164: Let’s Talk Royalties re: Publishing Options (Part Two)
8 Dec 2025 · 38 min
Jenny Blake breaks down how authors actually earn money across traditional, hybrid, and self-publishing routes. She uses her own books to explain advances, royalties by format, retailer cuts, and the math behind print runs. The path you choose depends on whether you want upfront cash, speed, or creative control.
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The profit from the book itself is really not the point when you're figuring out how to publish. It's what is this leading to? How does it connect with the rest of the business?
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.
Hello hello free Timers. Welcome back to part two of the conversation around should you self publish? What are the publishing options? In the last episode 162, I shared the three main options that you have if you want to get your book or big idea out into the world. You could self publish totally DIY on your own, often print on demand. You could go hybrid where you are funding the team upfront. You're partnering with an established hybrid publisher who knows what they're doing and has their own network of freelancers. And you could either print on demand or they could help you do a bigger print run to get economies of scale. And then option three, what you're probably most familiar with going traditional, where you actually partner with a big publisher. They keep consolidating over time, but they actually give you an advance. So not only are you not self funding the team or the printing or mailing out press copies, but you actually get an advance that hopefully buys you a little bit of time. Although most authors I know end up putting their advance entirely back into the book marketing. Now, astute listeners would have noticed that I barely talked about the profit side of the equation. Which of the three options is most profitable for the author? That's because it's almost a joke to say that I think most of us have heard the phrase a book is a business card. It's certainly not a profit center for the business. It can tie into profit centers. In fact, the best books, if you're writing nonfiction, if you want it to support your business. The best books would have a business backend that. The book does serve as marketing and exposure and brand building for other flagship offerings that you have. But what you don't hear is that a book is going to be a wonderful revenue generator. Not in and of itself. In fact, it's quite the opposite. The time to revenue ratio of writing, publishing and marketing a book is not for the faint of heart. Even still, there are nuances to consider when you're choosing between those three options of how to get your book out there. And so today I'm continuing on 162, sharing a little bit of a deep dive into these mysterious royalty waters and how you earn money from your book, at least if it's going to be directly from the book. How do each of those three methods, self, hybrid and traditional, stack up? I am just one person with three data points from my three books, from working with a really tiny publisher, working with a big flagship, big brand publisher, and then going hybrid. So if you want more data points beyond my own examples, I'll link in the show notes. You can check out the transparency projects Publishing paid me. It was a crowdsourced spreadsheet in 2020 trying to bring more equity and transparency into the publishing industry, specifically around advances. So there's nearly 3,000 responses in that sheet at the time of this writing. It's still publicly viewable and available, and you could see for different genres of books what people were paid in terms of their advance.
I'm going to work backwards on this one, starting with traditional publishing. So if you go the traditional route, a publisher will give you an advance that's in the best case scenario. And then usually you would have a literary agent who takes 15%. So I shared in last week's episode that my first book, Life After College, I got the book deal in 2010, had a $15,000 advance. And that's not usually paid out all at once. It's often paid out in four parts. Upon signing, upon manuscript delivery, upon publication date, and then one year after publication date. Every now and then there are bonuses built in. That book had a $5,000 bonus if I earned out within the first year, which I did gratefully out of nowhere. Target decided to buy 15,000 copies. But let's look at that 15K. So the agent is going to take 15% of that and then taxes are going to take another chunk. So that's more of an honorarium in this case Life After College, because it did earn out what that means. An advance is Essentially a loan against your future sales. You don't have to pay it back if you don't earn out the advance. But once you have earned out, like you break even with the teeny tiny royalty percentage. I'm gonna share more about that in a minute. Then that's when you get royalty checks. Publishers are notoriously slow and opaque with their reporting. So authors will often only see stats of their book sales twice a year, four times a year if you're really lucky. But I tend to only see two royalty statements a year. They're often very confusing to read and look at. And then with Life After College, it might be that twice a year I'm getting a $500 check. It could be a little more frequently. And if you sell foreign rights, those are, for example, a Japanese edition of Life After College or a Chinese edition. Those foreign publishers will also give an advance. It's usually smaller than the US advance, but it's still something. So if they pay $4,000 advance or 8,000, that also can be where some nice distributions come in. I shared last week that the Pivot advance was 10x my first book. That book deal came in 2015. It actually came in on my birthday in October of that year and that advance was 150,000. So again, of that, my agent would take 15% every time a check comes through, it's distributed over two years. And often in my case, I did put a lot of that money back into the brand and buying me time to build the business back end for when the book came out. With an advance of that size, $150,000. That's actually a big risk for a publisher because it's very hard for a book to sell that many copies. To give you an idea, there's an article I'll link to it in the show Notes that came out in 2022, where when there was a trial about monopolies and consolidation, Penguin Random House executives said that just 35% of books that the company publishes are profitable. Among those that make money, just 4% account for 60% of those profits. In 2021, fewer than 1% of the 3.2 million titles that BookScan tracked sold more than 5,000 copies. Fewer than 1% sell more than 5,000 copies. Another article from the observer covering this trial said that many of the advances authors receive against future royalties for the most lucrative deals are not advertising ever expected to earn out. Publishers own margins are substantial enough for them to profit handsomely, even if their authors never earn enough in royalties to surpass their advance. What would it even look like to earn out 150,000 advance? And again, I have author friends now who might earn double that. It really depends on the size of your platform, how many the publisher thinks you can sell, and whether they have competition at the time of giving you the book deal. Because in an auction, where multiple publishers want to give a book deal, that's why consolidation is bad, because there's less competition. So authors would not be in favor of big houses consolidating, because you have fewer and fewer options of where to publish, less competition, and ultimately a lower advance, which is the big moment that a traditionally published author typically will earn the money from that book, again from direct sales, not counting any other business activities. So with my example, let's take a look. What does it mean to earn out $150,000 advance, which I have not. So here we are. Pivot came out September 2016, and I'm recording this in early 2023. It has sold almost 40,000 copies. So that's in the top 1% of sales, as we know. And yet I still have a $30,000 deficit, or gap, in order to earn out the advance. That means that in seven years, I still haven't gotten another check beyond the four payments that came in right at the beginning of that publishing journey or across the first two years of the publishing journey, it would be my dream to earn out. It's just one of these things where there's a bar and I would love to hit it, but it's so rare. And I'm not saying it's impossible, but if I'm already, let's say, in the top 1% of sales, what would it take to clear that bar, to sell? What would amount to $30,000 more in terms of my royalties so that I could get checks in the future, which would be nice. You know, I say, quote, passive income, because we all know nothing is truly passive and it still requires marketing and keeping it alive in order to sell those books. So let's dig into the contract a little bit on the traditional side. Again, I'm just one author. This is just my data. My data points, they tend to be pretty consistent because big traditional publishers don't like to budge too much from their contracts unless you're super famous and have a lot of leverage. But the royalties that are stated in my contract for Pivot are that for hardcover, I would get 10% of the list price on the first 5,000 hardcover copies sold, 12.5 on the next 5% and 15% thereafter. So that means that if the hardcover was priced at $28, I would be earning $2.80 to $4.20 per hardcover sold. In terms of royalties, however, a year after the hardcover, we released the paperback edition, which was much more popular. It has an afterword. It's easier to carry with you while traveling. So the paperback list price is $17 and the royalties that I would receive are 8% on the first 150,000 copies sold. And now that we know the stats, we know that selling 150,000 is really rare unless you happen to be a mega best that point. In addition, when people buy in bulk or if I would buy direct author copies, you don't really get royalties at all. So when I was looking at my royalty statement for Pivot, I'm earning less than a dollar a book on the paperback copies that are sold. So I'm going to pull up my statement right now and I could see that. Hardcover, I've sold about 13,500 copies. Earnings are almost 37,000. Trade paperback, I've sold 21,225 copies. Earnings are 19,800, less than a dollar a book. So you can see how the climb to that 150,000 mark gets pretty steep with the ebook. Ebook, I think it's a little bit criminal. Ebook and audio, how much the publisher takes because there's no cost to them at all. So I sold around 10,000 ebooks and my earnings are 23,388, so about $2 a book. But if the publisher is selling it for $9.99 or $14.99, they're taking home, well, a good chunk of the rest. We'll talk about distributors in a moment because Amazon definitely takes a huge bite out of the pie when we sell foreign rights. As I mentioned, those are sometimes called subsidiary rights. And so my earnings, I have, you know, $80,000 in earnings from actual royalties and then about $40,000 from foreign rights deals. So like I said, that brings the total to 120,928. And the remainder that I would need to earn out my unearned balance is $30,000 somewhere around there.
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What's the point of me sharing all of this? I just want to give you as transparent a peek as I can into what these numbers are like and just how well your book would need to do to see another dollar. So the more business minded authors start to think to themselves, I don't like these numbers or I'm a business person, I don't need the advance in order to take time off or to supplement my income while I write this book. I have systems, I have team. And sometimes the business owner wants to be able to have more control over the process and have a little more skin in the game and a little more upside on the back end because it can get demotivating to do all this work to sell your book and sell, sell, sell and never see another dollar again. In terms of direct revenue, it's actually kind of weird how those incentives are aligned because sometimes a smaller advance, it doesn't sound as fancy when you say it out loud or to friends, but then it's easier to earn out and it looks like more of a success. The P and L for that book, let's say your first book or your last book, to get a future book deal. And so in my case, you know, the book has done really well. I'm sure Penguin Random House has long since been profitable on Pivot, even if I haven't been getting royalty payments. And yet it's not great to say, oh, the book didn't earn out. So sometimes you don't even want to get a big advance. It's nice to have a smaller advance, clear it, and show that the book has been a success. This is where hybrid and self publishing start to become a little more interesting because maybe if you control the process, you have creative control, you can assemble your own team. Yes, you're fronting the money up front, but there's more upside, there's more reward, and you can do more creative things in terms of reprints how you sell and package the book. So I learned so much going hybrid, which again means that I'm paying a chunk of money to engage with the hybrid publisher IdeaPress, who has sourced their freelance network of editors and designers from people who often have strong background in traditional publishing. What was interesting about that is that you know the good news and the bad news is I have full creative control. And you've all heard me talk about how important the book design was to me, that I wanted to know for once in my life that I fully executed a book's creative vision to the best of my ability. The best, most beautiful book that I could create. And I really wanted free time to go to bat with the big publishers to look even better than how most business books are published and printed. So I was quite luxurious, let's say in terms of my unit costs. That was by choice. I will break down the numbers for you right now. But I will say that the possibility with Hybrid is that if you don't produce an expensive book and then it sells well, yes, of course you can earn so much more per book. That's not necessarily the position I put myself in. I'll explain why, but there are some books that have done extremely well, like the coaching habit, which MBS talked about on one of our conversations, that his previous publisher, Workman, kept rejecting his proposal over a course of several years. So he finally said, forget you, I'm going to Hybrid publish. He went with page two press there in Canada. And because the size of that book is nice and compact, it's not too many pages, it's a small trim size as it's called, he was able to print them at scale, print a lot at any given time and then it has sold over a million copies, well more beyond that by now. And so that's a really nice profit center in and of itself. That's hybrid done really, really well. Phil Jones is another one. He has a great YouTube video. We'll put it in the show notes exactly how to sell 1 million books. His is also a really small compact term size. His book is called exactly what to say. And when you work with a hybrid publisher you can do things like a custom print run. So let's say company A wants to buy 500. Well you as the author could then say if you buy 500 or more books, we can have a custom forward from your CEO and the book can be co branded or we can put a special company a logo on the COVID You can do things like that and that can enable you someone Like Phil, to sell a ton of copies in bulk to companies with these extra bells and whistles. So Phil has also sold, I believe, over a million copies of his book. Exactly what to say. He's done many different versions of it. He really leans on bulk sales and is able to be very profitable for him because the cost of printing each book is not excessively high. Freetime had a number of interesting factors at play. For one thing, when we sent it to press in 2021, when we sent it to print, we were right in the thick of supply chain issues. The cost of paper was spiking. My book was longer than it really should have been. Than the publisher at IdeaPress gave me a parameter, you know, no more than 250 pages. Well, I just couldn't quite figure out what else to cut. So it's 336 that affects the price. I have spot color on the inside. I have the ribbon that you've heard me talk about, my pride and joy ribbon. That was the first thing I asked Rohit about when I was even considering how to publish this book and who to work with. I said, can I have a ribbon? That's $2 per book. The gold foil on the COVID $1.50 per book. Now, most traditional publishers would have said no flipping way. Unless you're Prince Harry or Brene Brown, there's no way we're spending an extra $2 a book just so you can have a ribbon. If you're what they call a small or mid list author, you're in the middle of their list. You're not the star celebrity author. They're just not going to even say yes to those bells and whistles. But because I got to CEO this book and have final say, I ended up creating a book that I knew would break even when sold through Amazon. But the idea press structure is that I'll keep 100% of profit if I sell directly. So If I sell 50 copies to a company, I'll keep 100% of the profit. Did you know that when you sell through retail? So let's look at Amazon, for example. Amazon takes 52% of the list price. So that means that free time, because all the bells and whistles, it's a little higher than most hardcover. It's $32. Right away, Amazon's going to take 52%. Within that chunk that they take up front, they toggle the price of the book and how discounted is or not according to their mysterious algorithm. So those discounts that you see on Amazon, that's All happening within their 52% take. So of a hardcover book like mine, that's $32. The retailer, Amazon's keeping $16.64 and we keep about $15. The way it's structured with my hybrid publisher is that they keep 30% of retail sales, so that's about $4.60 per book. And the gross take home from a free time copy sold through Amazon is $10.75. My unit cost to print was $10.50, so you can see that it's break even. And that was okay with me because I wanted it to be such a beautiful book that it would drive word of mouth that people would want to buy multiple copies, gift them to team members, to friends. I call it the collector's edition. And I figure if the book was a real sizzle piece that you would want to talk about, that can also lead to more podcast listeners and people to purchase the free time operations dashboard at the end. Done for you dashboard after you finish reading or join our private BFF community, that there were plenty of paths that a reader could take that I'm okay seeing that unit cost of the book basically be break even rather than trying to eliminate one of my favorite features and end up with okay, 50 cents a book. It just wasn't a big enough gap. However, if I had created a really small trim size or a paperback only, or I, you know, I didn't include any of the really fancy features or we weren't in the middle of a supply chain crisis, you know, different things, then the book could be more profitable in and of itself. To date, we've probably sold about 5,000 hardcover copies of the book. So for example, if the book didn't cost quite as much to print, and we do 5,000 times $5, that's $25,000. Again, to me, the profit from the book itself is really not the point when you're figuring out how to publish. It's what is this leading to? How does it connect with the rest of the business? And in the case of hybrid publishing, you would really want to save all the profits from the book sales themselves, its cost of goods for the next print run. Because if all goes well and the book is selling well and you sell out your first print run, you want to do another round. The way that print runs work is that there's economies of scale, so it costs far more per book. The print run kind of break even for me was printing at least 10,000 copies, got the unit cost low enough that I could at least break even. Through retail sales. And that was obviously crucial because let's say if I only wanted to print 5,000 books at one time, well, maybe the unit cost would have been $15 a book. And so printers reward quantity. So if you have the money to fund or a less expensive book to print, you could get a much cheaper unit cost by printing 50,000 copies at one time. This is what you always see on Shark Tank when they're talking about what they're going to use the money for. And often it's that they want to bring their individual unit costs down so that they can make more profit, but they need more funding upfront to even fund that larger order.
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Let's talk about ebook and audiobook. These can be very profitable for the author, especially when you go hybrid or self publishing, because the traditional publishers really has their hand in the honey pot on this one. I swear. So this is really, I think, a dirty trick from the large online retailer that shall not be named in this section of the recording. This really pissed me off. So did you know that because the traditional publishers have deals with that large online retailer, they're able to negotiate selling an ebook for $14.99 with a different royalty structure. But for all the rest of us, including hybrid published authors, Amazon essentially makes you price the book at $9.99 or below in order to receive a 70% royalty rate. So that means that if you sell the list price for the ebook is 9.99. 70% of that is $7 take home for me and my publisher. So publisher would take 30% of that and then my take home would be close to $5. But Amazon punishes you if you try to price it higher than $9.99, the royalty drops to 35%. So I just think that's so criminal. So if you sell, if you're not a big publisher and you sell for 14.99 times a 35% royalty rate, the take home is just $5.24 for you. And the hybrid publisher, I think that's very lame. Now if you're self published, you're not sharing any of that. So if you're self published, this is why some people go direct to Kindle or direct to audiobook or even both, because you can get $5 per sale of Kindle and Audible. And so I've already been receiving payouts from ebook and audiobook, which is really exciting. It's not passive again, given all the work that goes into it. But it's really exciting to be able to get direct deposits every month that are coming from ebook and audiobook sales. And you would never see that money if you were working with a traditional publisher because they keep so much of it and because all those sales really have to go back into earning out that big advance. In my case, that means that even though the hardcover breaks even when sold through retail, I am earning money that essentially funds the hardcover through audio and ebook sales. And that means that basically for every one hardcover book that sells, I need to sell an ebook and, or an audiobook or two of each that just funds the printing of that hardcover. Or if you look at it in the bigger sense, the word, you know, hopefully x percent of book sales lead to further engagements with the free time business. In the case of keynotes, I've talked about that in previous episodes, demand is light at the moment. But there was a part of me that figured, okay, five keynotes would sort of earn out the cost of printing the books. Now, the difficult part of Hybrid was, and because fully responsible, I fully chose to create the most beautiful book I could, which meant that it was expensive. It also meant coming up with $110,000 paid up front to do that first print run of 10,000 books. Now, I could really only do that once I sold a condo beginning of 2021. I took a lot of that money, put it into this whole process, put it into taking most of 2021 off to write the book and get it out at rapid clip. I don't think I would be able to fund that size print run over and over just because my business isn't that profitable that it's spitting out an extra hundred grand all the time. I mean, some people do have those kinds of businesses, but that's a big consideration. For whether you go hybrid or self published, whether you want to create a big like collector's edition beautiful book like I did, or you're okay with it being a little bit more pared down so that the numbers crunch that they pencil correctly and you're not like put into tremendous financial stress or, or as you can do with hybrid or self publishing. Print on Demand. With Print on Demand it's going to be a higher unit cost and it might not look quite as official or traditional because it's not run through a printing press. It's a different type of process that spits out cuts the paper, prints the pages. But a lot of print on demand books look pretty good these days. Print on demand is as it sounds, that only once a purchase is made, the book is printed. So even if you're paying a little more per unit, you know that you're not paying. You don't have to get a big chunk of cash together up front. You're just paying as the book is sold. So that can be more relaxing for the author as well. I see a lot of fiction writers self publishing going straight to Kindle and then creating a whole daisy chain of books like a 10 book fiction series where one book leads to the next and the next. And a lot of people, I mean there's more and more happening where you go direct to audio as well. With Amazon's Audible product, if you are non exclusive, as in you want to also have your book available on Spotify Audiobooks and Apple Audiobooks, your royalty is 25%. That's the route I chose with freetime. But if you publish exclusive Audible only, the royalty is 40%. So for a five to 10 hour audiobook, it might sell for 15 to $25. And then you choose, do you want to go with the big monopoly and have it be an Audible exclusive and therefore take home more, or do you want to go non exclusive and take home less? With all of this said from episode 162 on the nuts and bolts of the process to this one164, where I've tried to give you the most detailed breakdown I can of how royalties work and profit from a book, maybe I've already bored you to tears and you stopped listening long ago, the question still remains, what should I do? And I get this question all the time, and especially from people who are on the fence who specifically want to ask about hybrid publishing or self publishing. And sometimes I get not annoyed. But when people say, oh you self published, I go not at all. Self is so different. Than working with an established hybrid publisher who knows what they're doing. And with IdeaPress they really served as a vital strategic partner. They submitted free time. We've won six awards in less than a year thanks to them submitting it left and right. They're super creative with marketing ideas. So hybrid is definitely a much more robust partnership than self publishing. It's easy to mistake them, but I encourage you to just kind of know how to parse the difference. But the question remains, well, what should you do? Here's what I would think about have you published a book before? If not, maybe you do want the big brand association. You want to know that you tried, as I shared last week, by trying at least trying to get a traditional book deal. And in doing so you have that fancy brand association, access to their author alumni network, and it's nice to know at one point in your career that you did it. So I would ask, have you published a book before or is this your first book? If it's your first book again, maybe you want to go traditional just so you learn the process. With a traditional publisher, with a well established process and pipeline, do you have a really profitable business that could fund going hybrid? So how much cash do you have available? That's the next question I would ask. It's very cash heavy to hire the team. I did a lot of brand work even outside of hiring IdeaPress, funding the print run, funding the warehouse storage on a monthly basis, funding sending out media copies. And I put a lot of bells and whistles into those too. On the free time side of a little surprise and delight gift box with pins and pens and green shred. Long story short, you're funding all of that, so you gotta have a lot of free cash flow to do that. So do you have that? Do you have the stomach for it? Do you want to take that big risk on yourself? It's a big bet that you're placing on yourself and your ability to sell the books and earn back all of that investment, which, as we know from the stats, is not easy to do.
The third thing I would ask is what is your creative vision? So are you really fixed on a certain creative vision and product or is it okay that you compromise a little bit on that front? Hopefully you get a great editor if you go traditional. You're not always guaranteed that, but ostensibly they know what they're doing and maybe you don't need all the visual bells and whistles. You're happy to get your big idea out into the world. And number four, what's your timeline. If you are really on a time crunch or you really don't have the patience to wait two and a half to three years. If you're going traditional and you know that you are really efficient, you're good at juggling complex projects with multiple deadlines, you're a good leader, you can carve out the time to write, publish, market the book. That might also impact whether you want to go self or hybrid. I would say to go self, if you really want to go lean, you don't have a lot of money saved up, but you have these ideas. You want to get them out there, you want to get them out there relatively quickly. Or it's a compact idea, it's like a Kindle single. I always mention Jim Collins flywheel monograph. It's a one big idea from his bigger idea books or you're someone that you just want to pilot an idea before you go all in. Before you even try to get a book deal or hybrid publisher, you go direct to Kindle or direct to audio and get feedback, get your early listeners get feedback and use that to test the waters to see if you want to go bigger. If you have the money, you have a profitable business, you really believe in yourself, you're not risk averse and you feel confident that you can handle the complexity, especially if it's not your first rodeo, it's not your first book, then I would say you can be a fit for hybrid publishing. It's not for the faint of heart, but it is great for entrepreneurs because it's a very entrepreneurial process. You're learning a lot. There's a ton of complexity, a ton of different team members involved at various points in the process. And you're essentially. What I think is most fascinating about book publishing is you're just taking this little figment of imagination from your mind into a finished product that people can hold in their hands. It's incredible. That's my favorite part about publishing is this little whisper of an idea. For me, it was a download that came while I was walking, free time, a phrase that just dropped into my mind. And that whisper of an idea becomes a full blown book with a whole set of business activities behind it and a brand and a podcast, and all of you here listening right now. It's incredible. Like I live for that feeling. And going from zero to one, from an idea to. Because I've been a lifelong bookworm, holding that in my hands is just so special. That to me is priceless. No matter how profitable the outcome, it's already A success.
I hope between these last two episodes I've given you enough to at least juice your intuition a little bit. Ultimately, as with everything that involves getting a book into the world, it's like buying or selling a house. It's so complicated and there are so many moving parts that you have to continuously just surrender, surrender, surrender, surrender, you know, show me the one next step and trust the process. So I hope that in these last two episodes, maybe it sparked your intuition, something lit up, something resonated, where it kind of guides you a little more down one path, or at least to start going down that path and see if it starts to flow, the energy is there, the universe rolls out the red carpet. Or maybe you keep getting doors slammed in your face on a certain path you try to take. Or a tremendous resistance. As I had with life after college, when I thought I would self publish, I just hit the wall. That book would have never come out if I tried to self publish because I didn't have it in me to do it by myself. So you will know, once you start taking the steps, you will know and you will be shown what what to do. Sometimes you just gotta take one next step and one after that. So to wrap up, you hereby have permission to take your time, keep marinating on the idea itself, and trust that you'll be shown what to do with the process. You also have permission to take the pressure off. This can be such a pressure filled type of goal. It feels so monumental and so challenging, like climbing Everest to write the book at all, let alone decide how to publish it. So no option is perfect in a way. You can't go wrong. If you self publish, you can see if it gets traction and you can always try to pitch it or a version of it later down the road to a traditional publisher. If you try to get an agent and a traditional publisher and nobody bites, well, great, there's that answer. And with all of this, like I said, no one path is perfect. There's pros and cons to all of it. I think at the end of the day, what's most important are the ideas themselves that you actually craft the book and the ideas themselves to the very best of your ability. And then as I shared Tosha Silver's quote with outrageous openness, you just offer the book and say, whoever can benefit from this book, may it find them. That depends so much less on the publishing path and more on the energy of the book, the spirit that you infuse into the book as you write it or as you narrate the audiobook and as I say in free time. How we bake is as important as what we make, so try not to stress too much about the process and your options. The whole thing could be completely anxiety provoking if you let it be. Try to enjoy the complexity, the uncertainty, the massiveness of this type of project and again, just keep going. Try to create the best product you can while enjoying the process as much as you possibly can and trust that it will all work out. Thank you so much for being here listening. Have a beautiful rest of your day and I'm wishing you all well with your big ideas in progress.
If you've listened this far, you get a gold star.
Thank you.
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