10. Interview with Author Sheri T. Joseph: Going the Hybrid Publishing Route

In this week's episode of Show, don't Tell Writing, host Suzy Vadori sits down with author Sheri T. Joseph to delve into the intricacies of hybrid publishing. Sheri shares her unique journey in the publishing world, discussing why she chose a hybrid model for her books and how this decision has shaped her career as an author.

Key Topics explored include, What is Hybrid Publishing? Why Choose Hybrid? Navigating the Hybrid World, and Sheri's Advice for Aspiring Authors.

About the Guest:

Sheri T. Joseph grew up in a New York beach town until her family relocated to San Francisco. She went to UC Berkeley, received a JD from UC Law San Francisco, and studied economics, geography, and creative writing. She is passionate about the need for housing, and serves as executive director of a nonprofit corporation that supports creation of affordable housing for families, veterans, refugees, and vulnerable populations. She’s also a trustee for Homeward Bound, a provider of homeless services and housing. Sheri and her husband have three adventurous children, a one-eyed lab named Bailey, and live in Marin, California. Edge of the Known World is her debut novel. Author website: https://www.authorsheritjoseph.com/     

Find Sheri's book, Edge of the Known World in Bookstores, or Order Online HERE.

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Transcript

0:49

Welcome to Show Don't Tell Writing with me, Suzy Vadori, where I teach you the tried and true secrets to writing fiction and nonfiction that will wow your readers, broken down step by step. This show explores writing techniques and shows you a glimpse behind the scenes of successful writing careers and coaches writers live on their pages so you can learn and transform your own storytelling. Whether you're just starting out crafting, editing, or currently rewriting your first book or maybe even your 10th, this show will help you unlock the writing skills you didn't know you needed but you definitely do. I'm looking forward to helping you get your amazing ideas for from your mind onto the page in an exciting way for both you and your readers so that you can achieve your wildest writing dreams while having fun doing it. Let's dive in. Welcome, welcome everyone. Today we're going to be talking about publishing science fiction with Sheri Joseph. Welcome Sheri. Good to be here. Yeah, so excited that you could join us and I know you were working this morning. We're going to talk a little bit about that too. Should we dive in? Ok, let's dive in. I first met Sheri, I had to look this up, in 2022, and she was hoping to publish her science fiction novel with She Writes Press, their Spark Press imprint, which is a hybrid publishing press, and we're going to talk a lot about that today. And they matched her with me as a coach because they asked her to revise her book, which I think it was 117, 000 words. Was that what it was originally? At least. Something like that. Yeah. I think it was 117, 000 words and they said a hundred max. And we can talk about that too. I want you guys to ask that question because they get that question all the time. And they hoped that I could help her figure out where to do that, right? And so supporting Sheri through two rounds of developmental edits on her book was an absolute joy. Because her ability to take feedback and make her book stronger was actually unparalleled, Sheri. That book just, I mean it was good before, but it became absolutely amazing and you should be so proud. And that book coming out this September, it's brilliant. So Sheri T. Joseph grew up in a New York beach town until her family relocated to San Francisco. She went to UC Berkeley, received a JD from UC law, San Francisco, and studied economics. Geography and creative writing. She is passionate about the need for housing and serves as executive director of a nonprofit corporation that supports creation of affordable housing for families, veterans, refugees, and vulnerable populations. Thank you for doing that work, Sheri. She's also a trustee for Homeward Bound, a provider of homeless services and housing. Sheri and her husband have three adventurous children, a one eyed lad named Bailey, and live in Marin, California. Edge of the Known World is her debut novel. Can you tell us, Sheri, just before we get started, what is Edge of the Known World all about? I appreciate everything that you said. One thing that I would add to it is that kind of starting backwards, I had sent you a list of kind of new, very exciting news for me that it had been entered in something called the American Fiction Awards. And two days ago in multiple categories, because it's, we could talk about this a lot, especially for people who are trying to get published for me, what one of the biggest problems and issues was that I had written a kind of unplaceable book. I never thought of it as science fiction to me. It was fiction. It was speculative fiction. It was near future. It had a lot of different elements in it. But science fiction becomes a catch all for things when you don't know where else to put it. And maybe it's, you know, not completely current day based. So it ended up being labeled sci fi, which was a real problem. But, um, it just got, uh, in this American fiction awards, it got entered in multiple categories. And it won Best Novel in Best New Fiction, in Best Political Thriller, Best Technical Thriller. best science fiction general and got a finalist in the one thing that I had submitted for which was cross genre of all the funny things. So I just wanted to kind of open that with the problem of trying to label your work and the problem of where that fits in the publishing world and why that kind of led me in some ways to the hybrid publishing kind of working backwards from that. Because a lot of us have books that are truly mixed things. Especially your first book when you don't know enough to know that you need to be appealing to a specific target audience, which is the best. It may never be that good again. Yeah. But anyway, so Edge of the Known World very simply is a, what I call a literary speculative fiction. If you think it's kind of Margaret Atwood's work, like uh, Handmaid's Tale type of thing, but with maybe some more sex and funny. So, uh, on that, but that type of thing. More sex in the Handmaid's Tale? There's a lot of sex in the Handmaid's Tale. There is, that's actually right. I take it back. A close, that doesn't really, yeah, not that kind of sex. Yeah, but it's really sad sex, right? Yeah. So, but when you talk about it's science fiction, but it's not science fiction, people don't know where to place it. It's not Star Wars. It's not aliens. It's not apocalypse. It's not that kind of thing. Basically it's about a refugee girl who in the near future is who's a who. She's brilliant. She's funny. As far as she knows, Born and raised from a small town in Texas, and she finds out at 16 that she actually was adopted and was smuggled in from another country, and that we have a big cold war with, and she's basically an illegal refugee. And the problem is that this is an era where genetic screening tests, exactly like what we all do with 23andMe, In Ancestry. com, we all use that for Christmas presents and everything. Those screening tests are now used as standard security surveillance and ID. You go to the airport, you go to the DMV, you try to get into a university, instead of a fingerprint, they do a little cheek swab. This, this is not fake. This is where we're headed and we'll be there in a few years. Right? China is already doing this on a lot of their populations, the Uyghurs, the Kazakhs, things like that, to keep them in place. Right. Her problem is that she's got a little genetic marker through a bunch of political things. I don't need to go through very, very harmless, a little equivalent of a freckle that is only from people. And basically, what's a resurgent Soviet Union and it will get picked up on those genetic screening tests. And if she gets picked up. Even though she's got the papers and looks like everyone else etc. She will get deported. There's no asylum, and she'll probably get killed when she's sent back because she was almost certainly from the family of dissidents. So she learns this at 16, and it sets off a big adventure when she has to go find somebody who's gone missing and risk an international setting of these tests. So it's a love triangle. Of course, she falls in with these 2 guys who are, you Blood Brothers. There's a lot of international intrigue. It's mostly young people, so it's, it's the way, the way young people think and all those other problems. The most of the story takes place in their 20s, correct? Like it starts, she's 16 when she learns, but they're, they're young people, but it's not YA, it's a book for adults. Absolutely. It's because it's really the, to me, it's a love story. It's a very adult love story because it's not just a romantic love story. It's a love story. There is a big romantic love story thing between the younger people, but one of the biggest love stories to me is between these two brothers. And what happens when they go in conflict with each other. There, she falls in with an entire family. It's, it's about the love between family members. And what happens when you have to make those horrible choices between what you think is right for the greater community, what do you think is right for your own family? How does that family first, how does that all balance out? And I just love hearing you talk about this, Sheri, just knowing what a, what a deep and layered story this is. And you're right. It isn't traditional science fiction. Sorry for introducing it that way. No, no, no. You're absolutely right. It crosses so many genres. Um, as that's why you cleaned up in the American Snow Horse, you won in five, you won in, in four categories, plus, um, plus a finalist in another, right? And that is right where I just want to talk about hybrid publishing for a moment. There's traditional publishing, which is what we think of. It's the big five. And we spoke with Felicity George and Jess Bull, and we had some guests on the show that were. You know, going that route and answering questions there. And then we know about a little about self publishing, which is like, we do it all ourselves and we control everything. And then there's this other model in the middle, which is called hybrid publishing. Which you've chosen because it was hard to go the traditional route because there was no category, right? And so some, a place like Spark Press can take books like this that are beautiful and wonderful. And they give you all the support that a traditional press does, but with a slightly different model, right? Do you want to talk a little bit about the hybrid publishing model? So there is some payment, but then you, yeah, so go ahead. Sure. Just in a little bit of background, because I bet a lot of people were in the same situation that I was. So I, I wanted to write the Great American Novel, right, from the time I was a kid. This was a big thing to me. I ended up in law school. I think you may have done it, by the way, but Really? Well, it would be thanks to you. By the way, brilliant. I mean, in terms of like We'll get into that. How you lost those 17, 000 words. It was brutal. You were brutal. And it wasn't that we didn't knock heads, but you had this Absolute, and I'd worked with a lot of editors before, you had this absolute unerring way of picking up on things that I knew were flaws. But as a writer, if you spent literally a year working on a subplot, on a theme, on a couple of characters, you, you cannot, it is truly killing your children. You can't do it. I'm sorry. Even if you know in your heart. That's what you hired me to do. And what you did was you identified those that I knew, and some of it was super creative. It was as specific as you have two characters here that are taking up a lot of space. You should combine them into one character. Things that never even occurred to me before. Yeah, I think you had a, was it a cousin and an aunt? Yeah, yeah. And, and, and they had the same feel because they were part of the same family and they had a lot of scenes that were very similar. So yeah, you were able to morph those. That was a really cool thing that you did. And you literally were able to cut out scenes and cut out paragraphs and cut out things, but you didn't lose, I mean, you lost one of their names, but you didn't lose anything. Right. By doing that. Cause you had so many characters already. Yeah. I don't want to fawn over you, but, but it is absolutely true that this book would not be where it is or doing what it's doing, if not for you, I'm dead serious about it. And I know that because I had tried to sell it before I tried to get it. I tried to get an agent and I tried with publishers. And so I actually have your, your, your control experiment. There's pre Susie and there's after Susie, right? So, and I can't express how grateful I am about it. So, I went to law school. Yeah, I was a trial attorney for a while. I was with one of the giant firms here in San Francisco. I had. Three kids under four years old at one point and thought I was actually losing my mind. And all I really wanted to do is write. So I went back and I started taking a bunch of writing courses seriously this time, but going for a full MFA might've been a divorce at that point. So I did a lot of the UC extension classes and Stanford extension classes, which I really, really recommend from anyone who's near any universities. You get the same professors. You don't have the pressure God forbid, your family or your working or both. And so I came up from, like, I started at a poetry class which moved to a short story class which moved to a novella class which moved to a novel writing class which moved to an advanced novel class which moved to invited workshops and On and on like that. So after a long time of that, I wanted to be treated as a serious writer. Maybe is the way to put it. That matter a lot to me and it mattered a lot because I had come in through this kind of MFA related crowd. Everything was benchmarked, engaged by whether you could get an agent in a traditional publishing contract. Ideally, right. And when I ran into, it was probably multifactorial, but I think probably realistically, the biggest one was a combination of a book that was kind of unplaceable before you was definitely too long. Right. But also the reality of my age at that point, and that I did not have a platform, right? You put all of those together, and I knew the book was good because I would send it to agents, like through query tracker, or it was maybe even a little before that. And three or four or five times, they took it to read the whole manuscript, right? Which is a thing, as everybody out there knows, if you've done this, there's And every single time and that's no small feat, right? That's no small feat, but the manuscript wasn't ready at that time, right? That's exactly right. What would come back is I love it. I think it's a compelling story, but my team here doesn't think we can sell it because I kind of didn't have in mind so much that all the agents are doing is selling to publishers. Right. And if they don't think they can sell it pretty easily, there is zero motivation for them to be doing it unless you have a particularly unusual story or honestly, probably unless you're young and they think they can really work with you and develop you. Bookstores and traditional publishers have shelves. That certain things sit in, right. And if you don't fit that mold, um, that's why it's neat. That's why self publishing is an option, but hybrid is also an option because you, you do pay up front and, but then you get to keep your royalties, but, um, they can do a lot of the heavy lifting and there are, I just want to differentiate to just in terms of hybrid presses, because there's lots of presses that call themselves a hybrid press, but may or may not be legit. And the way that I say that, so she writes press. Amazing. I work directly for them. Sometimes like in this case, they actually matched Sheri with me and said, Hey, go work with Susie. She'll figure this out with you. And so that's how I met Sheri in the first place, but they actually have Simon and Schuster distribution. They have, you know, they have, they are considered a traditional publisher by the press. So Sheri was able to get a Kirkus review and I'll read that to you in a bit, like all the things they are considered legit. And that is because, yes, there is a package that you spend up front, and Sheri will spend up front to get their help, but then Sheri keeps the rights, and Sheri keeps, or eventually you can get them back, and you also keep the royalties, and so there are publishers out there that will call themselves hybrid publishers, and it makes me really sad, because I see this in my, in my Facebook group all the time, or in my email, sometimes people will come to me with what they think is a hybrid. Publishing contract, but it's actually from what's called a vanity press, which can be very dangerous. They lock up your rights and they take all your revenue. You know, they take all your things. And what happens is, and people don't realize that if you actually sign those contracts. Right? So be very careful. There's lists out there and writer beware site, they will list those publishers. It's very public, but you'll get an offer. You'll be excited. And if you sign with them, it will cost you a lot of money. They won't do anything for your book and you can't get your rights back. So it's not like you can turn around and like self publish it next year. Uh, you can't, you don't own it anymore and it's gone. You got to write another book. But the, the publisher she writes is amazing. They are super legit. And I was really excited to work with you on this one because, and I've had a number of clients that have had really successful launches there. I think they're incredible. And I, you know, I can tell you why. So part of the process of getting there was getting. Getting over myself on some of these other things in retrospect. I am a lawyer. So I have looked at those contracts and everything that you said is true as in everything. The, the ecosystem and publishing has changed radically. Certainly from the time I, I started in it. Right. And, you know, if you wanted to go with the big four or the big five, you're either celebrity or you have a very different level of, of platform and social media and, and all of that type of stuff, you know, the world has really changed. There are a lot of traditional, smaller, independent presses out there, loads and loads of them. Right. And with the idea that traditional usually meaning that you're not paying in and that you always hang on to your copyright, but you are licensing all the rights to basically create this book and put it out there in the world. And in return for that, they get to keep a certain amount of the profits called royalties. Of course. And you get a very small piece of the royalties. It's a very small piece. But even, even within that world, I think, increasingly, it's, it's not transparent that there are always buy ins. So what I've seen, and this is why I ended up with SheWrites, because to me, they were the most transparent. They had the best distribution system. There wasn't anything about them that I didn't respect because what I saw in a lot of the smaller presses that look like traditional and like maybe they would in the old world, maybe they would have had more prestige or something. There's always some requirement of a buy in. So you, you may get a tiny advance up front or maybe even no advance, but they theoretically cover the costs. But at the end of the contract, you're expected to buy 2000 of your own books at the end. That's the price, for example, there. So those worlds have gotten kind of smooshed together, but I'd say that, you know, you just have a range in this ecosystem, which she writes. What I really, we have a lot of 1st of all, tremendous community. Brook Warner is, is quite brilliant and she's been a real force in the industry at the real community of the writers. So, every I appreciated the contract, a reversion of rights upon request almost at any time. I ended up. Actually getting in advance and selling the audio book for me to a group called Tantrum Media. Right? Yes. Yes. So exciting. Yeah, which is great with a brilliant narrator. And I actually got an advance for that. And I just can't express how gracious She Writes and Spark Press was about handling all of that. They did not need to be, but they've been like that with everybody all the way along. The big kicker now with, that Brooke has arranged, because like I said, she is a real force and a real genius. I've come to understand that it's a little bit less about who your publisher is. And it's a lot about who your distributor is. And again, I don't mean to be repeating things, because a lot of people there are probably much more experienced than me. But I did not understand this. The publisher is going to take the rights to your book. They're going to put you through more work than you could ever imagine with multiple edits, if they're good, right? And they're going to be curated on the front end. I think she writes takes maybe one out of 10 submissions, maybe. So it already means something that it's been curated. The credibility is already there, right? They do all this work, all the publishing, they handle things like I didn't never understood about metadata. They do an amazing cover design. They do all of these things. If you were paying for it, self publishing for that quality, you'd be paying that much or more. That's what I've come around to. What Brooke did recently was the kicker from most of the, what you want to look at for a hybrid publisher and what you don't get in any of the self publishing is, do you care? If you care, you may not care about being carried in bookstores and being in libraries. Because there's only one way into those other than your local bookstores, and that's to be with a distributor that the bookstores work with. So if you want to be in, in Barnes and Noble on the shelves, if you want to be in, for a book passage, you name the independent bookstores that are all around, they will only buy books if they know that the distributor Who kind of prints them and warehouses them and does all the shipping and does all that contract work with them. We'll take returns in a very, very big, seamless, easy way. Yeah. So I'll talk, can I talk a little bit about returns? God, I'll shut up. You, this is really crazy, crazy concept for those of you who come from other walks of life and are new to this industry, or even some of us that are That have been around for a while. This is the most shocking thing about how it works in a bookstore. Um, it is shocking and, and, you know, it is a real disadvantage to self published books. So there are different formats, right? Right now, the three most popular formats, print copies, eBooks, which is just digital copies of books and audio books, so Sheri's getting all three, doing all three, two with she writes, and then she sold her, her rights, almost in a more traditional arrangement, I would say, to the audio, the audio rights. Where she actually got an advance and they're doing it all and like the whole thing. So that is absolutely like such a testament to how amazing this book is. But when you actually sell to a bookstore, here's how it works. So let's say there's, you know, we're going back to our Hollywood myths again. We have this huge thing and Barnes and Noble orders in thousands of copies because Sheri Joseph is going to show up and sign them and all these things. Right. And we're going to do a full table display and they order all these books and the publisher goes, yes, we've sold the books. Right. And then Sheri goes, and you know, like, maybe I should have used somebody else because Sheri's book is going to do amazing. But let's say that, let's say that those thousands of books, they want, and they still have 990 of them at the end of the month, they'll give it like four or five weeks. And then they'll pull the plug and they'll say, Nope, we're done. I'm going to return the books. Now, I want you guys, I can almost hear you all gasping wherever you're watching this from. Because when I say they're going to return the books, I mean you get full pop back from the publisher. So they bought the books, but they're kind of not really buying them because they can return them for full price. And what it means to the publisher, usually they're not even going to bother paying for the shipping back because the shipping is so expensive. So, you know what they do? They destroy the books. The bookstore destroys the books. They tear the cover off and they throw it in the garbage. The horror, right? They throw it in the garbage. And that, and the publisher has paid, let's say, you know, they ordered. I know people are like, are you kidding? Um, no, this is actually how this industry works. And there is no other retail industry in the world. That does this, that can return stuff after they bought it to the manufacturer. It doesn't make any sense. And so, and so, yeah, it's a huge risk for publishers. And so for a self published author, you can do that and get distribution if you make yourself returnable, but you open yourself up to huge liability because if you sell, you know, if you print a hundred thousand books and they do this huge buy, and then they return them or rip them to shreds and throw them in the garbage, you're out that money and you have to return, refund them and you could go bankrupt. It's really scary, right? It's really crazy. And so when a lot of the authors that have come on the show already talk about, you know, The print distribution and the reasons why their publishers have chosen to either print or not print the books and the distribution, that is why. Because it is actually a huge risk. Unfortunately. There's also print on demand, so you could still sell a print copy if you're self published. Or if you're with a publisher who doesn't accept returns, because smaller publishers, a lot of them don't. And you can also do commission sales. So you could buy them, Sheri was talking about Vanity Press that might make you buy 2, 000 copies of your own book at full price. Then you could put them in the store, but the store will take 45 percent of the cover price. So if you're paying full price, you're not making a dime and you can put them on commission and that, or sorry, on consignment. And then you can go around to all your local bookstores and put them in and then go pick them up. And it's, it's a huge pain in the butt. So that's why there's an advantage to hybrid. If you want to be in bookstores or in libraries, because they do some hybrid presses like spark press, which is a division of she writes, have that distribution and the advantage of traditional. Right. So what Brooke did was there was another group, PGW, that, that did that form of distribution. And so it was legitimate and credible with a bookstore. So Spark and Spark Press and She Writes have been in bookstores forever, but Brooke got successful enough that it attracted the eye of Simon and Schuster, which realized there's a lot of money to be made, not just in Simon and Schuster. Author published authors, but in all of these independent presses, including the top level, I've been presses that have real records of sale. So, Simon and Schuster's distribution arm opened up to a variety of independent publishers, including a few, the hybrid ones, not all. And I don't know what the qualifications I think it must have something to do with how many sales they have per year. So now. Simon and Schuster distributes as of August, this August, starting with my cohort, our books and the impact of that. You know, face it, just even the brand name has been really pretty astonishing. So it doesn't have to be Simon and Schuster, but I would urge everybody that when any independent press hybrid, what they call traditional, whatever. In this day and age and the economy and everything, you kind of need to look behind to what the distribution scheme is. And again, I've got hats off to. The authors who are doing romance things that, you know, they're selling them directly through Amazon, and they've got a social media empire, and they're selling hundreds of thousands of dollars of books. They're incredible. Right? And, and that's one way to go. So it's, it's really is, you know, God, I hated it when people said this to me, but you really do have to kind of figure out what matters to you, you know. There's lots of choices, right? And somebody, uh, Bonnie said in the comments, did I miss this? Is Spark related to IngramSpark? No, it is not. Super confusing. Yeah, super confusing, but no, SparkPress is just one of the imprints that handles, and I hate to even say science fiction, but um, or speculative fiction, uh, uh, so Sheri, within SheWritesPress. There's she writes press is a publishing house to hybrid, you know, as close to traditional as you can get right that was initially only women. So there's a lot of memoirs a lot of things and Brooke Warner really wanted to create a community of sisterhood because she left 1 of the big publishing houses and she was really unhappy with how things were chosen and how commercial it was. And a lot of women were getting left in the dust. So she created this publishing house called she writes. And then they opened up another division that's co ed. And in theory handles a little more commercial rather than a lot of the memoir and things, but I don't, I don't see a whole lot of difference there. And they're fully joined in every way, shape, and form. But one is still called She Writes and one is called Spark Press. So I'm on the Spark Press side, but it seems like a pretty solid fusion at this point. Ingram Spark is a different, Susie, you would know better than me. They're a distribution system, and so many, many, um, exactly, and you can, you can get on. Well, they can also be your publisher. They're not exactly if you're self published, you can use them to print your books. You can use them to distribute your books, you can use them. The big ones are IngramSpark, or you can go direct through Amazon, or you can use Draft2Digital, which sort of again is another direct distribution channel. Okay, awesome. So let's, this is, this is great discussion. Thank you for sharing all of this. I love that your legal background will help with some of these nuances because this is a tricky thing, right? When you become a writer, you think about writing a book and you don't think. Oh my gosh, I have to run a business around my book. It's a little bit daunting. You just put your finger on it. I had no flippin idea. I had no flippin idea and I run a business. I'm the executive director of an affordable housing nonprofit. You know what I mean? That does, you know, really large finances, really large developments. And I thought I kind of knew something about the business world. I knew nothing. I knew, well, to be fair, the publishing business is changing so quickly. Number one, the traditional piece of it is very antiquated and very strange. It's very different from many other, and it's very slow. I'll also say that the pace in the writing world is, is not like anything I've ever experienced. I worked on wall street. I worked in China. Like I. I work, like, in factories in China, I work at a totally different pace, and so, so to, like, wait months or to have people take a year to get back to you or something, like, what? So there's a lot of things about it, but it is changing. Hybrid publishing is part of that change. Part of the exciting part of that change, but also it means that it's changing so quickly that no one person in this publishing industry, not me, not Jenny Nash that came on the show earlier, not, you know, not anybody that's an expert in the writing world, not Brooke Warner, we can't keep up. And so we need these communities. And that's what I love, Sheri, you're talking about. The fact that you're banding together with the authors there and you're learning together. And that's why I have this inspired writing community and all these things because we need to share because we can't learn everything. It's impossible. There's you, you, you could, but you can, you can paint your own house. You can, you know, you can do a lot of things. If you have the time and energy. Right, you could in your niche. You could in your one lane, you could certainly go deep and learn that, but it's hard to keep your eyes on every, all of the choices and, and the options that you have as a writer need to serve you much like when you decide what it is that you're going to write. You don't want to just write to market. We don't want to just write this or just write that it has to come from your soul. Or it's going to be flat, but when you choose a publishing direction, you need to think about, well, what do I like? And what do I want? Do I care about being in bookstores or not? And there's many, many people, especially in some of the genres, like romance and mystery, where you can just solely publish and I say, you know, not just, but you can do it. Solely on eBooks. There is such a huge community. Keep everything that you earn, except for absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Because there are readerships in those genres that will carry you. You know, when Sheri's talking about hers, you have a different vision. You want this book to be in different places. And so to have that support. A really huge engine behind you is amazing. So I, I would like to talk about, because I felt like this was not talked about honestly enough up front about money. Yeah. Share it. All the behind the scenes for you guys today. That's right. Because I will be honest. I, my idea was that I never expected to get rich off of this thing, but I did not expect to go backwards. Right. Right. And the idea of pain, what it finally kind of occurred to me was going to cost to get this thing out. There was a very bitter pill for me to swallow. And it wasn't honestly, because I couldn't afford it. I'm at a different stage of my life. It would have been different when I was younger, but not now. It just felt inherently wrong to, to, you can talk about it as an investment and it is. And hopefully I will get money back on and at least be able to hold my head up that, you know, I, I, I didn't lose, I'm not worried about your book. It's good. But the reality is. Is that and I've got partially because of the way I came up to this I have a lot of friends in the traditional publishing world who withhold to random house or some of the big things, the reality there what their new reality is, is that if it may be everyone again knows this from your previous speaker, if you get an advance. Right? It can be a blessing and a curse, right? Because they're making a bet on you. They give you the advance. You never have to pay that advance back, but you don't see a penny then until the sales of the book fill in their pocket. It's called earning out your advance. Earning out the advance. And the reality is now that for most people, they will never earn out their advance because for one thing, the royalties that you're entitled to are pennies on a book that's published because of the credible cost of all these things. It takes forever to earn out any significant advance. And if you don't earn out that advance, you're gone, you're dropped. Yeah, exactly. And so the expectation is completely different. If you go into a publishing contractor agreement with a publisher and they're like, all right, well, you're new. Well, let's just see how you do. And you don't have an advanced thing you do for them. They're so happy, right? Like, so you could sell, you know, a thousand books and they could be like, that's great. Let's take another, that might be a little bit low, but. But, but, you know, they, you, you don't have to go nuts, but if they give you an advance that you won't earn out until 100, 000 books and you only sell 90, 000 books, you're in the doghouse and you're done. And so not only you, the presidents of the publishing houses that wanted Simon and Schuster's head just rolled two and three years because they made big million dollar bets on people that didn't earn out advances. Yeah. Yeah. And Deb was asking, isn't it expensive to go with SheWrites? And I think you've already addressed that, Sheri, is that, that it is. And so the hybrid, it's like, I talk about this, you know, even that with my own services, like paying for editing and things like that. And there's, there's a way to do it. That you can do it all yourself. Yes. And then there's a way to do it. That's going to cost you money and save you time and probably end up with a better product. I like to talk about book coaching as like the, it's definitely more expensive to work with a coach all the way along than to get me to edit it at the end. However, it's the Cadillac version, right? And you're investing in yourself. And when Sheri talked about investing in university courses and other things, you've got to kind of think of it like that. And then hopefully that will all work out. It's hard to see that ROI because your life Sheri will change. I, I'm always a broken record when I say this, but, but your life will change having written this book. And I know we were talking as we were waiting to go live today about, you know, you're not really sure yet how that's going to go, like you're still working and all those things, but what you really want to do is, Like invest in your writing and make that into your, or maybe you don't want to do it. I don't know. You don't know yet. Right. But you don't know where that's going to go. So it is an investment in yourself for sure. Um, and there are really tough ones because I live in a world and Susie you're, you're from this world too. I live in a world of ROI. And I, I don't know return on investment. I kind of think return on investment. I think that if I love what I do, and it feels like it matters, so I'm lucky that way. I don't think I would ever stop it because a lot of my motivation to write comes from the stories of people that I deal with. Refugees and, you know, all the rest of it. So I don't think I would ever really stop it for that because that that's what makes me tick. Everybody's different. But God knows this warrants a full time job. The thing that was also very hard for me getting into it with a hybrid or with anything was that no one can tell you any evidence based. Of what is going to help you sell books. It sounds nuts. More Facebook ads, more Amazon ads, more social media, more this and that. There's no evidence based anything on what drives a book other than maybe your team did. It works for some people. Yeah, that's what I'm getting on TikTok and asking for a pity TikTok that goes viral for their poor mother who spent 15 years working on a book. I would be all in favor of that. I am so up for charity and pity and all the rest of that. I'm good. But no one really knows. So it's a, it's a, it's just a hard thing to get your head around. What I ended up doing was I compared what, for example, she writes, which has gone up in price a little, what it would cost to do it through them. As opposed to if I wanted to self publish and create a team around me. That would get the same kind of result. And to me, the numbers weren't all that different. And so to me, that was a pretty easy decision because of the distribution and the support and talking to, I talked to even if you self published and hired a team that distribution or the, the audio book deal that you ended up getting, all of those things would be difficult. That's exactly all of those things would be difficult. And, you know, even down to the science behind your beautiful cover, which we're going to share, okay, so talk honestly about the money because it's a huge obstacle for so many people. It is. It is. But there are other ways, but then you have to do that work. And, you know, Writing the book is a piece of it. And then there's all this other stuff, right. That you don't expect. So, so I love Sheri because you're so methodical. You've run, you know, businesses before, or all of these things, you've got some big time jobs in your back pocket. And so I know that you did your research and you're like, okay, well, this works for somebody and not for somebody else. It's really hard to know. And it's kind of like. Writing your book and choosing that, I like to say, definitely learn from people and look at what they're doing, but then do what works for you because you have to sustain it over a long period of time. And for me, like I, I talk with a lot of fellow book coaches and they're like, Oh my gosh, Susie, why are you doing this? Why are they, because I love you guys, but why, but I love doing events like this and I love talking with writers and I love meeting all of you and answering all of these questions and because it's helpful. Right? And so that's how I designed my business. And so that works for me, but it wouldn't work for somebody else. And I would say the same thing when you're deciding how to market your book, you need to figure out there's a thousand things you could do, some which might work and some which might not. And there's no proof like Sheri was saying, it's not like, you know, you invest this, you get this back over time. You can figure that out for your own audience, but it's hard at the beginning. So Sheri, all that being said. You've got a launch coming up. September 3rd is the date. The book is available for pre order, by the way. What have you decided to do for your launch? Like what? Oh, I'm having so much fun. I'm super excited. The good part about being new about this is that I can ask really stupid naive questions and kind of get away with it. Right. Yeah. So I've got, there are no stupid questions, by the way, so it's again, hard to figure like doing book tours sounds like a lot of fun, but doesn't really sell books. So I got convinced that it actually adds to your author platform in the sense that. Yes, somebody Googles your name and there's a couple of pages of stuff with you in it. And those things tend to add up and matter like a website, big time more than I would have ever expected. So we've got, uh, uh, it's all kinds of social media, which is a misery for me. There's this was social media, help her out, comment on something. I don't know. Oh, yeah, it's all for someone like me. I mean, I may have a few hundred followers. Eventually, I may God forbid get up to 1000. It doesn't matter anymore that you can read everything you know better than anyone for if you're a big publisher, you're looking at 150, 000 followers and anything minimum to even attract your eye. So the real trick for somebody like me is, can I get enough people who like my work and care about it to repost? You know, to, to spread it from other people that do have bigger followings because they're younger, right? And, and just do that more. I've got a, my favorite thing right now. I've got an 18 year old. I call her my beloved minion from a local university was handling tick tock for me. Right. And she actually asked for the other day. So I, so that this put it in perspective for me, the audience that this is going to, because there's a lot of love angles in the book, she actually wrote to me and asked for just a very simple list of the page numbers of all the sex scenes. I love it. I love it. That's what she's got to concentrate on apparently for this. That's awesome. And it's funny because we've had romance authors on the show and you know, like, I think of that and I've, I've read your book and, and yes, there is like, there's romance in it, but I wouldn't have thought of it as having like these, It's big, but of course it does, but it's not the central piece of your plot, for sure. But I love that. No, no. To me, it's really built into the characters. And a lot of it is for humor, actually. But anyway, in terms of social media and knowing your audience and what you can be effective in. No, I am not going to be effective in pushing sex scenes in TikTok. I don't think that would represent the, you're going to get the wrong reader for that. But I do. Who knows? Who knows? I don't know. Yeah. I do have to tell you that. Again, I'm not talking about reading out loud sex scenes, but she wanted the romance stuff and she did ask specifically for that. And she knows the audience there. So that's not my audience. That's the point. Yeah. Well, let's see what happens with that one. I'm going to go check out that TikTok. But I got to tell you, having done two, so I don't always get the opportunity, but in this case I actually got the opportunity to do two times the developmental edit because I didn't meet you at the beginning. We didn't coach through it. So So I got to see your rewrite after we talked about it and, and all of the changes that you made to make it 100, 000 words. But I gotta tell you, when you sent that manuscript back for that second developmental edit, I was absolutely blown away, Sheri. Like, the way that you were able to take less words and do way more was amazing. Absolutely amazing. Your settings and characters are vivid. Your story is so gripping, you guys, like we haven't even really talked about it. It literally goes all over the world. There's some beautiful settings. There's some massive, massive adventure in this book. I'm going to read a few because you have some advanced praise. I want you guys to hear this because this is Again, if you go with a large press, but you can do this even if you self publish, but you just have to ask, but you can't get, for example, Publishers Weekly or Kirkus Reviews, typically, if you're with a smaller publisher, but listen to what they had to say about Sheri's book, because I want to tell you. Okay, Publisher's Weekly Book Life said, In this smart, multi layered debut, Joseph constructs a thoughtful, dystopian, near future adventure complete with genetic screening, international thrills, playful wit, and a welcome touch of romance. Throughout, Joseph's vivid world building and her scarifying descriptions of an oppressive state never detract from the psychological drama of those convincing, complex characters. Like, who wouldn't be thrilled to get that review? I'm going to read it out because you probably saw it, Sheri, and I want to see your reaction. Do you realize how good this book is? Because that's where it starts. I mean, we can talk about publishing until we're blue in the face, but making the book good is what's getting this reaction. Not because you bought, you know, not because you went with this hybrid publisher or this one, you know, I think I, I, I thought there was something there, but it wasn't until that second edit with you truly that I kind of went back at some point and read it when I put it down for a few weeks and picked it up and realized I would be excited to read this. And before that, it was just, it was so much in my head. We all know what that is, right? Yeah. It was your feedback. I, it is a funny thing, like winning these awards two days ago, which is, yeah, and this is before the book's not even out yet. I haven't even read the other two reviews that I want to share. I can say honestly, it wasn't that a friend was saying the same thing. It wasn't that I felt excited or thrilled about these rewards. I felt this massive sense of relief. Yeah. Because we're all nutjobs. I mean, who locks themselves in these rooms for years? We're all nutjobs guys. You heard it from Sheri Joseph, all the other things we could be doing with our time and our life and everything. And instead we're locked in these rooms away from people. We love writing and kind of why usually there's nobody shaking us and demanding that we tell these stories. So to get any validation that maybe I'm not crazy. It feels truly, it actually feels more like a relief than anything else, which is funny but true. Okay, I'm gonna do some more and I hope I'm embarrassing you, it's great. Okay, Sheldon Siegel, New York Times bestselling author of Special Circumstances, wrote a review for you. A stellar debut, deftly plotted and expertly executed, Joseph takes readers on a compelling and frightening tale. Alex Tashin is a character worth rooting for, highly recommended. Or carcass reviews. The skillful writing makes the book a worthy read. Okay, you don't get that kind of praise without the work that you put into this. So I just want to really just commend you. I'm so excited for this to come out. Sheri, we're going to flip into a couple of questions. We've got just about 10 minutes left. We're going to flip into a couple of questions. But before we do that, do you have a little, a short answer that you can give us? What's your best advice for all the writers on here? What's your best advice for them? Oh, I think the best advice is don't fall prey to groupthink. Be really true to your own voice. I think that the books that really stand out have a unique, very personal voice. And one of the reasons that I ended up leaving the workshops and everything through all of those programs is I think there's a real, Slippery slope to trying to please everybody, but don't do that. Stick to your guns about what makes your book and your story sound like you. I think that's really, really important. And then also, once you've done that, though, understand that this is what took me so long and that you helped me get there. You can write exactly what you want. and your mother will read it and that'll be great so you have to be willing to let people who really know what they're doing come in to shape it to take it out to the public so there's the kind of the part a and the part b and you have to find people that you trust like like i found you who allow you to keep your voice but make it better i will never come until pretty far down the road i will never impose Or ask a writer to squash their voice because I know I've seen it so many times that is going to be the magic and a lot of times when I get a manuscript the first time I can't hear the voice. And I would say that, you know, the draft, I could see glimpses, but it's like okay and then we have a conversation what is it that you're trying to do we, it feels like a feels like a step backwards sometimes but then you were able to bring that out. Thank you. Okay, I want to write a book like this. Okay, well that's not what you did yet. These pieces are missing. So it's always about the writer and just trust your instincts guys, because that idea, that beautiful idea that you have is probably amazing, but you have to be willing to listen on, okay, it's not, it's not on the page yet. I didn't get that beautiful idea from these pages, right? Absolutely. Okay, amazing time. I do have one question here from Jeanette and it says, one of our local independent bookstores will no longer take KDP books because they say the print copies are inferior to regular print books. Is this a trend that you are seeing? I don't know if you can comment on that, Sheri. I can take it if you'd like. Yeah, I think, I think that's, I understand that there's, there's print on demand, there's offset And then there's the official traditional type of print and I think that the print on demand per book is very, very expensive. So if you know you're going to be printing more than 500 as an economy of scale, you almost always want to do the offset. Which is going to be cheaper than the other. And I think at this point that even the biggest publishers are using offset printing, but I don't know. Most of them are. Yes. And, and I can tell you just in terms of costs, cause you guys were appreciating the cost earlier. I can tell you that by the end, when we published book one, I live in Canada and a lot of my books get sold at events because I'm a public speaker and I do appearances, I tour in schools, that type of thing. And so in the beginning we were able to print them print on demand in the US and the price wasn't exorbitant and then our dollar changed and so there's all kinds of things happening in printing. Remember I said, you can't keep track of everything. And so me being who I am, I actually ended up renegotiating all the printing contracts for my, you know. Publisher and brought them. So then we had a us publisher, us printer and a Canadian printer, but I got it down to, so it'd be the equivalent of about 80 cents us, but I was printing in the thousands, right? Because I was selling in the thousands and I knew like, if I showed up to. If I, if I had committed to this many speak at this many conferences and do this many things, I knew how many books I was going to sell because that's who I am. I'm a business person, right? So I could do some math and figure that out and then pay 0. 80 a book instead of 7 a book or whatever. Right? And so for me, that was worth doing. Now, I got to tell you, I do have books and because you can get caught with books and not because they didn't sell, but because in 2020, when the pandemic hit. I stopped doing all those large events, and now that they're back online, I've built all of this, right? And I've started this community, and all of these other things, and I don't go to as many events anymore, and I don't plan to. I still want to speak at conferences, I want to be talking to all the writers in the world, but I don't do as many. I only do a few school visits, or Residencies a year at schools and a few, like, uh, I'll do one tour usually a year in Northern Alberta, where there's some, um, schools that don't get a lot of artists that come. So in Northern Canada, I drive 10 or 12 hours North and I do a week up there and that's a corporately sponsored tour. But other than that, I'm not doing those large events anymore. So yeah, your plans can change and you can look at that and say, wow, I don't want to do that, or, wow, that's exciting. And you can build your writing career however you want to, Sheri, right? So, I can't wait. Oh, yeah. In fact, it's, uh, the problem is too many choices. Yeah. Well, pick one or two things I like to say, don't try to do them all because you can't do them all. Well, will you come back on the show in a little while after your launch and let us know how it's going. Okay. Well, absolutely. Okay. Amazing. So thank you so much, Sheri. Best of luck with your launch. We're cheering you on. Thank you very much. Talk to you soon. Okay. Bye bye. Thanks for tuning in to Show Don't Tell Writing with me, Suzy Vadori. To help me continue to bring you the straight goods for that book you're writing, click planning to write. Please consider subscribing to this podcast and leaving a review on Apple podcast, Spotify, or wherever you're listening. 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