self-publishing, publishing process, platforms, audiobooks, ebooks, print books

This is Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. We will accomplish our goals through sharing experience, improving tech skills, increasing business knowledge, and embracing life. Let's dive into the next episode. Hello and welcome back. We're continuing our season of interviews and we're continuing our interview with Dale L. Roberts, a self-publishing guru. If you want to downgrade him, just call him an expert. He has published quite a bit and we are continuing today in this episode our discussion of the publishing process. We started with just get it started. Get that first publishing milestone. Get it out on some platform. This episode we continue and look at once you've got that first step, you've got it written, you've got it published on some platform. What do we do now? Let's look at some of the other platforms and talk about some of the other methods of reaching our audience and how that can impact us and allow us to grow and reach people no matter what niche they happen to live in. Let's continue our discussion with Dale Roberts. So now with that out of the way, if you're looking at publishing wide as we refer to when we say publish wide that means getting onto as many platforms as possible. There are four Amazon alternatives that I just I really do like them and I've already mentioned them before and they include Apple Books, which actually if you look up Apple Books for Authors, that's their platform, Barnes and Noble Press, Rakuten's Kobo. Now Kobo is synonymous with the e-readers and such like that you would find in Walmart. Kobo works directly with Walmart a lot. They've got wide, wide, wide distribution. And then the other one's Google Play Books. Those four alternatives encompass something, whether it be an e-book and audiobook. Now when it comes to print book, the only one of those four that has print book lockdown, oddly enough, is Barnes and Noble Press. So they're the trifecta. You're able to get three different types of publications in e-book, print book, and audiobook. And the only problem I have with Barnes and Noble is its limited reach. Where Amazon can reach out globally, Barnes and Noble is kind of just stuck here in the US, which is okay, especially if your audience is here. But if you're trying to reach somebody outside of the US, it's rather limiting and somewhat defeating. But those are the four alternatives. There's other platforms as well. What's called an aggregate publisher. An aggregate publisher essentially works on your behalf to publish out to various different avenues. A great example would be Draft2Digital. Draft2Digital is an aggregate publisher in that they get out to those three of the four big alternatives I've mentioned, as well as libraries. They have a few other smaller retailers and such like that. They've got a revenue share model, kind of like how KDP does, Draft2Digital does that. There's so many different avenues. I could spend it easily two hours covering all of the different avenues that I know and have used on my own and probably another hour to two hours covering other places that I know of and have no experience in using them. Well, that's great. I always forget because I did play around at the time. I don't think Apple Books was even around when I first started or if it was, it wasn't very well known. I remember dealing with Barnes & Noble and sort of ran into the same thing. There were some nice things about it, but it was just sort of limited. I do remember when Apple Books came out, I looked at it and definitely not as I didn't see as much of a pure book platform, but definitely for an ebook or particularly something where you want to do a particular educational kind of book of some sort where you want to do some examples and things like that. It was a really vibrant kind of platform to put content on. I was really impressed with that. These others, I vaguely heard of Google Play Books, but I haven't even looked at that. It really hadn't connected in my head that, hey, there's another platform for it. I'd never heard of Kobo. That's awesome. Let's get on Kobo. You will thank me later. You'll love Kobo for sure. It's in fact, just speaking from the heart here, Kobo is not paying me to say this or anything else like that. They have the best user interface of all the platforms. I like the fact that you can upload your ebook and your audiobook directly through them. It's just dead simple. So though KDP has more tutorials and information out there, Kobo has less tutorials and such like that. However, I feel pretty confident that if you were a newbie and you went into there, it's fairly intuitive. You'd be able to figure your way through it much easier than would you would on KDP or the other platforms without a tutorial. Oh, cool. That's even better. I don't have to study before I get on it. I can just get on it and start going. Exactly. That's the thing is we're in a new era of this whole online business. Just in self-publishing in general, the modern day self-publishing model has just changed so much. It's no longer this weird pariah in the publishing world. Sure, some people probably still scoff at it. For instance, New York Times is notorious for rejecting any self-published books on their bestsellers list. They don't like bestsellers having self-publishing in it. They're like, no, you're an indie author? No, you could take your book elsewhere. I don't care if you sold thousands inside bookstores. But nowadays, though, I mean, it's the modern day self-publishing model. The beauty of it is it's more accessible and it's getting easier and easier and easier as people are kind of coming in here. Because you think, Rob, when Kindle had launched at least the KDP platform late 2007 to early 2008, it was pretty new. It was brand new. People were getting to ebooks. I remember even thinking back then, I was like, no one's going to buy ebooks. That's stupid. I legitimately thought that. And I honestly fought it tooth and nail until I actually left my job. And I was like, oh, I can't get by with just print book sales. And that's when I went into ebook sales. But nonetheless, this whole thing, this modern day self-publishing, it's no longer your weird uncle collecting a pallet full of his erotica books, trying to sell it out of his garage with no real success. It's changed so much. So much so. This is something that should excite people. You do not ever have to own a single copy of your book. That right there is boom, blows my mind. The fact that you can upload something for free, sell it on their platform, get a percentage of it and never have to own a single copy of it. That's just mind boggling because you think back in the day, if you were into the early 1990s or 2000s or even well before in the early 1900s, you had to put your own money up to actually publish your books. Or you could cross your fingers and hope a trad pub or a traditional publishing company would come along and sign you, which good luck on that. So this whole model is just amazing. And I think that it's becoming more accessible as the years go on. I'm almost waiting. The day is going to come where we're going to be able to put some electrodes up to our forehead and just download our storybook over into a manuscript and then just sell it. That would be incredible. That will be. But of course then you're going to have more the editing process would be incredible. Right. I know how scrambled our thoughts can get at times. Boy, that would be quite the editing process. I guess I never thought of the flip side of things. I'm sure it knows there's some stuff that should never ever go into my mind. You have to have a lot of redacted stuff. Yeah, right. Right. Exactly. Well, that leads us again, a perfect dovetail into another question is what you know, now that you've been around this for a while, you've done it a lot. You've talked to other people. You've seen these different platforms and worked with them. What are your thoughts on audio versus book versus ebook versus now the video platforms, Both from a, I guess, probably strong word to use, but viability kind of approach, but also just if somebody is doing their first thing, whether it's an audio book or a book or ebook, where you think maybe is a better place to start if there is one or maybe what the strengths or weaknesses are of those that somebody should consider if they're going to go put their, you know, get their thoughts down to paper or some digital format. To me, I think that the most well-rounded authors out there with as many options as possible are the ones that are going to succeed. You don't want to just be a one trick pony. I see a number of romance authors. They're guilty of this where they just put out ebooks because they're like, oh, no one ever buys any print books for romance. What? I used to work in different assisted living communities. I had entire libraries full of romance books. Are you telling me that like what I saw was in my imagination? So I think any author that gets into this, if you can think about diversifying what you have to offer to the world, of course, knowing your ideal reading audience, you know, makes a huge difference, but in the same instance, just making sure those options are available for them to pick and choose from greatly increases your odds of success in this business. So having said that, let's say you write your book, you got it all formatted. It's ready to rock and roll. Ebook is probably going to be the easiest thing to do because all you need to do, like I tell this is some people cringe and I think even some interior formatting folks out there for books or typesetters, as we call them, were probably cringing big time when I say this. Like you can literally get a Microsoft Word document or even if you don't even have Microsoft, you can get Google Docs, download the Doc X and you can upload that over to KDP or any number of platforms and that works for your ebook and it will actually create what's called reflowable text. And then all you have to have is just a good simple cover and you can buy something as cheap as say like seven bucks to as much as a few hundred bucks over on Fiverr for a book cover. Get the ebook done. Print book would be the next thing. Here's a fact. A lot of people kind of think ebooks is dominating because as far as the number of sales, pound for pound, as far as units goes, ebooks outsell print books. But when it comes to profits, they don't drive as much profits because they're smaller and of course, so for instance, you sell a book for 2.99, you might get $2 for it. However you look at print books, you end up selling one say for like $10 or $20 or $30. Your profits significantly more anywhere from as much as five to 20 or $30 for profits in print books eclipse both ebook and audiobook as far as sales go, as far as how much you're netting for profits. So print would be the next thing. Now, with that said, I am super bullish about this and this is strongly my opinion. I will tell you what's a fact right now. Audiobook is on the rise. Downloadable audiobooks, people are just voraciously consuming and the same thing goes like this last year in the pandemic when people were locked down, mass consumption of audiobooks. It was amazing and this happened and it continues to go. I think it was last year and again, I'm just going to pull this number off top of my head. Someone needs to probably fact check this, but I believe it was a 35% increase year over year. For the past five years, audiobook has grown. Why? Because it's easier to consume. People can go work out. They can have it on their commute. They could clean their house while they're listening to this audiobook. They can multitask. Whereas when you have an ebook or a print book, you've got to open it up. You've got to sit there and read it at your pace. You've got to probably stop every now and then and kind of like figure out, okay, what was I just reading about? So there's some comprehension things. Whereas when you've got audiobook, it's there. And we're in the day and age of instant gratification. That instant gratification is something that scratches people's itch immediately. Oh, I want Dale's latest book over an audiobook. I'm going to go ahead and grab that. That's fantastic. Oh, I just listened to your book yesterday. You did? All three hours of it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I went ahead and put you on 2X and I listened to it that way. Oh my gosh. It's crazy. So get it to where you diversify. Now you bring up a good one, Rob. And I love this. And I'm so glad that you I believe you have the foresight about this because I never said anything on the show notes about video publishing. There are authors out there that are content staying behind their keyboards. They never want to leave their house. They don't want to go in front of a camera. They don't want to do interviews. It's the authors that again diversify that are going to win big in the long term. Right now, over 80% of online consumption is derived from video altogether. Everything from YouTube to Facebook to Twitch to all these video platforms. People are consuming it because this is the direction the business is going. So those authors that equip themselves with video are going to put themselves into other people's bandwidths. They're going to reach their ideal audience much quicker with video than without. And here's the thing. Some people are probably like, oh my gosh, he just told me to write a manuscript and publish here, there, and there. Now he's wanting me to do video publishing. It's just as simple as this. You got yourself a phone. You got yourself a desktop. You probably have some type of a camera that's going to work. Use it. Point, shoot. Hi, I'm an author. I just published this book about XYZ. You could check it out. Blah, blah, blah. Yakety-shmackety. And build out your video presence by serving an audience. And in turn, when you serve that audience, you get ready to publish a book. Guess what they're going to want to do? They're going to want to buy that book. So yes, get on video like yesterday. Even if you have no intent of becoming an author, get on video. If you want to see your business explode, get on video. Sounds like you're pretty positive about the whole video thing. I, you know, the funny thing is, I started in YouTube. I really focused on it. Like I started self-publishing with Dale on YouTube in April of 2016. I went on a couple of interviews and for whatever reason, it resonated with the audiences that was there and it was self-publishing channels. And at the time I was just a fitness author, just sharing my success with self-publishing. Next thing I know, I got inundated by a bunch of just requests like, hey, how did you format your book? Or, hey, what place did you do? And so I was like, you know, I'll just shoot one video for each one of these questions. I weigh in, somebody asks a question. I'll just send them over to the video. And little did I know that I would start to enjoy the process of doing video. Because at first it was not really all that fun. Sure, I'm a ham for the cam, but at the end of the day, I used to look at my videos and I was, oh, this is so cringey. I'm like, oh, I'm going to do this. Oh, this is so cringey. Oh gosh, is this going to really work? But then I started to devote myself to actually getting good on it, polishing how I spoke, how I edited my videos, who I was talking to, how I published it, when I published it, things like that. And next thing I knew, it was like 2017 towards the end of the year, I was like, you know what? I think I can do this. I was at 1500 subscribers at that time. And I'm like, I'm going all in. 2018, I'm going to do video. And much like my career path with writing, the videos were much in the same way. And that it took easily, I would say about a year to two years before I saw some real traction. I started getting sponsorship deals offered to me. I was getting paid through YouTube AdSense programs. I was getting paid through affiliate marketing. And now I'm in a position that if I don't feel like working on a given day, I don't have to. I literally don't have to. Now, I'm not going to be the type of person that's going to flex my paycheck to you. That's just not my style because that just, I think, opens up a world of issues where some people might want to find you and use you for that type of thing. But I will say this, that I get paid enough right now that through YouTube and all the things that are involved with video, that if, like I said, if I don't want to work, I don't have to. But I can pay my bills and have money left over at the end of the day and live life on my terms. And that seems like a good place to wrap up this episode. We're going to have a, we have a little bit of additional material. So there'll be a part four of our Dale Roberts interview. And I'll do a little bit of a wrap up and maybe highlight a couple of things as part of that. So we won't have quite as much Dale time, but we'll give ourselves a little bit of time to really digest some of the points that he's brought out. But fear not, that's not it. We will continue our interview series after that. We'll have a new person to interview. I don't want to ruin the surprise and we'll talk to them as we get into that next episode and continue marching on. As always, I'm open to any suggestions. If there's somebody you would like me to interview at some point, send me an email, info at developerneur.com. I can add them to the list and we'll schedule that. So that brings us to the end of yet another episode. As always, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Developer Noir podcast. For more episodes like this one, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, and other podcast venues, or visit our site at developernoir.com. Just a step forward a day is still progress. So let's keep moving forward together. Hi, this is Rob from Building Better Developers, the Developer Noir podcast. We're excited to be on Alexa now. 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