35. Navigating Publishing in 2025 with Mark Leslie Lefebvre (part 1)

On Friday, March 7th, 2025 Suzy sat down with Mark Leslie Lefebvre, a publishing industry veteran with more than four decades of experience, in a live publishing Q&A session. Publishing has evolved from a traditional-publishing-only model to the rise of self-publishing via digital platforms.

In part one of this two part podcast we will share Mark's presentation and conversation with Suzy. During this discussion they delve into:

• The benefits of self-publishing, including creative control, higher royalties, and direct engagement with readers
• The challenges indie authors often face, such as marketing, distribution, and visibility 
• Practical solutions and strategies for success

Resources Mentioned in the Episode: 

Get the Slides from Mark's Presentation

Wide for the Win Book 

https://writerbeware.blog/ 

https://www.draft2digital.com/ 

https://markleslie.ca/ 

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Intro and Outro Music is Daisy by Zight and used under a CC by 4.0 DEED Attribution 4.0 International license. For more music by Zight visit https://www.youtube.com/zight

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, nonfiction, that are going to wow your readers broken down step by step. We're going to explore writing techniques. I'm going to show you a glimpse behind the scenes of successful writers careers that you wouldn't have access to otherwise. And I'm also going to coach writers live on their pages so that you can learn and transform your own storytelling. I'm Suzy Vadori. Whether you're just starting out, you're drafting your first book, you're editing, or you're currently rewriting that book, or maybe even your tenth book, this show's gonna help you unlock the writing skills that you didn't even know you needed, but you definitely do. I'm so looking forward to helping you get your amazing ideas from your mind onto your pages in an exciting way for both you and your readers so that you can achieve your wildest writing dreams. And you're going to also have some fun doing it. Let's dive in. Okay, amazing. We are here at the top of the hour. We're going to get started because we have so much to cover. Mark has to go through the entire last thousand years of publishing. Right, Mark? And we have so much to do today. Welcome, everybody. We're here to talk about the publishing landscape in 2025, which, you know, I don't even know much about what, you know, Mark's going to say today. But Mark is an industry publishing industry veteran with over four decades. How does that feel, Mark? You put it on your website. So decades in the publishing industry. And I first met Mark more than a decade ago, which makes me feel old too. Right. When I was first starting to write and getting into this and he quickly became one of my favorite people to talk shop with and sort of brainstorm and share ideas, but Mark can also always be counted on to create a welcome environment for writers of every level, whether you're starting out or whether you're super advanced. And so he and I are really like minded in that way. For writers, you know, creating events and things for writers to learn and interact and create. And sometimes we get into our share of harmless shenanigans, right Mark, like building blanket forts and telling ghost stories with writers underneath blanket forts, which has sort of become a tradition when we find ourselves in the same city, which is super fun. And speaking of tradition, right? So you've been on the front lines as the industry has transitioned, as the publishing industry has transitioned. From traditional only, right? Look at me. I did a dad joke pun, tradition of blanket forts and traditional publishing. So from a traditional only model to this sort of landscape of traditional publishing, hybrid publishing, independent publishing, which is also called self publishing and you've been a bookseller through that time. You led Kobo, Kobo's author relations for self publishing. When I first met you, you were introduced as Kobo Mark, and that's all I knew for a long time. And that's part of, right? And that's part of, partly because, um, there were a lot of marks, and partly because your last name is difficult to pronounce. And so, you get all these nicknames, which I don't think you mind. Do you mind? I don't mind at all. Okay. And so these days you're known more as Mark to digital, right? Um, because you are a director at Draft2Digital, which is one of the world's largest self publishing with support platforms. And you can talk, he'll share a little bit about that later. You're also a prolific author. I had to ask Mark. I'm like looking, I was like, wow, I didn't know you wrote so many books. He's written over 30 or contributed to over 35 books. Are they all behind you there? 35 books. Yeah, and your genre, like, ranges from horror, you've written a romance, you've got urban fantasy in there, and you also write books supporting authors in non fiction, which we're going to talk a little bit about today. So, Mark and I have actually been talking about bringing this type of talk to this audience, to all of you, for a long time. And, you know, since we couldn't build a blanket fort that encompasses the world, we wanted to invite you today to this Zoom room, so, to this really casual chat. about publishing, but with a specific focus on independent writers and independent authors and that publishing journey. We are really pleased to welcome you today, Mark. Welcome. Thank you so much, Susie. So what I'm going to do is, this is just to keep me on track, because I get distracted so easily. I may see a blanket fort I run off to. Is I'm going to pop up some slides. Now this is going to be for the people watching this live. I understand audio, you're not going to be able to see the slides, but I did see a question I'm going to answer in advance is yes, I will make the slides available in PDF format. I'll send that over to Susie and Liz and you guys can send that off to the people who are interested in it. We can even make it we can even put that in the show notes for the yeah, exactly. So people who might want to see the pretty visuals and stuff. But it's more or less just to keep me on track, because I want to, there's certain points I want to make sure we talk about before we dig into the Q& A. So, let me just make the next 15 minutes or so going through that relatively quickly, so don't worry, you will be getting those slides. The entire thousand year history, right? Yeah, and it's only a 62 page, uh, of slides, that's all it is, or no, 142, something like that. We'll, we'll get there. Thank you so much, Susie. So yeah, we're going to talk about navigating publishing. In 2025, as a, as a collaboration between Stark Reflections on Writing and Publishing and Show Don't Tell Writing with Susie Midori. So, just some high level thoughts. I want to start off with the fact that self publishing is easier and harder than it's ever been before. That's really important to remember. Lots of tools we didn't have, but there's also lots going on, and there's lots of competition as well. But it's still not as hard as breaking into traditional publishing, which has gotten significantly harder since I started. Actually, 40 years ago was when I got my very first rejection on a short story. Well, it's going to be 41, uh, years, uh, this, this summer. But this is an important element that we forget no matter how we approach publishing is that it's a business and so is self publishing and forgetting that self publishing or traditional publishing is actually a business is devastating if you forget that that's you're you're missing out on on an important element of why this industry exists and some books may make economic sense for a publisher to invest in And some might never, but they may fit a niche market and just at a high level of cost. So, for example, here in Canada, and it may, it may be different in the States as well because we're a smaller country here, but a publisher might need to sell a thousand copies in order to earn out what they've invested into a book. But a self published title might need to sell only a hundred, and I get into some of those examples. But I'm going to give you first a very super brief history of publishing so we can understand where we are today. It was derived from storytelling. It was derived from that intimate connection. And that's what story is all about. That's what writing is all about. It's that profound connection between two people. And we need more of that in the world than ever before is that connection, but we had it with storytelling. It was very intimate. The storyteller could react to what was going on in front of them. It evolved when we realized that we could put things on paper and we could transition that. Somebody could write a story down, send it to another village, and then that story could be read by other people in other places. See, Susie, I did build a dad joke into that because the very first The very first thing written on a scroll was a knock knock joke, it was knock knock, who's there? Scroll, scroll who? Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling down the river, because I'm a CCR fan. I knew there was going to be some dad jokes, thank you for that, Mark. So what happened is, that was still limited, right? You could only get stuff limited, like the hand scrolling. So when movable type, or Gutenberg's printing press, and binding, when that happened, Books suddenly became available to more people than ever before. And that every transition in publishing, every time we expanded the audience and more books were available, more writers were needed, more publishers were needed. Very, very important. But they were still hardcover. They were expensive. It wasn't until pulp magazines and the mass market paperback were able to bring books to people who could afford the books at a much cheaper price than ever before, and with larger distribution, again, great opportunities for writers, for writing in the pulp era, and also being able to get stuff into mass market paperback. But again, even though we had things like pulp and mass market paperback, there's still this prestige associated with publishing and literary and awards and All of the mystique that's involved in the romanticized version of a writer. When Amazon started with online book selling, and this started in the late 90s, that was a game changer. I grew up in a hometown that didn't even have a bookstore, and the library was closed for two months during the summer. So that was a significant game changer in terms of books. Being available more broadly, but it wasn't until the release of ebooks and digital that there was finally the most significant shift we've seen in the publishing industry, which has created the most opportunity for writers because it removed a lot of the gatekeepers. That were in London and New York and Toronto and places like that, and it allowed books to be published for lower cost and get to more people around the world than ever before. And that created opportunity for writers. But what's most important is when we look at the evolution of publishing, we don't think, for example, when we look at, oh, my God, now that Gutenberg did this invention, the scrolls are gone and that's going to destroy everything. Because it's not about completely replacing, although I don't think there's not as many scrolls around as there used to be, but it's not about completely replacing things with new technologies. As I learned from Mitch Joel, everything is with rather than instead of. Mitch Joel is a Montreal slash New York, Seth, Canadian Seth Godin kind of guy who does digital marketing. The Six Pixels of Separation podcast is a phenomenal look at digital marketing. And that's the way he looks at it. And I remember this on Twitter back in 2011 when the e book was really starting to take hold, was somebody tweeted, the book didn't die. It just had babies. It's just an additional way we can enjoy books. And speaking of additional, we have to think about self publishing, not as rejection, but about choice and about taking control. And when done self, uh, correctly, the only self in self publishing should be self directed. Because really, we still need to hire all of the professionals involved just like a publisher does. And that's what an indie author will do, is hire the editors, hire the designers, etc. to make their book as good as possible to get it out into the world. And they've adopted the term indie author in order to differentiate themselves from, from sort of that negative stereotype that comes with self publishing. Removes that connotation, but it's also a recognition by how this business has grown in the past 15 years or so. And what I love, because I love tracking traditional publishing and self publishing, and I love finding parallels, you know, when you study history, you can see patterns emerging. And I see that indie authors today are evolving in the same way that traditional publishers have evolved in the past. Through passion, through hard work, through new forms, through pricing, through niche markets. 1927 in New York, Bennett Schirff and Donald Kloffler said, We are going to publish a few books on the side at random. They became Random House, one of the world's largest publishers right now. And in the 1930s, Penguin revolutionized publishing by taking classics that were printed and available in exclusive hardcover editions and making them inexpensive paperbacks. Despite going with his new cheaper format, making classics available to more people than ever before, we still think of Penguin as a classy, literary publisher. So it didn't destroy the reputation, but it allowed more people to enjoy. They were experimenting with pricing and new formats back in the 30s. They've merged with Random House to become the world's biggest publisher. Then in 1924, Lincoln Schuster's aunt used to love doing crossword puzzles, but she could only do them on Sundays from the newspaper. She, you know, was very verklempt and said, I really wish that I could do crossword puzzles every day. So Lincoln got together with his friend Richard, they remortgaged a house, they invested their money in a publisher that was going to focus on niche publishing of crossword puzzle books, Dell. And that became the start of Simon Schuster Publishing, again, one of the world's largest publishers. What have we seen there? We've seen people wanting to do it for the reasons of passion, people doing, experimenting with forms and pricing, and people focusing on niche markets. And they grew into the world's largest publishers, and indie authors are doing all of those same things today. Because we've never had more choice than we've ever had. But the thing that's so important for you to remember, and I am an author who works with traditional publishers, and I self publish. I do both, and I benefit from both in a significant way. Because there's no single path, there's no one way to do things, even in the realm of self publishing, there's multiple ways of doing it. So, at the very high level right now, what we have today is key publishing options available for you, and you as the author get to decide these things. You have traditional publishing, where the publisher actually pays you, self publishing, where you're paying professionals like editors, etc. to do it, or some combination of both. And in the high level, the traditional publishers, you think of the big five, like the New York publishers, those are the major publishers that often require an agent in order to navigate. Or if you're getting an offer from one of them, you reach out to an agent and say, Hey, I have a deal. Would you like to represent me? And then you also have larger national publishers in Canada, the U S et cetera. And then lots of smaller indie presses and regional publishers and the further down you go. And I don't say down in a negative way because I've only ever signed publishing deals in the traditional realm with larger national publishers and regional slash indie press publishers. Pretty much every deal I've signed, I just signed one recently with a small Canadian publisher as well, is the lower down you get, you're not necessarily going to get as much of the support and the international exposure because of the marketing expenses that they have and the power they have. But you're going to get a lot more interaction and a lot more control. You're going to be able to work more collaboratively with those publishers. And there's really, from my experience, I've loved the experiences I've had working with the smaller publishers because I get to be engaged in those books in a very significant way where I probably might not if my publisher was a major New York publisher. There'll probably be other pros and perks to that. And then in terms of self publishing, you have fully assisted, where somebody, you pay someone to do all that work for you. There's the DIY, where you're doing all the work and publishing, and you're paying the professionals like the editors directly yourself. And then there's community publishing. And I want you to be aware that by default, Most publishers who call themselves hybrid are not necessarily there to help you as an author. They're there to help themselves to pockets and pools of your money as well. So one of the things I highly, highly recommend you check out is is Google the term Writer Beware. It's run by Victoria Stros, and it's a great place to find where people are doing that might not be, might be a little bit nefarious in terms of the things they promise and the contracts they lock you into. Yeah, and to differentiate that and to differentiate that, Mark, from fully assisted self publishing, which is also sometimes called hybrid, but you gotta be careful. There are, there are plenty of companies that do very good work And they're very onboard and transparent in how and what they do for you. But the significant ones who are making billions of dollars, they, they are making billions of dollars, are the ones that are out there to try to harm and they're really just trying to trick you into certain publishing contracts. Most of the nefarious players are owned by a company called Author Solutions. So the Alliance of Independent Authors is also an organization that helps track down and, and let authors know about various players. Victoria S's writers beware. Is more for more for the traditional side of publishing as well. Like publishers, you may not want to sign with, et cetera. So the key publishing pass here, this is important because a lot of people don't realize, you know, if we were in a room, I could see your hands. I can say, how many of you have self published. I suspect every person in the room is already self published because, uh, DIY or community self publishing is when you make your work available for free and it's completely self directed. You control when and how you publish and the platforms, you know, like X or Facebook blogger, WordPress, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest. If you're publishing there, that's community self publishing. So you you've already done it. See, it's not that hard. But the benefit there, and the reason it's called community self publishing, is the focus is on the engagement and the interaction you can have, rather than the broadcast method of the other kinds of publishing. Now, the reason people might want to pick self publishing, and they haven't changed that much in the past dozen or so years, Is beginning writers may use it in order to break into traditional publishing? Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna build a name for myself and then get into publishing that way. Mid list writers who are already so, uh, traditionally published might use, use it to break beyond the, the, the constraints of traditional publishing, such as, well, we can only do one book per one author per year, and what if the author can write faster and has more books they want to do in different genres? And then top selling writers, Brandon Sanderson, for example, who did a Kickstarter that earned him 42 million several years ago, it would, part of it was control and part of it was he wrote four more books than his publishers could handle, but part of it was now I'm in control with these assets and I can do some extra things with it. Other reasons are higher royalty rates. I've never earned more than 8 percent on a traditional publishing deal so far. So the bigger name authors will get 10 to 25 percent or I can make 70 percent of the retail on self publishing. There's faster payouts. I get paid every month at 45 and 90 days versus once or twice a year from traditional publishers. And again, a faster publication schedule. I'm not tied to a traditional publishing, a four season selling schedule. I can release books when they are ready to go. I also have more creative and business control. Now, the high level options, and I'm not going to go into much detail about these because it's just too much to get into, but the high level is going direct. For simplicity, you can use a distributor such as, I'm obviously partial to Draft2Digital. You know, Amazon Kindle, Kobo Writing Life, Google Play, I usually go direct there, and then I use Draft2Digital to get to Apple and Nook and Tolino and a whole bunch of library platforms. There are other distributors like PublishDrive and StreetLib as well, and again, there's just choices and options and you can experiment with them. Now, the way distribution works, the, the reason it may be beneficial is, okay, it's single entry, I don't need to log on to six different systems. I can log into one or two systems and, or one system with that and get into pretty much all the places I need to go. It's free, I can get a free conversion from a Word document to an EPUB, even print, and the distributor takes a, a, a small cut. So when I go through a distributor, I earn 60 percent instead of 70%. So on a 10 book, that would be Directly get 7 and distributor that'd be 6 for the e book. And again, it's the convenience in the time saving. With print publishing, again, high level, KDP Print, great way to get your stuff directly onto Amazon. It's free, you don't need an ISBN. They also print here in Canada, which makes getting those author copies a lot easier. And it's great for Amazon, if you want actual distribution to get it listed online at the various bookstores. IngramSpark is probably the best way to go. It has the most options. There are some costs involved in setup. Uh, ISBNs aren't an issue for Canadians, but you may need to purchase one there. And then Draft2DigitalPrint is another way to get that book into Ingram's system. And you get a free ISBN and automated cover app. And so there's some options there. Again, you have those choices. For audiobook, you've got ACX is the big player, Audiobook Creation Exchange. Gets that on Amazon and Apple. And you can upload an audiobook you have, you can find a narrator there, and you can pay up front for them, or there's a no pay up front, but there's a caution there, is that locks you in for seven years of exclusivity. You can also use Findaway Voices. They distribute to 43 retailers and libraries that include Amazon and Audible. And you can upload audios you've produced, and you can pay up front. Um, there's no need to pay a split payment with a narrator. There are digital, Apple digitally narrated audio, which you can get free narration. AI narration through Apple. It's completely free. They'll allow you to distribute to OverDrive, the library platform. Google Play has a free tool as well. You load your e book there and they let you download it and load that e book to other platforms. And just in the last couple of weeks, Eleven Reader Publishing from Eleven Labs, who actually have one of my voices, they actually have my voice available and I use it sometimes when I'm traveling and I don't have a mic and I need to get my voice recorded somehow. They have a new tool available only to Americans, and I think in the UK right now, not yet available in Canada, but I've signed up to be notified, and they have 11 reader publishing as well. But the truth about self publishing, and I'm very positive about it, is that it's not all that different than trad publishing, in that 20 percent of the books make 80 percent of the revenue. And there were big players who earned millions. So, Bella Andre, one of the pioneers in our industry, romance writer, she earned more than a million dollars selling e books for, you know, five dollars U. S. And this was with a series, the Sullivan series, that her editor and her publisher said, no, no one's ever going to buy these books as well. So, there's those cases. And many authors do really well. There are thousands of authors earning more money in self publishing than they ever earned just being traditionally published and being a mid list author. And most authors will make some money. Many will never sell. Not all that different than traditional publishing. At the high end, looking at this, the cost, you've got 3, 000 potentially. Could even go higher, down to 300. I wouldn't recommend going that low, because usually editing is going to cost More than that, but looking at a book that's priced at 5 an e book, you know, and making 3. 49. So, doing the math, you need to sell 86 copies to make your 300 back, or 860 copies to make that 3, 000 back. And then there's things like dropping the price to 0. 99 to get more sales. Well, that just means your volume needs to really be significantly higher. But I like thinking about the long term and think about your goal. Do you want to earn this money back right away in the first year, in the first two years, in the first three years, some of my audio books, the first audio book I produced in 2014, I'm still about 2, 500 away from earning back my investment on that one. Other audiobooks I've produced in the last few years, I earned my money back within the first year. So, it's not always the same, and you can't rely on it. Some things you can rely on, though, are the three P's of publishing success. I like to say that patience, practice, and persistence are close, as close to the magic bullet as you can get. This is writing, continuing to write, continuing to work at your craft and get better at your craft, and remembering that overnight success takes time. There was a time when you had to wait months to get a rejection from a publisher and then pick it up and send that off to another place. It's not all that different when you're self publishing. Sometimes you don't see the sales right away. I self published a book in 2016, and then that was a Canadian rebel from New York. I rereleased it with a new cover in 2020 when I started to turn that into a series and I sold more books in the first four months of release, re-releasing it in 2020 than I did in the four years that it was sitting there between 2016 and 2020. And persistence. It's basically getting those rejections, or whatever it is, and not giving up, and trying again, and believing in yourself, and continually getting better at your craft, and writing your next book. I do have a podcast at starkreflections. ca, where I love to harp on about the things I'm learning about the industry, and talk to wonderful people like Susie, for example. And my contact information is there, but now, I'm going to stop talking, take a sip of my coffee, and take a break. Is everybody, how exciting was that? Like, how much information did you just get? And yes, we will make those slides available. Because Mark knows all the things. Fabulous information, a firehose of information, so much to understand. I'm reading you the comments, I don't know if you're following them. Okay, so. We've got many writers here today who are writing and starting to think about publishing, right? So they're just at the beginning of their journey. So what we asked at the beginning, who's here today? are just thinking about it. Some people have already gone down this path. When should they choose this path? And when do they need to choose this path? Well, there's no need to, right? So, I mean, the thing is, is the best thing you're doing, like, you're here, you're participating, you're learning, learn as much as you can from as many different sources. Don't just trust what I say. Take what I say and what Susie says and what a whole bunch of different people say, and you're going to find that, well, that doesn't work for me, this other thing works for me. But it's okay to experiment. Now, when I started, I started submitting short stories. I said, 40 years ago, I got my first rejection at the age of 15, sending stories off to a market and getting rejected. That was one of the only options available. I'm a strong purveyor in, in experimenting with short fiction. So if you want to try and sell something, have you written anything short? There are markets available where you can send your stuff and maybe you get 25, maybe you get 200. You're not going to make much money off of it, but selling to a some sort of magazine or market could be one way of experimenting with your writing. Hey, what, how are people reacting to this? Similarly in self-publishing, you don't have to publish a book. A, an ebook does not have to be 300 pages bound between two pieces of cloth. An ebook can be, and I have published short stories. Hey, let's just try the short story as an ebook. I'll sell it for 99 cents. I can get a cover for $75 from some of the services that I don't have to spend a significant amount of money on it, right? And edit. Getting an editor to clean up a short story is a lot more cost effective than a book. And then I can experiment and see, well, what is this self publishing? Like maybe It's about your readership, right? Like, cause if they're, if they're reading your short stuff, then maybe they'll read your long stuff. And if they're reading your long stuff, they're going to Like people, think about it. When you read a book and you're finished, you automatically go and say, I love that. What else did they do? Right? Yeah. So you're building a body of work and it doesn't have to always be novel, novel, novel, novel. Exactly. Yeah. And again, like, just think about a band doesn't start off playing at Massey Hall in Toronto or Radio City Music Hall or the major venues. They start off in a local pub, right, potentially playing or at their high school gymnasium playing whatever. So it's the same thing. Think about that with your writing. You can start with some smaller projects and just, and it's not as scary. It's not as big a deal. Like, Oh, no, I'm not. I'm just going to self publish the short story. I'm not even going to tell anyone about it. Cause I just want to see how it works, right? Yeah, that's great. And what about genre? Does genre matter when we're looking at like, do some genres do better? A hundred percent. Yeah, no, but in general for these guys, a hundred percent. And I, and I have access. Remember I have access to the sales data from draft to digital. I've worked in the industry for years by far, bar none. Romance outsells everything and it's not they're not even in the same universe in terms of how much romance sells because romance readers are the most beautiful wonderful people in the universe Because they read voraciously they read, you know, three books a day like my mom was that kind of reader Back in the day, which is why I became a reader, I don't necessarily, I do read romance, but I don't read a lot of romance, because it's not, I like to genre jump, but that's the one that is going to outperform anything else. Now, there are things like Romanticy is hot right now, which is the combination of fantasy and romance. And there are genres that come and go, like vampire stories are hot and then they're not, stuff like that. Genre fiction tends to do well in digital a lot more, because a lot of the stuff that's happened in the e book world, the e books have kind of replaced that mass market paperback reading, that beach reading. Because it's a lot more convenient. I can have it on my phone. I can have it on my Kobo reader, or my Kindle, or my Nook, or whatever. You can have it immediately, right? Yeah, and you can get that immediate satisfaction as well. Like, all my books are available through Draft2Digital to the library system. So I can, you can go to Libby, which is an Overdrive based app, and you can get, if the library doesn't have it, you have access to pretty much any one of my books available for free. And so there's this great access to works. And again, People who are reading fiction aren't necessarily interested in collecting having I I'm a big book nerd collector I have a lot of signed copies back there as well as my own but now when it comes to digital reading They just want to just I just want to enjoy the next book the thriller the next thriller the next mystery the next Romance, etc. So you're talking about digital versus print, which, which happens in both traditional publishing and independent publishing, but those genres, would you say are easier to break into as an independent or self published writer because you can sort of leverage that and you don't need the distribution? Is that, I'm sort of trying to, yeah, yeah, you can, between the lines there. To be quite honest. The challenge right now, back in the day, one of the major shifts in, when I started in the book industry, back in my day when I started, when I was walking to school both ways uphill and 10 feet of snow. Back in the day there were 12 big publishers and there were a lot more opportunities for writers. So you 12 were they called the big 12. You had the big, it was the big 12. I don't know, it was nine 92. There were 12 major publishers and now there's only five. And so every time that's happened, that's meant less options for agents to pitch to big publishers, less options for writers as well. But what's happened is in the meantime, other options have opened where the writers don't have to go through those channels, so it is hard to get. Now, one of the ways, one of the ways I used to, the going wisdom when I started was sell some short stories and sell to magazines and then build a name for yourself. And then when you pitch your book to a publisher, you can say, Oh, I've been published in these magazines, bang, bang, bang, and prove that you're good, that people like your stuff. You can do the same thing now as, Oh, I've self published a bunch of books and I've sold X, X, X, X, X, Mr. Publisher. And I was just witness at a conference in Colorado Springs where there were agents and editors there. At superstars writing seminars of people who had self published and had proven that they had a readership And both agents and editors are like, Oh, I'd love to see that next book of yours because you've obviously proven that people like reading your stuff. Let's see if I can sell this to a publisher. And that you have an ability to reach an audience, right? Because a lot of times we're, we're building our own audience and that's the thing. And sometimes, I mean, it's not as simple as, I love these examples, but it isn't always as simple as like publish it. Either people find it or they don't, there's, there's a lot more to it. But if you've done that already, which I know some people on this, at this event have done that, have published it kind of quietly opening, opening, and it hasn't happened, you know, is it done? What do they do? No, so like I said, I mean, in, in, I had a book out for four years and I sold more in, in the first month or the first couple of months of when I relaunched it because like I had the wrong cover for one. And then the fact that I made it a series suddenly meant every time I release a new book in the series, most people in the world have never heard of it. So when I release a new book in the Canadian World Series, now book eight is in the works to be coming out soon. When I release a new book, there's going to be people who come back and go, well, I'd like to go back to the beginning. And so book one sells. And this happens in both traditional publishing and self publishing Nothing sells frontlist like or nothing sells backlist like frontlist like frontlist. Yeah, exactly And so the other thing too is i'm also running a promo so because I have the control over this and I can't do this with my most of my publishers aren't willing to do these kinds of price promos on ebooks, but My Canadian Werwolf in New York book one, which is regularly five bucks, is dropping down to 99 cents on March 11th, 12th, and 13th. I went to writtenwordmedia. com. I booked what's called a promo stack, so I have three different newsletters going out on the 11th, the 12th, and the 13th that they're going to email a whole bunch of people who are looking for cheap books. And I'm going to sell a whole bunch of these books, obviously at 99 cents. I'm not going to make much money on them. But what will happen is a small percentage of the people who buy that book one Are going to go on and buy books two and three and four and five. And so that's one of the things I can do to get my stuff in front of more readers. Yeah. And I mean, I love how you present this, Mark, because publishing independently means that you are a business, right? And you get to make all those decisions. It's a little daunting for some people, right? Yeah. So do you have to be technical to do this? Oh, honestly, no, no, because I mean, and the reason I like Draft2Digital is you can use a Word document and pick from the templates and make a pretty book. So, for example, the one cover designer I use the most, he charges me 149 US for a front cover. They're gorgeous covers, they're really beautiful, and it would be 300 to do a full cover wrap, but what if I can't afford the 300? So, with Draft2Digital, all I have to do is, to get the print book, load the front cover. And they'll make a machine perfect cover rap for me, and I can still control what text goes on the spine and stuff. So, again, you can do it relatively cheaply. It doesn't have to cost you a lot of money. You said earlier that you relaunched a book, and because you had the wrong cover, and then it like exploded and did better in that first Well, it didn't explode, but it sold way better. Well, but it did better. It sold way better. So what's the wrong cover? What are we looking for? Here, I'll give you this example, and I mean, it's difficult to tell. I mean, this was the original cover for a Canadian werewolf in New York. The story is about a new Which has a New York, which has a, um, skyline with the sun, sun and the moon is in the sky, high in the sky and stuff. It's kind of muted, muted colors. It's not ugly. It's not urban fantasy. And I didn't realize when I had that cover It looks like women's fiction, to be honest. Yeah, and again, because the wolf is not, the werewolf is not very prominent, you only see him as a man, you never really see him as a wolf. I thought, Oh, okay. This, I don't want to send it to people who only read urban fantasy because I don't think they'll like it. And I realized, no, it is urban fantasy, even if the wolf is very minor and even having a new cover is a big moon glowing, glowing moon and again, the same building looking colors, Canadian flag and the moon, which is a consistent theme. One is done for all my covers. He's done a consistent lettering as well. And again, it shows you the darkness of more urban fantasy esque. And that alone, I mean, it was partially the cover. Obviously, this cover is way, way better and more suited. So you can have a great cover, but if it's a romance novel and it doesn't look like a romance novel That would be a terrible cover for a romance novel, by the way. Yeah, no, it would be, it would be. But, so, take, one of the ways to know if a cover is good or not Go to Amazon or some other online retailer and look at the top sellers in a category and compare your cover. Like, grab the little thumbnail and go, hmm, and play the old Sesame Street game. Uh, one of these kids does not like the others. If it sticks out way too much, even if it's beautiful, it's not going to appeal to the right. Yeah. And I like to say that same thing. Like take that thumbnail of the new cover that you're considering. Do a search on, you know, whatever platform, look at the other covers in that. Space that are selling and say, does it fit in and yet does it stand out? Right? Like it's kind of a tall order, which is where you might want to work with a professional versus just creating your own cover, that litmus test. Right. Yeah. And, and, and again, you might not know. And I've, and I've made that cover mistake numerous times. I remember doing it, you can fix it. Well, that's the thing is if you have the bad cover and it doesn't sell, you're done. That's it. Yeah. And I did. I did that with a short story where I was like, I don't really crappy cover. And then I know when I, when I updated the cover and it only cost me 50 bucks to get the new cover. So, but when I upgraded to a 50 cover. I actually made money on this short story as opposed to, Oh, look, I made 35 cents. Hey, let's talk about AI for a really brief moment because we could, we could have a whole other event on AI and our feelings and thoughts about it. But you know, what about AI covers? So I am, I'm not against them. Yeah. I am very much wanting to support creators and I wanna support the people who work in the industry, and I want to support artists. I would rather work with a designer who knows design, who can use AI tools to enhance things. Because, for example, a designer may need to. To have something and some of the, because you're going to stock imagery sites and trying to purchase element, like one will go to three or four different stock image places and pull different things in, but there may be things he can't pull in that those need to be generated somehow. Well, how do I get this is like, well, generate it this way. So, but I would rather have a professional who knows what they're doing do that, rather than me. And the other thing, the scary thing is, if you do leverage AI in generating covers, not only is there the issue of potentially putting someone else out of business, right, like they can't do the work because they're suddenly getting whatever, that's the moral decision you have to make, but you may have readers who are offended by that because they have that moral stance. And so it's a delicate situation. You also have this risk of using other copyrighted information without knowing, right? Yeah, and it's getting, it's, it's really And you have to disclose that, you know, if you, if you are self publishing and you've used You have to disclose it and then, yeah, like you said, some people just may not look at it because it's AI generated, but you may actually have a major issue because you can't And I, yeah, disclosure is important. When I, I said there's an AI mark voice, uh, that I've generated through 11 labs. And when I, I'm gonna go look up that up by, no, when I'm traveling, like certain episodes of my podcast where I introduce the podcast and I say, hi, this is the AI voice of Mark. I'm on, on the road, my mic, I don't have a good mic, and I'm hotel room. I don't like the echo. So I'm using this AI generated voice. And so I right up front let people know because honestly that it's not me when i've done I mean what I do is before I send a manuscript to an editor I use pro writing aid and i'll grammarly and stuff like that and the reason I use pro writing aid is because some of the editors i've worked with are wanting to Smack me around in the face because I make the same stupid mistakes as a writer and the, and, and ProWritingAid when I run it through there a couple times and I clean it up, it saves my editor so much headache and hassle of having to tell me really redundant stupid things I do. Now, I still need my editor to help me out the way that no one, no one but a human can help me, but A, it makes my editor happier because they have less to deal with. And it saves me a bit of money because it's it maybe it saved them three or four hours of redundant, useless work that they didn't need to do. Yeah, awesome. You have given me such a great idea though, Mark. Totally off topic, but I am going to book an hour on my calendar next week to find your AI voice and figure it out. And I'm going to start sending you voice notes in your own voice. Oh, that'd be nice. I can send myself love notes, right? Yeah, that's awesome. Okay, so what does it cost to self publish? You've been really open today, sharing lots of, sort of, I've spent this, I've spent that. What does it cost? Is it free? Or is No, no, once you have the, the machine, the machine perfect, I was going to say the print ready. Once you have the, the edited finalized stuff, you can self publish for free. You can self publish for free to Amazon. You can self publish for free using Draft2Digital or Kobo writing life or whatever. There is no cost to use those systems to publish. The way it works is you see what the cost is and the money comes back to you. When it's ebook, there's no cost. When it's print, there's a print cost and distribution cost and stuff like that. So the margins differ depending on what kind of thing you're publishing. But you can self publish for free. I would advise you would invest your money in editing and design. At the very core minimum, get an editor, get a cover designer. Absolutely. Okay, so on the flip side, that's publishing. And how much money can I make? Let's be real. How much money can I make? You see, you meet with thousands of writers. You can make seven figures a year. You're most likely, I'll be honest with you, most books that are self published or traditionally published will be lucky if they ever make 500. So I'm not, what I want to say, paint is a realistic picture. So if you have self published and you've already made more than 500, you're doing really well. Because most books that are published are not going to sell. They're not going to sell well at all, as well. So, so again, I want to be realistic. Yeah, but what's the difference? Can you tell? When you meet with a writer, can you tell who's going to hit it and who's going to make 500? Honestly, I had a meeting with a client earlier today, who is a very successful client, who has had one of his books turned into a television series, and his sales are not as high as you would think they should be, considering one of his books was turned into a television series. So, there's no guarantee. There are also people who have put out book after book after book, and they're great books, they're wonderful, but they haven't been discovered by the right people. And, and that's why the persistence is so important. So Hugh Howie, I'm not sure if anyone's familiar with the TV series, Silo. I'm not, I wasn't talking about Hugh, by the way, I was talking about a different author because I know lots of people, but Hugh Howie, his book, Wool, was adapted into Silo on Apple TV series. I think they're going into season three or something like that. And it's doing really, really well. Wool was his 10th book and his first nine books didn't really sell. So he didn't make much money. He didn't make money off those first nine books until wool just started to do really well and started to do really well around 2012, 2014, by the way. So it's not like it just got turned into a movie immediately. I mean, Ridley Scott optioned it back in the day and that got him on the. Tension from a bigger publisher who bought the print book only rights. And, and then that fell through over years and then Apple picked it up. So again, it doesn't happen overnight. Right? So that's something that's really important to remember. Again, I self published my first book 21 years ago, and I probably on, on that book, that first version of one hand screaming the very first book I published a collection of short horror stories. I probably made about maybe a thousand dollars in total over 20 years. I didn't make a lot of money off of it. Fortunately, I know more, and when I released a double sized expanded version last year, I did make several thousand more. on that book in a very short time period. But again, I had 20 years of experience doing it, so I learned a few things. Yeah, awesome. Okay, what resources are there to help indie authors learn? Which book of yours should we start with? I honestly think the book of mine that contains the most information that gives you some insights into distribution and libraries and being open to publishing your books with trad publishers and self publishing, I think Wide for the Win is probably one of the best ones, Wide for the Win. There's also a really, really great group. It's a Facebook group, but there's also a community like on a separate platform. That's not Facebook. It's kind of like a, it's called circle and you can go in and there's great tree of wisdom and there's advice and there's other authors there. You can ask questions about, I honestly think of wide for the wind brand in general, the book, if you're a book reader could be useful. And then there's also the group where you can just go in and read all the free resources available. Thanks for tuning in to Show Don't Tell Writing with me, Susie Vadori. I'll be continuing to bring you the straight goods for that book you're writing or planning to write. Please consider subscribing to this podcast and leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you're listening. Also, visit SuzyVadori. com forward slash newsletter to hop on my weekly inspired writing newsletter list where you'll stay inspired and be the first to know about upcoming training events and writing courses that happen in my community. If you're feeling brave, check the show notes and send us a page of your writing that isn't quite where you want it to be yet for our show to tell page review episodes. Remember that book and your writing is going to open doors that you haven't even thought of yet. And I can't wait to help you make it the absolute best. If you're feeling called to write that book, keep going. And I'm going to be right here cheering you on. See you again next week.