This is a YouTube video titled "Self-Publishing or Traditional Publishing? (Money vs Status)" created in January 2024. The content features a detailed monologue or talk discussing the pros and cons of self-publishing versus traditional publishing, focusing on the financial and business aspects of book deals, publishing contracts, and the realities authors face in the industry. The speaker explains the predatory nature of legacy publishing, the economics behind advances and royalties, and the strategic considerations for authors deciding between self-publishing and traditional routes. There is no indication that Nicolas Cole is a participant in this content.
I just want to open it up for you. Tell me about self publishing. Tell me about how this, this became in your life in the first place and what the benefits are. Oh, man. Couldn't be happier to jam on this because, yeah, you're absolutely right. I. It's not something that, I mean, I've talked about it, but it's definitely not been the majority of our business at all. But yeah, most people, I think, don't really realize that the game, like the long game that I'm playing is not, hey, let's build an Internet business. You know, Like, I, I am extremely interested in, in digital first businesses and business models, and I also think that they are incredibly lucrative relative to, like, the legacy publishing world, for example. But, but like, that's not my end game, you know, like my end game and what drives me every day is James Patterson's worth $800 million. And I think that I can get there on my own through self publishing and through a combination of digital first education businesses in a way that no other writer up to this point in history has been able to do. And, like, that's my north star. Like, if J.K. rowling can make a billion off of Harry Potter, there's no reason why I can't make a couple hundred million. I just. There's no part of me that doubts that. And so let's start at the beginning. Okay. Why. Why am I so convicted in this? Okay. I am as much. It's. I think it's taken a long time for me to admit this to myself, but I am as much an entrepreneur as I am an artist. And I am as much an artist as I am an entrepreneur. And so one of the benefits that I've seen of building companies and building businesses in the context of being a very creative and artistic person is that it has taught me a lot about the business of publishing and the business of how do you make money with words. Number one takeaway is how predatory the legacy publishing industry is. And I'll give you a perfect example. About a year ago, Dickie and I got multiple book deal offers. We had multiple people reach out to us. There's a huge trend, of course, creators and people getting huge book deals. And I took a couple meetings and I looked at the contracts that agents were offering. And in the contract, the standard. The standard is them saying, out the gate, we represent you for life. So the moment you sign anything, you write for the rest of your life, they're going to take 10 to 20% of. Okay, the first, when they sent that to me, I literally laughed in their face and was like, you want me to sign what? And when I pushed them on it, they were like, this is standard. Most writers have no problem with this, okay? The reason most writers have no problem with it is because they don't know what they're signing. Insanely predatory. Okay? So number one, number two is most people also don't understand what's happening when you get an advance. Okay? So the average advance people don't realize is not very high. The average advance for a non fiction book is like 10 grand, 20 grand, maybe 50 grand. Right? And the only way you're getting above 100k six figure advance is if you have a giant audience on the Internet. And the I. Or you're a celebrity or someone. And the irony is if you have a giant audience on the Internet, then you don't need a deal because what they're buying isn't your talent. The publisher isn't buying the fact that you write a great book. The publisher is buying the fact that you have half a million Twitter followers. So you don't realize what they're actually buying from you, okay? And then most people also don't understand that when you get a book deal, what's effectively happening is think of that book as a company, think of that book as a business. Selling that book is a product of a. And that is your business, right? It's no different than you selling. I have a SaaS platform, I got to go get customers, right? You have a book, you got to go get customers. They give you an advance standard, call it 20 grand. And in exchange you get paid an 8 to 15% royalty, which effectively means they just bought 85% of your company for 20 grand. And as an entrepreneur, that makes absolutely no fucking sense. Right? And okay, so then we push this a step further, all right? I just, I got to finish the logic line. Okay? So then whenever I point that out to people, they go, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but the publisher helps me get distribution. All right, so let's just back up one. That would be the equivalent of you going to a VC firm and saying, I will sell you 85% of my company for 20 grand. And in exchange the VC firms like. And we're going to give you some ad spots in a publication or whatever their distribution promises, right? And I guarantee you whatever the distribution promise is probably isn't worth the 85% that you gave up for the vast majority of authors. But what happens is everyone points to James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, or everyone points To Mark Manson, author of Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. And it's basically like pointing to someone who wins the lottery and goes, well, it worked for them. So you go out and you buy lottery tickets because some random person in Idaho won the Powerball. And you think that that's your strategy for making money and that's it's so flawed. And then what they don't understand on top of that is they go, but the publisher gets me into a, into bookstores, okay? Have you ever walked into a bookstore? They don't have every book ever written in the bookstore. They have like the top 25 books that are all on the charts in the front display. And then they maybe have another like hundred or 200 books scattered around the bookstore. And you don't realize that half the reason why the books are there is because it's like a, it's like a self fulfilling prophecy. It's like the book's already selling and so we're gonna put it in the bookstore, which makes the book sell more, which, and it's like they are not going to take your book and put it in every bookstore in the US or every bookstore around the world. What they're going to do is they're going to take your book. This is exactly what's going to happen. They're going to take your book, they're going to put it in a test market, 30 bookstores in specific regions. You're going to be the one to spend your advance marketing the book that you now no longer own, promoting it to your audience, selling the book you no longer own. And then when you drive sales, guess what? For 99% of authors, you're not going to cross the tipping point where the publisher cares about you. And the publisher's business model is the same as a VC firm, which is we make 100 bets, 90 of them fail, 5 of them break even, you know, and then maybe the other handful, five are the giant returns, right? So when you get a book deal, the same time that James Clear got a book deal with Atomic Habits and he starts outselling you by a thousand to one, your publisher doesn't sit there and go, boy, we really got to work harder to help your book because we took 85% of it, they go, you don't matter anymore. We don't care about you. And now you're left to sell the book that you no longer own. And so it's taken me like 10 years to piece all this together. But now that I, like, see that whole logic line, I'm like there is only, I think there's only three scenarios where someone should take a book deal. One, you're only going to write one book in your life. If, if you know that you're only going to write one book and you don't have any interest in building the skills or doing any of the other things that have to do with becoming an author, you just want to write your one book, take the book deal. Because the, the economics of the book deal don't matter to you. What you want is the status. What you want is to be like, I got a book deal, right? So yeah, do that. The second scenario is if you want to play the I want to swing for the fences. Like this is either going to be the next Atomic habits or it's not. And in order to do that, that means you have to. Most people don't realize this. I did a whole study about this in my book Snow Leopard. We looked at the top bestselling business books of the past 25 years. We reversed engineered them into different categories. If you want to write a massively best selling book, it has to be in two categories. Personal development or personal finance. If you're not writing a personal development or personal finance book, you're not going to make the New York Times bestseller list. It's not going to happen, right? And third, if it's not one of those two, it probably is. But if it's not one of those two and you're like, I want to write a leadership book or an insights and thinking book or whatever it is, and I'm playing for the like even forget sales and money like I'm playing for New York Times bestseller, okay? Get ready to spend a quarter million dollars, get ready to spend your whole marketing, your whole advance. Get ready to spend money on your own, money from your own pocket, promoting your book. And most people don't like why is, why is Tony Robbins a New York Times bestseller seven times over? Well, because he has a hundred million dollar plus business that he can just throw money at and go, here you go. Most of the nonfiction business books that are bestsellers are from people who have a very lucrative business that they pour the money into the promotion of the book to guarantee New York Times bestseller. So if you don't understand all the pieces of that picture, what's happening is you're a little writer who's excited about being an author. And then the agent hands you the contract, you sign away your life and you have no idea what game you're signing up for. And as a result. There's this whole cliche about writers don't make any money, or authors don't make any money, or there's no. There's no money in publishing. And meanwhile, everyone thinks there's no money in publishing. And the big five publishers are doing 12 billion a year, so there is money in publishing. They've just convinced you that there isn't, so that you will sell 85% of your startup for 20 grand.
