162: Should You Self-Publish? (Part One)

Hi, this is Charles Michael Davis. Toyotathon is on so stop by your local Toyota dealer for incredible year end deals on the cars, trucks and SUVs known for their legendary reliability like the stylish and efficient Camry, the Ready for anything RAV4 or check out a rough and rugged Tacoma or Tundra, all with great financing and lease options available to qualified customers. Visit buyatoyota.com to find out more. Toyota let's go Places.

This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Welcome back Free Timers. This episode builds on the recent episode 158 on 10 filters for deciding on a book or big idea topic. This one is one of the other most common questions that I get in the free Author toolkit and from friends and friends of friends and friends of friends of friends who I'll often voxer back and forth with to answer this one big question. Should I self publish? In today's episode, I'm going to break down the three main options you have if you want to get a book out into the world. And of course it's always changing and evolving. And then I'll share six considerations that might help you decide which of those three paths to take. So of the three paths self publishing, hybrid publishing and traditional. And then the six considerations that would help you weigh those three options.

First, I want to give a belated shout out and thank you to two reviews that came in recently. Recently ish Jozzy Time in December wrote so good and so a long overdue review for this brilliant podcast. Jenny's ideas are a must have for any solopreneur or aspiring solopreneur. Also great for creatives and anyone who wants to reassess their relationship to work. Thank you jozzy time. And one more from Mr. Tangu in Canada on January 18th. I just love these names. They're so creative. Best podcast for Operating a Lean Team Jenny is the absolute most helpful person for any new business owner or burnt out entrepreneur to follow full stop. She has the best templates, analogies and tactics. Not to mention she stays focused on helping us reach a higher purpose while we move things. Needle that just makes my day, my week, my month. Thank you so much you have no idea how much these reviews motivate me. I get shy to read them out loud on the podcast. But I also want to give big thanks to those of you who have taken the time to leave one. It's so motivating because I come here to this recording studio in midtown Manhattan and sometimes I hit a wall or I don't know what to share, or I don't know what you as listeners find most helpful. And every time I get your feedback, your specific notes, or what your favorite aspects are, it just gives me another surge of momentum to keep going, keep recording, and keep digging for more ideas to share that I can be helpful. So thanks again to both of you and to every single one of you who is here listening. And listen, if you're not at a point where you're writing a book or you even want to write a book, maybe you know somebody who does. And when they are debating and weighing the options of how to get their ideas out into the world, just point them over to episode 162. The best way to grow the show is word of mouth. So I would really appreciate you sharing the love. You can do that at Pod Link freetime, and that sends them a link that they could listen in whatever podcast player they love the most. And if you want to access the free author toolkit, that's@itsfreetime.com authors that's itsfreetime.com authors. Without further ado, let's get into it.

A little bit of context so you understand where I'm coming from. I always like to say I'm not the end all, be all expert. I'm an author. I have three books. I've done them different ways. And so I'm going to share my experience with you. There are other people who have different experiences, different goals, different things that are important to them. So this is just my opinion on these three publishing options and what I think would be most helpful for you to consider. So I have three books. As I mentioned, two are traditionally published. My first book, Life After College, was published with running press in 2011. I got 27 rejections from publishers and one yes from this tiny press. And that set me off to the races. I'm pretty sure my advance at that time was $15,000 total. I had 500 newsletter subscribers. This again was back in 2010 when I got the book deal. And of that 15 grand, 15% goes to my literary agent. That book happened to earn out after a year because Target bought 15,000 copies to put on their end cap. Displays for new grads. So that was a really exciting, big win for life after college. I think it's sold about 40,000 copies to date, and less than 3% of books ever sell more than 10,000 copies. So it puts it in a unique position as far as how many copies sold. My second book, Pivot, I was super thrilled to get a book deal with my dream publisher portfolio. It's a division of Penguin Random House, and just going to their offices for the pitch meetings was so exciting. Like walking into their big expansive lobby in downtown New York. This was when they were just off of Houston street and seeing the floor to ceiling bookshelves lining the walls and that iconic Penguin logo. I remember going to the offices in the UK as well, just pinching myself left and right. Every time I interacted with this publisher, I was elated. And the editor who acquired my book at that time, her name was Natalie. She was so energetic and believed in the idea so much. And that was really thrilling to get a book deal with the big house. I mean, now it's down to about five big houses. And that keeps changing as publishers try to merge, sometimes fail, sometimes succeed. The advance for that book, I've never shared publicly on the pod, but hey, why not? I'm all about transparency these days. The advance for that was 150,000. Now, this was bigger than expected because there ended up being competition. The problem with publishers consolidating is that you get less and less competition from different people or different houses that might want the book. And as soon as more than one publisher is interested, now it goes to auction. Now they got a bid against each other to try to land the book, which is a big honor for a book to go to auction. And so I was really lucky because it went to auction. I got twice the size advance that I might have otherwise received. Now, I will tell you that although Pivot has sold almost 40,000 copies as well, so it's been very, very successful by all measures, I still have not earned out the advance. I'm so proud of all that book has accomplished. And the IP from Pivot alone has earned my business over a million dollars. And yet I have this bee in my bonnet about trying to earn out the advance someday. Usually what happens is the royalty checks are tiny after that anyway, because sales tend to taper off over time, especially if you don't have an evergreen topic. But Pivot is still as relevant today really as it was when it came out. So I still have hope. I still carry hope when you get an advance of that size, it's paid out over two years and the agent takes 15%. So there's usually 25% on signing, 25% when you deliver the manuscript, 25% when the hardcover comes out, and possibly another 25% when the paperback comes out. Some of that is negotiable, but traditional publishers are pretty set in their ways, and in a lot of ways they can be because they have all the leverage. With my third book, Free Time, that came out in March of 2022, woo hoo. We're just about celebrating its one year bookiversary of being out in the Went Rogue, I decided to go hybrid. I was absolutely thrilled to partner with IdeaPress. I did have a meeting with Portfolio, but ultimately decided for so many reasons that you'll hear later in the episode, to go with IdeaPress and really take the reins, be in full creative control. But there's a whole different investment and cost structure of going hybrid. Now that we've laid the landscape out with my history, it gives you a little peek into the three publishing options. But let me say it more succinctly and directly. So the three main ways that you can publish a book, you can self publish hybrid or traditional. Let's work backwards, starting with traditional, because that's actually the one that you can kind of wrap your mind around the best. The other two are a little more nuanced and can vary from person to person.

So traditional publishing is exactly as it sounds. You're getting a book deal with one of the big five publishers, most likely, unless it's a small secondary press or an academic press. And typically a traditional book deal comes with a book advance, whether it's 15k like my first book or 150k or I know authors who get 500k or more. Let's say if you're Prince Harry, it's 20 mil, which is actually the fastest selling book of all time, second to Harry Potter from first week sales. That really blew my mind. Traditional publishing, it's a machine. These are big companies and there is a lot of bureaucracy. But it's also the classic, it's the well oiled machine according to them. You know, I think there's some room for improvement in terms of tech savvy and efficiency, but that's just me. What you're really getting with traditional is beyond the advance itself, the brand. You get to be associated with a big brand. It's still seen as a gatekeeper, it's still seen a little bit as a filtering mechanism. So sometimes podcasters or media, they're underwhelmed, shall we say, by self or hybrid published books, because there is no gatekeeper. Whereas as soon as you say, oh, my publisher's portfolio or Crown or Simon and Schuster, there's some cachet there, there's some status, there's a sense that you've made the cut. And the elites in the publishing world, the powers that be, the ones with the great taste and discernment, have anointed you as qualified. So again, there's pros and cons to this, but it can be pretty nice to have a big brand behind you if you can achieve it, because it does open doors and you can even network with the fellow authors under that imprint and reach out, as I often did, to people I want to have on the podcast and say, hi, I'm a fellow author, or I'm a fellow portfolio author. I'd love to have you on the show.

All right. The second option is hybrid publishing. These are publishing houses that have assembled teams of experts, often teams of people who used to work for traditional publishers, but the cost structure changes. So with hybrid, the reason it's called hybrid is that they are still driving much of the process, but you as the author, are driving the funding. That means you're going to pay an amount up front for the team, you're going to pay for strategic consulting. You're going to basically pay for them to work on your project. So instead of getting in advance, you are paying for all the editors, the developmental editors, the copy editors, the book designer that they might subcontract out to. If you don't have your own person proofreader, you're also going to pay for the print run. However, what makes it hybrid is that they still have a process that they move you through. They are your partner throughout the whole process, and they might also, and oftentimes are quite discerning because they can only take on a certain number of projects a year. So they want to make sure these are ones that we believe in or that fit the imprint and the vibe that they're going for as a hybrid publishing house. Some examples of hybrid publishers include Idea Press, who I was really proud to publish with my friend Rohit Bhargava, who's a fellow author and speaker. He launched that company several years ago and just so impressed with what he's built because he wanted to solve what he saw as the problems with traditional publishers. Another example is page two. They're based in Canada. They have published all of MBS's books, or not all, all of them. But the recent ones like the Coaching Habit that has sold over a million copies. And my friend Casey Carter who was on this show, will put his episode in the show notes he did print on Demand with Page two. They also have an amazing team and they consult with you and they partner with you. And especially for a first time author, it's really helpful to have a whole team that knows what they're doing, that has a high standard for quality and helps you move through the entire process.

The third option is self publishing. People often confuse self and hybrid. They think, well, if you didn't get picked, you self published. As you just learned with hybrid. Hybrid involves a lot more investment and a lot more partnership with publishing professionals, even if they're not, quote, traditional. With self publishing, you're fully on your own. You have an idea, you write your book, use source subcontractors to edit it and do the page layout and then you can decide do you want physical copies of the book. If so, it's often the case that you're going to do print on demand because what hybrid and traditional publishers will do is help you fund a print run where you have to get to a certain minimum to have the numbers start to make sense and the cost of each book go down. So a traditional or hybrid publisher might help you print a print run of 10,000 copies or 5,000 copies. When you self publish, it's just harder to do that. You don't have the contacts and the connections. You might not have that much cash to spend upfront for something that you don't quite know how well it's going to sell. So you often would opt for print on demand through something like Amazon. CreateSpace might even be renamed by now. Or if you self publish, you could publish direct to ebook or even direct to audiobook. You could either go exclusive with Amazon and Audible and get a higher royalty, or you can publish in many different places and make sure that you're discoverable on any audiobook player, whether it's Spotify has audiobooks now. Findaway Voices is the main place you would upload in addition to Amazon's acx, that's the Audible platform for authors. So between ACX and Findaway, you're pretty much covered wherever somebody listens to audiobooks. A lot of fiction authors will go the self publishing route because they don't necessarily need physical copies of the books. They'll publish 10 books in a series and each book points to the next. And there are some authors and there are a lot of people who write about this, talk about this online who are extremely successful with creating a whole universe of interconnecting ebooks where one leads to the next, to the next, to the next. Joanna Penn is the go to expert on this kind of model. I'll put a link to her great podcast and website in the show notes. Some business authors will publish direct to Kindle as well, and you can even do that to test your market and test your sales, because there's no cost of goods sold other than the costs and time and energy that go into writing the content. So it's a little easier in that you're not dealing with printed proofs and really intricate page design. You will likely need to hire a contractor who could help you with format and upload the ebook and do that in different formats, make sure it looks right and the table of contents is linked, et cetera. But it's a little more straightforward. It's a little quicker and faster to get it up. And I would say in my experience, with free time, at least 50% are still buying the physical copy of the book. And then it's about 25 and 25 of who wants ebook and who wants Audible. But it's always changing. So you might decide that for your ideal reader, they don't care about a printed book. They're going to mostly listen to it while they're on the go. The main thing to think about with self publishing is that it is all on you. And for me personally, as an author, I don't think I'd get the project over the finish line because for a really big creative effort, I do like to be accountable to people and owe them things by certain deadlines. I know that if I were doing it all on my own, it would be really, really hard to stay motivated because there are a ton of moving parts, a ton of people you need to hire. Get them to stay on track with the deadlines, make sure that you're hiring the right people. It's a lot. It's not impossible, but it's a lot. And of course, even though you could just go direct to ebook or direct to Kindle, some people feel it's not really a book until you can hold it in your hands. And they want that moment, whether it's print on demand or print run with a traditional printer, they want to hold it. They want to see it on their bookshelf. And that would give your readers the impression too, that this is a real official artifact. This is a book.

We'll be right back just after this.

This episode is brought to you by State Farm Listening to this podcast Smart move Being financially savvy Smart move Another smart move Having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state.

Whether it's a movie night or just midday, Skinny Pop is a salty snack that keeps on giving. Made with just three simple ingredients for an irresistibly delicious taste and a large serving size that lasts deliciously popped. Perfectly salted Skinny Pop Popular for a reason. Shop Skinny Pop now.

Now let's get into the six considerations should you self publish? Should you go hybrid? Should you try to go traditional? I cannot tell you the answer, but I can tell you, having done a little bit of everything, how I would think about this.

Number one, what are your cash flow considerations? Do you have abundant cash flow in your life? Doesn't have to just be coming from your business? Do you have significant savings that you could fund going hybrid? Or are you at a point in your career where you you would really love an advance and you need an advance? When I wrote Pivot, that advance meant a lot to me. I was kind of in between big ideas. Life after college had come out five years prior, those speaking gigs of my keynote career in the age of the app had started to slow way down, and the advance was incredibly helpful as I built my way into the next phase of my business with Pivot and everything that surrounds it. So cash flow is a huge consideration. And that might also dictate whether you can afford to go hybrid or you want to start with self publishing. That might be a little lighter on the budget.

Number two, your business model. Is there a clear path from this book, this idea that you have as a marketing tool for bigger revenue streams? If so, you might be able to justify hybrid or self publishing where you're putting a lot of money in up front. You're taking on all the risk just as if you were your own venture capitalist, because you know that anything you spend on creating and printing and distributing the book will come back to you because that book is leading into other revenue streams within your business. Most authors I know who go hybrid tend to be business authors because their business can afford the cost of producing the book and co producing it with an A plus team, hopefully with whatever hybrid company you would choose to work with. Whereas if you're writing a Fiction book. It's just harder to justify that spend up front until the book becomes a smashing success and the ebook completely goes viral. And then maybe you can look at some other options. And by the way, there are many people where they start off self publishing and if sales are going bonkers, of course, traditional publishers start to peek around the corner and they might get interested and they might even offer a book deal for a revised edition.

The third consideration, quality. Self publishing gets a bad rap because anyone can do it, everyone can do it. I don't even know how many books are on Amazon, but it's millions and millions and millions. And the thing about self publishing is that there's so many ways it can be done poorly if it's a printed book. We all have seen a book that looks self published. Something about the paper quality or the cut on the edges or the COVID quality, or the design or the number of typos. Books take a lot of work and a tremendous attention to detail. And sometimes when people self publish, they don't really realize how much you need to have other pairs of eyes, other people working on it. A book, it really does take a village. It's just wild to imagine how many people are involved in producing one book that goes to print. Not just in the big idea and the structure of the writing, but down to every last detail. So when you're thinking about the quality, how important is quality to you? That's really important. Let's say you're going to go hybrid. You want to make sure you vet a hybrid publisher to see if the books that they produce are high quality. Do they look self published or do they look like they could be traditionally published? In the case of IdeaPress, they print at the same print shops that all the big traditional publishers use. So with free time, my whole goal was to go to bat with the big boys and that you would hold free time in your hands and you would never know. Actually, I wanted it to be more beautiful than a traditionally published book. And that's the other thing I want to say about quality. Having done two traditional and one hybrid, I was delighted to have so much creative control going hybrid. And I feel the quality of the book is much better because I was able to make choices about what I was and wasn't willing to pay for that influenced the quality and the delight factor of the book. So for example, with pivot, I asked the publisher, can we emboss the pivot logo on the COVID Embossing is where it gives it that three dimensional texture because the pivot logo is three dimensional. That was the whole thing about pivoting. It's dynamic. We're always in a continual state of pivoting. And I thought that embossing it, making that Escher esque already three dimensional looking logo, physically dimensional would be so exciting. And they said no because when you're a mid list author, you're not Brene Brown. They don't tend to say yes for all the bells and whistles because it takes away from the profit margin of that book and they're already taking a risk on someone like me. So they're not really willing to like go all out with the design. They will do the best that they can on making the content of the book exceptional. And Natalie certainly did that. She made the book so much better. The COVID design. I've never had a good experience with a traditional and I've never really been that impressed. When I see friends send drafts, we're often like crying hysterically behind the scenes. I was sick to my stomach with so many covers that I've been sent over the years. And so you're not even guaranteed quality in terms of the COVID If you look at any recent business books that have come out, sometimes you can tell it's just the COVID quality is so low it looks like clipart that those are the ones coming from traditional publishers. So when you're thinking about quality, I also for free time hired as you know, you've heard me say many times. An entirely separate brand strategy and book design team I worked with together agency. I'll put the episode with their co founder Adam Chaloja cheep in the show notes where we go behind the brand and really explain how he thought about things. But I spent a ton of money on book design because I wanted that high quality and I could because there was nobody to tell me no. So that's like a good thing and a bad thing. You can definitely let costs run away with you, but quality is a big consideration and you're not necessarily guaranteed top utmost quality just because you go traditional.

The fourth consideration is speed. Is speed a factor for what you're trying to create? I do not recommend rushing a book unless you're getting out a pilot prototype version. It takes time. It really does. My first two books took almost three years from working on the proposal to holding the book in my hands. Free time because I had been through the process twice because my process was so joyful with free time and the whole thing was about operational efficiency and idea press was willing to work on an accelerated schedule and because I was trying to ride a trend wave of what was going on with the pandemic and more people striking out onto their own. We went from proposal to published in one year, and that's remarkably fast. I knew when I met with Portfolio in March of 2021 that if I were to work with them again, the book would not come out until late 2023, if I was lucky. With Traditional, you have no control, by the way, if they tell you you have a certain pub date, as happened to me with Pivot, I thought it was going to come out in March of 2016, and at one point along the way, they just said, nope, we gotta bump you to September. Sometimes that's because you and the team are behind, you're just not meeting your deadlines and they need more time. And sometimes it's they're trying to figure out where you fit with their other authors. And again, if you're a mid list, you don't get final say over the pub date. So it could get pushed out six more months from when you're expecting it for no reason at all. And with Pivot, that really freaked me out because I felt like I needed, I needed the book to launch so I could launch the next phase of my business. I didn't even know how I would stretch my cash, my money, those extra six months. So it created a lot of stress. In the end, of course, it's always perfect, and I'm so glad it came out at that later date. Book publishing in general, no matter which route you take, takes a ton of surrender. The process is so massive that at every stage you just have to surrender, breathe, try to lower the anxiety of how much there is to do, how much is going on. But with Traditional, it even sometimes takes six months, just from the meeting you have with them to them saying, yes, we want to work with you. It could take six months just to get the contract written, go back and forth with your legal teams and signed. So I mean, that's six months right there. Whereas with hybrid, depending on your ability to meet your own deadlines and how quickly you and the other contractors that you're working with are able to work, I wouldn't recommend a year, but I do think you could do reasonably a year and a half instead of three years. So if you have a topic that's really timely and it's part of a current trend wave, or what's happening in the zeit, as my dad would say in the zeitgeist, or for your business goals, you just know you need it to come out sooner. Speed would be a factor in your decision.

The fifth consideration is team and process. With traditional, it can be a little bit of a toss up who you're going to be assigned to your team and how they're going to work with you. So you'd be very lucky to get a book deal with an acquiring editor who believed in you, who was really freaking good at what they do and stays with your project through the finish line. Because sometimes if a traditional publisher, they have turnover or they have people pivoting in and out of roles or the organization, so you're not always guaranteed that the person who even signs your book stays with it. And then you might be randomly assigned an editor that you may or may not resonate with. They might be more junior in their career. And so with traditional publishing, if it goes to auction, you have a little more control over at least who your editor is going to be, because you're as much evaluating them as in the various meetings as they're evaluating you. Now with traditional, process is its own bag. I don't know how to explain it other than you become part of a publishing machine. For better or for worse, there is simply more bureaucracy when you go traditional, because they have their ways and you're not their only author, and so they're going to put you in a process. Some of it works really well, like they send you a guide to working with us or here's what to expect in the next few years or at every stage stage. And then some of it is just maddeningly slow or inefficient or broken. And like any big company, you're kind of dealing with that bureaucracy and that infrastructure. People think that going traditional means you're going to have all this marketing support that is really not a guarantee. You're lucky. I was lucky that I had a lot of great marketing outreach help when we were working on pivot with portfolio. But you pretty much have to assume that you're going to do all the work. So don't go traditional, just hoping that they're going to get your books seen and you're going to get on the morning TV shows and all the big podcasts. No, most of that is going to come from you and your connections. You're also not guaranteed the team that you know and love with hybrid because you don't know who they're going to assign or get to help with your book. But you have a little more influence because you're paying the bills. So you just have the say over how many developmental editors you want or developmental edit rounds. Did you like this person? Or if you need to switch someone out or I had a preference that I only wanted my editors to work with me in the Google Docs version. I did not want to save to Word and send Word files back and forth. I hate with a passion Microsoft Word. So it was very important to me. I even said I would like to assign a different copy editor if they will not work in the Google Docs version. That was really important to me and a traditional publisher would have probably never allowed that. Another note on process I found it quite annoying that when they were helping line up podcast interviews it was a lot of back and forth and this was several years ago, so maybe they were more averse to using my calendly link, but I just thought it was really inefficient how scheduling happened and I wasn't allowed to get the email addresses of any of the hosts who said yes. There was a lot of masking and protecting contacts, which I did feel was kind of bizarre. But with traditional they will at least mail out all the media copies of your book, all the advanced copies. They really stopped doing physical galleys or arcs advanced reader copies during the pandemic, and I don't honestly know if they would say yes to that now today. And so I found it really valuable back when I traditionally published to say I'd like to send out 300 advanced copies to all my favorite bloggers, podcasters, media contacts. Or you could ask for 500. You could ask them to send out 100 to major media and they will. That might be something that you negotiate up front nowadays just to see. I think digital copies, digital galleys or digital advanced copies don't really work. I can just say as a podcaster myself, it's so much easier for me to forget this book exists and consider someone for my show when it gets lost in my Kindle app compared to when I see it on my desk and I go aha. Oh yeah, I want to have them on the show. So the fact that a traditional publisher will pay for the print run, that's a big expense upfront. They will pay for the warehouse to store all those books, which could be upwards of $1,000 a month if you have 10,000 books and they will pay to ship them out. These are all big expenses that add up if you're doing it on your own with hybrid or self publishing.

The sixth and final consideration that I can think of for now, although as usual, I'll probably think of five more by the time I stop recording this episode, I guess I'll just have to do a part two. There's the know that I tried factor, and that includes thinking about your platform size and your connections. So all this talk about the three options, we're acting as if everybody could get a traditional book deal if they wanted one. We know that's not the case. We know that they're very selective and not always with good reasons. It's like dating. Sometimes you just don't know why they've all rejected you. Or one publisher who says yes will say yes for the same reason that another one said no. And it just can feel kind of random. The number one thing that traditional publishers are looking for is the size of your platform and reach. Your book proposal is essentially a business plan. You are saying, based on my numbers, based on my reach, here's how I can prove to you that I can instantly sell 10,000 copies. Some authors are willing to pay for services that will help sell those 10,000 copies and they're willing to spend a lot of money to ensure and guarantee that they're going to sell those copies and often aim to make a list. Or they have a ton of corporate connections and they say, I already have five corporate clients that have each committed to 5,000 books each. I'm making up really big numbers. This gets the traditional publishers drooling. So yes, they care. Who are you? Like, why you? Why this book? Why now? They want to make sure it's not redundant to something else they have out there or even something they've recently said yes to that's not out yet, just like somebody pitching a TV show pilot. But most of all, they will salivate over the numbers. That's the thing that's going to be the tipping point. And so that's why some uber popular fitness influencer can get a book deal, even if the book itself is not revolutionary. They can get a book deal because they can show the publisher that there's going to be a strong roi. And this is something that authors have been talking about more lately, that it's harder and harder to get a book deal without these massive numbers. Publishers tend to pay attention to a lot of vanity metrics that the business owner themself knows are not actually real. Like you might tell them the size of your newsletter list and they don't even ask what the open rate is of who's actually seeing your messages. So all this to say the sixth consideration is just as I felt with my first book. I just wanted to know that I tried it was like applying to stretch schools out of college. I wanted to try to get an agent and I wanted to try to make the rounds and pitch publishers. And if every single traditional publisher said no for my first book, Life After College, or my second Pivot, then I would have self or hybrid published by the time it got to free time. And we were riding these crazy waves of the last three years. The number one most important thing to me was not knowing that I tried with traditional. It was ensuring that for the first time in my life I could fully execute my dream creative vision as manifested in a book. As I say in the acknowledgments, books have been my bomb, my best friends, my business advisors. Books have been so meaningful to me throughout my life. I wanted to create the best, most beautiful, most delightful book in the most delightful way on a delightful timeline that I could. And so my question was not pick me, pick me. Should I work with a traditional publisher? With a publisher, if you've already worked with them, you do give them first right of refusal typically. So I did have that one meeting, but after that meeting I knew, I knew I gotta go on my own on this one. And it actually even better fits the spirit of the book itself. So if you're a first time author, you might have that feeling that I just want to know that I tried and try to get an agent. There's a book proposal template in the author toolkit on the right hand side under the Pivot resource section. You might want to try to get an agent. And if you're able to do that and they believe in you, you go make the rounds and try to get a traditional publisher. And traditional publish might say, as they said to one of my friends, take a year, grow your platform, write for some what my friend Dori calls high profile publications and then come back to us. We're very interested. She did and then she got a book deal a year later after she did a lot of groundwork or every traditional publisher might say no. And then you go, okay, great, well now I'm at the next fork in the road. Do I hybrid or self publish? Because I'm still really committed to this book and this idea, I recommend listening to the episodes with David Moldauer. I'll put them in the show notes. If you're wondering how to get an agent, because we did really cover that, suffice it to say, write a one page query answering those questions, why me? Why now? Why this book about your platform size that author friends that you have might be willing to forward to their agents to say see below. Are you interested in having a call with this person? Make it really easy. So it's a one page query email bullet points, almost like a little resume of why should they get on the phone with you? And then with your agent, you can work on that bigger, often 30 page book proposal that again is more like a business plan. And the proposal also often includes two sample chapters. So what's wild is that if you whether or not you get a book deal writing the proposal, even I did write one for free time and I did write the sample chapters. It's kind of encouraging because although it takes a tremendous amount of work just doing the proposal alone, you get some momentum because the proposal includes your business plan, your marketing, your competitive titles, and then your whole full table of contents, often with a little summary of every single chapter. And then you've written two chapters. So by the time you do all of that, whether or not you get a book deal, you're kind of off to the races, having already started the book and being really clear on the outline. Even though of course things always change and evolve as you get feedback from readers and editors. There are several great books and podcasts related to all of this. I highly recommend Chandler Bolt's self publishing School podcast and he wrote a book called Published that I'll put in the show notes. There's also A.J. harper wrote a fantastic book. She is Mike Michalowicz's collaborator and she talks about how to write the best possible book that you can. And so I know I'm going to think of all these extra books and recommendations for you, but so just check the show notes. I won't read them out in detail now, but make sure you look at the show notes. For this episode. You can go to itsfreetime.com episodes162 and you'll find all the goodies. And I'll add to that over time as well as to the Author toolkit. Again, if you want to access the author toolkit with templates and loom walkthroughs of everything I can possibly share, that's@itsfreetime.com authors.

So before we go, let's recap three routes, self publishing, hybrid or traditional six considerations, cash flow, your business model, quality, speed, team and process. And knowing that you tried, which does include your platform size and your connections with that, you hereby have permission to take just one next step at a time. Even if you don't know how things are going to shake out. Even if you're nervous, even if it's vulnerable to put yourself out there. Just take one next step and trust that you will know what to do after that. This process involves so much surrender and so much intuition of just saying show me the one next step. Because you can't always know upfront what exactly the right thing to do is. And remember, when you're writing a book, you are a messenger. As you surrender the process, remember this mantra that I use, make me a messenger. Show me what would be in the highest good for all involved, including me, including whatever publishing team I work with, including the readers who are going to be reading this in the future, what is in the highest good and in best service of these ideas that I will bring through me by tapping into the collective consciousness. And if you can return to that that you are a messenger for this set of ideas, it can take some of the pressure off of you having to have all of the answers up front because you know what you're working toward and you know that no matter what, these ideas will get out into the world. And then, as I learned from Tosha Silver, the next prayer is just May this book find all the people who could benefit from it. So whether it's word of mouth, whether the growth is slow, just continually offering up the book and saying, may this find everybody who could benefit. Thank you so much for listening everybody. Send this to a friend if they're debating what publishing route they should go, and I hope you have a beautiful rest of your day and brilliant serendipity. Good luck and ideal timing for whatever book projects you work on next.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star. Thank you. Word of mouth is the most joyful way we can grow this show, and it helps us land interviews with the luminaries and insightful guests that you would most love to hear from. Please send this episode to a friend who might find it helpful, and for show notes and related links from this episode, visit itsfreetime.com while you're there, make sure you're subscribed to the Time well Spent newsletter. You'll get instant access to my Tech Toolkit, a continually updated list of all the software I use, along with the total monthly spend to run my business where no one works full time, even me. Visit itsfreetime.com join remember, you are are running the show. It's time for radical reimagining and everything is up for grabs. Let it be easy, let it be fun, and build with love.

Whether it's in Drive, Dropbox, Slack, or that folder called Ugh, Dropbox dash finds it fast Smart search built for messy humans. Learn more at Dropbox.com/.