456: Inside The Crazy World Of Traditional Book Publishing With Michael Drew

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You’re listening to the My Wife, Quit or Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Today, I my buddy Michael Drew on the show. And as you guys know by now, I have a book coming out on May 16th called The Family First Entrepreneur. And the way my personality works is that whenever I do something, I try to learn about it as thoroughly as possible. Michael Drew is the founder of PromoteABook.com, where he has launched 124 consecutive books onto the national bestseller list. And in this episode,

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We’re going to talk about the crazy world of traditional book publishing, and I can guarantee you that you’ll learn a ton about this industry. But before we begin, I want to let you know that tickets for the 2023 Seller Summit are almost sold out over at sellersummit.com. And as of this recording, there’s exactly one mastermind pass left and five regular passes left. It is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And you all know me well enough by now to know that my event has zero fluff.

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Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their business and not high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people and we all eat together and everyone parties together every single night. Personally, I love smaller events and tickets always sell out. If you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250k or $1 million per year, we also offer a special mastermind experience where we break up into small groups, lock ourselves in a room and help each other with our businesses.

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The Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 23rd to May 25th. I also want to thank Spockit for sponsoring this episode. Now, most of you who have followed me for a long time know that I’m not a big fan of dropshipping, especially from AliExpress or China. But I do know that many of you listening don’t have a large budget to start an e-commerce business. So if you want to dropship from US or European suppliers, I like Spockit and here’s why. Spockit integrates with all the top e-commerce platforms, which makes adding products in order

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fillments seamless, they also offer branded invoices, which allows you to add your logo and store name to the invoice so it appears as though it’s being shipped from your warehouse. But the main value add is that 70 % of their suppliers are from the US and Europe. As a result, your shipping times are fast at between two to five days, and the quality is superior. You can try Spockit for free over at mywifequitterjob.com slash Spockit. That’s mywifequitterjob.com slash S-P-O-C-K-E-T.

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And then finally, I wanted to mention my other podcast that I run with my partner Tony. And unlike this one, where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the Profitable Audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now on to the show.

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Welcome to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Michael Drew on the show and Michael is the founder of Promotabook.com where he helps authors launch books onto the New York Times bestseller list. He lives and breathes books and he’s launched 124 consecutive books onto national bestseller lists and he’s got over a thousand number one Amazon titles. He’s been marketing books his entire career. He’s perfected his craft over at respected publishers such as Bard Press, Entrepreneur Magazine, Longstreet Press.

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Thomas Nelson Publishers, and many more. And all you guys listening know that I just finished writing my book, The Family First Entrepreneur, which is due out in May. And in this episode, Michael is gonna give us a deep dive into the book industry, and I guarantee you, for you guys listening, that it is not how you expect it to work. And with that, welcome to the show, Michael. How are doing? I’m great, thanks for having me. Unfortunately, the folks can’t see, but I’m here in an idyllic, beautiful…

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Lake Atletland Guatemala running a month-long Book Riders Retreat. It’s ideal as it’s February and it’s 72 degrees outside and there’s no humidity here. And the folks here are all gonna have a book written by the end of the month. So thanks for having me on and thanks for joining me here in Guatemala. It sounds like I should have gone to that retreat because it took me three years to write my book when I could have just done it in a month by going to Guatemala. I mean, that’s the big thing, right? mean, most folks…

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aren’t writers professionally and they don’t know how to do that. Most of my clients and folks like you, you might be a thought leader or influence or content creator, but writing a book is a distinct skill set, right? And I’ve been doing this now for 24 years, going on 25 in August, and I’m a proficient writer. I’m not a great writer. I’m a proficient writer because this is what I’ve done as a career for the last 24 years. There are really amazing writers that are out in the world and some of them work for me, but…

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Coming up with an idea and sharing it and making a difference in the world in non-fiction writing is distinctly different than simply being an amazing writer who does great with prose and whatnot. They’re distinctly different things. And so for me, the first objective is to be able to make sure to be able to get your voice out and understood and do it in a way that meets the needs of your readers. Because at the end of the day, most of us are not Emily Dickinson. We’re not going to say…

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and write in our bedrooms by ourselves and let that content sit under our bed or in our closets until we die, right? We’re writing with purpose and intention to be able to make a difference in the world. And so the first thing is to be able to get that out. The second is to have a good team to back you up, to be able to take your ideas and make them into beautiful prose. Well, see, here’s the thing. I know that you’ve launched what you said, 124 consecutive books, like…

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How can you launch so many hits? Are you just really selective with your clients? It seems really difficult to bet a thousand. Yeah, I like to say that I cheat. I only work with winners, right? But a couple of things. The first thing to note is that the best sellers list, the hidden secret that nobody really appreciates is that New York Times and other best seller lists are not real best sellers lists. They don’t count real sales in real time. Not every book that is sold is reported. Not every book that is reported is counted.

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Not every book that’s counted is counted equally. And not only that, if you read, if you go to the bottom of the New York Times bestsellers list in the fine print, they literally state in writing black and white that they are an editorial list. And so within their editorial controls, they can choose to include or exclude a book at their editorial discretion. Now with that, there’s some hope because they have created standards for which they apply

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equally against all books. So if you hit the standards, all of the standards, which are pretty extensive, but if you get all of the standards, then they will they will allow you to be included on the list. If you miss one of their standards and the standards exceed simply having enough sales. But if you if you don’t meet all of their standards, then the book will be the New York Times will determine whether or not they’re going to include your book editorially on their list. So.

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When I say cheat, this is what I mean. If you understand the science of the system and the science is what the rules are set up by the New York Times and other best sellers list, the art is figuring out what kinds of authors and businesses and platforms are best served by meeting those standards and how to leverage their businesses in meeting those standards. And so when I say cheat is knowing what the standards are and what’s needed to be able to hit that, I then look for authors and clients and business owners that both

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benefit from hitting those standards and then are also able to do it. Because at the end of the day, you could have an amazing book, but if you can’t hit the standards, it doesn’t matter, right? We’re not going to be able to support your efforts to become a bestseller. And I don’t really play the luck game. I don’t play the Oprah game. I don’t play the, we’re going to wait and see what happens because that’s just not how the industry works. Right. Yeah. I mean, one thing that I’ve learned is that books don’t sell themselves.

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you gotta really actively go out and market these things. And it’s harder than selling like my $2,000 a class almost. Yeah, I think when we first met, that’s one of the things I said is selling a book is more difficult than selling virtually anything else. And the reason for that is that the readers aren’t considering the price of the book, right? The 1995, 2495, whatever the price is. The consideration that you’re…

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your potential audience and readers are making is, I going to spend the four, six or eight hours to read the book? Most of us, and I don’t know how many of the books behind you fit into this category, but most of us have what I call shelf help on our shelves, meaning books that are helping the shelves that we didn’t read and they’re just sitting on the shelf, right? And so the subconscious psychological determination that we make when looking at buying a book is,

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whether or not we’re going to spend the time to read the book. And one of the other things that I observe, and people don’t like hearing this, but because the currency that we’re asking our readers to spend is time, one of the very worst things that you can do with an expectation of outcome is gift a book to somebody. Because unless they had already predetermined they wanted to read that book, the probability of them reading that book is very, very remote. And so that contributes to the idea of shelf help because more than likely,

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the book that you’ve been gifted or that you’re gifting to someone else is not going to be read. Huh. Well, that’s kind of depressing, Well, it’s rallying. And here’s the thing about books. Books don’t just compete with other books. They’re competing with every sporting event on the planet. They compete with the time that your kids need you to come to school to go to an assembly or a music program or a play or anything else. So they compete with

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video games and they compete with with church if you go to church and they compete with the time you spend on YouTube and the time you spend watching TV and the time you spend watching movies. Books have to compete against all of those different mediums. And while the mechanics of publishing don’t require a well-written book, the engagement of a cut of your audience and customers do because what you have to do with a book is get your your audience member

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to be willing to invest the time into your book versus doing other things. And again, going back to that time investment, that is a much bigger investment than a 30 minute TV show or a two and a half hour movie or anything else. Like you’re spending significantly more time reading a book than you are on other mediums. And so in order to be able to convince your audience to read the book, you’ve got to have something important to say and say it well. Yeah. You know, the last time we spoke,

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We talked about the economics of books, which I found fascinating. I would like the audience to know about that. So first of all, why are these hardcover books just priced so high? How much do the publishers make? How much do, like what are all the little cuts that people are taking all along the way? It’s a great question. And I want to do it in, ask the question in context of why publishers no longer market books. Okay. Because the number one thing that I hear from an author is, well,

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I’ll write a good book and then the publisher will market it. And the reality is the publishers cannot market the book because of the economics of the book. between 1880 to 1980, the average number of books published each year was 40,000 new titles. With the advent of the personal computer in the early 80s, every Tom, Dick, and Harry believed that they could write a book. Whether they could or should or shouldn’t, they did, right? And so…

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When I started publishing back in 1999, there were 76,000 some odd books that were published that year. So almost double from the 1880 to 1980 number, Last year, there were 1,076,000 books published. That’s crazy. 1,076,000. And about half, a little less than half of those books were still print books. The other half were e-books in some digital format.

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And we define this through ISBNs, which is the code on the back of the book that is the individual identifier of your book over another title. so, but I mean, so you’re talking five, 600,000 new titles, print titles that were published last year alone. Now, the reason, and I’m giving a little preface before I get into the numbers, this is important. The average retail book store carries 100,000 titles, right? Of those 100,000 titles.

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Between 70 to 80 % are what we call backlist titles. These are your perennials, your classics, and last year’s bestsellers. So what that means is, of the 100,000 titles, 20 to 30,000 new titles each year make it onto a retail bookstore shelf. Out of about 1,076,000, and you go back down to the roughly 600,000 print books, you’re still at 20 to 30,000 of that number.

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600,000 new titles that make it onto a retail bookstore shelf. Now, a lot of folks may be saying, well, doesn’t Amazon and digital sales change that? And the answer to that is no. And here’s why. In terms of the size and scope of the industry, Amazon is the biggest retailer in the industry at about 16.7 % of sales. And in contrast, Barnes & was at 11.1 % of sales last year in the industry as the number two retailer.

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But if you take all online sales, Amazon, BarnesNobel.com, all of the other online retailers, and you add all of those sales together, they represent around 24.6 % of all sales. And so what that means is just over 75 % of sales are still going through brick and mortar stores. BarnesNobel, Books of Million, Hudson’s, Walmart, Costco, Sam’s Club, the grocery stores, Target.

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There are 2,000 independent bookstores in the US. You still have a majority, a vast majority of books that are being sold in print format through a brick and store. just find that so hard to believe. mean, all the bookstores in my area have closed except for one Barnes & Nobles for the most part. There was a dip. There absolutely was a dip during COVID. Great. Okay. it zoomed back last year.

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Right, it went back to the normal numbers. actually, so Varns & Noble is the big brick and mortar store. They’ve only closed like 10 stores. They changed their strategy on how they bring books in and how they do what’s called co-op, which we’ll get into later, and other things. They brought in a new C-suite from a book group in London to be able to come back and have them. But they’ve not closed that many stores. Books a million has actually expanded.

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Borders closed back in 2015-2016. Books a Million purchased about half of their stores and expanded their reach. There used to be 6,000 independent bookstores in the US. We’re now at 2,000, but those 2,000 are pretty strong. And what did occur during COVID because people were traveling were the majority of the airport stores temporarily closed during that year.

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but they’re all up and running and functioning at full rate at this point. And so, yeah, there was certainly downturn due to COVID, but that’s really been rectified. so, people, there’s something to say about being able to hold a book in your hand, being able to smell, have that tactile touch. I actually wrongly made a prediction about a decade ago that within five years that e-books would represent close to 50 % of sales, and that never happened. In fact,

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we saw it get almost to 30 % in terms of sales ebooks and then it’s gone back down significantly. Really? Okay. So ebooks are less than 30 % of sales. Uh-huh. Amazing. Okay. And it’s just, look, for some of us, I do a lot of audio and ebook reading, but for the masses, it’s not a thing, right? There’s a distinction there. And so going back to the original question about the monetization, all of this is important because…

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The still the name of the game in the industry is still that brick and board distribution. So when you, when an author goes to a publisher to be able to get published, um, what they’re, what the publisher is looking for is the author’s ability to create sell through of their, of the book at the store level, essentially in today’s market, publishers act like venture capitalists and what they’re looking for with their authors.

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is the validation that the author understands their market, have been able to prove that market, and have been able to generate sales. Because the publishers really don’t understand platform anymore. They don’t understand marketing. They barely understand media. And so what they’re relying on, like a venture capitalist, is your ability to be able to demonstrate your ability to sell your message. But then there’s the other competition issue of…

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You know, you’re dealing with another five, six hundred thousand titles all aiming for twenty to thirty thousand spots each year. so so so what you look at then is not only your your marketing, but then the what most people realize are two things about about publishing. Number one, every book that’s on a retail bookstore shelf, that’s a front list title published this year are paid for by the publisher. It’s called Coop. It’s merchandising in any other retail industry.

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And by the way, every publisher offers co-op on all of their books. So it’s something that gets paid no matter what, but it’s a hard cost. And so the hard cost is going to be like a dollar for a book spine out, $2 for a book per unit, per unit for a book that’s face out, $3 if it’s at the end cap, which gives it more visibility, $4 per unit if it’s on the table at the front of the store, and $5 if it’s got a special display or if it’s point of purchase. so- How does the publisher decide which books to spend on what?

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Like do you have to prove to them that you’re gonna move a lot of books? As the author, again, the publisher is a go-between between you and the retailers. So the publisher is looking for a belief that you’re going to create sell-through at the store level. they offer co-op on every one of their new books, a New York publisher or even a Mid-Sense publisher. They have to, because everybody else is.

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There is no distribution unless you offer that co-op. So it’s something that is required to be offered on every single book. The difference, what differentiates your book from a different title is the marketing that you bring to the table. There’s a grading system that existed at every one of the retailers and the grading system includes how well did the author’s last book sell at my stores? How well does the average book by this publisher sell at my stores?

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How well does the average book in this category sell at my stores? And what’s the marketing that the authors bring to the table? Based on the answer to those questions, the author gets a grade of A, B, C, D, or F. And the grade level then dictates the number of books on the shelf. And of course, at that point, with that number of books on the shelf, D level distribution at Barnes & Noble will be offered one level of co-op, whereas A level distribution will be offered a different level of co-op in terms of that.

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buy by the retailer, right? And so the requirement by the publishers, you better be able to bring the marketing NPR to the table because at best what they’re going to do is be able to print and pay for the co-op of that book. And that goes to the second point, which is most people don’t realize that books, unlike other merchandise and other industries, are 100 % returnable by the retailer back to the publisher.

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My first book, The Family First Entrepreneur, is available for pre-order at your favorite retailer. And leading up to the launch in May, I’m doing something crazy. I’m giving away a new bonus for people who pre-order every single week until the book launches on May 16th. And here’s the kicker. If you buy a book before the bonus expires, you get access to it forever. But if you buy the book after the bonus expiration date, you won’t get access to that week’s bonus. And here’s what I’ve given away already.

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a workshop on search engine optimization for e-commerce store owners, a workshop on how to self-publish your first book, and a workshop on how to structure your blog post to rank in search. In addition to the weekly bonuses, you also get access to my six-week family-first business challenge, access to my three-day print-on-demand workshop, and access to my two-day passive income workshop, and free access to any future live workshops. Now, aside from all these bonuses, the book itself

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will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that doesn’t require you to work yourself to death. Because you can in fact achieve financial success without being a stranger to your kids. You can make good money and have the freedom to enjoy it and you don’t have to work 80 hours a week and be a slave to your business just to make it all work. I will teach you how to start a business from the perspective of a parent who makes both business and family work. Go to mywifecoupterjob.com slash book and I’ll send you the bonuses

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invitations to book parties that I’ll be throwing all over the country, and other special offers. That’s mywifecluderjob.com slash book. Now back to the show.

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What determines whether I get the $5, I said I, whether I get the $5 front of the store co-op? Is that something the publisher decides or is that something the bookstore decides? No, it’s something the bookstore decides based on your grade. And based on the grade, like $5 point of purchase is going to go with an A level book. a B level is going to get front of store placement. C is going to get end cap. D is going to get face out. OK.

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Anything below that might get spying or less. And if you have no track record, the chances of you getting to the front are probably pretty slim, I would imagine. Well, so the opportunity on a first-time author is that they actually can get more distribution on their first book than they might be able to get on their second book. Because there is no track record. The opportunity is if you come in with a strong enough marketing campaign, the…

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retailers may take a little bit of a chance on you because they simply don’t have a track record. So on a first-time author, if you go in guns blazing, you might be able to get better distribution. And that’s important because if you do a really good job on the first book, it would then influence your ability to get distribution on your next title and other future titles that you publish. if you are a first-time author working with a publisher for distribution, my advice is…

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throw everything in the kitchen sink at what you’re doing to be able to create the sell through. One note before I get back to the finances, which is where we started this part of the conversation.

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It’s important to note that the industry is a risk mitigation industry, right? They don’t take risks on books. And so your opportunity with the marketing and the work that you do is to eliminate risks, both for the publisher and then the retailers. If you can do that, you’ll be able to play at a higher level in terms of what you do. But you also need to be able to follow through. can’t just be…

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just a lot of talk. That happens a lot. A lot of authors come in and promise the sun, the earth, and the moon, and can’t deliver. So be able to deliver at least 80 % or better of what you’re promising to the publisher and the retailers, because how well your current book does will directly influence and impact what you do in the industry moving forward. Going back to the numbers then, let’s use a simple number. It could be higher than this, and inflation certainly impacts

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the price of printing and paper and all of those things. But let’s use some simple numbers. Let’s assume that the retail price of the book is $20. right? Okay. Now the retailers get paid, they keep when a book sells 50 to 55 % of the retail price. To keep it simple, let’s use 50 % if they’ll more likely go out and make it so that the retailer keeps $10 per unit sold. Okay, so now-

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We’re down to $10 there, right? So then we look at the printing cost of the book. So let’s assume that the printing cost on the book is $3 a unit, because let’s say it’s a hardcover book and it’s $3 per unit to print. Okay, cool. So now we go from seven down to, or probably 10 down to seven. Well, then let’s assume that we get average retail distribution and co-op and that the average price per unit

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is three come at $3 per unit. And by the way, this is assuming that the book sales. If the book doesn’t sell, the numbers become even worse for the publisher. But assuming that the book sell, they now go from $7 down to $4 once you deduct the co-op from that. And then authors on average are to make $2 $3 per unit sold as a royalty. So let’s assume it’s a lower number, it’s $2. So we’re going go down from $4 to $2 per unit. So

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At best, not including overhead, not including shipping, not including all of the other expenses to be able to run a company, a publisher’s making roughly $2 per unit sold for a $20 book. You go up to a $40 book, they’re maybe making $4 per unit sold because of the way that the numbers scale at that point. It’s just not that much better of a deal, but the publishers are looking at…

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trying to squeeze out every penny they can here, there, and everywhere else. But this is why publishers also don’t do marketing because if they’re only making $2 per unit, there’s really no budget left for them to spend on marketing, PR, and advertising. And this is why they require that their authors bring the marketing to the table. All right, $2 a book. That doesn’t sound like a good business to me. How do these publishers stay in business?

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and pay for their fancy offices in New York and all the staff. A lot of its legacy media and most of New York publishers, now all of the New York publishers, are owned by multimedia conglomerates who are using books as ways to be able to justify other money and revenue opportunities not associated with the individual books themselves. In publishing, it’s not the 80-20 rule, it’s the 95-5 rule. 5 % of the books make 95 % of the money. And really what…

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publishers in the US are looking to do today on the 95 % is really they’re trying to get as close to breakeven as possible versus a loss. And one of the biggest things that a traditional publisher can do beyond getting the retail distribution for your book is selling the subsidiary rights, the foreign rights, TV, movie rights, and those other things. Most publishers leverage the fact that New York is the media capital of the world. And they leverage that

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when they have moderate success with their books to be able to sell the foreign rights for books to foreign countries to say, hey, look at the success we had in the US. If we had success here, you can have success in your country as well. And so they’re able to export that fairly well. And their objective is in selling the rights to get as close to breaking even on the 95 % of the books as they can. Interesting. What are the economics of selling foreign rights? Typically speaking, you’ll get

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Let’s say you sell the rights to a publisher in Portugal. They might pay 10 to $20,000 for the rights to own that book in Portugal and to print and to make the money from that. And typically speaking, the publisher will give the author, depending on the publisher, 30 to 50 % of the payment from that Portugal publisher. I see. Some countries we’ve seen in South Korea or in Japan, if you can…

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if they’ll publish it or in, sometimes in India, you might get a $50,000 payment to be able to buy the rights for the book. So let’s just throw some numbers here. So let’s say a publisher gives someone $100,000 advance in order to make up that they got to sell 50,000 books just to break even. That’s what you’re telling me? That’s what I’m saying. And then what is the, give me some numbers here. What is the average book sell for from like a big five publisher?

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So, and look, you’ve got different kinds of books, right? You’ve got hardcover, you’ve got paperback, you’ve got mass paperback, which is even cheaper, so you can buy a Harry Potter book as an example, in hardcover, $24.95, and paperback at $16.95, and mass market paperback at $7.95. But for the most part, that’s for the really big books, what we’re looking at today is hardcovers in the $24.95 range.

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We’re looking at paperbacks around $12.35 to $16.95. The mass market’s still about what it’s been. But the objective on when you’re selling a book, whether it’s your first time book or a new title that’s being published, it’s likely to come out in hardcover. And the reason for that is that, again, going back to the idea of selling rights, if you have even moderate success with a hardcover book,

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The publisher then has two choices. They can print the paperback, which doesn’t cost them, other than the printing costs, it doesn’t cost them a lot of additional funds to do, or they can sell the paperback rights and be able to recoup their investment. All right, give me some numbers. What’s considered a reasonable selling book at Hardback? Well, let me tell you the average. Because things have changed over the years. When I started, I would say that I would tell folks that on average in five years that a business title

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or non-fiction title would sell 5,000 books. That’s not the case at all anymore. Like we’re talking 24 years later. Last year, if we look at the New York publishers alone, they published roughly 20,000 titles. And those 20,000 titles averaged selling 500 copies. That’s it? It’s dropped over the years? It’s dropped over the years. Yep. Well, again, when I started, were 70-some-odd thousand books being published. were 1,076,000 books published last year.

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There’s a lot more media opportunities today than there was 24 years ago, right? I see. If you look at the, if you remove the 20,000 books that then your publishers published, you’re looking at, so you got a million 56,000 left. Yeah. You’re looking at an average of about a hundred sales. Man. Per title, per title. And so here’s what’s important with that.

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you’ve got the front list of the backlist title. So if you want real success in publishing, you have to get your book modeled. You want your book to be a backlist title. Well, the time frame to do that, this is why I say throw everything in the kitchen sink that you can at the book in the first 90 days is because your book will live or die in 60 to 90 days, depending on the retailer. You’ll either create the sell through at the retail level or you won’t. And if you don’t, the book gets returned and the retailers don’t carry your book anymore. And if you do,

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then you’re able to get modeled. And if you can keep that level of sales for a year, then you’ll be backlisted in the following year and keep that level, that model level for the following year. I see. It just seems like based on the numbers you told me, the publishers are hemorrhaging money. They do make money, but it’s… Look, you’ll have a book by a politician, say…

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say Donald Trump or Biden or whomever else, that’ll sell 10 million copies, right? So they’ll have books that make a lot of money. And the smaller books don’t make, they lose money, but they don’t lose huge amounts of money per title. they still end up being profitable. And like I said, in terms of that foreign rights and subsidiary rights standpoint, they’re back in tactic of being able to sell those rights.

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is really how they mitigate losses for all of the other books. So they end up doing just fine. But their objective is to be able to get a book beyond the first year so that it’s modeled at the store level so they don’t have to pay for that shelf space anymore. Because once they get to that point, then hopefully at that point you got people going into bookstores and buying the book at no additional cost other than the printing cost of the book. I see. Okay. How much do they make on a paperback? Are the economics better? They’re the same.

33:25
It’s about the same. It’s about the same. Well, they might make less per unit if they’re pricing it lower per unit. They’ll use cheaper paper to reduce costs. look, if you to use a symbol number, if you use 10 bucks as your starting point, maybe you’re printing costs of 75 cents versus three bucks. But your your call price doesn’t change hardcover paperback. You’re still spending one to five dollars per unit. Right. And the author royalty.

33:53
might go down from $2 for the author to $1 for the author, but you’re still, mean, the numbers were got to be about the same. All right, so let me just see if I understand. So the co-op cost is only for the beginning during launch, and if you can get your book onto the backlist, the publisher no longer has to pay that co-op fee. Correct, I mean, there are exceptions to that. So as an example, I did a book by a very well-known sales trainer.

34:20
and put it in the number one New York Times, the next year, the next May, Barnes and Noble came back and said, hey, we’re doing a business special for Father’s Day. We want to put 100,000 copies of the book on the shelf, and we had to pay the co-op for that. So there’s some exceptions to that. the objective is for a publisher to get past that first year, have the book modeled and backlisted so that other than special opportunities, they don’t have to worry about paying that shelf space. OK. All right.

34:48
Let’s switch gears a little bit. What does it take to hit these bestseller lists? First of all, what are the bestseller lists that are the most prestigious, and how do you hit them? And it’s a good question. And they have changed in some regards over the years. And I focus primarily on nonfiction. So I’m looking at that. But you’ve got The New York Times, which from a book standpoint is considered the crumb to the crumb. Now, for me, New York Times, from an impact on sales standpoint,

35:19
doesn’t have a huge impact on actual sales of the book or on my clients’ platforms. Really, New York Times, the readers of that section of the New York Times are people that are literary snobs, in my opinion, people who really look at the literary quality. And that’s not a problem, but if you’re writing a business book or a diet book or a health book or a workout book or a cookbook, those folks, those readers…

35:44
aren’t going to be as interested in that content as they might be in a work of fiction. So if you’re writing a book of fiction, New York Times is fantastic. It’s in the industry. It’s considered the top list. Retailers care about that. From an actual engagement of sales, I don’t see a huge movement on that when making the New York Times list. The Wall Street Journal would be the next, and that’s especially true on nonfiction and especially on business.

36:12
Right, so if you’ve written a business book, a money book, a wealth book, even to a certain degree a personal development book that is focused on wealth or money or business, like Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by T.R. Wecker, then Wall Street Journal is amazing. Wall Street Journal, you get on that list. Business people who could hire you are reading that book. Business people who…

36:39
could buy your book and give it to their employees are reading that list, right? And so it’s an amazing list for that category of author. And the way that I look at the ranking of list, number one, New York Times would be top. Number one, for a business title or a personal development title, number one, Wall Street Journal is actually above making the New York Times bestsellers list. If you’re a guy or health, yeah, because…

37:09
if you’re writing number one, because you get to put that status number one to the audience that is most interested in your material. So that’s really amazing. Whereas if you hit number one USA Today and you’re a diet or a health book because of the broad nature of that list, then USA Today for that kind of author is better than just making the New York Times. So number one New York Times, number one Wall Street Journal or number one USA Today, depending on the subject matter, is better than just making New York Times. And then you’ve got New York Times and then below that you’ve got Wall Street Journal.

37:38
and USA Today as lists that have importance. There are LA Times does a list, Publishers Weekly does a list, Chicago Tribune does a list. So there are some regional and local publications that do bestseller lists as well, but they’re localized, right? So they have benefit. And if you’re heavily in the LA market, the Chicago market or wherever, then Fantastic Does a List will have an impact on what you’re doing.

38:07
But in terms of the national list, it’s New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. Okay. And I guess let’s just start with the New York Times. What are the five criteria? I think that’s what you mentioned in the beginning. So going back to the need for distribution, number one for New York Times is retail distribution. And this is why we really look at the effort before the campaign comes out because

38:37
We can hit the other four standards, but if we don’t have that retail distribution to begin with, they won’t, we move from qualifying from a technical standpoint to having to have an editorial conversation, which is never a conversation that you want to have because they could choose to include or exclude you based on their own biases and beliefs. Right. And so what we’re looking for is to put at least 10,000 units on the shelf. Now, again, to be clear, the New York Times is not a real best sellers list. What they’re looking for

39:06
within their rule system is validation for why they’re seeing sales being reported to them because they don’t really understand why. And so they’ve come up with a standard to be able to validate that. So number one is retail distribution. if you don’t, their argument, which is fair to a point, if you don’t have enough retail distribution, how are they seeing these sales coming in? Right. That’s number one. Number two is actual sales. So when we, when we look at running a campaign,

39:36
we look at pre-selling 20,000 units. Now, let me give you an analogy of what we’re doing compared to the normal industry and unfairness that exists. In the traditional space, there’s something called embargoing. Embargoing is a legal agreement between the publisher and the retailer. And what that legal agreement states is that the retailer is not allowed to put any copies of that title on the shelf

40:04
until the exact release date. Now, we don’t see that a lot, but a really clear example of this that we all heard about in the news was Harry Potter. When each Harry Potter book was released, there was an embargo on it, on the sale of the book, and you could go to Barnes & or Books of Million or Hudson’s or Amazon and pre-purchase the book, but the retailer was not allowed to ship the book or give the book to the consumer until the publishing date. If they did, the agreed upon fine was $250,000

40:34
per unit that they put on the shelf. So it was a really big expense and cost if you made the mistake. And there were occasionally books are here or there that put a book out early and they got fined for doing so. And so what would happen is that all of these retailers would accumulate all of these orders for a year or two or three, depending on the duration of the release of the book from one title to the next.

40:59
and they would hold all of the orders on the funds. And then the day of the release of the book, they would take all of those funds into the coffers and deliver the book to the consumer. And so by doing that, of course, a book like Harry Potter that’s being embargoed is going to hit number one on the list because you’ve got two or three years of pent-up sales and the millions of copies that are now all being processed at the same time.

41:28
When I work with a client to run an Evertimes campaign, we don’t rely on a legal embargo because for most of my clients, actually I’d say all of them, none of them are at the Harry Potter level. Retailers don’t like doing embargoes because it means that they can’t put their customers’ money into their coffers. And so they want to put money into their coffers as soon as they can. And so for most titles, let’s say the book was coming out in May and if Amazon got the book or Barnes & or whoever got the book in April,

41:56
and there are people who’ve pre-ordered from the retailer, they’re going to ship. Amazon’s going to ship the book to the customer the moment the book comes in. Why? Because as soon as they ship the book, they can take that customer’s money and put it into their coffers. They can’t do that under an embargo. And so they don’t like doing that unless they’re forced to, like on a big book like Harry Potter. And so what I do with my clients is the same thing. I have my clients embargo the sales directly.

42:23
So, and not give the sales to the retailers until the pump did. So they hold the orders and the money. And then we do a controlled release based on the algorithm at the New York Times, the breakdown of how the different retailers are weighted. And so we give X number to Amazon and Y number to Barnes & and Z number to Books-A-Million and beyond. Like we split that up and have those retailers fulfill the orders all within the same week in an author embargoed versus a publisher embargoed process, if that makes sense.

42:52
And so we look at, we want to have those sales all happening at the same time to ensure compliance by the retailers who are reporting and to have the highest percentage of those sales being counted. The next standard is ebook sales. Now it used to be that the New York Times had an ebook bestsellers list. In February of 2017, the New York Times made some major changes to their lists of which the standards that I’m giving you, most of them didn’t exist previous other than sales and retail distribution.

43:20
And so what the New York Times did is they got rid of the five spots on all of their lists and they got rid of half of their existing lists and they did that with the objective of being a more exclusive bestsellers list than they had previously been and so one of the lists they got rid of was the ebook list and So what they did is they made ebooks a standard to qualify, right? So so while they’re well, they want to see the print sale of the book. They also want to see the

43:49
e-book standard or the e-book sales happening at the same time. This is something that they have determined if you have print sales, you’re have e-book sales at a certain level. So our objective during the launch of a book is to be able to put 10,000 or more e-book sales through promotions through Kindle, Kobo and Nook, which are the three main e-book reading devices, right? So that’s the third standard. The fourth standard is what’s called online social proof. So again, I wanna be clear.

44:18
The New York Times as a sophisticated poll is looking to validate why they’re seeing sales come through. And so the first thing they’re looking at is what’s going on in online media. About five years ago, what you started hearing media and publicist change of their language was that traditional media was no longer print magazines and newspapers and radio shows and TV shows, but traditional media was now blogs and…

44:46
blogs and blogs and podcasts and all of those things. And so in February of 2017, the New York Times launched an online technology that it’s a spidering technology similar to what Google uses for ranking the quality of a website and ranking a website before their search results. the New York Times launched this validating spidering technology to be able to go out and see that there was sufficient interest in your book.

45:15
to be able to know that, the reason we’re seeing sales is because we’re seeing all of this online conversation around the book going on. And so while The New York Times doesn’t release the exact standards, what we have determined in the last six years through the many campaigns that we’ve run is that, well, I don’t know the bottom number. We always aim to have 350 blogs in the month of the release, 90 vlogs in the month of the release, 90 podcasts during the month of the release.

45:44
We aim to have to run some kind of of online social media campaign to get 50,000 consumers engaged with likes or comments or shit not probably shares and comments on on Facebook Twitter and LinkedIn each right and those those are the things that the New York Times are looking at to validate that Why they’re seeing sales, right? The final standard is is what I would call old media or traditional media

46:14
which is radio, TV, and print, which are still valid forms of media. But what they’re looking for is for the author to have themselves or their book featured in 100 markets in TV, 100 markets in radio, and 100 markets in print. Now, if you have a good PR firm, TV and radio is still syndicated, right? And so that syndication allows you to get one national hit to hit

46:43
TV or radio prints a little bit more difficult. And so oftentimes we have to look at things like matte releases and other things to be able to hit the print center because it’s not it doesn’t have the same syndication that it used to have, right? That those syndication teams all broke up. But those are the standards that that New York Times are looking for from a technical standpoint for you to qualify. If you hit those standards, then they’ll they’ll let your book on the list. If you don’t, let’s you only have the sale, the sales part of it, maybe part of the distribution.

47:12
then it’s an editorial decision that the New York Times will make. they’re going to look at, they like your publisher? Do they like your subject matter? Do they like you? Like they’re look at really subjective things. Right. Wow, that sounds pretty comprehensive. Yeah. To hit that list. Yeah. Okay. Well, I don’t want to take up too much of your time because I know you got a workshop to run here, but…

47:40
Thanks for giving some insight into the book industry, why publishers don’t spend money on marketing, and what it actually takes to hit the cream of the crop, which is the New York Times bestseller list. In case your audience might be a little discouraged about publishing, me give them this encouragement. The information that I’m sharing should be empowering. It should give you an objective to aim for.

48:08
to be able to work in and succeed in the publishing industry, right? And that it doesn’t have to happen overnight. In fact, what I would tell you is that on average, my New York Times bestselling clients don’t run New York Times campaign until their third, fourth or fifth book. Because what we’re doing is building their platform and their business in the interim and still using books as ways to build credibility.

48:35
with their audience and their customer base and being able to add to their list and audience. But it’s usually the third, fourth or fifth book over, could be anywhere from a three to 10 year timer. I have clients that it took 10 years and five books launched before we ever ran a New York Times campaign. Now, every other subsequent book that they run before that added and built their platform so that when we ran the New York Times bestsellers list, we were

49:03
able to hit those standards that I shared fairly organically because we’d built the business to that point. so I would say, yes, you may not be able to go from nothing to New York Times on your first book, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a way for you to have success. You simply have to take the information that I’ve shared and use it to create a plan and to aim to hit those numbers at some point in the future.

49:32
and to then worry about running a New York Times campaign at that point. Right. Michael, where can people find more about you and your services? So my basic website is promoteabook.com, because I like to make it complex. P-R-O-M-O-T-E-A-B-O-OK.COM, promoteabook.com. The writer’s retreat that we run here in Guatemala. By the way, it includes a publishing deal. So at the end of the month, the promise is your book will be written, and we got a publishing deal lined up for you. That’s cool. Yeah, I like that.

50:02
We do this for a lot of those folks that can’t run New York Times bestsellers, but are using their book to grow their business and are looking out into the future. It’s a month long retreat. It’s really hard to be here. We’re at 6,000 feet. I’ve got five volcanoes behind me. It’s 72 degrees out with no humidity for a month. It’s really terrible. got to ride every day. So there is that. But if you want to more about the retreat, it’s bookretreat.com. Because again, I like to make it complex.

50:29
Bookwithreed.com. B-O-O-K-R-E-T-R-E-A-T.com. Nice. Well, Michael, thanks a lot for coming on the show. I learned a lot. I learned even more than the first time I chatted with you. So thank you. You’re welcome. It’s my pleasure.

50:57
Once again, I want to remind you that my annual ecommerce conference will be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on May 23rd to May 25th. I really want to hang out with you in person, so let’s meet up. Go to SellersSummit.com. That’s S-E-L-L-E-R-S-S-U-M-M-I-T.com. I also want to thank Spocket, which is the dropshipping supplier that I like for ecommerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily add products to your store and have pre-vetted suppliers ship your products to the end customer, no storage or fulfillment required.

51:25
And the best part is that most suppliers are in the US and Europe for super fast shipping. For more information, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash spocket. That’s mywifequitterjob.com slash sp-o-c-k-e-t. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.