How to Prove You’re a Thought Leader (Instead of Just Saying It) This episode unpacks…
Demystifying ghostwriters and their work in publishing | Jesse Finkelstein & Dan Gerstein
Understanding what ghostwriters do and investigating the various options for publishing.
An interview with Jesse Finkelstein & Dan Gerstein that originally aired on October 21st, 2021 as part of Leveraging Thought Leadership Live on LinkedIn.
Working with a ghostwriter can be confusing and complex. In this episode, we are joined by an expert in each of these fields, to help thought leadership practitioners get a better grasp of the possibilities.
Dan Gerstein is the founder and CEO of Gotham Ghostwriters, where he uses his talents to connect authors with speakers looking for help, focusing on matching both people’s needs and personality.
Jesse Finkelstein is the co-founder and Principal of Page Two, a publishing agency helping non-fiction authors navigate the full range of options while providing high-level support for a wide variety of organizational publishing activities.
We start the conversation by discussing the concept of ghostwriting, and the tasks available to those who perform that function. Dan helps us understand that ghostwriters can write every word of a book, or work as a developmental editor— or anything in between! All the while, their duty is to maintain focus on the expertise, reputation, and authority of the client.
With a firm grasp of the writer in hand, we move to the publishing side. Jesse clarifies the mysterious business of publishing. We learn about the various methods of publishing, the need for an established platform, and why authors want to retain the rights to their book — as they do with their other intellectual property.
This episode takes us from page to print and everything in between!
Three Key Takeaways:
- It’s easier than ever to publish a thought leadership book, the task a ghostwriter can help you accomplish is standing out and making an impact.
- Before starting a thought leadership book, you need to know your unique value proposition and how it fits into the world.
- Publishers look at more than the content of your book. They want to see that you have a strategy, and that the book aligns with your larger business model.
If you need a strategy to bring your thought leadership to market, Thought Leadership Leverage can assist you! Contact us for more information. In addition, we can help you implement marketing, research, and sales. Let us help you so you can devote yourself to what you do best.
Transcript
Peter Winick Hey there and welcome. You are on our second LinkedIn live, which we are. We’re broadcasting right now, so I want to dive right in. I’ve got two fun friends here today with Jessie Finkelstein. Give you her quick bio. Jessie has spent her entire career in books. So prior to being co-founding an amazing publishing house up in Canada called Page two, Jessie held several management roles at big publishing houses, including that of a CEO of DNN Publishers and associate publisher of Ring Desk. She’s done some really cool stuff. We’ll get into it. And then we’ve got in the middle or at least in the middle of my screen, Dan Greenstein, who’s a nationally recognized political writer, communications strategist and idea man. He’s a graduate of Harvard College. He is in 2004, he moved to New York and he is the founder of Gotham Ghost Writers, which is probably one of the leading, at least in this country, if not the world’s ghostwriting agencies. And. Well, and you’re also the co-founder of the Professional Speaking Writers Speechwriters Association. Did you have a little bit of a stint in politics as well, being a speechwriter? So welcome. Welcome to you both.
Jesse Finkelstein Thanks so much. Great to be here.
Peter Winick Let’s dive in. If we do this sort of in a linear way. I’m not really sure where we start. You start with the ghost. Where do you start? With the publisher. So why don’t we start where people come to? All three of us sort of confused, perplexed, etc.. So maybe start with you, Dan. Give us some thoughts around picking the right partner on the ghostwriting side. Sure. Well, I think it might be good to kind of set up this conversation with a very quick framing of the context, which is if you are a thought leader, it is a terrific time to be able to produce a book and build a platform, in large part because there a there are so many opportunities that never existed before and ways to have your voice heard. Publish a book. You know, give speeches. The powerful democratization of technology means that so many more people can be heard. And whether it’s different forms of publishing, whether it’s different forms of technology platforms. And then secondly, there are so many resources out there in terms of professionals, whether it’s a thought leadership consultant, an expert strategist like Peter, a publishing partner like Jesse or the to me, amazing array of freelance writing and editing talent that’s out there so that the opportunities are there, the resources are there. I think the main challenge for people is first and foremost, kind of like demystifying the process and hopefully to do a little of that. Yeah. And secondly is, Peter, you know, you hear this point a lot, which I think is really, really important, is it’s easy to produce and publish. It’s hard to stand out and get impact from your thought leadership and your content that you’re producing. And I think that is something that people really should be focused on, is first foremost treating this like as, you know, an investment in their reputation and brand and how do I get people to know about me and my expertise and developing your plan as much as your content. So let’s stay on that path of myth busting. So I know that I find a lot of times talking to clients that have aspirations or in the process of writing a book and I say, Well, tell me about the plan and the plan as well. I’ve been working on this thing for six months or two years or some extreme period of time. I’m just going to get an agent and then they’re going to give me a book deal. And then, you know something, rainbows and unicorns. And I’m like, It doesn’t exactly work like that. As hard as writing a book is, and I’m not discounting or diminishing that activity. Getting to Dan’s point, the message out there and the marketing side and the exposure side and the platform side. So flip it to you. Just someone comes to you as a publisher. What is it that you’re looking for? Yeah.
Jesse Finkelstein Wow. Well, what we’re looking for is, I think, common to what all three of us are looking for. People we love to work with are people who are thinking about their book project in the context of the whole, the whole ecosystem that they’ve built. Right. We love looking for not just subject matter experts, but masters people who are who have achieved a degree of mastery in their area. And what I mean by that is not only knowing and owning your unique value proposition and your content, your subject matter, but also appreciating how it fits into the world. And if you say, Peter, how it stands out, ideally from a book publishing standpoint, we’re working with people who already have a sense that the book well, well, my bias is that it’s the most special piece of the whole ecosystem. It’s one piece of a much broader puzzle. And that’s why I think that that authors are really well set up for success if they’re thinking about the whole at all of the intellectual property they’re developing, how they’re developing it, when they’re launching, which product or service and how those things fit together, that that’s really what’s set to shoot.
Peter Winick I kind of agree that the book is really, really important. However, from a strategy perspective, I find that often it becomes the tail that wag the dog because when you get into book mode, there’s a project plan, there’s a schedule, there’s a project manager, there’s decisions to be made, there’s deadlines, as you know. So we stay on that. But we have to look at the book, my opinion in a in a more holistic perspective. Okay. So the book is one leg in the stool that supports this thought leader. Right. And what is it that we want to happen? And to me, it’s always about you have to think about both of those things upfront. It’s not let me write the book, let me get the book out there and then I’ll think about the business, write the book. It’s sort of the, you know, the grand opening of your store. And then you walk in and then there’s no inventory, right? No. You open an ice cream shop with one flavor. I love ice cream. I can’t continue to come back. I. I agree with a bit of a twist that a book could be the centerpiece, if you will, because it’s tangible and it lands on the desk and it makes a thud and all your friends think you’re 32 points higher if you published a book and we won’t tell you otherwise, but it needs to connect together. So yeah, so Peter, it’s a it’s a great point and I would just want to build on that by saying that first and foremost, I think thought leaders who are want to produce a book to, you know, again, get their message out, amplify their ideas, and more often than not, to credential themselves, whether it’s to get speaking opportunities to promote their business, maybe even transition away from being, you know, in a C-suite into being an individual consultant, an expert, whatever it is, are really well-served to think about the book as a pop up business, right? Is that just like you said, it may be the cornerstone of that business, but it’s it’s part of a larger strategic objective. And then secondly, as part of that. Right. And I think this is sort of the bias that’s carried over from traditional publishing that too often clouds the minds of thought. Leaders who want to be authors is the book is not the product. Your expertise and your reputation and authority is the product. The book is a marketing vehicle. And I think if you start with that as your you know, that the anchor of your strategy and recognizing that the book is there to showcase you and your expertise and not the thing. Right. Right. That you’re going to sell and make money from. So I want to I want to bridge that perception to succeed. Yeah, I want to bring that back to something Jessi said earlier. You know, you’re looking for folks that have mastery. So there’s a little bit of a chicken and egg, right? If I’m someone that says I will show my mastery by writing a book and you’re a publisher going, show me your mastery, show that I will work with you to write a book. You know, to me, that’s where it gets really fun and creative, right? You can show mastery by having domain expertise, blogging, podcasting articles, speaking, consulting. And, you know, there’s 100 ways to show mastery. And a book could be sort of a capstone or from a publisher’s perspective, like, they’ve already thought this through, they’ve got a followership, a platform, etc.. So I want to want to touch on the mastery piece and maybe bridge on that just to when you’re looking at it as the publisher, you have to sell books, right? This is not a nonprofit world, right? We have to cover our overhead and cover our costs, etc.. What are some things that you look for in a potential author that gives you some comfort that, yes, they will be smart, were of like mind, etc. but they also understand what it takes to from a business side.
Jesse Finkelstein I think it really comes down to strategy and making sure that we’re all aligned in our understanding of where the author is that and in terms of their own profile, building the networks that they have, the existing communities of interest that they’re already tapped into and where we need to get to, that’s not always a pure numbers game. I think a lot of people go into it having this impression or maybe having had experience shopping their books around to publishers who say, you don’t have enough Twitter followers to us, that’s not you can have a lot of Twitter followers, but if those people aren’t engaged with you and they’re not it’s not a real community that is going to actually respond to your book launch outreach, then they’re meaningless in terms of book sales. Right? But if you’re someone who does have a degree of mastery in your field, that might mean that you’re speaking and consulting for groups of 100, 200, 500 people every month. And it and maybe you’re getting in front of them in real life, maybe it’s on screen. You know, there are so many different ways to be connecting with people and to be expressing your mastery in that way. So to my mind, it’s about just deciding together what are those vehicle, who are those communities and what do they represent in terms of the book marketing and sales opportunities too? We like to think way beyond what can you sell in the bookstores? What can you sell through online retail sites? Right. Often those are the most unpredictable parts of the whole process, and it’s really great if we can dig into how can we look at the most the immediate direct communities that you have to sell in market to.
Peter Winick You know, I think that I mean, to your point that the level of engagement. Right, I could be some Instagram influencer and people for some reason would care what champagne I’m drinking, which they don’t. Right. But that’s not an engagement. Right. That’s sort of bring you know, that’s something to flip through while you’re standing on the line at Starbucks, there’s a level of depth and engagement typically expressed at an organizational level, like a company embraces your model on leadership or creativity or whatever, and that wow, everyone. A company X has not just read the book literally, but they’re using the thinking, the models, the methodologies and the frameworks. So no, I think I think that’s a great point. I want to go in a little bit of a different direction in terms of choices, so we’ll get to publishing in a minute. But then I you do this much better than I because it’s your domain expertise. But I also find I’m unpacking a lot of myths with clients of, what goes might a writer mean? Somebody writes and I put my name on it like, you know, talk about sort of the continuum and finding that sweet spot and all that, because I think people have misconceptions and biases, misunderstand what it means. And it’s understandable. I mean, like, you know, there’s ghost in the title of it. It’s absolutely serious world. We work and we work and we use ghostwriter as an umbrella term to really cover a broad spectrum of what we call collaborative. Writing relationships. Right. And there is the classic idea of a ghostwriter is that the person is going to write every word in the book Soup to Nuts. But the author is providing the intellectual framework and the brand recognition and the authority that creates the context for the book. And then there are people who are, you know, at the back end, you know, developmental editors, and they’re there to kind of make the manuscript the best version of the author’s vision after there’s a product already in place. And then just like you use that term spectrum all along the way, there are kind of different kinds of roles that writers and editors play collaboratively in helping authors take what’s in their head and get it on the page in a way that is going to really be compelling and advance their interests. And I think a big. Determining factor of the success of a of a book where there is going to be some kind of writer professional writer at work is the author having understanding of what are my needs and then picking a partner who is a good complement and a good partner and kind of filling that role that need that’s particular for that author. And it will vary to a large degree, not just in terms of the actual role or work that the writing partner does, but the chemistry and work style, right? So in some collaborative writing relationships, the authors really engaged and in the end, the author and the co-writer are swapping back drafts, or they’re even doing alternating chapters. In other cases, the author will kind of sort of create a blueprint for the book and then a chapters, and then the writing partner will fill that in, and then the author will do it after the fact. There’s not a one size fits all or right answer really is just depending on what the author’s work style is like and what they feel like is going to work best for them and a writing partner. And then having that clarity of expectations about what the writing partner is going to do and what’s the division of labor or what the author is going to do. So there’s not confusion or misunderstandings. Those tend to be the best. Yeah. And where and where your magic comes in, Dan And your firm’s magic is not only finding the right place on the continuum, that that person has a need, but then one level clicking on that is finding the right match, right? Yes, you can have a perfectly on paper matched candidate to do this, and for some reason they remind the author of their, you know, third grade teacher that belittled them or like there’s there isn’t a level of intimacy or just click or not click that’s beyond what’s on paper, you know? Yeah. We and we recently did a series called Ghostwriting Confidential, which was aimed to kind of demystify the process and answer a lot of the basic questions authors have. And the very thing we started off with is what is ghostwriting to kind of help people define it in a way that brings some clarity and then recognizes that there are different kinds of resources out there. And then we did a whole separate blog post about how to choose the right partner for you and what criteria to be thinking about and anyone who’s interested. I’m happy to share that after writing links and things like that. I want to move that love.
Jesse Finkelstein Well, Peter, I’d love to just pick up on what Dan is saying. Yeah. I feel quite passionate about this. The idea of demystifying the ghostwriting part of the process as well from a publishing standpoint. It’s this is part of why I wanted to call out the specialness of a book, not just kind of in a facetious way. Obviously, I find books special, but it’s more that there is so much mystery around book publishing in general. And I think this is part of the, you know, considering yourself a master in your area. Part of it is mastering the idea that you are an author and really owning that in every sense of the word, not kind of letting yourself think about it as some kind of airy fairy thing that someone else is going to take care of for you. You own your intellectual property. You kind of refer to myself. If I were writing and publishing a book, I would want to direct it. I would want to know that to have some control, a good degree of control over the process, if not complete control. And part of that is how the writing process goes and what the what the finished product is like. It’s amazing the number of people who come to us, who are true masters in their areas, who come sounding very apologetic about the fact that they may not have mastered professional writing. And I’ll say, Well, at what point in your storied career would you have, you know, you’ve been running this company or you know, you have this deep expertise in your area. When would you have begun to do your professional writing? Exactly right. Why would you? The idea is you have the you have the subject matter expertise. You have the ideas. You have built your communities. So why not engage the best possible professional writer who is a master in that area to help express it, to help you with that, with the best possible form of expression for your ideas. To me, the…
Peter Winick Totally.
Jesse Finkelstein ..if you can afford the cost because there are costs involved, as there are in every part of the process. And if you can find the right match and have a really great experience, which is exactly what Dan’s firm beautifully, then I often think, Why wouldn’t you do that?
Dan Gerstein Yeah. You know, it’s so funny, Peter, that kind of support, that’s such an important point. And we see this in a subset of the people who are coming to us for some thought leaders, right? There is a sense of shame that they need help. Right. Right. And it’s doesn’t mean writer. I mean, people think write author equal writer, but it created a barrier or an impediment to them actually doing what they want to do because they’re hung up on this idea that because they’re so successful as a thought leader or corporate executive or consultant, that it’s somehow they’re either failing or misleading people if they get some help. And part of what we try to do is to get them over hurdles to recognize that it’s your ideas, it’s your vision, it’s your name. At the end of the day, it’s going to be expression of you. Right. But just like if you’re a CEO, you’re not your own CFO, right? You’re not your own communications director. And you hire a team that has special competencies to help you succeed as a leader. And there’s nothing wrong with relying on whether it’s a writer and editor, a book coach to help you, because this is not something that everyone is good at or they have the time and there’s. And so just taking that same part or guilt out of the equation is is a big relief, I find, for a lot of people to help them understand at the same time. The other point that just made it is super important is even if you’re working with a ghostwriter or a co-writer, writing a book is a major commitment. Right. And too many thought leaders, a project that I have a writer is not that big a deal. And they say at some point, like, why are you writing a book? Well, someone told me to write and give these remarks in terms of setting their expectations and positioning them to succeed is to sort of say, you got to think of this like it’s a pop up business. And even though you might be the CEO and you have people helping you, it’s still your name on the product. It’s your reputation on the line, and it’s going to take a major investment and that you have to prepare to see it through. And we’ve had many people that we in essence kind of sort of say, you really should spend some time preparing yourself mentally ready and committing the time, even if you’re not writing every word in the book so that you’re prepared to see this through, because a lot of projects get abandoned even in their early stages, because the author doesn’t realize, my God, this is a lot of work.
Peter Winick No, I think that’s totally right. And I think that, you know, the subset of authors that are actually writers is really, really small. And people have a misperception or a misconception about that. And then the other piece is, you know, a typical author is only going to write X number of books a year. A ghostwriter might have been involved in dozens, you know, three, 4 or 5 projects a year, and they can bring different hey, we tried it this way for this type of person and styles where you can’t afford to experiment. You know, when you’ve got one book to put out over a period of time.
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Peter Winick I want to go to something that I’m thinking. I totally missed an opportunity here to sort of market this as a Halloween ghostwriting demystifying. We should have smoke coming out.
Jesse Finkelstein Let’s start again. I got to start this whole thing again.
Peter Winick I’m going to go I’m going to go slip into my Elvira costume and I’ll be right back. I know nobody wants to do that, but I want to demystify some of the publishing. So Dan just sort of busted some of the myths on ghostwriting. So here’s what happens on the publishing side, right? People think it’s easy to think binary. Self-publishing means, you know, you’re a loser. You’re rejected by everybody. You can do it on creative space. It’s going to have typos, whatever. Or the other side of the spectrum is there’s the big New York publishing houses and there’s nothing else in between. I think what happens is when people come to this place where they’re ready to put a book out, there’s someone, even though they might be top of their game elsewhere. Naive, ignorant, just not knowledgeable around the reason the fate of a publisher and an author. Their business model reasons right there a mindset reason. So talk about that a little bit and not just you know obviously about page two, which is great, but just sort of across the continuum.
Jesse Finkelstein It is. I mean, we keep touching on this. See, your Halloween theme rings true. It is a very mysterious business. And that’s one of my bugbears. Right? I’m trying we are trying as a company all the time to demystify it. And that’s one of the reasons I think it is really hard. It’s not a transparent industry. It’s really hard to understand how to navigate it so that that sense of mystery continues and it’s hard for people to understand. I don’t expect when an author comes to talk to me that they’ve somehow surveyed the entire landscape and they know how to navigate it. It’s difficult. So but to your point, this is one of the great things about this moment. There are many, many ways to go about this. And I think when coming back to that that question of strategy, I always say to someone and to people who are asking me, what’s the best, you know, the most important thing about choosing a publishing partner? I always say think first about the nature of the experience, the kind of partner you’re looking for, and really think about that in meaningful terms, not just, you know, whose brand do you want to have on your book, which frankly, I think doesn’t even mean anything to consumers anymore. And so what does it really mean, something to you? But I think it’s about your own sense of what kind of team do you want to work with? What do you want the quality of that experience to be like? And that might help you determine, is it right for you to go find an agent? Is it really important for you to have someone like that in your corner to help you navigate the industry? Is that going to be very time consuming for you? Do you want to have a really straight line and a path directly to a publisher? In which case, what kind of publisher? And in order to evaluate that, I often say you can actually tell a lot from a website. You can dip in and see what kinds of books are they publishing, what kinds of categories, and also how what, you know, what kind of experience does that team have? So look for those markers and start to develop your own assessment of what’s really important to you about the experience and as well as the result.
Peter Winick So let’s just try this two ways. If you were, what advice would you give to an author? I think shopping publishers. But thinking about different publishing models and publishers, What are a couple questions? Things to look for, things to ask for, to know, because it’s going to be a foot on both side, right? You probably had opportunities where it was a fit for you, but not them and vice versa.
Jesse Finkelstein Of course, we’ll all take you back to your point about the spectrum. I think about on that spectrum. If you are to work with a traditional publisher, it’s a licensing model. That means at its essence that you are going to license your intellectual property and the publication rights will rest with someone else for that period of time, which could be the full term of copyright. Depending on how long the book is in print. That is a very significant piece of the puzzle that, unfortunately, many authors sign those rights away without thinking in meaningful terms about that. It only becomes crucial at the point where they want to get their rights back or to do something else with their work that the publisher doesn’t want to do. So that that’s a really big piece of the puzzle and it’s something that comes into the conversation a lot. For page two, we don’t license rights. And that’s one of the main reasons people come to us because we’re working with thought leaders and entrepreneurs who they’ll come to me and say, Well, I’m not licensing away the rest of my content. I want to own everything and I want to control it. And the book piece is no different. So that’s really the mindset for which we created art. Many are people of that mindset and so on. On the other end of that spectrum, when it comes to self-publishing, you own everything and you do make all the decisions and you have complete control. But on the other hand, many people in that case feel very alone and they are at the whim of, you know, maybe one person you happen to know who can edit your book and who, as you said, put it up on some platform in a casual way. Well, anyone tuning in to this to this broadcast, I think is not casual about their work. Right. If you’re a thought leader.
Peter Winick And there’s multiple learning curve. Right. Right. Yeah. What I’ve seen, you’ve got the learning curve of editing. You’ve got the learning curve of printing production and graphics, of distribution, of cover art like ESPN. I mean, there’s like 800 learning curves, but nobody’s really all that interested in as an illustrator, just trying to create a book. And so, you know, and each of those is an opportunity to make a mistake, unfortunately.
Jesse Finkelstein And to lose time and frankly, to lose money. We have a lot of people who come to us partway through an experience who say, I’ve already spent $20,000 on this book that I don’t even like. And, you know, what am I going to do with this? Which is I, I hate hearing that, but it happens, I guess, on the in the midpoint of that spectrum lie, what people call hybrid publishers. And that can look, I won’t get into the weeds, but of course that can look very different from one to the next. But fundamentally, that’s why the word hybrid has arisen, because in many cases with a company like Page twos, for example, we’re in that middle space. We don’t license rights, and yet we do run the entire enterprise the way that any robust publisher would from concept development right through to sales, marketing and distribution. So that’s an. Perience that kind of has what some people feel has the benefit of both. You have a great deal of control. You own your intellectual property. You are able to determine many points of the strategy. And yet and the companies are essentially working for you in service to you.
Peter Winick And then underneath that, which I think. Should influence, if not drive many folks decisions are the business issues, right? So if it’s a traditional publisher, am I getting an advance? Probably not. Do I have to guarantee them a number of book buys at wholesale? Basically, you know, shouldering all the risk? What’s the read share on the back end? So the book is a wild success. I have a partner taking $0.90 out of every dollar I give to think about that and I love it. B Yeah, so most of my clients are yours are entrepreneurs. Speed is like not an entrepreneur’s friend, right? When you start to tell them a traditional publisher is an 18 to 24 month cycle, they’re like 24 months ago. That was three careers ago for me. Like, I want to get this done, you know, now. So I think, you know, economic model, all those things are issues as well.
Dan Gerstein And that’s a really important point that I can’t emphasize enough to people who are new to the insular world of publishing, which is the evolution. Both with digital platforms. Various different business models. The rise of hybrid publishing, all of which is means there are more options for authors. Right? And that’s an overall that’s a good thing. The industry is much more accessible. There’s different solutions for authors who have different objectives. Right. That’s really important for people to realize. It’s not this either big traditional publishers or, you know, really barebones minimalist. You know, carry the burden of self-publishing. The key thing, though, I think, for a lot of people is to get over. This the legacy bias that there is this prestige factor with traditional publishing that is so much more important than every other consideration, And I don’t want to minimize it. In some cases, having that badge of credibility that comes from having a branding publisher has value, but not at the expense of potentially other considerations, one of which, just so to speak. Right. If I have to wait 18 months for my book to come out and the entire field I’m working in has gone through like two revolutions, then your interests haven’t been served. And that chasing that elusive badge of credibility has become a self-defeating act. And then the second thing is that for a lot of the clients that we’re all dealing with and the broader thought leadership community and this is part of the myth busting element of this is they’re never going to get a book deal. And to waste their time chasing that and trying to get an agent to validate them and then get a publisher, it’s a waste of time and money and opportunity takes you off your feet, takes you off your path. And there are a lot of terrific hybrid publishing options out there. And I think one thing I would encourage people to do, again, it’s an evolving field and there are definitely some less ethical actors out there, but there is an organization called the Independent Book Publishers Association, IVP, one of the great services they did is they put out kind of a code of standards for the new hybrid publishing landscape, and it allows very easy for outsiders, people who don’t know much about publishing to kind of have a checklist to sort of say, does this publishing company do things this way? Then it’s more than likely that you can trust them, that they’re going to be a good partner. Then you can then figure out, okay, do they know my genre? Are they going to be able to get a book out in the time I want it, whatever it is that’s specific to you? And then the last point I would just make is that, again, this goes back to my point about the amazing array of resources that are out there. Just like the, you know, a lot of authors have published traditionally have relied on their agent to be, in essence, their consigliere and guide them through the process and help them make decisions. There are a lot of publishing professionals out there who can serve that role if you’re not going to publish traditional. Right? And again, if you’re working with a great publisher like Justice team, you’re not going to be alone. But even at the beginning of the process before you you’re you find someone of that caliber to partner with them to produce your book. Having someone who can kind of fill that role as a trusted leader and help you think through strategically, you know, what’s the right publishing path for you is really valuable and it doesn’t cost that much money. Yeah, exactly.
Jesse Finkelstein I appreciate what Dan saying. Peter, if you don’t mind me jumping in. Yeah. I’m going to say something maybe a little bit controversial and advocate for time because I’m completely with you, Peter, in terms of your comment about, you know, I guess time is sort of the friend and the enemy of the entrepreneur. And our world moves very quickly. And it’s a lot of people do come to us saying, I want to get a book out right away. The thing is, what we’ve found is that if setting aside how long the selling cycle takes and all of the kind of mystical issues, the thinking again about what you the intentionality, you know, down with saying, well, why do you even want to publish this book? What is the reason you’re doing it? And if you think about the rest of your working life and what you’re putting out into the world, sometimes if you slow down and think about that book, as you know, it’s a real it’s a very important milestone that you’re going to build other things around. Sometimes building in time to that actually has a tremendous amount of value. And I’m only saying this because it’s something that I think that is part of the specialness of a book. If you are going to go into this massive undertaking, this puppet business, like Dan was saying, I think there’s value in giving it breathing life into that schedule and giving it the time that it needs. It’s surprising how much you can build around it, not only for the sake of the book, not only being able to, for example, have a really lovely long runway with finished copies to market your book, but it might be that we find all of a sudden our authors will say, I’m so glad we built another six months into the marketing schedule because suddenly I have this TEDx opportunity. And that crystallized my vision for the positioning of the book. All kinds of things align when you realize, Hey, this is different. Let’s take your time with it.
Peter Winick And I want to sort of dovetail and then we’ll have to wrap in a moment onto Dan’s pop ups, although it is a bit of a pop up business. I also encourage clients to think about a book on a 5 to 7 year amortization schedule because most publishers think of a book in a seasonal way because you have your. Spring releases your fall releases, whatever. But to an author, nobody really actually to an end user, nobody cares that that thing was published on October the 3rd. Whatever, whatever. I mean, I look at my books, I look at all of your bookshelves. They’re not produced. It’s not in the order, you know, sell by date. And I think sometimes there’s this psychology in the book world of, it’s an April 2022 release, whatever. If you’re the author, you’re going to amortize that over 5 to 7 years. And you need to think about if I got the right book in the right hands of the right person, whether it’s the day it came out or a year or five years later, those light bulbs are going off. You know, I think people sometimes lose sight of that. So I want to thank you both for either demystifying or scaring folks a little bit for Halloween, we should have all been in orange. But thank you all for sharing your different perspectives and different expertise. It’s been great.
Jesse Finkelstein Thank you, Peter. Thanks, Dan. It’s been a lot of fun.
Dan Gerstein Always helpful, Peter.
Peter Winick Excellent. Thanks. To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com. To reach me directly. Feel free to email me at Peter at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.
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