So you wrote a book. Now what? How do you present it to the world? How do you get people to actually read it? That’s where Dan comes in. Dan is the owner of Fitting Words, a publishing platform offering full-service editing, production, sales, marketing, and distribution. Dan collaborates with authors to make their book stand out, and develops creative solutions to bring their book up to professional grade.
In this interview, Dan and I discuss the importance of publishing your book in a way that best represents you and your business, and aligns with your goals. Writing the book seems like the big hurdle to jump (and to be sure, it is one of them) but there’s so much more to the process. Do you know what title you should select to reach your potential reader? Do you have a strategy for getting your book out into the world? Dan does.
“You’re not going to get your book into every bookstore in the country without some PR and marketing behind it.”
– Dan Wright
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Transcript of Our Interview:
Jess:
So I was reading over your website and I saw the statement on your website that your book reflects you and your business and I really loved that. I think that there are many different reasons that people decide to write a book. But whatever you’re writing, it is a reflection of you and a reflection of your business. So I want to just start by chatting about how do we make sure that we’re creating a book that, to quote you again, impresses your customers and your prospects.
Dan:
Well, you know, it starts with a lot of conversation with an author and getting them to talk about their objectives in writing a book if it’s going to represent their company name or them personally. I mean, a lot of my clients do what I do, you get a lot of personal consultants. Some people are speakers and conference speakers. So they have to have a solutions-oriented book. Some people, their book is more of a resource. But yeah, you can deliver a much better final result or outcome if you are able to drill-down and be sure that you understand what your client is trying to accomplish. Most times and my favorite client for what I’m trying to attract are people who are using their book to open doors. They’re not trying to sell 10,000 or 25,000 books. They’re not trying to be a New York Times bestseller. They’re just trying to go out and deliver an impression on a CEO of a company. And when you write a book, you are a person that wrote the book on the subject. Okay. You know, they’re not going to throw a book into the trash can as quickly as they would your business card. So there’s more stick-ability in that, but it also raises the bar. Your book has to be excellent, so you’re viewed as being excellent.
Jess:
That makes sense. Definitely, and I think part of the process of getting to that as you mentioned, is having a lot of conversation both with your clients and with your peers to kind of flesh out your ideas about what you’re actually writing about to get that clear, right?
Dan:
That’s right. And also a book allows you a certain advantage over a pamphlet, right? You can send somebody a pamphlet, some information, things like that, and that actually drives a lot of questions. It doesn’t provide a lot of answers. But a book, it’s different in that it allows you to perfectly articulate everything that you want a potential client to know. You can say it the way you want it said, the way you want it heard, and let people go back and forth and read it and reread it quoted. You may even use your book to fuel the content on your blog or video blog. So a book is really good, we use the term calling card, but it’s just a device that’s on steroids.
Jess:
Would you say, even if people aren’t, even before they read your book, it just has gives you a lot of, to actually have a book, it’s kind of like having a college degree. You have something where you’re like, look, I did this. It’s an accomplishment that you can show to give you extra status. Is that correct?
Dan:
That’s right. But if you have a book that has a great title, imagine a title that raises people’s eyebrows. Wow, I love that title. Right. And I did a book for a gentleman about three years ago, and we titled his book is very provocative, but the title of the book was Lectures From the Gates of Hell. And that’s kind of provocative, you know, it was an inspirational book. And we got him on some national media and nationwide radio and that’s to die for. Right. And the radio host enjoyed repeating the book title. He would say, okay we’re, we’re gonna cut to a commercial, but we’ll be back with Dr. So and so and his book Lectures From the Gate of Hell. So a great title, it raises eyebrows, and sometimes it’s a great subtitle lets you promise something. You can title it to like one word like ergonomics, there’s a famous book for you. But the subtitle is really commanding and something that you promise the reader, “Hey, you know what, there’s a problem out there. There’s a problem in your world. This book has the solution”. It also lets you bring some endorsements on board, right? So you may want to have other experts say, “Hey, you know what? You know, Jess Hershey, she knows her stuff. I’ve never encountered anybody who knows this subject from this point of view. And you’d be well advised to contact her”. Right? And maybe a foreword from another famous individual. You know what if Bill Gates were to write the forward on your book, a one page forward, and you make his name bigger on your book then you make your own name, right? Yeah. So these are things that you can do with that calling card called a book that you can do that sometimes people don’t think about that, but they come to me, a professional, I’m expected to know those things.
Jess:
And these are all ways to set up your book, so the initial impression just really makes people want to dig in. It catches their interest.
Dan:
That’s right. You know, in publishing it has been my livelihood, ever since I grew up and I’ve been in this business since I was 25. I’m somewhat older than that now. So yeah, I can remember all of those books that really stuck with me and the ones that I’ve read that really had me reading it from cover to cover. It’s shaped how I viewed relationships. It shaped how I viewed myself has shaped how I viewed money and my children and all of those things. And most people who really know their stuff I think have that potential to create that sort of experience. Maybe not with every single person that reads your book, but I think you’ll find that some people out there will really resonate with you. So I always encourage authors to be passionate as they write. Be authentic as they write. Don’t be afraid to acknowledge some frailties and weaknesses on your part and talk about your own personal experiences. People will resonate with that.
Jess:
Yes, it’s much easier to relate to a personal story then it is to a general idea in my opinion. And so sharing and being vulnerable like that just lets you connect a little more.
Dan:
Right, Yeah.
Jess:
All right. So after you write a book, you have the book, you have the title, you have all of those catchy things on the cover that we talked about. How do you make sure people find it and what are the factors that go into the sales and distribution process?
Dan:
Yeah. You know, that question just by itself is a wow. That’s everybody’s problem. How do I sell this book? How do I get my book out there? Now some people, maybe they wrote a book and it’s never going to be in a retail store. The retailer doesn’t want to offer that book out there because it’s a, you know, how do I take warts off my nose? Okay. It could be something that’s so niche-y, so unpalatable, necessary, okay, it has its niche, but it’s the casual bookshop or who’s never going to be looking for that book. Even if that’s the case, you can use Amazon. Amazon, for instance, is actually two different Amazons. There’s vendor central and there’s seller central. Now Fitting Words, we offer a lot of traditional publishing services, including sales and distribution. My Fitting Words clients, we sell to Amazon. We don’t sell through Amazon. Amazon actually buys our books just like they would from Simon Schuster random house or Harper Collins. But an individual who has a book may just go out there and print a hundred books at a time. People don’t need to know that you’ve printed a hundred thousand copies of your book or anything like that. You can print a hundred and sell your book through Amazon. You would be going through Amazon seller central and your book is there, people can buy it, you would ship it to them. And some of the advantage there is that you get to engage directly with people that buy your book.
Not when Amazon sells the books that I sell to them, Amazon doesn’t report who that customer is. So you don’t get to know who’s buying your book. But you also might want to set up your own website with a shopping cart and we recommend people use Shopify for their shopping cart. And so people can go in there and just like you would buy a book from Amazon, people can buy a book from you. It takes their money, they put their name, their address, and their email and all of that in there. So you have that information, you ship them their book, and then you can sell them your second book when that comes up. So Amazon is an option for everyone.
Sometimes you may simply want to go through a company called Ingram and they have a program called Ingram Spark. A lot of self-publishing companies, I’m a hybrid publisher, but some self-publishing companies use Ingram Spark regularly. Ingram is the world’s largest book wholesaler. Even Barnes & Noble buys books from Ingram. And so Ingram Spark, you can sign up with them and there’s a yearly fee. It’s not exorbitant, but they will take care of all your data for you. They’ll upload all your data, even up to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all of that. Your book will be available print on demand. And if you’re doing a book signing in let’s say, Bowling Green, Kentucky, that store in Bowling Green can order the books from Ingram and have a hundred books there in advance of you going and signing books in Bowling Green or your hometown or whatever. And that’s a very nice service that you can do, but it falls short of sales representation. It’s one thing for your book to be available to be find-able, but it’s another thing to have a person that’s actually saying, Hey, Mr bookstore buyer, let me show you this new book that I have by someone so-and-so. You know chances are you’ll never see your book on a bookshelf unless you have someone who is in a professional book sales capacity, that’s just reality.
Jess:
To go in and put it in front of someone cause there’s such a sea of books out there, right?
Dan:
Yes, Hundreds of thousands of new books are published every year. The majority of the books that are on the shelf right now at Barnes & Noble were on the shelf last year at Barnes & Noble. And I read a recent article, and this has always been true, but now it’s even truer, is that in publishing is becoming a top-heavy industry. The books that you find on the shelf and bookstores are your most popular authors, your most popular subjects. And the presence in those bookstores is driven by marketing budgets and PR budgets. And so that’s rarefied air. So I’ve got to some clients that spend their personal money on a PR company and were able to put a couple of thousand books into the market that way. We’re able to do it without that. But you get generally a shorter life in the market. You might just get a regional buy. I did a book about Pat Summit. We got books into bookstores around Knoxville, around Asheville, but it was not a National placement. So you can get some things done, but you’re not going to get an order for 3000 copies that puts a book into every bookstore in the country without some PR and marketing behind that.
Jess:
That makes sense.
Dan:
But that’s kinda the cruel reality of how are people gonna find you? You know, when you do your website you need to also add search engine optimization, that language in your website that as people go and Google for solutions to something, what are those catchphrases that everybody’s typing in. Make sure that those phrases and words are on your website. And I know you know a lot about that. But that’s where it’s at. You can’t just have a website and expect people to trip in and find it and fall right into it. No, you have to be strategic. You have to engage with people. You need to be writing blogs, you need to be on LinkedIn, you need to find ways to get into that community. You need to find the niche. You need to target the people and be relevant and resonate.
Jess:
Yeah, I love that. So I’ve heard this idea that you mentioned earlier a couple of times about how writing a book is like your new business card. I just wanted to touch on that a little bit and say, so if someone didn’t have a big PR marketing budget for their book, do you feel like there’s anything wrong with putting the work into writing a book and then having it mostly to hand to people as a gateway to use for your services rather than trying to get it in the stores and all of that big hustle?
Dan:
Yeah, absolutely. In fact, doing what you just described is the more sure path to being successful with your book. For instance, you know, I’ll kind of speak in vague terms cause I don’t want to just talk every individual author that I have, but I have someone who is approaching corporate America with his consultation business. He plans on giving away a hundred books on the day that it launches. He believes there are 100 CEOs of companies that could use the services. He wants them to be aware of the fact that his services are available, and these are people that might hire somebody to come and speak at a corporate retreat, to speak to the board of directors, to speak to their management teams, to give away as gifts to all their customers. There’s, there’s a lot of different ways that an institution or an organization or company can buy your book and buy them in very large quantities. When people think about a successful book they think about the cash registers ringing at Barnes & Noble or Books a Million. Right. But you know, in all the years that I’ve been in publishing, the biggest orders that I took were from institutions that wanted every customer to have a copy of that book. The biggest order I ever took was for 450,000 copies of a book.
Jess:
Ooh.
Dan:
Yeah. What would that do for you? It would make you independently wealthy in a moment. Right.
Jess:
Getting it in the right hands to get those orders. Yeah,
Dan:
Precisely. And you know, the book wasn’t outrageous. It was never on the New York Times bestseller list. In fact, I doubt if Barnes & Noble bought 900 copies of that book. But a major worldwide organization bought a lot of them. I’d like to see people get their thinking away from retail and get them to start thinking about their audience and the value of these institutions that they can benefit from using your book, and to develop that sales pitch and to polish it and to do some research and find those institutions. Those companies and organizations are probably in the town that you live in.
Jess:
Yeah. Yeah. And I think even if by putting the book into the right hands and getting in front of the right individuals is leading instead of more sales for your book, it’s leading into them purchasing your services. That’s also a great gateway and a great outlet and a reason to offer some free books to some important people and see how that goes.
Dan:
That’s right. That’s right. And you might find you need to talk to your tax accountant to see if that’s the case, what could be your tax write off from marketing and things like that. But that’s also, it brings a lot to bear of your book and its attractiveness and making sure that it looks professional. The pressure is on to make sure that your book delivers and how it appears and how it’s structured, how it’s read, and all of that. There’s an old saying that great marketing makes a bad product fail faster. So start with your product. Don’t quit on it. Don’t take shortcuts, and have professionals work on it if this is the level of your vision for your book and for yourself.
Jess:
That’s great advice. I love that. So on the note of things that people don’t usually think about I wanted to ask you, what are the most common mistakes that you see made in the writing, publishing, distributing, and pro distribution process and how do we make sure that we avoid them?
Dan:
Well making mistakes is easy, you know? And I say that from years in a large traditional publishing company who had the reputation of doing it better than anybody. Even the smartest people in the room can make a bad decision. What drives bad decisions more than anything is desperation thinking. Stop being desperate for success. Be cold. Be calculating. Ask for the unvarnished truth from people knowing that your friends will lie to you. They will say that they love every idea that you have. But you have to be sort of calculating. But desperation thinking will cause you to see everything in it’s very best possible light. And it’ll make you go from desperation thinking into wishful thinking. Okay? So you never want to be there. And so sometimes I kind of closed the door on a client every once in a while when I hear them say certain things, like everybody tells me this ought to be a book. Okay. You know, and I can guarantee what they should have told you is don’t go and publish this as a book. So these are the kinds of things that kind of thinking will drive some of these mistakes.
Number two, one thing a lot of people outside of fiction, we’re not talking about fiction, fiction is its own publishing animal entirely, but oftentimes people are too broad in their approach. I hate it when an author says this book is for really, anybody. Yeah. This book is really for anybody in sales. This book is really for anyone in business. In fact, there’s no competition out there for a book like mine. So they’re thinking very broadly and you know, if your book is for everyone, then I can’t tell you who your book is for.
And so I always encourage people to describe the reader to me that they are writing to, who’s your audience? How old are they? What might be their socio-economic circumstances? Are they family people? Do they ingest media from TV or is it from magazines? Do they read more than they view? I mean, what is it? Can you describe at all the type of person that you’re writing to? And then some people, when they tell me about their book, they find that they have to make a federal case to convince me or tell me what their book is about. There’s an old, old song. I think maybe I could coin this and give it the one breath test. Tell me about your book in one breath and when you’re out of air, you’re out of time. So, you know, don’t give me a list of 10 things that are wonderful about your book, just what makes it powerful and simple and convincing. And you’ll have my attention.
But if you go on and on and on in professional book sales, that’s a sign of a book that you’re having to work too hard to sell. Great books, you can sell them in 30 seconds and then spend the next five minutes talking about how many that they’re going to buy. Depending on the size of the bookseller, that could be 12 it could be 105 hundred or 450,000 copies. Right? So you know, get that sales pitch nailed before you ever go out in public and start talking about your book.
The other problem that people get into is they are just too doggone humble. Come on, you wrote the book on the subject. Go ahead and tell people that you know more about this than anybody. No one’s going to want to go to a doctor with a confidence problem. No, they are going to want to read a book from someone who knows what the problem is. They have solved the problem and can help you solve that problem.
The other thing is that they place too much value on how many books they will sell. They just think, “I’m going to sell 10,000 copies of this book. I’m going to sell 20,000 copies of this book.” But they can’t tell you how they’re going to sell 10 copies. So already their heads in the clouds, they don’t have a plan. How am I going to sell 500 books on the very first day? The book arrives because I’m going to have the design files, the cover files. We’re going to start on the process of delivering their book to them three or four months, sometimes before the book actually comes off the press. They’ve got that much time just figuring out how many books they can sell. They need to go from author to marketer months in advance.
Another thing is they underestimate the amount of work and time it takes to successfully promote their book. People that come to me, they view this exercise as a success because week in and week out they’re talking about their book because they’re talking about their business. They’re not trying to sell 10,000 books. They’re trying to open 10,000 doors. They’re trying to talk to 10,000 CEOs and one CEO at a time. They’re thinking about any event, what events can I go to to help put my brand out there? I’m going to go and give 50 books away or 30 books away or maybe sell 50 books or whatever. And they have that mentality month after month after month. And they don’t get weary because this is their passion. I find that some people will fatigue at about six months, but they still have books in the warehouse. And so I try to keep the process fun, where they have fun with their book and handing it out to people and go out and speak at rotary clubs at every opportunity because people love that. And then that, I know we touched on this, they trust their friends. Advice, talking to people that are professional. If your friend is a professional and does speaking, has written a book and knows these things, that fine, but there’s a lot of assistance online. If you come to someone like me, I’ll take your call all day long if you’re a client and just kind of help you recenter your actions, activities, and your objectives and what it is that you’re trying to do in your business.
Then a close cousin to some of this is sometimes a book author will think too much about the value of the transaction and too little about the value of the connection. So, you know Jess or Dan, you know, I went and I sold 10 books, that was a lot of work to sell 10 books and I made $150. And you know, that just didn’t seem worth it. Well, tell me about the 10 people that bought your books. We were there, right? And so sometimes this is a problem for a lot of people. Even traditional publishers that are trying to market a book. I used to be in direct marketing. They would always think about, well, you know, we only sold 250 books and we were targeting 10,000 people. And I said, yeah, but here are the 250 that bought the book. Well, what are you going to do with it? It might be an organization with 10,000 people you delivered that to. It’s sitting right here in front of you. What’s your plan now to sell 10,000 books? So sometimes the problem is not the book, the problem is not the people or the event or anything like that. It’s in your thinking. I only sold 10. But who are the people?
Jess:
Yeah. They’re your people
Dan:
And how many times do you hear people come back from an event and they’re on fire. It’s not about the meals that they ate or the hotel room they stayed in, the people that they met, they feel like, wow, this could really change the trajectory of my business. This person loved what I had to say. They’re encountering the same problems that I’m writing about. We’re going to connect later, want to fly me up to Seattle. These things happen in real life and the answer is yes, they happen in real life.
So those are some of the problems I find that people slip into when they publish a book with even if a self-publisher, a traditional publisher, or a hybrid publisher like me. They’ve got this book, it’s the tool in their hands and they haven’t quite mastered what to do with it.
Jess:
Yeah, that’s very helpful. Those are great things to think about going into this process of writing a book. We’ve talked a lot about different tips that you would offer people. We’ve kind of mentioned them here and there throughout the interview, but I kind of wanted to end on this, a summary of what tips would you offer to authors or future authors who would like to bring their book into the world?
Dan:
You know, some of this kind of goes back to your college composition class or something that somebody told you in high school or whatever. But you know, I like it when, and I don’t do a lot of writing coaching, but I do that a little bit and always tell people to map out your book before you begin to write it. Where are you going to stop? What is the journey you’d want to take your reader on and where does it stop? What’s that parameter? And you know, when you get that set, then you’re ready to begin writing your book. And so a lot of times people will find that map becomes the table of contents. In a sales situation, when I was in sales and I would go, I was vice president of international, I would go to Sydney and I would talk to large booksellers there. And if it was a book that the content was really truly something remarkable, I would show them on a piece of paper here’s the table of contents. And the buyer always looks through that. They start at the top and they look all the way to the bottom. They’re looking at the chapter heads, they want to see, Oh, okay, what is he talking about? What’s the journey? Hey, you know, I’ve had that issue a lot of times. It’s not all 10 chapters of a book that people remember. It’s one chapter of a book. And beginning with that, start with a map. And then once you start writing, don’t stop for corrections. Don’t get bogged down. Hey, you know, I wrote a chapter last night where I wrote 500 pages. But I kind of want to go back through that.
You know what, you’re killing yourself. That’s a lot of energy that you’re using. And the best thing to do is to begin writing. And until you’re done, don’t stop. Because there’s always time for editing. There’s always energy for that. You can always do that down the road, but sometimes you just can’t, you might not get into writing but use your best hours or best energy to do that and dedicate your best hours to it. Don’t let it become a drudgery. Let it be a happy experience. I’m writing a book, okay? And it may be a big book. It might be a small book. Let it be a great book. Don’t get bogged down. But just engage, just imagine that person that you’re sitting and speaking with and you’re writing that person.
The other is the tip to be professional. Understand that for your book to be its best, you’re going to need a professional editor. You’re going to need a professional jacket designer. Everybody needs these things to be your very best. There’s a difference between great artwork and a great book cover. Sometimes professional book designers want to win an art award. They’re not great book jackets. What does a great book cover have to do? It needs to deliver a powerful first impression. And your book cover, it’s a number of things. It’s not just the colors, not just the artistic elements, it’s the title, it’s your name, how it appears and where it appears as the background of all of that. So there’s a number of things that you can do to help that and a professional can bring all that together.
And then last of all is articulate your strategy before. This is who I’m writing to. This is their demographic. This is why I’m writing it. These are my objectives in writing it. If, if you know what your objective is, that will help you in mapping it out. In other words, Hey, I’m writing to present this type of solution and that will help you everywhere in the publishing process.
Jess:
I love it. This is great advice. I think this will be very helpful for anyone who’s hoping to take this on. So thank you for sharing your time with us today.
Dan:
You bet. And I’m sorry, it sounds like tedium, but yeah, I’ll try not to drag my clients through it. I’ll just try to keep them up at a high level of happiness and strategic thinking while we try to take care of a lot of what I’m talking about here in terms of the book jacketing and the editing and all that,
Jess:
Make it a happy experience for everybody.
Dan:
It is, but it’s a bigger job than you think unless it doesn’t mean anything to you.
Jess:
Yes. Math homework. Yeah. Thanks so much, Dan.
Dan:
Okay. Thank you for having me!