Reclaiming Your Rights: How Authors Can Take Control in a Shifting Publishing Landscape | Michael Jenet

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What Every Author Needs to Know About Protecting Their Rights and Marketing Their Book

In this episode, Michael Jenet shares his journey from author, on the brink of losing the rights to their own book, to publisher ensuring what happened to him, never happens to another author.

What happens when your publisher holds your book hostage? Today on Leveraging Thought Leadership, Bill Sherman speaks with Michael Jenet, author of “Ask: The Questions to Empower Your Life” and founder of Journey Institute Press, about his grueling battle to reclaim the rights to his books after a new publisher took control. Michael’s story isn’t just one of frustration—it’s about standing on principle and creating a new path for authors.

After years of legal battles, Michael and his wife and fellow author Dafna managed to regain their rights, but the ordeal sparked a deeper question: How could they prevent this from happening to others? That’s when they decided to start their own publishing company, Journey Institute Press, with a mission to put authors first and offer a more ethical, nonprofit-driven publishing model. They learned valuable lessons about the evolving book market, and now, they’re helping first-time authors navigate the complex world of publishing with integrity and sustainability.

Michael also shares key insights about long-term book marketing. Forget the one-time launch event at your local bookstore—today, it’s about leveraging multiple formats, influencers, and long-term strategies to keep your book relevant. Whether you’re launching a hardcover, paperback, e-book, or audiobook, the goal is the same: get your book into as many hands as possible and keep the conversation going for years.

For aspiring authors, Michael offers this critical advice: start building your audience before the book is even written. Marketing falls on the author, so engage your readers early, find where they are, and get them excited long before launch day.

Three Key Takeaways:

Own Your Rights: Michael Jenet’s battle to reclaim his book rights highlights the importance of authors fully understanding and protecting their intellectual property in the publishing world. Don’t assume your publisher will always have your best interests at heart.

Long-Term Book Strategy: Successful book launches go beyond a one-day event. Michael emphasizes the importance of thinking long-term, using multiple formats and engaging influencers to ensure your book stays relevant for years, not just during the initial release.

Build Your Audience Early: Authors can’t rely solely on publishers for marketing. Start building a community around your book early on, even while you’re still writing. This will drive excitement and help ensure a successful launch.

These insights highlight the need for authors to take charge of both their rights and their marketing strategies to succeed in today’s publishing landscape. If you have a book on the horizon and are seeking a solid thought leadership approach to marketing, reach out to Leveraging Thought Leadership to discuss how we can help. 

 

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Transcript

Bill Sherman Every new author hopes that their latest book will make a big impact. What an author’s books. Are capital investments of time, energy, insights and passion. It’s really unfair to measure their success or failure within a 90-day launch window. Today, I speak with author and publisher Michael Gibney and will learn his story about how he reacquired the rights to his book and relaunched it himself. He also made the unusual choice of setting up a publishing house as a not-for-profit entity. We’ll explore how that choice impacts his work as a publisher and what he’s learned on the journey as an author himself. I’m Bill Sherman. This is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Let’s begin. Welcome to the show, Michael.

Michael Jenet Thanks for having me.

Bill Sherman So I want to begin with a story of a book that got a second chance. Okay. So you had written a book that, well, by some definition could be said to have written off into the sunset and got a breath of life. Would you start with that story?

Michael Jenet Yeah, of course. I actually you know, when I’m talking to people, I often tell them that I define myself as a recovering corporate CEO. And I had just jumped off that cliff, right? So I had some time on my hands and I wrote a book that I had wanted to write for.

Bill Sherman As a retiring CEO does, rather than play golf or anything. Right. I had some time with a manuscript. Yeah.

Michael Jenet I need to torture myself into writing a book. And so, you know, I wrote the book. I was lucky enough to find a publisher now. The timing of this is 2014. I, I left in 2013, finished the book in 2014, and that was before Amazon started doing print on demand. That was before the print on demand craze really came into being. So there were some opportunities to publish in different varieties, but mainly I had to find a publisher and I did. I found an independent publisher. I’m willing to publish the book. And so he, you know, took me through the process. I knew nothing about publishing at the time, got the book out there. And then within two, two and a half years, maybe, he and I published a second book with him. My wife had published a couple of books with him. He sold the company and another publisher took over, which, you know, that happens. And that publisher invited every one of the catalog. I think there were multiple six, 5 or 600 people in the catalog that he bought. He had a camera, the zoom call with them and said, How are you doing? What are you working on? Blah, blah, blah. And I had my own my wife had her own. We thought, okay, life just moves on. We have a new publisher. Within four months, he contacted everyone on the catalog and said, I’m putting your books out of print and if you want the rights to publish them back, you have to pay me a lot of money. And it was thousands of dollars per title. And between my wife and I, we had four titles that we had published with that catalog. So we found ourselves in a quandary because the contract we had signed, it didn’t have a provision for this. And so we contacted lawyers and, you know, looked at various avenues and they all came back basically with the same message, which was it’s a it’s a toss up because your contract doesn’t specify one way or specify another. It’s really going to be up to a judge. And the cost of going to litigation will likely be more than you have to pay to get these rights back. And you could also lose and then have to pay additional fees, you know, lawyers fees and thereafter, etc., etc.. So it took us a few years actually, of negotiating and trying to figure out ways to get the rights to our own books, to publish them again back. And they’ve been out of print for years. And so. Basically at that point, once we got the rights back, you know.

Bill Sherman Let’s pause for a yeah, let’s pause for a second. You’ve got this choice where you can say, okay, we can investigate trying to get the rights back or we can say that’s part of the past. That work is gone. Yeah. How do you process through that and make that decision? Because that’s got to be a tough one. And you and your wife having a conversation in real time, right, of the is this part of our past? Is it worth pulling forward? And if so, what are we doing?

Michael Jenet Well, it’s a good question because especially it wasn’t just one book. Right. Collectively, there were five books all here. And you know, as an author, you’re angry because this is your work that you’re. Look, I’m not going to, you know, beat around the bush. We were being extorted for money for our own books back from a publisher who did nothing. I mean, this is not the guy who originally published our books. And by the way, that company went under three years later. But, you know, we this is why it took so long is why it took a few years, because we went back and forth, you know, how much is it worth it to us to do this? Is it is it a principle issue? And I’m not going to lie. Part of it was just standing on principle and saying, this is wrong. Like we should whether we do anything with the books again or not, we should have the right to. And it just took I mean, it took some time. It took some you know, we did get some people involved to try to mediate and do some, you know, mitigation of the eventual cost. But ultimately, we had to pay to get them all back, and we did. My wife’s book is actually her first book is not coming out until next month. It’s taken that long to get through this journey. And my second book won’t come out probably until next year. Re You know, republish.

Bill Sherman Now, were they books that were considered evergreen that if they came out in the 20 teens, could be republished pretty much straight up into 2024? Or did they take a lot of work to get them ready for a 2024 context?

Michael Jenet It’s a good question. So my first book is pretty Evergreen. It’s you know, it’s a lot of success principles that have lived on forever. And so you have you have the ability to continue. There aren’t any stories in there that wouldn’t necessarily mean they need to be changed. It did take some editing work. These books were never really edited. We were told they were. They weren’t. There was no real layout or typography done, so we had to really republish them. My wife’s book was interesting because hers was a journey she took in 2009, but the stories that came out of it and the principles of the book are evergreen. So even though the book happened in 2009, it was evergreen. And then my second book is a parable. And those, you know, those can last forever. And her second book is a personal story. So again, yes, they were evergreen and the bulk of their content, they did take some work and some manipulation. There were some things we wanted to update and go through and make sure were editing for sure was terrific. That was an interesting learning experience. But mostly they were evergreen.

Bill Sherman Okay. So and I’m still in this sort of analysis phase of do we buy these rights back? Right. Yeah. So you’re looking okay, what work would we need to do? We’re going to have to reedit. We’re going to have to update the manuscript. But then there’s we’ve got to figure out how to publish because although you were a CEO, I don’t think publisher was a had you to warn grievance?

Michael Jenet No. Correct? No, it was not.

Bill Sherman And so how did you approach that question of the if we publish it, how are we going to get this done? Do we go to someone? Do we do it ourselves? And then I have one more question on the sort of go no go, but let’s stay with publishing for first.

Michael Jenet Yeah. I mean, I think at the time, if we looked at the four books, my wife’s was probably the one we wanted to make sure we republished more because she was just getting she had a better network of distribution. People were asking for her book and now it was out of print. And then secondly, mine, because we thought there’s something to this book. It can help a lot of people. We want to get it out there. So. If we looked at the four books in totality, that was sort of our focus. But you’re right. The question was, what do we do? And, you know, this is at that point it’s 2017, 2018, maybe when we’re getting the you know, we’re starting to get the rights back and we know they’re coming. It may take a little time, but we know we’re going to get them back. And we’re looking at the publishing landscape and going, boy, there’s the self-publishing thing, but it’s really young at that point. It’s kind of fairly new. And there were some changes in the publishing landscape, but we didn’t know much about it. Add to this part of the work that my wife and I did, you know, we’re doing at the time was curating Ted talks. And it’s a longer story I won’t get into. But what came out of that were all these people. We did it for 14 years. I mean, we just stopped doing it this year. But across that swath of time and hundreds of people we put on the stage, I’d venture to say 90% plus would come up to us and say, hey, I know you guys are authors. I want to write a book, too. How did you do it? Right? And so as we’re going through this process of being extorted for our rights and we’re having a lots of the people in our network and our friends and family and just peers saying, I want to write a book, too. How did you do it? The thought starts to happen of what if this happens to them, right? Because it happened to us we weren’t prepared for we had no idea that this was even a thing. And so I started looking into the publishing landscape and trying to realize you’re trying to figure out which direction we going to go, where are we going to look for a traditional publisher? Where are we going to get an agent? Were we, you know, what were we going to do? Because sort of side note here, my wife at one point actually had an agent because there was someone who wanted to turn her book into a movie. And unfortunately, the agent died and this just went by the wayside. But so we had dabbled in that world and thought maybe we should go that route. But ultimately, was that sort of foray into researching the publishing world that led us down to starting our own publishing company and saying, we’re going to do this our way. We’re going to do it the right way and we’re going to publish it ourselves.

Bill Sherman Okay. So this leads to the question of the second chance. And I want to dig in in several different ways here. There’s one in terms of getting a second chance to relaunch a book. Right. And. Most authors don’t either get that chance or choose to create that chance. And so you had an opportunity to look with fresh eyes even before you repurchased the rights to say, well, what are we going to do different? How are we going to get this book out into the world? Because there’s difference between having the right to republish it and then actually getting the book into the hands of readers. How did you address that question of, Hey, if we buy these rights, what are we doing different this time?

Michael Jenet Yeah, it’s a it’s a good point. And, you know, it’s a little bit of backwards. Think you’re thinking in reverse because, you know, by the time we got to the point where we could republish my first book, which happened this April, so April of 24 and then my wife’s first book is getting republished in July of 2024. Right. So we had a lot of experience by then. I mean, we launched our publishing company in 2020. So we’re four year going on four years into the into that. I had been researching the publishing industry for two, almost three years prior to that. So we learned a lot along the way. And then of course, publishing books with other authors. We learned a lot of things that way. And so I think going into it this time, we were a lot better prepared, not just on the process of publishing, you know, the editing, the development that, you know, all of the things that make a book, a good book from, you know, design and layout and type, all the things like we had a better idea of what the book needed to look like. And again, going through all of the manuscripts of these books, we realized none of that was really done the first time. So we had that hindsight. And then looking at some of the things that have changed over the last five, let alone ten years of publishing and honestly, the audience readership of books and where people are buying books and how they’re buying books and all of the things that go into the distribution and marketing of books, We just knew this was going to be a longer game for us. This wasn’t about I mean, we did launch parties. I did mine virtual. My wife is doing her physical. You know, we’ve done it both ways with authors. And so we’re playing around with different pieces of the puzzle as we go through the launch process. But for example, when I first launched my book in ten years ago, there was a book signing at Barnes and Noble and the my friends showed up and bought a book and I signed it. And that was great and wonderful. It made me feel.

Bill Sherman And to clarify, your friends in town rather than. Yeah, right across the country. Because with Zoom, you can at least have more friends show up.

Michael Jenet Right? And so it was just a local, you know, handful of friends showed up. A couple of people walked by and looked over IDs of what’s who’s this guy? What’s he doing? You know, that kind of thing. But it was fun. It was you know, I enjoyed it. Looking back on that, though, that’s not what most people are doing these days. And the virtual launch was fun because I did get to pull in people from across the country and even across the world. But the point was that was it. When I first launched the book, I did the book signing, it was out, it was available. And then, you know, not a whole lot happened because we only had the one copy. We had the paperback. They didn’t even publish in hardcover. They did eventually do an e-book, and I did record an audio book, but they didn’t really distribute that. But what we learned and again, part of this is just the last 4 or 5 years is that sort of mimic the larger publishing houses in the world, which is, okay, let’s launch a hardcover, let that sit for a for a while, whether it’s three months, six months, a year, whatever, and then do the e-book or the paperback and e-book and Kindle and maybe an audio book. And so we have this longer vision now of launching our books different ways, but doing them in a way that can hopefully get them out there to people fighting influencers who want to review the book or want to, you know, want to talk about it, and doing all these things that are done today that weren’t done ten years ago, it just wasn’t even a thing. And so our plan is to do it. I guess slower is probably the right word. Longer over a longer period of time versus just one big push at the book signing and then you’re done. And also doing it the right way and trying to make sure we marketed the best way we can because it’s really up to authors these days to market books. Publishers aren’t doing that.

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Bill Sherman So from an author’s perspective and you illustrate something that I’ve said and have heard many times is that for the author, the book is a 5-to-7-year capital investment rather than, you know, something that’s on a 60 to 90 day pub cycle and pub calendar, Right? You know, you’re going to be attached to the book much longer than a spring release or a fall release in a traditional sense.

Michael Jenet Absolutely. And, you know, the release dates around books have, by and large, gone away. There are still, if you can get it launched by the holidays, that kind of stuff. But the publishing world is changing so much. And when a book should be released and to your point, you know what I tell my authors and it really is author specific, right? So some authors will literally just write a book to use as a calling card. That’s it. And they really they’re not even that attached to the book itself. It’s just a means to an end because it’s.

Bill Sherman A check the box. I wrote a book and yeah.

Michael Jenet And maybe they want to have a speaking circuit or maybe they want to, you know, be a teacher and they want to be able to use the book to get those jobs. And again, that’s great. Nothing wrong with that. And that’s their vision. Other authors are really tied to their book, and it’s part of maybe it is part of a movement that they’re starting or maybe it’s a series of books and this is the first one or the next one in the series. So it all kind of depends on the author what that long game is. But it’s a long game for all of them, no matter what, right? If you’re going to use it as a calling card, that’s the calling card you’re going to use. And maybe after a few years you’ll need to updated with a new calling card and a second book, a third book, whatever. But it’s still going to be, like you said, a multiyear process. And then if you’re starting a movement or you’ve got a series of books that you’re writing that again is part of a longer term game that you’re investing in and you’re investing, you know, it’s hard to write a book. And so once you’ve done it, don’t just put it out there and think, now that I published it and it’s available, people will come and buy it. That’s not how it works. You it’s it’s a job.

Bill Sherman It absolutely is. And you wind up being the roadie for your ideas, much like you know us. And you’re schlepping that book everywhere. And I think one of the things a lot of people write a book whole is they get the ideas out of their head and onto paper. They know they’re going to do some sort of book launch and book tour. But then there’s this. Often for first time authors, the hope that, okay, I’ve got the book in my hands. I’ve been on book tour. I’m done with it. I can move on to the next thing. It’s like, Yeah, no, you’re going to be talking about that for quite a while.

Michael Jenet Yeah, hopefully. Right. I mean that’s that should be the goal. Whatever ideas you put into your book, you want as many people as possible to get that. And that’s not about the book launch and the book tour. That’s just the start. That’s the launch, right? You do want to get out there and especially if you’ve written something that’s evergreen, it has legs and you want it to have legs, you want it to help people. And if that’s your goal, then yeah, that’s something that hopefully you do for as long as you’re willing to do it.

Bill Sherman So I want to turn to another topic, and this goes into your publication model, your business model. You made an interesting choice when you said, Hey, how are we going to set up as a publisher? You want to share what choice you made and some of the impact that has had?

Michael Jenet Sure. I love the I love that you use the word interesting choice. I think some people would say so you could use some different words. So a little bit of backstory here as well. My wife, for pretty much all of her career up until very recently, spent it all in nonprofit. She grew up in nonprofit. She worked in nonprofit. That was her background. I started in the poor for profit world work, limited government, and then came to the nonprofit world entrepreneurship, all that stuff. And so between us, we had quite a bit of experience. The issue, though, I think arose when, you know, in 2017 to 2018 when I started to investigate the publishing industry and I saw a lot of things that I didn’t like, not only the predatory publishers, like the one who took advantage of us, but just models that were really, in my mind, taking advantage of authors to try to start to try to make a business work. And that includes the big the big publishing houses, right? I mean, you got these organizations who yes, they oftentimes will publish a book and it’s a loss leader for them, but they’re making money off of even those authors and they’re making money off of their backlist. And then, of course, the big ones that hit that are disproportionate. So the author and it’s the author’s work. And this is this is where the crux of it came for me was we’re talking about an artist, right? It doesn’t matter. It’s an author versus a painter versus a singer. It doesn’t matter. It’s still art and it’s a form of art. And these people write their books. They put their souls into this art form that is then sort of taken away from them and used by these companies to try to make a buck to try to make a living. So, okay, if that’s the model and there are various ilcs of that model and I didn’t like any of them, then what are we going to do? And this is where my wife and I really dug in and spent some time sort of thinking about. What do we want to do if we’re going to start a publishing house? Because we don’t want to be another publishing, we want to be another one of these models, whether it’s independent, traditional, you name it. We didn’t want to do that. And so because of her background and because I had spent some time in the space as well, she asked the question, which was, what if we did a nonprofit? And, you know, I first was like, well, how does that work exactly? And she said, well, we’re like any other nonprofit. You will have to write grants to get funding to start and get it moving. But if you think about it, at some point, if books start to go, if some of the authors start to really sell and there’s income coming from that, it becomes a sustainable model. If your goal isn’t to make as much money as possible, but your goal is to help as many authors as possible. And that was the shift for us. So we really wanted to create what we like to think of as the publisher we wish had existed ten years ago for us, obviously, and also the publishing model that would appeal to especially first time authors who don’t have any experience in the world of publishing to say this is how it should be done. We are going to put you, the author above us, the publisher, instead of the other way around in every aspect. But we’re not going to sacrifice the quality of what you get from it. We’re still going to try to give you as best as we can, the same experience you would have if you went with a traditional or a larger traditional publishing company. So we created a nonprofit publishing.

Bill Sherman So you took the complexities of publishing and added grant writing? Yes, because we’re not.

Michael Jenet Crazy enough just to be authors. We wanted to get into publishing and do it in the hardest way possible.

Bill Sherman So how did that work?

Michael Jenet Let me add one more layer. Right. So let’s talk about being, you know, the challenges of being an author. Now let’s add the complexities of publishing. We’re on top of a grant writing, and then just because we’re not crazy enough, let’s throw the timing of the launch as February of 2020, literally three weeks before the pandemic hit. So the first obviously couple of years or year and a half, I guess were non-existent. Like every business, like everywhere around the world. But some interesting things happened because of who we were going into this. We just launched this company. We had plans to do all sorts of fun things like were you.

Bill Sherman Printing onshore or offshore?

Michael Jenet Say that again.

Bill Sherman Were you printing onshore? Offshore?

Michael Jenet Well, onshore.

Bill Sherman But okay. So I didn’t have. You know, boxes of books sitting out in a harbor cell? No.

Michael Jenet And there were still issues because you still had distribution channel issues. Right. Right. And we even had writing author issues because people didn’t know what they were going to do. You would think that a pandemic with everybody being sent home would give them time to write. But the anxiety and the stress of what’s going to happen with the world versus what’s going to happen with my job was what’s going to happen in my family. People writing all that much.

Bill Sherman Which is just a shift in cognitive load, you know, things that used to be easy, such as, Hey, I need to pick up some toilet paper, you know, when I’m out at the store. This is now a scavenger hunt that takes time and creativity that you can’t spend towards writing.

Michael Jenet Right. This was the anxiety was it wasn’t just, am I going to die or am I going to have my job? It was every part of your life was upended.

Bill Sherman Exactly.

Michael Jenet And it was because of that bill that we decided we did two things almost right away. One was to throw away our business model for publishing, at least in the short term, and say, look, we’re not we’re not going to be able to do a whole lot in that arena right away. What else can we do? And so we created two things. One was a writing group on Facebook, just literally a prompt a day. We would post a prompt and a picture and say, okay, you know, a couple of words, dot, dot, dot. Now you finish that. And the goal wasn’t to get people to write a book. You would just say, write something to take your mind off of all of that other stuff. Right. And crazily enough, we are still doing that every single day. We put a prompt out and a picture and the writing group people and just say, you know, it’s it’s an open book to the public. Anyone can join. It’s just a way to help them write. So that that started literally, I think the week that we all got sent home. And then the other thing we did was we had plans to do retreats and all these other things threw out the window and said, What if we did a virtual writing program to help people actually write? And so we created a year long program that starts with a 28 day sort of bootcamp that helps people get the structure of the book. And then we help them finish it. And we do that once or twice a year. So those things came out of the pandemic. So that as we started doing publishing, we had this community of writers who were either writing on writing prompts or writing through the group. The program that we’re ready, that we’re starting to finish their manuscripts. And so we didn’t have a problem getting people to sort of submit their manuscripts to us. The issue was, how are we going to pay for the editing and the design and the layout and all that? So we wrote a few grants. We got a few, you know, small grants to get us started. We put what little funding we could back into it, and then we just kept cycling. And here we are four years later, I think we published, you know, one book at the end of 2021, right. Sort of as we came out of the pandemic. But then we did four books the next year. We did. I think we’ll do close to 12 this year. 12 or 13. I think we’re getting a little close towards the end of the year. I’m a little worried about a couple of them, but, you know, 12 to 15 books a year is my goal because I think that’s a good number to both address the quality issue and have a good number of authors cycling through. So that’s kind of where we’re at, is we’re up to where we want to be yearly in terms of number of authors that we’re publishing. But, you know, we continue to write grants to try to fill some holes here and there. I’d love to. You know, I’m writing a grant of several grants now to try to get more some of the back end PR and marketing help to our authors because we can give them materials and we can give them ideas. But it’s hard, you know, as well. So it’s really hard. So to try to give them a little bit of support on that end is where the sort of focus of our grant writing is right now.

Bill Sherman So and you’ve talked, Michael, about first time authors. You’ve talked about your experience of not knowing what you wish you knew. What I would ask is a couple of things. One, what has kept your passion up in getting the ideas and books out into the world? Because I could have seen a version of yourself in your wife that said, okay, this was an experiment that went completely wrong. Write it off and we’re done with it. Why do you continue?

Michael Jenet Well, it’s a good question. It’s it’s funny, when you look back at things, you know, when I when I jumped off that corporate cliff, the first thing I did was write a book. But then I got back into entrepreneurship and I went into business with a friend of mine and we started a video production business. And we did that for a while. And I just kept coming back to this writing piece of me write that wanted to keep writing. And so I left that, and that’s when I launched the publishing company. And, you know, to be honest, publishing is is hard. It’s complicated. As you pointed out. It’s also more than a little bit challenging sometimes. Every author is unique. Every author is different. And each one of them brings their own challenges to the table, not just in their writing, but in their in their going through the publishing process, whether it’s editing, rewriting, cover design, you know, layouts, typography, things that they have, they have certain feelings about. And again, we’re trying as a publishing house to give them as much voice as possible in that process. Because I again, if I go back to the very first book that was published by, you know, by that publisher for me, he didn’t like the title of my book. He didn’t like my idea for a cover of the book. So he basically forced me to change the title and come up with a different cover that they designed. And to be honest, I hated both. Over the years, I didn’t like either one. So when I republished it, I changed the title back to what I wanted and I changed the cover. But I didn’t want that experience to be what our authors got. So I give them a lot more say in these things, which is harder on us because I give you an example. I’ve had one author, we went through 30 plus cover designs before we found the one that they liked. But that’s the way you have to do it. If you want to give that author as much power and as much control over their experience. And let me just be clear. The self-publishing world is growing by leaps and bounds, and technology is making it much easier and much better for people who want to self-publish. So if I’m going to have someone who wants to publish with me, I need to make sure they have almost as much self-control or control over the book as they would if they self-published. If that makes sense.

Bill Sherman And you put in a line with that for illustration and that if I want to cover a rabbit in a tutu, I can get a generated rabbit in a tutu very easily. Right.

Michael Jenet You can. But most of the publishing was so Amazon and Ingram, who are the two biggest print on demand you know services right now are both. Not willing to accept air generated covers because there is the copyright issue. You don’t know where that rabbit came from, right? Absolutely. I’m very clear in our contracts with our authors that they cannot use either to write or to design anything. And I have look, I get designs from my authors all the time. What about this? Can you do this? Where did you get that? I used such and such. I think it’s great. We can try something that looks like that, but we can’t use that.

Bill Sherman Can’t do that. Exactly.

Michael Jenet And that makes that may change in time. You know, the AI model and how copyright law, that’s all going to get addressed either plus, you know, plus or negative. It’s going to get addressed at some point here in the future. But until it does, right now, I stay away from that. It’s too dangerous.

Bill Sherman Absolutely. But from a competitive perspective, people think. I don’t need X, Y, and Z service. Why go through 30 iterations when I can, you know, just knock it out in an afternoon for sure.

Michael Jenet And it is a challenge, no question about it. That’s why I say, you know, the publishing model that we’ve created is not one to make it easier on us. If anything, we’ve done the opposite, but it is the one that I believe gives the authors the best possible outcome, you know, product as well as the best possible journey. Not to miss them, not to play on our on our word, on our title, but it gives them the best possible experience in the publishing process.

Bill Sherman So, Michael, there’s a number of authors who are in manuscript state at this point. They haven’t figured out how they’re going to publish yet. Setting aside your model and your business, but just speaking as a publisher, what would you want a first-time author working on their manuscript to know about publishing and to be thinking about long before they even start having conversations with the publishers?

Michael Jenet I could spend way too much time answering that question. But I think if the number one thing that I would tell authors, regardless of where they’re going to get published or how they’re going to get published, is that, again, I mentioned this earlier. Even if you go with a traditional publishing model, they’re not going to do the marketing that they used to do in our parents age and even in our younger days. Right? That model doesn’t exist anymore in. And if you look at some of the stuff that well.

Bill Sherman The number of titles is exponentially different.

Michael Jenet It’s 4 million titles a year. I mean, there’s so much out there, right? So the point is that much of the post publication, whether you self-published or not, most of the publication, self-help, you know, post-publication marketing and PR is going to fall on you unless you hire a company to do that for you. So what can you do now as you’re writing your manuscript, or even just thinking about the idea of the manuscript you want to write? Is to get a community around you, online community. And it doesn’t necessarily matter which social media presence you use. You should have a website, yes, but you should also use social or and you should also use social media. Whichever one you play in and where you are, start there. However, you’re going to want to start thinking about the type of book you’re writing and where those readers live. So if you live, for example, you because you’re a business person, you live on LinkedIn and this is where you spend all your time, so you’re building your community there, but you’re writing a romance novel. They’re less likely to be on LinkedIn. Where do they where do your romance novel readers live and then start building a platform there? This has benefits far beyond just getting a community. It’s if you want to get an agent, the agent is going to want to know whether you have a platform. If that agent’s going to a traditional publisher, that traditional publisher is now looking to see if you already have a platform and a brand and if you self-publish. Same thing applies In order for you to get the book out there, you need a community and a brand and a business that’s already out there talking about the book that’s coming. Get people excited about your book before it even gets to the editing stage. By the time you get ready to publish it, they’re so excited they’re going to help you get the word out. And that’s just going to make it easier for you to get your book out there. So that would be the one thing I would tell people to do when they’re in that first stage.

Bill Sherman The importance of going where your audience is and building community with audience. I think for the practice of all leadership, whether it’s a book or it’s original research or it’s a podcast, you have to meet your audience rather than expect them to come to you. Hi, Michael. I want to thank you for joining us today to talk about books, your journey and requiring the rights for your books and your wife’s books, as well as then, you know, going and taking the road to publish other books.

Michael Jenet Well, thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Bill Sherman Okay. You’ve made it to the end of the episode, and that means you’re probably someone deeply interested in thought leadership. Want to learn even more? Here are three recommendations. First, check out the back catalog of our podcast episodes. There are a lot of great conversations with people at the top of their game, and thought leadership, as well as just starting out. Second, subscribe to our newsletter that talks about the business of thought leadership. And finally, feel free to reach out to me. My day job is helping people with big insights. Take them to scale through the practice of thought leadership. Maybe you’re looking for strategy, or maybe you want to polish up your ideas or even create new products and offerings. I’d love to chat with you. Thanks for listening.