How Thought Leaders Win the Publishing Game | Ken Lizotte | 674

And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you're joining us on a version of our podcast that we do on LinkedIn Live. So my guest today is Ken Lazotte. Ken is an old friend. He is the author of 7 books, including The Speaker's Edge, the ultimate go-to guide for locating And landing lots of speaking gigs. He has written a whole bunch of other books. We won't get into those just yet. He's a columnist and a blogger at the Huffington Post. He's the chief, chief imaginative officer and founder of Emerson Consulting. And he's worked with over 350 clients towards their, you know, focusing on the publication of their books and articles. He's a certified management consultant. He's got lots of other accolades, but I don't want to bore you with those.

Not that they're boring necessarily, but Peter, time's running out.

Exactly. So Ken, welcome aboard. Thanks for coming on today.

Thank you. Thank you. My first ever in live, so it's, it's a maiden voyage for me.

There we go. Yeah, I hear this internet thing is, is probably here to stay, so we, we wish you luck on that.

Maybe.

Um, so explain, you know, you and I have had this conversation, but explain for us in layman's terms what it is you do, who pays you to do what? 'Cause it's a little bit confusing, but I think once you unpack it, it makes a ton of sense.

Well, not really. It shouldn't really be confusing. My clients pay me. How does this sound for everybody?

Great. Thanks.

Okay.

That actually— thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

But my firm is, the primary specialty is helping my clients get a book published if they, if they want to get a book published. Sometimes people don't really want to get a book published. They're, it's too overwhelming for them. In that case, we work with them on articles and get articles, ongoing series of articles so that they're, they're publishing their ideas. And in that way, they're positioning themselves as thought leaders. So that's the whole—

but when you say you're helping them get a book published, Yeah. But you're, you're not an agent, right? You're not a publicist. You're not a ghostwriter because people need to figure out, I think, where do I put you in the spice rack?

Yeah. Well, actually my firm has got a small staff, but my firm does provide all of those things. We do serve as an, as an agent the same way a literary agent would serve, but we do it through our, our fees as opposed to the traditional agent approach, which is usually to take a percentage of royalties or an advance, you know, like that. And I learned early on when I started this business 27 years ago, and my background had been in publishing and in writing and all. And I had been a ghostwriter at one time, and I had written articles on a regular basis and all. But when I got into this business, what I, what I really wanted to do is, was help people make their, their book or article dreams come true. And that sounds a little lofty, but it's really true because people do have a sense very often that they, they've got an idea for a book and they, their, their, their biggest concern is whether or not anybody would publish it or is there any way anybody read it? Would anybody buy it? Would people laugh at it or would they not, or would it be taken seriously and all of that? And I actually, um, coordinated with my clients in the first year since I had known, uh, literary agents and I had known publishers directly myself. I thought the smart thing to do would be to work with literary agents, uh, most of them at Peter Winick and, uh, work with my clients and get paid for helping create a proposal, which is what, uh, one needs to do if they're gonna they're going to land a publishing deal and then turn it over to a literary agent. And the interesting result of all of that after about 6 months, 8 months, or a year is that none of the agents, these were top agents who got very excited about this or that project, none of them came through with a publisher. And my client would say to me, uh, Ken, what's going on with the agent? I hadn't heard And guess what? I didn't know because they wouldn't, they wouldn't respond to me either. If they didn't have good news, agents don't want to respond. So after about like approaching a year at this, I said, you know, if this was all about failing, I can do that myself. Why do I have to, why do I have to delegate that? So, um, so that's what I did. And that, so that I took the literary agent piece and folded it in to the writing and editorial where we helped create the proposal. And then as the years went on, you said publicist, we do offer publicist service as well, promotion. We do offer ghostwriting, but not, yes, but not really. Because one thing I learned, uh, uh, in my own experience with ghost— being a ghostwriter and knowing ghostwriters, uh, when I was younger, is that it's a very hard thing to pull off. No matter how great a writer you are, it's very hard to get into somebody else's mind and experience and years of nuance and all of that and really become that person. So sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

No, it's, it's tough. So give, give us a sense though. You, so you've been at this game for quite some time. The sort of the changing landscape of publishing and what the expectations are. And then after you depress us with that, maybe enlighten us with a little bit of what a book can do for somebody from a career standpoint, from a business standpoint, from a getting the ideas out there standpoint.

Well, the biggest, the biggest difference, but this really goes back decades as opposed to just a few years, is that publishers do much less than they used to. I'm going to say like 30 or 40 or even 50 years ago in terms of promoting their own books. And it's all on the, on the author now. So when I work with someone and we are preparing a book proposal, The most important piece of that book proposal, the most important piece, more important than the idea of the book, is what is the author prepared to do? And what would be the author's promotion plan?

So stay there for a minute though, because this is where ultimately in many instances there is and will continue to be a lack of alignment between what the objectives of the author are and what the publisher are. Because at the end of the day, a publisher, good, bad, or ugly, it's number of units sold times some profit margin in excess of an advance if one was paid. If they don't do that, they don't get to stay in business.

Right, exactly. And I guess for it, and guess what? That's the same as what the dynamic you encounter if you do a contract with an agent. So those agents that were not returning my calls as well as my client's calls, and then my client would have, back in that situation, would have signed a contract directly with the literary agent that I put—

Yes, not with you. Right, right, right.

Well, they weren't getting return calls and it really was before emails was, you know, as it, as it is now, but, but so the thing is that an agent whose income is reliant on what a publisher will bring to them and what the units sold of a book will bring to them means that they have to act in the very same way in terms of screening out. Right. Yeah.

And, but I, where I was going though is for many authors, a book could be wildly successful except if you look at BookScan and go, well, Wait, that only sold X number of units because for an author, wildly successful might mean you got invited to the right stages. Someone hired you as an advisor or consultant, all the other things that are not a couple of bucks that you're going to make on a per unit basis of the book. So I think in many instances, the relationship has so much tension due to the lack of alignment. So therefore, you know, and you know, you still, when you start as mostly sort of New York publishing houses, we now have, you know, a continuum of ways to get things out into the marketplace. There's self-publishing, there's hybrid, right? Which is kind of a sharing risk on the business model standpoint. And then there's traditional. And I would argue that, you know, if I put $3 in front of you, you couldn't look at them and tell which is which. 15 years ago, I think you might have been able to from a quality standpoint, but you know, Qualities are non-negotiable. So talk about maybe the selection of the right business model type of publishing relative to a particular author's goals and objectives.

Well, there's, there's two games. There's two. And when you're, when you're contracting with a publisher, you have a publisher as opposed to self-publishing or hybrid or any of that. I mean, that's, that to me is all self-publishing. But when you sign a contract with a publisher, it's because you are agreeing to play their game, which is that you're going to work very hard to get as many units sold as possible. That's where the publisher makes its money. But, but in reality, most of my clients, although they would, you know, a lot of them would love to have a best-selling my bestseller, everyone can feel that. But what they really want is the credibility from having a book and the use of a book as a marketing tool for their businesses as much as for the book. But the publisher doesn't really want that. So you've gotta play both games or you got to kind of opt out of the, of the publisher's game so that you can use your book to make more money. Now, I, I know that you were involved in a major research recently or survey.

Yes.

Yes. And, and I know what came out of that and I actually could have participated, but I chose not to because I, I kind of wanted to just see what other people like you, you know, came up with in terms of the results. Yeah.

Well, and just to fill in folks what we're talking about, we published back in the fall, the largest ever comprehensive research study done at looking at the question of what is the ROI of a nonfiction book. So it was, it was a partnership between my firm, Thought Leadership Leverage, Gotham Ghostwriting, Smith PR, and Amplify Press. So we wanted to answer this question because we're each in the space serving similar people doing different things.

Wow.

So what was your take on that? Oh, it would've been the greatest, other than obviously the greatest report ever written. But if you're enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com. /ltl and share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as at thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast.

Well, it was them too, of course. That's the first thing you think of. You and then the others that were involved, Josh Bernoff, uh, was one. Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, um, what, what it was, was it affirmed what I already knew. It confirmed it. I was kind of wondering if I've been missing something. Every now and then you want to do a reality check. Sure. So, you know, and, but it was the same thing. That's, you found that people made money, people were surveyed, made money by other means than sales of books. You made money from speaking engagements and/or consulting fees and, you know, training, all those kinds of things. Those are the things, the way you can say this book made me money.

So stay there a minute because I, A, that is one of the insights from the research, but what's interesting about that is you say, okay, so you make money from selling a book by making money by selling things, not the book. So if I was in the candy business, I wanna sell the candy for a margin that drops a profit, right? So it would be number of candy bars or bags of candy or whatever, and I'm counting the days till Halloween and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, with a book, it's quite different because you could also have a book that is commercially incredibly successful, sells a ton of copies, et cetera, et cetera., but for some reason doesn't resonate with the market that it should have resonated to grow the business of the thought leader. That's unusual, but that happens too. So it's, it's not an exact correlation necessarily of the more you sell, the more you're exposed to the right people. It's gotta get to the right people. And I think, and I'd love to get your take on this, a lot of authors try to please everyone as opposed to getting really, really laser-focused and saying, you know what, most of the world doesn't care who I am, what I do, what I write about, what I research about, and that's okay. Keep it laser-focused on that small slice of the population where your work would have the greatest impact. So how would you think about that, Ken?

Well, to me, that sounds like sort of the normal course of business in some ways. A lot of times when we start out with a company, in a service that we think is the service that we'd really want to promote, who our target market, uh, right, to be is different than what we thought. It's like, for example, I, before I started this business, I was in a different one where I was helping people in mid-career crisis work the, work that out for themselves and, um, and, um, and maybe make a career change or something like that. And that, that was, that was at a time in, that was in the '90s. It was at a time when, uh, there was a recession going on and it was also the time when all this rightsizing and downsizing and everything got crazy. When I would, I'd be talking to somebody or at a party or something and they'd say, oh, what do you do? I'd say, well, I'm helping people, uh, get out, out of, um, you know, career crisis and this and that. And invariably the person would say to me, Well, gee, wow, you must be booming. And guess what? I wasn't booming yet. Okay. Because I looked at the attendance sheets that I'd pass out when I went out and spoke, or I looked at who our clients were, what their situation was. And very, very, very few of them were unemployed. The unemployed people were not coming to me or to us, my partner and I. And, um, and then we realized the people who were coming were people who still had a job, but they could look down the road and say, I think I gotta make a change, but I'm gonna take some time and reflect and figure it out. So I found that it was a different clientele that, that I had to go at. And I can see that that could happen with a book. But I think that the idea is that, uh, in most cases what I see, and I, I see a couple of my my, what I call client thought leaders and that have some messages here. Todd Church is just saying that I got him a book deal with Simon Schuster. Post Hill Press helped him get his book Visual Leadership and Brand out there in the world. I know what Todd does. He's very careful about where he puts a lot of his energy. So, so that's him. And then another one that I see is Jen Freed, who's who's saying that I helped, I helped Ken too. My hope is that my dream continues to come true. She, she, Jan is also really focused on speaking engagements and to the right audience and this and that. So you gotta, I think what I'm saying is that it can go in another direction and maybe that'll be okay for you, but if it's not, then use the book as a tool for who you want to get to. And, and if nothing else, people are just plain impressed when you have a book, whether they read it, whether they buy it, whether they this and that, right? It's a tool that really validates the fact that you're an expert.

And, and, you know, the, the other disconnect, if you will, between what works or what is a best practice for an author and a publisher is books, no pun intended, have a long shelf life for an author, but for a publisher, They think about them as seasonal, you know, releases because that's the cadence of the business, right? Like I have a spring release, I have a fall release, whatever. Todd, I'll let, I'll point out Todd 'cause he's a mutual friend. His book is out, I think it's 2 years, maybe, maybe 3, Todd. And he's still getting attention from it.

He's still getting that new, uh, people reaching out to him because still using it. And now he's still using the picture that I, I that gave you to put out to everybody who's attending had me holding this book, The Expert's Edge, that I wrote, published. Okay. The Expert's Edge: Become the Go-To Authority People Turn to Every Time. Okay. They, they actually put that title and subtitle on there, but yeah. Where? Yeah. Okay.

Yep.

And when was, when did I publish this? When did I have this published? Late 2008. Well, Billy, isn't it? You didn't, you didn't ask me whether or not the book I am holding in the photo was a recent book. You just accepted the photo. But this, but this is still an important book for a lot of people. I know if—

well, for most, most books are evergreen and principle-based, right? If that, if, if you were pointing out a book in 2008 on I don't know, best software to use to automate your office, you know, I probably wouldn't be interested in that.

Yeah, exactly. That's true. So, yeah. Yeah. So that's most of the point, I think, as far as that goes. Shazdi. Cool.

So as we start to enter the last couple minutes here, somebody's out there theoretically or hopefully considering writing a book, what would you tell them to consider and what would you tell them to think about before they choose to sort of dive in?

Yeah, the, the, the first thing I do in a case like that when someone comes to me like that is help them understand just what we're talking about today. The, what are the two options here? What are the two? I call 'em games. What are the two games? You're gonna play the publisher's game or are you gonna play your game? And your game means that the smartest way, the most logical way to go about it is to self-publish, which I offer that service to. So, well, I'm not trying to convince anybody to go this way or that way. I think they just need to know what the ups and downs are of each of these. And when you look at it logically, self-publishing makes way more sense. Than having, because it's, you've got the control of being able to control the content, the title, the COVID this and that. You don't get all that speed, the, the time to market, right? Yeah. Or whether you can weather the market, the market. So, um, so it's very important to make that decision in the beginning. And then once you've made that decision, then we can go forward and we can get the book that you want to put out for you to find a publisher for it. And we'll just keep— the fact that I get paid for this and it's a set fee, it's not like I get paid month after month after month and I can draw this out. The fact that I get a, get a, a cons— let's call it a consulting fee for this, is that I will keep going. I mean, people say, well, where's your incentive? Sometimes I hear that. Where's your incentive? Where's the traditional literary agent's incentive if they're going to get 10% of nothing? Where's my incentive? My incentive is the same as any consultant or any service provider or whatever. I want, I hire, you hire me, Peter, I want you to be saying to people, Yeah, I know that Ken Lassat, he got my book published. Yeah. I don't want you to be saying, well, you know, I spent a lot of money and he's a nice guy, but nothing much happened. That's not how it works.

Right. Right.

No.

And it's about, it's gotta be about the outcome. It's gotta be about the results. And, you know, part of what someone is paying for is the experience. Part of someone is paying for is when they're working with someone like you, they're gonna make less mistakes than they would have if they didn't. Right? Because you, you, you could point out things that are like, well, here's why we don't do things that seem that, that, uh, that would make sense to you to do. So, cool. Any, any other final, no pressure, but final words of wisdom that could change the directory or trajectory of someone's life? No pressure.

Just that if they have an idea for a book, whether, whether they hire me or not, They should know that we're in a landscape right now where it can be done, whether it's option or that option, this game or that game, it can be done. And people should not be, you know, you still got a lot of this leftover baggage about whether a publisher would care about it or not. If you look for enough, look to enough publishers, you're going to find publisher, no matter what your idea for.

Yeah. I, it's a matter, I, I, I think it's a matter of it's the right publisher for you based on your goals, objectives, and desired outcomes. Yeah. So this has been great. I appreciate you, Ken. I appreciate your wisdom. This, you've, you've been around this for a long time and had your hands in hundreds and hundreds of projects. So, uh, I appreciate you and I, I, uh, thank you for sharing some time with us today.

Well, it was fun coming on. What, what are we gonna do tomorrow? You and me?

I don't know. I haven't thought that far ahead. Thanks, Ken.

Okay. Bye. Bye, everybody.

To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter@thoughtleadershipleverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.