little thing that searches for my name online, and about a year ago, I found this article listing the top 27 content producers that were out there. It said in this article there's over 600 million blogs, and My name was listed as one of the top 27 content producers. And hey, it's not that I'm doing anything big. I'm just writing this article about publishing once a week, sending it out, doing it over and over, and being consistent about that. And that's, that's one of the keys I think for, for any entrepreneur is to figure out what you're, what you want to do and then do that. Over and over. It's that persistence and consistency that really pays off for you in the long run.

Hey listeners, are you ready to turn your passion into profit? Then grab a copy of Profit First for Creatives. Click the link in the show notes to purchase a copy. And if you're not ready to make that full commitment, you can download a free copy of the first chapter. Check it out right now. Yeah, I think, yes, the, that statement about you're 100% responsible for your success is, I think, the distinction between an entrepreneur and a non-entrepreneur. I, I think that's one of the biggest challenges when people show up and they say, hey, I want to start a business, you know, I want to write a book, whatever it is. And they make that leap into entrepreneurship. And why I think so many fail is they don't understand that if you're not an entrepreneur, you're, you're casting most of your decisions on someone else, right? Absolutely. And, and they take care of that. They, they, you know, and, and then you earn significantly less because of that. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs starting out see that like, I'm making this person a whole lot of money, like I could do this and make more money, right? And that's their initial thought. But then they don't understand what else is all going on there, the back end, and why they're only getting paid a fraction of what the company makes from them is because there's all this other stuff that has to be done. And a lot of people hit that buzzsaw and they're like, "Eh, this isn't for me." So, I would challenge people that are considering being an entrepreneur to have a full— you're not going to have a full— it's like trying to explain to people that don't have kids what having kids is like. You got to experience it, right? But at least have an idea of the breadth and scope of what you don't know, and what you are now 100% responsible for, because there's no one else that is going to do it for you.

That's right. And what people don't realize, it's like a forgotten fact almost out there, Christian, is that even these Chicken Soup for the Soul authors that have sold millions and millions of their books, they were rejected over 160 times before they actually found the publisher. You know, that's a, that's a ton of rejection. They finally found a little publisher in Florida that would publish that first Chicken Soup for the Soul books. Now, they told their publisher they were going to sell a million books during the first year, and that publisher laughed at them. They never said— I would laugh at them. It took them a year and a half to sell their first.

That's still very impressive.

And but what they decide to do, and they talk about this, is that they practiced what they call the rule of 5. They got up every day and they did 5 things to be telling people about their book. You know, they did a radio show or a podcast or a book signing or a newspaper article. I mean, there are dozens of things that you can do, but the fact that they did 5 of them and that they did them over and over and over, ultimately is what happened. It caught on out there, and now they're very successful.

Yeah, and that goes back to what you said about persistence and consistency. I think persistence, a lot of entrepreneurs don't have any problem with. I mean, like, if they get over the hurdle and they say, oh, I am responsible for all these things and get going, The persistence. A lot of people that are entrepreneurs are persistent. You can flip that around and say that character trait might show up as stubborn. But it's the same trait. But the persistence, I mean, the consistency is a different animal because it's almost contradictory to the persistence. A lot of entrepreneurs get real frustrated with the mundane, right? They, they like to do the problem solving, the novel thing, thinking, creating, like the problem solving. Like, that's what they like. But then when you've got to manage people or, you know, manage marketing or manage finances, like all those things that go along with business, It's like, I don't want to do that part. And so you have to balance those two to be successful in the long term. I agree, the consistency thing is huge. And a lot of entrepreneurs like myself are impatient. It's like, I know, I see the vision, I want it now. And it's like, it doesn't work that way.

No. It's really hard. I mean, we do a lot of boring stuff, you know, over and over and over. I mean, I post on social media, you know, 12 or 15 times a day that I do, but I have a system that I've worked out. I only take about 30 minutes a day to do that, but that's why I have 175,000 followers on X or Twitter, and I have 19,500 connections on LinkedIn is that I'm I'm consistently working on, on that kind of thing.

So going back to the, the, I'm, I'm going to choose to be responsible for my success, um, that decision. So like, I, I want, I want to kind of dive into that. Like, what, where was your headspace there? Were you like, you went to this and you looked at your royalty statements and I'm like, I'm not making any money like, where was your head at? Like, were you frustrated? Were you like disappointed in yourself? Like, what was your mindset at that point?

Yeah, I was frustrated and confused, actually. I didn't know what I was supposed to do. And you're right when you were talking about how entrepreneurs face a lot of failure. We fail a lot with what we do. So, you have to just keep Part of it is just keep trying different things to find the right path for you on this journey. There's no 1, 2, 3 kind of formula to be able to do it. In other words, if there were, every book would be a bestseller. And instead, you know, there's over 11,000 new books that are published every day, counting the self-published stuff. So there's a huge volume of stuff that comes out of there. The people that really make it at the end of the day are trying different things and finding that path that really works for them at the end of the day.

What would you say? Because I've been accused of, and I know I'm not alone in this as an entrepreneur, I've been accused of shiny object syndrome. So, like, entrepreneurs are like raccoons. We, we, we get distracted very easily. Sure. With new and novel things. And that's, I guess, what I'm tying back to the persistence, not the, the consistency problem, is like, how do you, how do you approach that where on one hand, you've got to deal with failure and, and try something new. But on the other hand, you've— whatever you find, has— you— that works, you have to be consistent at it. And, and so, like, I, I've had trouble balancing those things. Like, how do I know I'm giving— I'm not giving up too soon, right? How do I, I make that call?

Yeah, it's, it's, it's really hard to know. But, you know, and people in publishing all the time will say, for example, uh, social media doesn't sell books. Well, And I think that's true. It doesn't really sell books, but here's what it does. Social media gives exposure about the benefits to your book over and over to people because they've pretty much proven out there, Christian, that somebody has to hear about your book, you know, 7, maybe 20 times before they actually reach into their wallet and say, oh, that book, I ought to buy that book. And so that's That's part of what the social media things are doing is really stressing the benefits of your book, showing them that it's a book that they should be interested in. And finally, they'll come around and say, oh yeah, I should buy that book. Maybe I should read that book. Maybe I should do some of the stuff that book tells me to do.

Yeah. And I think about— I don't know if this is true in fiction. But, you know, in nonfiction, I would think this is true, especially like business books. I track my— I have free resources listed in the book on a URL that people can download free resources to use, but they have to give their email. And, you know, after a year of tracking this data, 5% of the purchases download the free resources. And, you know, I even actually put this in the book in the final chapter. I, you know, is that I know most people are not going to read the whole book, right? And, uh, some people are going to buy it and never read it, not, not read any of it, right? Especially if it's a Kindle version that it's, you know, a $10, um, you know, impulse purchase. Or even worse, the, the, the, the, the, like Midwest Tape that does the, the, the rent where, you know, they're paying whenever they access it. So like, you know, the engagement that you, you think that you're going to get with a reader is not what you think. Like, you, you think that Oh, people are going to take this home and they're going to consume it in one sitting and they're going to take these principles and they're going to take action on it. And that's not reality. But the reality is that even if they don't buy the book, I have influenced them by the book being there. You have. When they know it, right?

You have.

Exactly. And so it's, it's I guess going back to what you said initially, it's redefining your intentions and your expectations.

It is. And for example, at Morgan James, we've learned that if somebody gets the ebook version of your book and starts to read that ebook version, even if they get that for free, there is a high probability they're going to turn and buy the print copy of the book. So I, I did this book years ago called Book Proposals That Sell: 21 Secrets to Speed Your Success. I've, I've done 2 book proposals to get 6-figure advances, Chris. So I do know a little bit about what a book proposal is, and I've read thousands of them through the years. So now we have the revised edition. Somebody could go to bookproposals. Ws, bookproposals.ws, and you can get the full version of my book over there for free. All you do is you put your, put your first name and your email address in there, and then you can get it for whatever version you want, because we've proven that if they, if they start to read that, there's a high probability they're going to turn and buy the print copy. So those free ebooks, we lose nothing by giving away those free ebooks. We actually drive print book sales by giving away a free ebook. And so it's another unusual kind of marketing thing that Morgan James is doing to encourage our authors to do this, do this type of work and to get out there with your book so that people know about it at the end of the day.

That's a fascinating—

yeah.

Well, yeah. And I get it because The Kindle version, Amazon really screwed up the publishing world. And I actually interviewed a gentleman that is working on an alternative platform to self-publish that I think his model is fascinating. And I don't know if it'll work. But he was talking about how Amazon really facilitates the self-publishing, because it doesn't matter to them how many books are sold on, on a, of a particular book, because it's just free advertising for them. If someone comes and buys a book, they're going to get the suggestions from Amazon, and they're more likely to buy something else that has nothing to do with the book. Um, and, and that's, that's part of their marketing strategy, is, is it is, it is true.

And, and actually, at Morgan James, Chris, we actually encourage our authors not to use the word Amazon because you can imagine bookstores, right or wrong, believe that Amazon's destroyed their business over the years. So a bookstore owner will not care that you have 150 Amazon reviews, but they will care if you have 150 5-star reviews. So they don't care that you had an Amazon bestseller. They will care if you had a best— that you had a bestseller. So we just try to teach them not to, not to use that word Amazon when they— as they're, as they're talking to people about their book.

Yeah, but, but, you know, for people like myself that had a derivative book off of Profit First that was already a bestseller. I think Mike uses Penguin as his publisher. As part of my licensing agreement, I had to self-publish. Penguin said, you cannot publish with a publisher. Now, I suppose if I thought it was going to be good enough, I could have pitched it to them. And Penguin would have published it. But the reality is, is that a publisher was not going to publish that book, uh, even if I could, because, you know, it's not going to sell enough.

Yeah, and even at Morgan James, I, I tell authors all the time that Amazon is a big customer of ours, but they're only 24% of our overall business. So the way I look at it, you publish with Amazon, you're missing 76% of what we do for the book out there. I mean, our books are sold in 98% of the bookstores in North America, including the brick-and-mortar stores. So, I mean, we saw at Target, for example. So I encourage authors, if they've self-published, they should maybe still be pitching me with their book at Morgan James because we have a huge other market that we can tap out there with their book if they want to come with us.

Does that mean then that you are— you become the publisher or are you just providing services?

No, we would ultimately they take over their book and become the publisher for their book. But there's a lot of reasons to do that, and we fully explain that during the submission process and everything to them.

Yeah. Okay. So what if an author is looking at going with a publisher, any publisher, yours, anyone, what is the publisher's expectation of how many books will be sold? Like, there's some minimum that, like, if I don't think it can sell 10,000 copies, I'm not going to bother with it.

Well, and it'd be different for different publishers. Some publishers do have a high number, 10,000, 100,000 books that they expect to sell of every title. For us at Morgan James, our expectation is to try to sell 3,000 to 4,000 copies during the first few years.

Of your book.

Okay. Uh, sometimes that happens, sometimes not. Just depends. We got to— we really work hard to try to choose the right authors. At the end of the day, that's part of what Christian Brim does.

I think that would fall in the realm of capturing a lot of people that are self-publishing, you know, like that, you know. I don't know. We've sold, uh, in a year, I think we sold 2,000 copies, which I don't think is bad.

I think that's good. I mean, a typical self-published book, if it can sell 100, 200 copies during the lifetime of the book. So the fact that you've sold a couple of thousand is terrific.

I remember, even though I was self-publishing, I did work with a publishing company to provide the COVID design and the editing services, format and all that. And so I was talking to her early on in the process. And I said, "You know, it doesn't, after talking to you, it doesn't sound like a book has to be really good to sell well." And she said, "No, it really doesn't." And I'm like, Well, that doesn't sound right. A book should be good. It should be well-written. It should be easy to read. It should deliver on its promise. But the reality is that it's more about the marketing of it. Would you agree with that statement?

Yeah, well, the marketing is a big element of it. I mean, I always think you should build your book on the right foundation. So the The writing is really important to me, that we have a well-written, well-executed book at the end of the day. But yeah, the marketing is important. And the other element that a lot of people don't realize about books is, you know, if your book sells 5,000 copies during the lifetime of the book, that's a good number for us in the publishing world where there's a lot of other ways to get the word out about your book. And for example, in print magazines, and there's still a lot of print magazines out there, it's pretty easy to reach 100,000, 200,000, half a million people with your book. And so I always encourage people to take a look at their content and see if there's something in that content that they could excerpt or take out a personal experience make that into a magazine article, get that out there into the magazine world because you can influence a lot of people with doing that. That's why I've written for more than 50 magazines through the years and why I continue to write for magazines.

So, Terry, if people want to learn more about working with you, how do they find you?

Well, one of the things I really want people to do is I've set up a a way that you can get this 10 Publishing Myths book from me for only $10. That includes the shipping. Seems very fair. Along with over $200 worth of bonuses. Now, these are not lackluster bonuses. I mean, one of my bonuses, I interviewed a guy who self-published his book and has sold thousands of books to public libraries. People forget about libraries. Libraries have money to buy books. And so this guy, would get a list of libraries and he again consistently called them, pitched the right librarian, and would after the call pack up the book along with an invoice and sell his book. He sold thousands of books doing this. It's an idea that people don't even think about doing that kind of thing. And so if you go to publishingoffer.com, publishingoffer.com, bookstore.com. Somebody can get this book from me for only, only $10. And I also, I have an 11th myth, Christian. Alice Kreider, an acquisitions editor, when she sent me her endorsement, she said, Terry, you're missing the 11th myth. I'm like, okay, Alice, I'll bite. What's the 11th myth? She said, well, the 11th myth should be that if I send my book to Oprah Winfrey, she'll book me on her show. And I'm like, well, yeah, that's a, that's a pretty good myth. And so what I decided to do is to write that chapter. And when we designed the book, we designed the chapter to look like the rest of the book. And somebody can get that from, from me for free if they go to TerryLynx.com, plural, TerryLynx.com/11thmyth, 1-1-T-H, myth. And then you can get that whole chapter from me. As far as how people reach me, I actually have my personal email address in my Twitter profile because I want people to be able to reach me. So if they go to terry@terrywhalen.com, that's probably the easiest way that somebody can reach me. But you'll see I have a lot of material out there online. I want people to be, to be able to reach me. Uh, people call me one of the most accessible people in publishing, and I believe that's true. A lot of these editors, you can't even reach these people. They don't even respond. But I do try to respond to my email and my phone calls and all that kind of thing.

I love that. Listeners will have all of those links in the show notes. If you like what you've heard, please rate the podcast, share the podcast, subscribe to the podcast. If not, shoot us a message and let us know what you'd like to hear. Until then, tata for now.