Finding Passion and Purpose in Publishing

First up, it's a new season and a new name! Boni and John discuss the reasons for the name change from The Empowered Author Podcast to the Ingenium Books Podcast. Then we dive in to the wonderful ways to find passion and purpose in publishing. 

Are you tired of being told to just keep writing more books, without any real progress in your pursuit of getting your book published and to market? Are you confused about which publishing approach is right for you? You're not alone. In this episode, we'll explore alternative paths to success and reveal how branching out beyond traditional book publishing can lead to exciting new avenues for your work. Get ready to discover untapped opportunities and unlock your potential in the world of independent publishing.

In this episode, you will be able to:

• Understand the essence of independent publishing and the significance of being an active author.
• See how nurturing a genuine passion is instrumental in the independent publishing world.
• Investigate the correlation between profitable margins and providing a livable wage in publishing.
• Dive into the challenges posed by AI innovations and the imperative for ceaseless learning.
• Reveal untapped opportunities that lie outside of traditional book publishing, like venturing into TV and film licensing.

The key moments in this episode are:

• 00:00:00 - Introduction
• 00:01:01 - The Future of Publishing is Independent
• 00:05:21 - Running a Successful Independent Publishing Business
• 00:10:25 - Historical Domain of Publishers
• 00:13:55 - Author Engagement in the Marketing Process
• 00:16:17 - The Importance of Diversifying Income
• 00:18:41 - The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Publishing
• 00:22:13 - Pursuing Film and TV Licensing
• 00:27:12 - The Business of Film and TV Licensing
• 00:28:00 - Conclusion and Call to Action

The resources mentioned in this episode are:

• Visit the Ingenium Books website to learn more about their publishing services and to check out their stories that inspire, enlighten, and challenge.
• Join the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) to connect with other independent publishers and to attend their annual conference.
• Consider becoming an independent author or publisher if you have a passion for creative expression and want to have more control over the publishing process.
• Make sure to pay yourself and your team a living wage, even if margins in the publishing industry are tight.
• Be engaged in the exercise of marketing your book to reach your readers, as readers are often more interested in the author than the publisher.
• Check out the cool little video on the Ingenium Books website that explains their core values.
• If you're interested in film and TV licensing, music tracks, or audiobooks, stay tuned for upcoming episodes that will cover these topics and learn more at https://ingeni

Transcript

John Boni Wagner Stafford (00:49.658)

Welcome to season two, new season, new name, the Ingenium Books podcast. We're so excited to be rejuvenating the podcast and starting a new season. Yeah, we took a little bit of a break, like a year or so as we reevaluated our priorities and dug deep into what the business reasons were, which is, you know, all part of being a publisher and figuring out how to get your.

John Boni Wagner Stafford (01:16.338)

message out and who you want to get it out to. Anyway, before we dig in, welcome to season two, of course. Just a quick little connection. The season one of our podcast was called the Empowered Author podcast. We have 52 episodes. We love those episodes. We had some great feedback. We had some great conversations with some great guests. One of the reasons we've changed our name, there's two reasons actually. One is

After we chose the name, we discovered that there were two other podcasts with the same or a similar name. And at first we didn't really know how big a deal that was going to be. When we were researching and choosing the name, we didn't find any evidence of another podcast with the same name. But once we were in 20 episodes or so, we discovered that. So we wanted to have a name that was uniquely ours. And

So it's the Ingenium Books podcast. Yeah, simple, clean. Yeah, very clear. And so the focus where we were talking in season one, those first 52 episodes focusing pretty explicitly on issues of importance to authors, hence the word author in the title, we're shifting the focus a little bit.

to talk about authors, publishers, and change makers. And that is a nod to the kinds of stories that we publish at Ingenium Books. From the homepage of our website, we publish stories that awe, inspire, enlighten, and challenge, that show us how to transform our relationships, bodies, health, finances, businesses, or ourselves. We publish stories that build trust in the universe.

that demonstrate our innate resilience and that prompt us to rethink what's possible. Hence the change maker part of the subtitle of the podcast. So I'm kind of excited. How about you? Oh, very, very excited. Yeah, looking forward to it. Yeah. So we will have all kinds of cool topics coming up for our future weekly episodes and...

John Boni Wagner Stafford (03:35.286)

topics of relevance, whether you're an author, whether you're a publisher, whether you're an author-publisher, a publisher who's also an author, and that changemaker piece as we talked about. We're going to be talking about film and TV licensing. We're going to be talking about music tracks in audiobooks, which is something that John's working hard on. We're excited to share some of those things with you. Information and discussion about...

the publishing business, trends, things that are changing, challenges. Artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence, AI, yeah. And marketing and of course writing craft and all of those things. All those things that are relevant and we're planning to have a bit of a rhythm. So we'll do a writing focus and a creation focus on one episode and then we'll move into a publishing focus and then we'll move into the changemaker focus. Sorry, my hand hit the microphone there.

John Boni Wagner Stafford (04:31.130)

and we'll just see how that rolls out. But every week, so we're looking forward to it. Thanks for joining us. But this episode kicking off, season two, is gonna be about our recent visit to San Diego at the IBPA University Conference, IBPA being the Independent Book Publishers Association.

of which we are a member and we learned a ton about running our business, the publishing industry, new trends in the publishing industry. We learned a lot about what other people are doing and how, gee, what we're doing is pretty much the same what they're doing too as hybrid publishers. So we're happy to talk about some of the things that we learned.

Yeah, so Independent Book Publishers Association or IBPA, they're publishing University 2023. They have one of these conferences every year. I can't remember if, I think they held them virtually during the heydays of the pandemic. And we've been members of IBPA for, I don't know, six or seven years now, and we've made plans a couple of times to go to the conference. One of those times was right when COVID hit, and it was like, ah.

I guess we're not going this year. So this is the first time that we've made it to the conference and it will not be the last. It was really a great experience. So, yeah, we wanted to talk about some of the things that we heard and share with you some of those things. And I guess one of the things that stuck out to me that I heard in one of the keynotes was the future of publishing is independent. Did that strike you?

Yeah, yeah, it was and it was actually rather good to hear because that's kind of where we are going and have been. Well, we are independent. We are independent, but that's where we have been. And it just supports the whole notion of newness, creativity. There was a lot of talk about the big five being the big five publishers who have different models than independent publishers do.

John Boni Wagner Stafford (06:47.370)

and or hybrid publishers. So that was all pretty interesting to learn about. Yeah. I also thought it was interesting to hear, I might've even been in that same keynote. I can't remember exactly where I heard it, but where there was a very clear articulation of what the word independent means when we're talking about independent publishers, independent authors. So, and one of our authors asked us recently what this was. And so,

John Boni Wagner Stafford (07:17.786)

they described whoever it was, I'm sorry, I can't remember who it was to give appropriate credit, but they described an independent author or an independent publisher as meaning that the author in an independent relationship has some skin in the publishing game. And they also equated it to, and this made a lot more sense, and I don't know why I had never thought of it this way, but they equated it to, you know, if you talk about you're an indie filmmaker,

John Boni Wagner Stafford (07:46.050)

or you're an indie musician, we have a pretty good idea that that's what that means, that the creator, so whether you're a musician or a film producer or writer or author, has some skin in the game in one way, shape or form, you're out there actively fundraising or in some ways supporting the creation of your- That's money, creativity, it's what you might be doing with your marketing, it's bringing the idea to fruition, it's-

John Boni Wagner Stafford (08:15.698)

Yeah, and that does differ from the traditional model where the author does not have skin in the game. And we would just say the author also does not usually have creative control. They give up a lot of rights and they give up a lot of their potential for royalties on the other end. Not that there's a right or a wrong. There's a publishing model out there for everybody and not the right. There's no one size fits all.

So that was interesting. What was something else that stood out for you? Well, I just wanted to kind of add something to that. As an independent publisher or an author who is publishing your own books, therefore an independent publisher, and we had a podcast about this last year, at least one, you're running a business. Yeah. So one of the other things that we delved into on day one, in fact, or before the conference started was a lot about...

what it takes to run a successful business as an independent publisher, whether you're an author with one book, an author with a series of books, a hybrid publisher like us running with many, many authors and many books. We're all running businesses, small businesses. Yeah, that was a really, it was a four hour session, one of the pre-conference sessions, and it was really interesting to hear some of the things.

John Boni Wagner Stafford (09:37.854)

I found it very validating to like, oh, we're having, other people are having the same challenge that we are. For example, lots of talk, both in that session and elsewhere around the conference about how publishing is a very low margin business. Yeah, we're not always or necessarily in this business solely for making lots and lots of money. In fact, you can't not even solely, that's not.

that's not gonna happen. So that brings to light, when you're running your business and us as well, of course, what's driving that? And the word passion comes up, you need to have a passion for what you're doing that is going to be leading and driving that business, I think. Yeah, yeah. That was pretty important point that was made. Yeah, exactly. So if you're not in it for money,

then what are you in it for? And if you don't have a passion for whatever part of the process, whatever part of the business brings you that energy from the passion, you know, there's all kinds of different passions that people can have, but it really is about being passionate about some element of that. And it fit for us. I thought it was kind of interesting, you know, of course they talked about mission and vision and that sort of thing. And we have a...

purpose statement and a set of core values. And they're talking at first and I'm like, oh, we don't really have a mission statement. And then the more they talked about it, yeah, we do, we do. Our purpose statement is breathing life into ideas, which so it's a purpose statement which feeds directly into our passion, which, you know, so the whole notion of ideas and

John Boni Wagner Stafford (11:22.486)

and breathing life into them, helping authors see what's possible with their ideas. So we're breathing life into our own ideas, but also helping authors by breathing life into their ideas, helping them get out into the world. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And our core values, like the passions, they're number four on our list of core values. And you can see our core values on our website. And we have a cool little video that I actually love that talks about our core values. But number four is passion for creative expression.

John Boni Wagner Stafford (11:52.566)

Yeah, so. You have a cute little girl on that. Yes, yes, that's right. That's right. So one other thing that I, and I didn't hear this in the publishing, in the business of the business session, or maybe I did, I can't remember, but I thought it was interesting that historically reaching readers has never been the domain of the publisher. Mm-hmm.

So there's, you know, how many times have we had conversations with authors as we explore whether their submission is going to be right for us and whether we're going to be right for their book, where the question is, well, so, you know, do you do any marketing? And we actually do a lot of marketing around the author and their book. But to hear that stated and to hear examples from other very successful hybrid publishers that...

do not do author or book marketing. They focus exclusively on marketing their own brand and their company. And obviously the fact that they are publishing these books. So it's not that the books have no visibility, but that it's a very different way to think about that. And again, there's no right or wrong. It's just that we have been investing a lot of time and money into supporting authors and helping authors with that.

marketing piece and frankly not doing a whole bunch about marketing our own brand. So one of the things that we're going to be taking a look at in the next you know few months as we continue to develop our three to five year business plan. And that underlines the importance of the author being involved, engaged, engaged in every aspect of the book production and marketing but especially in the marketing somebody said the conference

Okay, your book is now edited and the manuscript is all ready to go and it's uploaded and it's ready with all the distributors Now the hard work starts and it's because we need to all of us including the author and especially the author needs to be Very engaged in the exercise of getting their book in front of their readers marketing Absolutely, and I know that I often say to authors when they ask us this question about how much marketing we do is that I Don't think I can think of a reader and I think of myself as a reader

to I don't care who the publisher is. I read a good book. I don't go like, oh, who's the publisher and go research the publisher. No, I go straight to who's the author. Does the author have a website? Where's the author engaging? Do they have a Facebook page? What are they saying? All that, I read their bio. So readers, I think in general, and of course there's always trouble when you generalize, but I think readers.

don't really care too much about who the publisher is. We as publishers care more about who a publisher is on a good book, we will go find out who did that one. But that's because that's part of our competitive research if you like. I needed to go back to, well I needed and wanted to go back to the discussion about margins in publishing. And one other thing that's related to that that we heard that I think is important to talk about.

John Boni Wagner Stafford (15:04.166)

and the publishers that are listening and watching this will be interested, maybe will be interested in this. And that is the encouragement to make sure that even though margins are very tight, that it's important that you pay yourself and your team a living wage. And that was interesting to hear because something that we struggle with,

John Boni Wagner Stafford (15:33.166)

Quite a bit, I would say. You know, that's a general business notion, but the publishing industry, there are not, even the big five don't make huge margins on most of their titles, and then they've got one or two or three that are big hits, and that's where they make their money. It's kind of like the Christmas sale, right? You make all your money at Christmas, but you need to be taking care of yourself, and you need to be taking care of your team, and you need to be taking care of the people who surround you, who help you to produce the books and write the books, whether...

You're independent as an author or a publisher. Yeah, and so it's not uncommon. And we augment how we get paid out of the Ingenium Books business is very heavily subsidized by other sources of income that we have. And I think we're very fortunate that we have those other sources of income because our business probably would look very different today.

if we needed to rely, well, and maybe it wouldn't, maybe we would have made different decisions if we didn't do that. Anyway, really good food for thought and again, something else to dig into as we continue to evolve. And then the notion of also paying your team a living wage, also really important, of course, and I know that we've had many discussions with ourselves. You know, there's a, in business, there's a...

John Boni Wagner Stafford (17:01.338)

a notion about it being wise business to collect fast and pay slow. So you wanna have anybody that owes you money, you wanna make sure that you're receiving it as quickly as possible. But if you have 30 days to pay a bill, you don't pay it until day 30. And with our team, we don't do that. We, you know, our team are also independent people. We've got...

some fantastic and experienced and talented and dedicated people who have as much passion for what they do as we do. And we like to make sure that we get them paid quickly everybody's kind of waiting around for money. So not that that's wise from a- I gotta go pay some bills. Right, yeah, sorry, I'll be right back. Not that that's wise from a business perspective but that's what we've chosen to do.

What's next? I'm looking at what's next. I wanted to talk about, I don't know, there, my screen is changing. We also attended a session, a couple of sessions actually related to film and TV licensing, and that's something that we're gonna be talking more about on this podcast because it's something that we are very purposefully digging into. And maybe before we do that, should we just quickly touch on what we heard?

about AI before we get into it. Because otherwise we, and not that, like we are not AI experts, you know, I've dabbled with chat GPT and we use Otter.AI to help us with transcripts. So it's, you know, it's not foreign, but we're not aficionados by any stretch. But you had some more, you sat in on some more sessions about AI. So AI, artificial intelligence is here, it's here to stay, it's been around for a long time.

John Boni Wagner Stafford (18:48.146)

And there's lots of talk in the news recently, even in the last week or so, one of the AI gurus from Google who's left. Saying it's gonna be the end of humanity or whatever. So nothing to be afraid of. But- Well, I'm afraid of the end of humanity. No, but AI. But we've got a lot to learn, everyone's got a lot to learn, even the people who are creating the AI. And we know that there are going to be some benefits that we as-

humans as publishers as writers can benefit from. And we know there's gonna be some downside and we don't know totally what that impact is gonna be. We learned a bit about a tool, a small little AI tool related to audio books that listens to your audio book and says, hey, this gap is too long or.

you know, there's a mic pop there. There's a mic pop there. So that's good. Generates your list of pickups. It reduces one of the listen backs that I've got to do of a four or five or a 10 hour audio book. But so that's a good thing. So we're still learning a lot about it. We have our eyes open to it and we are following it closely because we certainly want to be in the know and share everything that we learned about that with you through these podcasts and everything. Yeah, there's, you know, I have my own concerns about.

copyright issues and authenticity issues and not having our work stolen or all of those kinds of issues. But somebody said, you know, we had the same conversations when the internet came about and we had the same conversations again when social media started to hit and now we're having the same kind of conversation around AI and the world didn't end. But we need to be careful and you know, spam, what is spam all about? It's horrible.

and all this kind of stuff. So we need to be in the know and we plan to be in the know. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, okay, film... I mean, and there were so much that we... There were sessions we attended. We broke up... We didn't break up. We're still together. We looked at the... Attended separate sessions. Yes, we attended separate sessions and came back together and compared notes so that we could, you know, get as much information as we could. So we attended sessions on marketing and branding and...

supply chain issues and there was a big focus as well on DEI, which was really, really good to hear. It's diversity. It is a DEI. Oh my god. The I is inclusion. I was a DEI diversity equity and inclusion. Yeah. And so lots of really inspiring people doing really great work in this area and something else that we'll be looking at with respect to

what it means for our business and yeah, we certainly. And the people we work with. And the people we work with and yeah, so marketing and branding and all that kind of stuff. But let's talk about film and TV licensing. Well, film and TV licensing, we've been actively pursuing this for the last year or so with at least one of our titles and we've been learning a lot about it and there were two sessions, one specific session and a follow-up session, I think. Yeah.

at the conference, which just was amazing. It was fun. And its focus actually was on how do you pitch to the executives who are going to say, yeah, we'll take your book or no, we won't. But it certainly validated the work that we've been doing with the Picture Wall, which is the title that we've been working on for the last year. And it gave us some new insights. With respect to licensing, yeah.

with respect to TV and film or film licensing. And it has validated a lot of the work that we've done. It's encouraged us to do some more work in different areas to help move things forward. And I think some of the things that I heard that were interesting and not necessarily brand new stuff, but the number of award-winning TV series and films

John Boni Wagner Stafford (22:53.634)

that are based on books. I can't remember the statistic, but it was a lot. You know, we were just talking, just before we started recording, is it the majority or is it just more many? So we're just gonna say many, cause I don't know what the number is off the top of my head. And we know that, and it's the same, it's the same thing that happened in the early 2000s, might've even been the year 2000. I was in the newsroom in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

in Vancouver and we were having a meeting with all the reporters and the executives of the news team and they were talking about what the internet was going to mean and they were saying content is king. Everybody's going to be looking for content. Well, it's the same thing happening now with all the streaming services that there is a huge appetite for content for all of the videos and TV series that we're just gobbling up. I mean, how

You can sit down and speed through three or four episodes or watch an entire season in one sitting on a gloriously lazy Sunday afternoon. Oh, don't get me started. But so there is a demand for content. There are really good stories being told with books. And so why wouldn't we be looking to make that connection and open the doors to what is possible for some of the books that we publish?

that we think have legs on screen. And we have a lot of them. And it's just another amazing outlet to get the story in front of the right people. Our passion is to get those stories out there and so many more people could benefit from the story that's being told, the message that's being conveyed through film and television. Yeah, but it is a totally different, you don't have the same, obviously we've got

you know, 50 or 80,000 words to show the arc of the character and the story arc and, and, you know, to bring the reader to immerse them in, in a different way into the story that we're telling, whether it's fiction or nonfiction. And on the screen, you don't have that. Yeah, it's very different. It's, it's much more visual. So you have to be able to show if it's a very, if it's a highly emotional story, you have to before you're thinking about whether it

will work on the screen, you have to think about, what is the viewer going to see? What is the setting? How is the story going to demonstrate that emotional quality when all we can see is the face of the character? So it really does take a different twist. Some of the other things that you need to think about is, where is the story told? And from the perspective of,

how many settings are there and where are the settings? And so if you have, you know, one of our books that we just love and we looked into trying to...

explore a film and TV licensing opportunity for it is Flying with Dad by Yvonne Caputo. We love the story, the story of her father's experience training for and then becoming a navigator in B-24 bombers in the second world war and he got PTSD and that impact on the family when he got back home and the impact that that had on her relationship with him her whole life and right away it was like oh we have uh 11

different locations just in the States. Then we have locations in Europe, we have locations in the air, in an airplane. We have locations flying, you know, doing bombing runs over the English Channel and over the European countryside. And we have, you know, all the, it was like, oh, that is a expensive, not impossible, it just becomes expensive. So it's one of those things to be aware of as you're trying to prepare your pitch.

John Boni Wagner Stafford (26:53.898)

that that's what the executives are gonna be looking at. How much is it gonna cost us to produce this thing? And interestingly, the gentleman that was leading the workshop at IBPA this past weekend as we're recording this, he was saying, very few film and television shows actually make money. It's same as publishing, very few actually make money, but it's the blockbusters that pay for everything else. And you never really know which one is gonna go pop.

John Boni Wagner Stafford (27:21.582)

So yeah, they had this very cool contest. So the workshop was about developing your pitch. And then they had a contest over a luncheon where they had chosen seven people and they got up and did their pitch. It was really, really just some really, really good ones. Really good ones. So we have a very self-imposed limitation of keeping these podcasts to 30 minutes. So we're approaching that. We're gonna honor that.

but we'll be back every week and we encourage you to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and we'd also love to hear from you if there's something you'd like us to talk about, we'd love to hear. So feel free to drop us a note, a line and we are, we'll be making some noise and trying to tell people that season two is here and we look forward to.

John Boni Wagner Stafford (28:21.730)

Coming, coming back. Yeah. Well, welcome back to the podcast. Yes. Excellent. Thank you so much. Thanks.