The Future of Publishing: Insights from Keith Riegert

Welcome to Media Minds with your host, David Wolf.

Welcome to Media Minds. I'm your host, David Wolf. Joining us on this segment is Keith Regard. He's a seasoned veteran in the publishing industry, the CEO of Ulysses Press and Velo Press Books. These are both distributed by Simon Schuster. Keith also leads the innovative publishing tech company called Perfect Bound and co-founded the book publicity and marketing firm Pacific Court. And if that's not enough, he also teaches analytics and consumer insights at NYU Center for Publishing and Applied Liberal Arts. Joining us on this segment to share his valuable insights on the future, well, the present and the future of publishing and the evolving role of technology. Welcome, Keith Regert.

Thank you so much, David. I'm really pleased to be here.

So you've been around the publishing business a few years, if I've got that right. If we could just start with the origin story a little bit, that would be great for context, then we'll go from there.

So I come from a publishing family. My parents founded Ulysses Press in 1983, and when I was growing up, you know, I was very enamored with the publishing industry and my dad tried as hard as he could to get me to not go into publishing. So I made a beeline for it, you know, got my English lit degree and started in the family business in 2008. Uh, and have basically been there ever since.

It's a lot of years. So with all this time in the business, I'm guessing, uh, this is a second generation or version 2.0 in a way for you. How did you being around that, how's it informed the 4 companies you've started now? And there may be more than 4, but the 4 I know about, how, how is it informing the way you're operating now? And, and, um, So forth.

That's a great question. I, you know, I've seen the industry change from the sidelines for decades now. You know, the company is as old as I am. And originally Ulysses Press started out as a travel publishing company and did very well with the Hidden series. So Hidden Hawaii, Hidden Coast of California. And then we saw when the, the internet really took off, uh, travel websites absolutely decimated travel publishing and left the few companies that still are around, like Fodor's and Lonely Planet. Uh, but the smaller independent publishing companies that focused on travel had a hard time surviving. So Ulysses in 2001 started to pivot out of travel and into health and spirituality and eventually became what we are today, which is a data and trend-driven publishing company that focuses on finding what is coming up next and then finding the expert author to publish into that area. So we're really focused on, uh, underpublished niches that we know have a built-in audience. And can reach that audience. And that has really been the origin of all of the other companies that, that we've been building over here. So for example, Pacific and Court, which is a publicity and digital marketing firm, is aimed at independent publishers and authors and uses a lot of the strategies that we've developed at Ulysses over the last 20 years., to reach audiences for books that otherwise might have a hard time in the market. And, uh, you know, Perfect Bound is something similar. I am a diehard indie publisher. Uh, I know what the Big Five pay for printing. Uh, it makes it very hard to compete on their level. So anything that we can do as independent publishers to level the playing field and bring in some of the technology that exists at larger corporate publishers for independent publishers can have a huge impact on our revenues as well as profits and allow us to publish the books that we really wanna publish. Wow.

There's, it's a very selective model, isn't it? I mean, you mentioned Ulysses and the way you're, you're really reverse engineering it.

Yeah.

From demand, aren't you?

Yes. Yeah. So we do our acquisitions in reverse. We are actively hunting using very large data sets to find the areas that, you know, an audience exists and we can tap into it, but the book doesn't exist yet. And so we, instead of, you know, taking in submissions from agents or authors, we then go out and find the expert author who may have never written a book but has, uh, you know, expertise in this one particular area, which could be as, you know, wide-ranging as survivalism or, uh, metal detecting. Yeah. And then we'll, we'll write the book with them.

This is really interesting, and I'm not a veteran of publishing, as you know, but is this, is anyone else doing it like this where they're reverse engineering it and then go finding, proactively finding the expert, even if they're not an author, which is fascinating.

The, there are very few companies that are doing it. The, the biggest example, uh, was Callisto Media, which is now owned by Sourcebooks. Uh, so they, they were doing it on a large scale. Uh, we had been doing it for, you know, starting in 2001 when BookScan came out. That was our original data set that we were mining. Uh, but it, you know, it. It really flies in the face of how publishing has always worked. And I think that it's a, a model that is hard to get used to for editors who come in because it is very creative and collaborative, but you're, you're starting from a position where you have to basically invent the entire book. And that can be a tough, uh, sell.

Yeah, yeah. You're inventing it from— you're creating it from scratch, but it is based on data. And the one thing you know that a lot of authors that are, you know, sometimes struggling out there, uh, self-published and so forth, are that they don't know if their book is going to be a hit. They have no idea about how the market may or not receive it. It's coming more from them and thinking about, okay, now I need to market this thing.

Yes.

Which could be a good pivot for us in this conversation. Um, Pacific and Court. Tell us a little bit about your approach there. Is this designed for self-published authors or something different?

Yeah, definitely self-published authors. Courtney Jason, who's the president and publicist, has specialized in this area for a long time. She was with Smith Publicity before starting up Pacific and Quart. And you know, the, the origin of this idea came out of my time that I spent at Hachette Book Group. I was associate director of analytics for the marketing strategy team, which was the centralized marketing team that oversaw all 19 or so imprints. And what I found in the data when I was working there was there were a couple of marketing avenues that had really positive return on investment, and then a lot of marketing avenues that didn't. And the ones that, that were working, uh, in the late 2010s were really Amazon Advertising, Facebook, Instagram, and that was pretty much it. Uh, so when I came back to Ulysses to take over as publisher, We had just lost our publicist and I made the decision that we weren't going to rehire for that position. We were going to hire for a digital marketer and we were gonna put our marketing resources into the avenues that I had seen work. And that helped us become one of the fastest growing independent publishers for 3 straight years. Publishers Weekly and really allowed us to drive discovery and awareness for not only each individual title, but for the company itself. Eventually we did want to have a publicist. I think it's really important for our authors to be able to get as much publicity for their books as possible. And that's when we teamed up with Courtney, a seasoned veteran, we'd worked with her at Ulysses Press to bring in the resources that we felt we needed at Ulysses as a small independent publisher. So a part-time publicist and digital marketing resources that we could leverage going forward.

Keith, if you will please repeat the ones that, the platforms that are getting traction for you. You said them earlier in this segment.

Yeah, so the ones that were working the best at the end of the 2010s, Amazon Advertising, Facebook, and Instagram, Pinterest as well has worked really well. The platforms that are more difficult tend to be TikTok and X, formerly Twitter. But you know, the audience for books and the demographics that are on Facebook and Instagram tend to line up very closely.

Can I unpack that a little bit with you? So when you, when you're using these platforms, you're producing assets that are based on the book and then you're putting 'em out like what we would expect. I mean, that's video and so forth. Is that exactly the way it looks? Yeah.

So the formula for that, the basic one is using carousel advertising on Facebook and Instagram. So you have one title that you're really focused on, but in order to achieve a positive return on that investment, you really need to build awareness for as many books as you can. Because, you know, when we do the math on, on our analytics, what we find is, you know, 100,000 people might see your advertisement on Facebook. Of those 100,000, 10,000 click through to the website to view the book. Of those 10,000, 1,000 will click through to the retailer page. So Barnes Noble or Amazon. And of those 1,000, you know, you, you get 100 that may actually make the purchase.

Yeah. So it's a funnel. It's a funnel diagram you just painted there.

Exactly. But it is a steep drop-off in the number of people.

Right.

Right. Or if you're spending, you know, $1 per click or something, then you are losing money. And what we're trying to do is get down to, you know, 5 cents a click and they're gonna see all of these different books that Ulysses has to offer.

And that's so valuable for our authors, our listeners and viewers to hear, to put some reality on what it takes to market a book. I know from our experience, so many of the authors are focused on the book itself and that's where the work really begins.

Yes.

I mean, at that point it's the now what? Okay. And this is an answer to the now what? So thank you for that.

You've been listening to Media Minds with your host, David Wolf. Media Minds is produced by Audavida Studios, a premier production company producing audiobooks and podcasts for clients worldwide. Be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. To learn more about the team at Audavida Studios, visit audavida.com.

Keith Rigert is our guest. He's, uh, the CEO and founder of, uh, many companies. Uh, we'll give some contact information at the end. Um, let's switch to AI and, you know, we can't really have a conversation about publishing without, you know, sort of talking about the proverbial digital elephant in the room. Um, maybe the highest question would be, how is it impacting, you mentioned data mining so that you can reverse engineer in the Ulysses model. Any other things about AI that you'd like to just talk about or, you know, comment about as we move into this very rapid evolutionary cycle?

Yeah, I have been very obsessed with AI for the last 2 years. My big, uh-oh moment was, I think about a year and a half ago, I asked ChatGPT to write some Python code for me. To scrape the Urban Outfitters website and then return a data frame with all of the books that they were selling. And I had spent years learning how to code in Python, and ChatGPT wrote better, cleaner code in 3 seconds than I had ever written. And at that point, I, I realized like, I need to really get into this because this is going to change everything. Uh, the publishing industry has not warmed up to AI. I think it's gonna take a long time. Yeah. But I am really pushing our staff and other indies to adopt some of these tools for non-publishing purposes. So we're not gonna have ChatGPT write a book. We're not gonna have Midjourney illustrate a children's book, but when it comes to doing things like drafting a press release or coming up with a sample outline that you're going to send to an author, or, you know, creating placeholder covers for sales conference, or having it— having Midjourney storyboard out a children's book for you or give you, you know, the exact type of illustration that you want your illustrator to go after. These are all things that that would take our employees hours or days, and now it's minutes. And there's so much flexibility, there's so much opportunity to increase productivity in what is traditionally a very, you know, information-heavy industry to tap into those tools to dramatically change the way that we're working. So what we're seeing is, you know, on a lot of those tasks that would take an hour, uh, things are dropping to 40 minutes or 30 minutes or 20 minutes. Yeah. And in aggregate, you know, we're seeing about a 20% increase in productivity, which means that for every 5 employees we have, we gain a 6th for, you know, $20 a month in, uh, in OpenAI, uh, fees.

Yeah. You start to look at the quant of all this and it, it makes economic sense. And then, uh, you know, the, the, the ability to just go and the coding moment that you described, I think many of us have had this, your first time you prompted and then saw what it can do.

Yeah.

You know, in our world we've been generating scripts for podcasts with an interviewer and a clone of the author's voice. And that, and with productifying that.

Yes.

I mean, it's absolutely spectacular. So yeah, it's not the creating of the content so much. It's the appendage to your brain. And then also in the corporate sense, structurally, yeah, just being able to optimize some of these back office processes or creative processes that otherwise would take so much longer. So there it is. I've just reiterated what you said. That's that moment of truth. And I didn't know you were a coder. So for a coder to say this, you know, that was pretty, that's a lot of impact. Um, so following the line of AI and where this is all going, uh, yeah, it's going to take time, as you said, for the uptake, the, uh, for users to adapt it for certain aspects of creativity. And then there's all the ethical questions that are going around and And that's just gonna take time to flesh out. Is that your sense of it? It's just time and humans getting used to the idea.

I mean, I think that there are going to be plenty of publishing companies that jump in and are creating AI, uh, written content and AI-created cover images, and there will be a market for that. I think that there is obviously a market for a company that can come in and say, you know, what story do you want to, to hear right now, uh, with the protagonist David Wolf? And you know, it's set in your hometown like that, that is an absolute huge market. I don't think that it's ever going to be what dominates, uh, publishing. I think that you're always gonna have human-created content, human-created art. The bigger thing that, that I'm really anticipating is, you know, I'm pretty convinced that by 2030 we are going to have a publishing company that publishes books written by people, but has, you know, one or two staff members that are human and the rest of the publishing company is going to be run by AI agents. Who do, you know, author outreach and contracting and pay your royalties and do the accounting, do all of the title management for books. And to me that, you know, it's exciting as a CEO to think that we could do so much more and really focus on the creative aspects of the business instead of the, mundane administrative work, but it also really worries me that we are going to continue to lose employment within this industry. It's, it's already been shrinking. PW had a great article about how quickly it has consolidated and, and how few people are working in this industry. And I'm worried that that's gonna accelerate.

Yeah, there's gonna be a short-term, a lot of short-term pain, which was I guess probably true in the Industrial Revolution as well. And we're kind of sitting right in another one. And then certainly it's affecting the publishing industry. And yeah, I appreciate that. Keith, thanks so much for your insights today. We'll put all your contact information and the companies that you run, Ulysses Press, Velo Press Books, Perfect Bound, and Pacific and Court, we'll put it in the show notes. Really appreciate your insights today. Thanks so much for joining us. Hope we can do it again, maybe in a year when proverbial 30 years have actually transpired in terms of AI, right?

Yeah.

Technology.

I'll just have my, uh, my AI clone come and do the podcast.

Exactly. We'll send, you'll send your avatar. I'll send mine and the, the, yeah, the AI guys will talk to each other.

It'll be great.

Thanks again, Keith.

You've been listening to Media Minds. With your host, David Wolf. Media Minds is produced by Audivita Studios, a premier production company producing audiobooks and podcasts for clients worldwide. Be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. To learn more about the team at Audivita Studios, visit audivita.com.