Episode 862 – Traditional vs Self Publishing
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 862 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, we're going to talk about the differences between traditional and self-publishing. I have experience in both and I'll tell you my thoughts on it. So check out greatinternetmarketingtraining.com if you'd like to get in my mentor program. It's the longest running, most unique, and most successful ever in the field of internet and digital marketing. And grab a copy of our automation e-book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree and oh hey, what's going on right now? If you're listening to this, like right now when I release it, screwthecommute.com/bss, ebook sales school, and you can buy a premium pass and you get a consultation with me and you can have access to all the videos, or you can just join up. I mean, it's almost over. So you want to grab and watch as many free videos as you can, and that's good free training. But if you want to get them all when you see what's there, hey boy, it's a cheap price. I think it's either 67 or 97 bucks for a million bucks worth of free training. So check it out screwthecommute.com/bss. if you're listening to this now when I release it.

[00:01:43] All right, let's get into traditional versus self-publishing. I'm going to do a pro and con thing, except I'm going to start with the cons for each one. So traditional publishing cons. Well, there's a long wait time. When I did my John Wiley ebook, it was 18 months from the time I submitted the manuscript, so maybe four months of writing the manuscript. So it was 22 months from the time I wrote it to the time it came out, and it was an internet book. So some of the things were obsolete before it even came out. So it's a long wait time when you're doing traditional and you have to write a book proposal. Unless you're some super big celebrity, then you don't have to. But most of us aren't. So you got to write a book proposal that takes time. And then in today's atmosphere, they nickel and dime you to death. I even back then when I came out with The Ultimate Guide to Electronic Marketing. They charged. You know, they gave me a big advance luckily at that time. All right. But they nickeled and dimed me to death. They charged me to index the book. They charged me for the graphics that went in the book. So I was like, what? Are you guys kidding me? And now and the last thing before the pandemic hit, when I was speaking in the the author industry, the average advance was $1,500. And so it's just, um, you know, that's a lot of bad stuff about traditional publishing. Well, let me give you the pros. All right? Now, if you hype it up really big for any of the big publishers that are left, there's a little bit of prestige to it.

[00:03:29] When I say I had a John Wiley book, well, that kind of carries some weight. It's not that important anymore. But anyway, it's something you can you can brag about. And they also have distribution. So they got connections with everybody on earth that sells books. So you don't have to worry about that. All you got to do is write, and so that's a good thing. However, when I say all you have to do is write. In both self-publishing and traditional publishing. Pros cons no matter what, you have to sell the book. You are the one that sells the book. Now, unless you're like Joe Biden, who got, I don't know, a couple of million dollars advance for his memoir or something. Yeah, they're going to put their whole marketing team on it and blow it up like crazy to try to get their money back. But most of us aren't in that that arena. So you have to sell the book no matter whether pro con, self-publishing or traditional. Now, if you're really flush with cash and you want a bestseller, well, and you definitely want to get a deal with a major publisher, you can offer to buy 25,000 copies or maybe 15,000 copies and guarantee that you're going to buy them, and then you've got a deal.

[00:04:46] They don't care what you put in the book. If you promise that you're going to buy or you prove, or you put the money up, that you're going to buy a bunch of books and a little bit of underworld stuff. I kind of knew people that if you had $200,000, you could get a New York Times best seller. How they did it, I don't want to know. Even if I did know, I ain't telling you about it because it's kind of a little creepy. But anyway, that's traditional publishing now, self-publishing the cons. You're responsible for every piece of ink on every page. Okay? So you have to do it. The cover and the cover design, the interior design, the printing. Even if it's print on demand, you still have to give them the proper files editing, typesetting, barcodes, uh, all that kind of stuff. Um. And you either have to store the books in your own facility or home, or garage or storage facility, or pay to have somebody else store them and ship them for you. And, uh, your, uh, your cost per book, I forgot to I forgot to mention this on the traditional publishing. I had to pay 30. It was a 24. Nine, I don't know. No, it was 1995, I think. Cover price on my Ultimate Guide book. I had to pay $13 a piece at wholesale to buy him for myself. Well, that kills you to be able to make deals with your book.

[00:06:21] So anyway, your cost per book is way lower in and that's why let's get into the pros of self-publishing. Number one. I put on my list here. Speed as fast as I can, get the thing done. It's in the marketplace and that means way more profit for a couple reasons. One is I didn't have to wait 22 months to make any money on the Ultimate Guide book, and I made less money because it was, you know, I had to pay so much per unit and I was not able to make deals. See, when you self-publish, you're like, for instance, my 24.95 Wake Him Up book only costs $2.10 to print. So gorgeous. 300 page soft cover and so I could make a lot of deals even if I gave you a 50% discount. I'm getting 12 bucks and making $10 a book. Okay, so you can make all kinds of deals with self-publishing. Now, if you're going to self-publish, I highly, highly suggest you get a copy of the self-publishing manual by Dan Poynter. Now, he was a good friend of mine, and he was, uh, I mean, he had 20 versions of this book out. So to get the latest one that you can find and he's passed away now, we all we all miss him, but it just lays out everything you need to do to come up with a good quality self-published book and to print it at the reasonable prices at professional printers.

[00:08:00] It tells you how to make the bids, you know, get them to make bids on how much they're going to charge you. Everything is laid out barcodes, ISBN numbers, catalog, you know, Library of Congress, cataloging numbers, all that stuff you need to know is in the self-publishing. And I'm just totally in that now, uh, because I just don't want to fool with self-publishing or with professional publishers. That and there's very few of them left, but they're just too slow for me. I don't have time to wait around for those jerks to dick around for 18 months. And, like, you know, I could I could make 100,000 bucks easy on any book that I come out with in the time that they don't even have it out yet. Right. So. So I don't want anything to do with it. You might, and think that there's prestige in it. You're not willing to do the work to to self-publish. I mean, but you keep in mind you can still hire people to do the stuff that you have to do to self-publish on a, you know, when you pay them and they're done, you don't have to pay them royalties, or they don't collect the money for your book and charge you a fortune for the book. You just pay them and get it off your plate.

[00:09:10] Now, there are some hybrid publishers that you can deal with that will you pay them a big chunk of money and they create all the book for you. And you still got to market it, though. That's what's crazy to me, to pay all that kind of money when you got a market thing. So and they're out there and some legit, some are total rip offs. But just keep in mind you have to do the marketing. You can't get away from this. And that's the downfall of most authors. They just want to write and then they're broke. And then because they refuse to market, they want to spend all their time writing nothing marketing. And then they wonder why they're broke. Even if the writing is really excellent. You know, you know, a lot of the publishers. It's funny, I saw I saw a thing one time where somebody submitted the manuscript for Gone with the wind. And in most of the major publishers, it didn't get opened at all. When it did, it got rejected because they're just, you know, they it's just a sales organization now. They don't care if the book is any good. And that's kind of a sad thing, but that's the reality of it. So I'd rather have it in my control. I'm a big self-publishing advocate, and I'm even more of a digital publishing advocate now because you have 97% profit, it costs you absolutely zero.

[00:10:32] If you've watched my hey, you could here's a thing for you, you can go to screwthecommute.com/prize. It's my e-book marketing master class where I was interviewed by Derek Decker on, uh, it was only 47 minutes. I mean, I can go on for weeks on on this stuff, but I condensed it for you and how much money you can make and what you need to pay attention to for ebooks. Um, but anyway, a lot of people do want printed books to sell to directly to people or to pass out as credibility builders and all that. And I'm all for that, too. But, uh, there's the differences. You got a lot of cons to the traditional stuff. Not as many pros, but the self-publishing, if you're willing to claw through the what it takes to put out a good looking book, then you can make way more money that way. So. So that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. Check out greatinternetmarketingTraining.com if you'd like your handheld with one on one tutoring from me and my entire staff, where we cut everybody else out and just concentrate on you, nobody at my level will do that. So good luck trying to find somebody that will even talk to you. So there you go. Check it out and, can't wait to see what you come up with when you write write, write. Catch you later.