Ep 111: Behind the Scenes of Hybrid Publishing

Navigating hybrid publishing can feel overwhelming, but understanding the unique way it helps indie authors grow their author career helps authors make informed decisions.

This episode covers fundamentals of hybrid publishing, identifies potential red flags, and highlights critical questions to ask publishers before signing any agreements.

TOPICS COVERED:

• Differentiating between hybrid publishing and self-publishing 
• Key red flags in hybrid publisher contracts 
• The importance of understanding upfront fees and backend profits 
• Questions to ask hybrid publishers before signing 

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Chapters

• 1:30 Avoiding Red Flags in Hybrid Publishing
• 4:44 Navigating Hybrid Publishing Agreements
• 17:28 Important Questions for Hybrid Publishers

Transcript

Speaker 1: 1:30

Elizabeth Lyons than absolutely necessary Because, let's face it, some overthinking, second-guessing and overwhelm is going to come with the territory, if you're anything like me. In short, I love books and I believe that story and shared perspective are two of the most impactful ways we connect with one another. A few things I don't believe in gimmicks, magic bullets and swoon-worthy results without context, as in be sure to reveal that a result took eight years or required a $30,000 investment in ads, because those details are just as important. What I believe in most as an author, the long game is the shortcut For more book writing and publishing tips and solutions. Visit publishaprofitablebookcom or visit me over on Instagram at ElizabethLionsAuthor.

Speaker 1: 2:20

Hello, hello, all right, welcome to this next episode of Write the Damn Book Already. Today we're going to talk about something that I've actually talked about before, but I've gotten some different questions around it, so we're going to come at it from a different angle, and the topic is hybrid publishers. I received a DM last week on Instagram from someone who said can you help me out? I've just received a publishing contract or agreement from a hybrid publisher. I'm nervous as all get out. I'm paraphrasing I'm nervous as all get out. Can you help me figure out if this is legitimate or what I should be on the lookout for, like. Is this an air quote, good contract? As more and more hybrid publishers and just publishers with different business models come on the scene, I think that this is a question that's going to come up more and more, and the answer is going to shift a little bit, but probably not too terribly much. So I want to take an episode to talk about what a hybrid publisher is and then, even more importantly, what are the red flags that you should look out for and what are the questions that you should ask, because the truth of the matter is there are some really really great hybrid publishers out there, and it's a really good option for a lot of indie authors. There is a difference between a hybrid publisher and a self-publishing service or a self-publishing services provider, so I want to clarify that, and I think that will also help to help you understand the questions that I'm going to then provide you with when it comes to talking with a hybrid publisher about the agreement, about the contract, or even before you get that far, to find out exactly how they work. Not because any one model is necessarily right or wrong I mean, everything works for somebody, but in order to determine if the model will work well for you, because the thing that we're trying to avoid here is having you sign on the dotted line when you get really excited that someone is interested in your book, because that's the first thing that happens. We get so excited that someone's interested in our book that we sometimes move forward without asking the right questions and thinking it through, not to mention the fact that we don't know what questions to ask, and a truly reputable hybrid publisher will be more than willing to give you these answers and in fact they kind of hope that you ask. I would even argue that they should be giving you this information upfront, just to make sure that you're clear about everything, because that is the best way to avoid an issue down the line.

Speaker 1: 4:44

Before I launch into this, I want to give a quick shout out to Katie Kurtzman of KTK Publicity. I've worked with Katie twice now to have some of her clients on this podcast and she reached out to me this morning to ask if I would like to have on Nicola Krauss, whose first name I pray I'm pronouncing properly, but we'll find out in due course. Nicola is the co-author of the Nanny Diaries, which you may be familiar with. It was made into a movie decades ago. I mean it was when Nicola was first starting her career. She was in her early 20s and now her first novel is coming out with her in her 50s. So I am in love with this idea on so many levels and want to talk to her on so many different points. The novel is called the Best we Could Hope For. It comes out beginning of May from Little A, which is an Amazon imprint, and the reason I want to give a shout out to Katie is that Katie sends me personal. We've worked together twice. So first she reached out to me to have Zibby Owens on, because Zibby is also a little a author, for her most recent book, blank, and then she reached out to have Nicola on, and the thing that I appreciate so much about Katie is that her emails are personal and much like the emails that I get from Zibby Owens publishing team over at Zibibi Publishing, like it's a done deal. Before I even read the email I automatically know I'm going to want to have this person on because there's some thought put into it.

Speaker 1: 6:04

So for all of you authors who are looking to hire someone to help you with publicity, specifically to get on podcasts. One question I would encourage you to ask them is how do you handle reaching out to the podcast hosts whose shows you want your clients to appear on? I cannot tell you. I mean, it's, it's I'm not going to say it's thousands, but I receive so many emails that are. It's very clear that the PR person has no idea what my book is or what my podcast is about, and they're just pitching me all the topics that their podcast or their client, rather, can speak to on my podcast, none of which have anything to do with book writing or publishing as a process, the process of either. And then somewhere along the way, they were taught that you just send the email and then you schedule a follow-up email for three days later and then you schedule another follow-up email for three days later that say things like I know you're busy, so I'm bumping this to the top of your list. I don't know if it works for any podcast host, but I can tell you it doesn't work for me. So if you are someone whose PR person is pitching podcasts that way, you're probably not being considered for this podcast and maybe you don't care about that, but you're probably not being considered for a lot of other podcasts as well. So that's just a little PSA, because a lot of these podcast bookers are absolutely incredible and the two that I found actually the three that I found so far that I love more than life because they've gone the extra mile and it just doesn't take that much effort to go the extra mile are Jackson Musker, katie Tease and the whole team over at Zibi Publishing and now also Katie Kurtzman. You are greatly appreciated and I have no doubt that your clients appreciate your attention to detail and building these genuine connections as well.

Speaker 1: 7:43

All right, so moving on to hybrid publishing. First of all, let's get very clear the difference between hybrid publishing and self-publishing really is that the author is bringing in someone else who also may, and usually does have a financial interest on the back end. So with a hybrid publishing deal, in most cases I'm not gonna say all, because new things are popping up all the time, but in most cases the author is paying the publisher a fee, and that fee can range anywhere from $1,000 to 80,000. I mean, it just goes. They're all different variations of that, but the bottom line is the author pays an upfront fee. They essentially cover a portion of the risk and the upfront cost to have the book published, and then the publisher does whatever it is that they agree to do and then they typically take a percentage off the backend of sales, and it can range anywhere from 10%. I've seen all the way up to 50%. I'm not here to say what of that is right or wrong or good or bad. That's just how the hybrid deal works, in contrast to a traditional publishing deal, where either the author is provided and the thing with the traditional publishing deal is this the author does not pay. Thing. With the traditional publishing deal is this the author does not pay up front. With a traditional deal, they don't always receive in advance and if they do receive in advance, it might be anywhere from $100 to, I mean, a couple million dollars, but they don't always receive in advance. In some cases with a traditional publishing deal, the author receives no advance, but they receive 50% or more of the profits on the back end. So they have a much bigger opportunity to earn off the back end than they might if they are with a traditional deal, where the traditional house is putting 100% of the investment and the risk up front.

Speaker 1: 9:30

Self-publishing and hybrid publishing are similar in a lot of ways, but with self-publishing, either the author is doing the work themselves. They are going out and sourcing the cover designer, hiring them, working with them, finding an interior designer or typesetter. They're getting their own ISBNs, they're uploading on their own to Amazon or IngramSpark, draft2digital, smashwords, wherever, or they hire a self-publishing service to help them with some or all of those services. So perhaps they're more than comfortable. They've got someone who can design their cover, but they don't want to deal with the interior formatting, so they hire someone for that. But a self-publishing service typically will have no financial investment in how well the book does or doesn't do. They do what they're paid to do and then they cut the cord and wish the author well and off. Everyone goes, happy as clams. One can only hope so. The hybrid publisher realm gets sticky, frankly, because the parameters and the fine details of the agreement aren't always made clear and they're often in the fine print. It's that fine print that authors, in all of their excitement to have someone interested in publishing their book, miss.

Speaker 1: 11:35

If you have a contract or an agreement from a hybrid publisher, that's making you queasy, here is what I would suggest. Number one you may just be nervous, and that's normal. I mean, that's probably a part of it. It's uncomfortable to sign away your book. We all wonder like am I doing the right thing? I mean, my God, sometimes when I buy shampoo I'm like is this the right shampoo? Am I going to want to be married to this shampoo for the next three months? Like that's. Just making decisions sometimes is difficult for people.

Speaker 1: 12:00

But there are a few red flags that I suggest you look out for and we're going to talk about the red flags. I've got three and then we're going to talk about some of the questions to ask up front to make sure that you are extremely comfortable with how their process works and you aren't going to be presented with any surprises along the way. The first red flag is that a hybrid publishing house or any publishing house, because they probably won't identify themselves as a publishing house reaches out to you. Unless you are a humongous celebrity or you've just gone like hella viral on the news or whatever, you're probably not going to have a publishing company reach out to you and, most specifically, they will not reach out to you and then ask you for even a dollar. So that should be a huge red flag, and you know I don't use the word should often, but in this case it's absolutely appropriate If anyone reaches out to you.

Speaker 1: 12:54

You know not great hybrid publishers and again there are some really really good ones, thank goodness but some of the ones that I wouldn't ever want anyone to deal with. They have a penchant for sort of trolling Facebook groups and different hashtags and topics on social media and they find authors who are working on a book and they are well known for reaching out to those authors through DMs or even through email, if they can access that and say, hey, we've heard about this, we're really excited. What a great concept you have. We'd love to talk to you about publishing it. That right there should raise a flag. But if you choose to reach out to them which you're, of course, more than welcome to do and you find out that there is a fee associated with any aspect of what they're proposing, just go in the opposite direction immediately.

Speaker 1: 13:44

The second thing that you want to just it's a bit of a red flag, but let's call it a pink flag is that they offer publicity. It is so common for authors to get so excited about working with a see the air quotes publisher because they think they're going to do my publicity and my marketing for me, they're going to sell the book for me. Even with a traditional publisher, that is by and large, not true and you will be expected to do the lion's share of your marketing and publicity. When a hybrid publisher says that they do your publicity, this is an area where I say ask more questions. So we'll get into that. But you want to be very clear about what are those services and don't just get excited by the idea that they might be doing publicity for you, especially because they are probably attaching a price tag to that publicity and you want to make sure that you're getting what you're expecting to get.

Speaker 1: 14:36

And the third red flag in my experience is having there be a high upfront fee but also a high percentage taken off the back end. Now we can debate forever what a high upfront fee is. Some people would say $100 is high and some people would say you know, $10,000 is low. The bottom line is, if I had to give you a number, if a hybrid publisher is charging more than $3,000 to help you get your book out on the market and then on the back end is going to take more than I'd say between 10% and 15%, and even that feels the 15% feels a little bit high to me. But 10% and 15% off the backend. I would just question that, because my question is what are you doing on the backend to earn that 10% to 15% or more percent? So it's hard to give hard and fast numbers that should immediately raise a red flag. But those are things.

Speaker 1: 15:32

The red flag is that they reach out to you. The pink slash, maroon flags are the inclusion of publicity and a high upfront fee, but also a high percentage that they're taking off of sales on the back end. I once spoke with a children's book author who paid upwards of $8,000 to have her children's book published and then her profit margin was $1.10 off each book, of which the publishing company took $1. So she was making $0.10 off of each book even though she paid, one would argue, not only the full publishing cost but well beyond they. They already made their profit margin or a profit margin just off of the fee and then we're taking a huge percentage off the back end. I mean that's almost 100% off the back end.

Speaker 1: 16:22

So let's get into what questions to ask if you are not approached, because even if you are approached. You're welcome to ask these questions, but if you're looking to work with a hybrid publisher because you don't want to do this solely on your own, you don't want to just hire a service to do it for you, you really want a partner where you kind of both have some skin in the game, which is completely fair. There are some questions that I highly recommend you ask before you even have the contract in hand. The first one is who will own the listing to the book? So under whose account is the book listed Now with a hybrid publisher? In all likelihood, the answer is going to be the hybrid publisher, and that makes sense because in all likelihood, they are going to be taking a portion of profits off the back end. Otherwise, they're just a publishing service. They're not a hybrid publisher. What's important about this is that, once you know that in all likelihood you're going to be under their account, what you want to understand is what is the process then? For two things. One, you're going to be taking a portion of profits off the back end when the book is initially listed.

Speaker 1: 17:29

Who's in charge of coming up with the keywords, the categories, the description for the book on Amazon? Who puts all of that together? Do you have a say in any of that? And or do they have experts on their side who absolutely not just because they say they know what they're doing, but know what they're doing? It is extremely easy to upload a book to any distribution platform and just throw keywords in there that are either irrelevant black hat, meaning they're just meant to. It's like clickbait of the worst possible kind, which will do nothing good for your book in the short term or the long term. They've just Googled something really quickly, or they're super high competition. They may be high search, but either way they're super high competition. So your book might show up for them, but on page 13, which no one ever gets to.

Speaker 1: 18:16

So you really want to understand when someone says hey, we're going to upload your book for you. It's not as simple as look. Uploading it honestly is quite simple. The challenging part of uploading it is having a sense of what keywords to start with, what categories to start with is having a sense of what keywords to start with, what categories to start with and how to write a keyword-rich book description. That will only help attract your ideal readers. So if they're listing to their account, the question becomes who's in charge of deciding what those things are.

Speaker 1: 18:44

Beyond that, should you ever want to run a sale on your e-book or on your paperback, but specifically your e-book? Or should you want to change your sale on your ebook or on your paperback, but specifically your ebook? Or should you want to change your keywords or your categories or update your description? You want to understand how you do that, like. What's the process for that? Because you won't have access to that account to log in and do it. They will have to do it for you.

Speaker 1: 19:05

So that's just something where there's not necessarily a right or wrong. There are a lot of hybrid publishers who have a very clear process for that, because they want their authors, especially if they're making money off the back end. When you make money, they make money. So they want to enable you to say, hey, I think we need to change up these keywords, I think we need to change these categories, but you also want them to be able to guide you and say, no, no, no, we don't want to change our keywords every 72 hours, we don't want to change our categories every 96 hours, because that'll cause some challenges in the back end of the Amazon system with their algorithm and whatever else they use to put your book in front of the right people, because, remember, there are over 42 million books just books alone listed on Amazon, and by this point, honestly, they're probably more than that. So you want people who really know what they're doing in that area and have a lot of experience with that. There's no perfect way to do it, but you want people who have experience doing it.

Speaker 1: 19:54

The next question you want to ask about is their payment terms and timelines. So how much of a percentage are they keeping off the back end of sales and how often do they pay their authors? Is it monthly, quarterly, semi-annually or annually? That way, again, there's no right or wrong answer, but that way you have a really good sense of when you're going to get paid. Another question is how do you get sales data? So do you have like a contact Once your book is published? You want to make sure that you don't kind of just get dropped from the whole thing, especially if you're paying upfront for the service. So how can you find out, and on how often of a basis can you find out, what your sales numbers are, what's selling where, what version of your book is selling best, how are your sales working? How's your promotion working? You wanna have a way to tie all this stuff together. Do you get reports from your hybrid publisher? Are they monthly, are they quarterly, semi-annually or annually? That let you know what's sold. If you've got your book enrolled in KDP Select, how many pages have been read, how you can corroborate all of those things with sales and other promo opportunities that you have going on podcasts, that you're perhaps appearing on tours, those sorts of things.

Speaker 1: 21:10

Returning to the publicity side, if they say, hey, we help you with marketing and publicity or distribution and publicity or any version of this, if the word marketing or publicity is used, you want to ask them what are the specifics of that? Oftentimes I hear of publishers who say, well, we'll build you a website, but what they mean is they'll give you a page on their website that's not helpful, or we'll send out a press release. Nobody reads press releases. I mean, I really firmly believe this, especially not if you aren't a major name. The world is very, very, very noisy, so a press release isn't going to do anything. World is very, very, very noisy, so a press release isn't going to do anything. If it's along with a whole series of other things, fine, but that's not in and of itself, going to move the needle.

Speaker 1: 22:01

If they say we'll help you with your social media, what does that mean? Does that mean that they're going to make one or two posts on their social media that tags you? Does it mean that they're going to give you a few posts? Does it mean that they're going to run your social media that tags you? Does it mean that they're going to give you a few posts? Does it mean that they're going to run your social media for a month? And then? Who do they have doing that? Is it someone who knows what they're doing in that space?

Speaker 1: 22:19

Another question to ask is how do you obtain author copies? If you need to acquire author copies for an event or to just have on hand to give to people to leave in airports, to leave in parks with a hey, if you found this, it was meant for you, take it, it's free. Note on the front of it. How do you access those? What's the process for that and is there an upcharge for them? In other words, if the wholesale price of the book is $4.27, is that how much you're going to pay for the book, probably plus shipping, or are they going to add an extra couple of dollars to that so that they can make money off of it Again, not good or bad. You just want to know.

Speaker 1: 22:57

When it comes to pricing or to no minimum sales quantities, one of the things you want to understand is is there a forced purchase required if a certain number of copies don't sell? So there is a pretty well-known, pretty large hybrid publisher that does not charge authors up front, so it could be considered a traditional publisher and they split the proceeds with their authors 50-50. On the back end, however, if after a certain number of months I think it's six months, but that may change, it doesn't matter If after a certain period of time, 2,500 copies or so have not sold off of their website the publisher's website, not Amazon, not any other website, but specifically off the publisher's website, which I mean, who's going to order from them beyond, unless you're a speaker and you have a big bulk order that's going to come in and they get some. You're a speaker and you have a big bulk order that's going to come in and they get some sort of a deal by purchasing from the publisher. If that doesn't happen, the author is automatically charged or sent a bill for 2,500 copies and that bill can range anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000. I know more than a few people who have been presented with that bill and did not realize that that was in the fine print. They just got very excited about oh my gosh, these people look very reputable, because they do look very reputable and they've been in business for a long time and, to be fair, I'm not going to say who they are. But, to be fair, the people who understand what they're getting themselves into don't mind this aspect. They find it a very fair agreement. It's the people who get excited about no money up front, 50% of the proceeds on the back end but don't realize that they're going to be charged for upwards of 2,500 copies if they don't sell off that website within the first six months, who get a bit of a surprise that they're not real happy with.

Speaker 1: 24:44

So those are the main questions that I recommend authors ask hybrid publishers up front, just to make sure that your expectations are in check. There are a few more that I have listed on my website. I put the link in the show notes just so you can have easy access to it. Or you can go to publishaprofitablebookcom forward, slash, blog and search hybrid and you'll see the list. It's the seven critical questions to ask a hybrid publisher.

Speaker 1: 25:11

So I hope this has been helpful. I hope it takes some of the angst away from oh my gosh, like what am I signing away here when I sign on this contract, so that if you do choose to work with a hybrid publisher, you can be really excited about it and feel really confident about it as you move forward. As usual, keep your questions coming and I will talk to you again next week. Thank you so much for tuning as usual. Keep your questions coming and I will talk to you again next week. Check out publishaprofitablebookcom for book writing resources and tips and to see all the ways we can work together to get your book out into the world. Again, thanks so much for listening and I'll talk with you again soon.