Should You Self-Publish or Traditional Publish Your Book? | Michele DeFilippo

PROFITABLE TALKS...

In this episode of Profitable Creative, host Christian Brim speaks with Michele DeFilippo, founder of 1106 Design, about the intricacies of independent publishing. They discuss the evolution of self-publishing, the importance of professional editing, and the risks associated with DIY publishing. Michele emphasizes the need for quality in book production and the challenges authors face in navigating the current publishing landscape. The conversation also touches on the misconceptions surrounding bestselling authors and the role of technology in the publishing industry.

PROFITABLE TAKEAWAYS...

• Independent publishing allows authors to retain control over their work.
• Self-publishing requires authors to invest in professional services.
• Quality standards in publishing have evolved but remain crucial.
• DIY publishing can lead to poor quality books.
• Technology has changed the publishing landscape significantly.
• Professional editing is essential for producing quality books.
• Authors should understand their audience and purpose for writing.
• The term 'bestselling author' has lost its meaning in the digital age.
• Quality production is key to standing out in a crowded market.
• Human expertise remains irreplaceable in the publishing process.

Join our community of creative entrepreneurs and get a free copy of our No-BS Guide To Making Your Creative Business Actually Profitable delivered straight to your inbox. We’ll share smart, simple tips to help you keep more of what you earn—no boring accountant talk, we promise.  
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Transcript

Christian Brim (00:01.315)
Welcome to another edition of the Profitable Creative, the only place on the interwebs where you will learn how to turn your passion into profit. I am your host, Christian Brim. Special shout out to our one listener in Saccacus, New Jersey. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. In any case, thank you for listening. My guest today is Michelle De... I screwed it up already. Michelle DeFilippo. DeFilippo. Good God. Help me, Michelle.

Michele DeFilippo (00:31.096)
DeFilippo.

Christian Brim (00:32.525)
Michelle DiFilippo and I practiced it before we started. Let's see if I get the company's name right. 1106 Design. All right, Michelle, welcome to the show. Sorry for my stumbling.

Michele DeFilippo (00:36.11)
Okay. Correct.

Thank you for having me, Christian. I appreciate it.

Christian Brim (00:46.991)
Absolutely. Now we know this is not AI generated because, you know, it's human. So 1106 design. What do do at 1106 design?

Michele DeFilippo (00:58.698)
We design books for independent authors and also for publishing companies. We've been doing it since 2001. I've been in the publishing business since 1972 in different aspects. And so we just love to help independent publishers mostly.

Christian Brim (01:18.361)
So you're not working with the authors, you're working or you are working with the authors, correctly.

Michele DeFilippo (01:23.372)
Well, there's a lot of misunderstanding in the business that has evolved over the last 20, 25 years. When it originally began, independent publishing or now called self-publishing meant that the author was the publisher and the author would hire the experts, excuse me, to produce the book and also earn all of the revenue from sales when that book was sold. Over the years, it's become misunderstood. Self-publishing has been

Christian Brim (01:37.817)
Mm-hmm.

Michele DeFilippo (01:50.86)
redefined to be do-it-yourself publishing, which has led to an awful lot of terrible books on the market. But publishing is a business, that's why I was interested in your podcast to see how we could explore that together.

Christian Brim (01:53.977)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (01:58.608)
yeah.

Christian Brim (02:06.381)
Absolutely, and I would imagine over 20 years you've seen a lot of changes You know, I probably doesn't resemble in some ways anything Like when you started but then in some ways is probably just the same

Michele DeFilippo (02:24.278)
Well, in many ways it's the same because the standards are the same. What makes a good book hasn't changed in all the years I've been in the business. But the way people approach creating that level of quality has changed quite a bit and not for the better in some ways.

Christian Brim (02:40.951)
Yeah, when I wrote my book, because it was a derivative of Mike McAlewitz's Prophet First, his publisher, Penguin, required it to be self-published. couldn't use a... Not that I could get a publisher to publish it. It was not worth it. I hired a company, Grace Publishing, I think.

Michele DeFilippo (03:03.882)
Thank

Christian Brim (03:11.481)
can't remember the lady's name in any case. It's been a couple of years since I worked with them. But essentially, I think they do something similar. They helped me conceptually. They provided the editors. then when we went to get it published, got the formatting right, they didn't do the cover art because Mike and his team kind of held sway over that. That was like a requirement of their publisher that

you know, the book format had to look a certain way. So they did the cover art. Is that a fairly accurate representation of what you do?

Michele DeFilippo (03:52.142)
Well, publishing is no different than any other business. There are good players and bad players. And in today's publishing world, there's a lot more problems that authors need to be aware of. The first misunderstanding is that authors need a publisher. You don't need a publisher. Self-publishing means that you are the publisher of your book. Now, authors do need services to produce their book, editing, design, so forth, everything that you experience.

Christian Brim (03:56.868)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (04:09.327)
Hmm.

Christian Brim (04:16.537)
Mm-hmm.

Michele DeFilippo (04:20.983)
but they don't need to and true self-publishing means the author invests in those services and manages the experts and together they produce a great book. Well, over the years, that message has been lost. In the old days, traditional publishers and even still today, traditional publishers don't charge the author anything to produce the book. That's what I would like to call a real publisher. The publishing company is making the investment.

Christian Brim (04:27.991)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Michele DeFilippo (04:50.985)
and then reaping a return when the book is sold by keeping most of the revenue from sales and paying the author a small royalty. That's perfectly fair. Today's publishers are charging the author to produce the book and they're also taking a good portion of the revenue when a book is sold. That doesn't seem, that doesn't work out too well for the author. And it's also unnecessary because companies like mine,

Christian Brim (05:09.699)
Mm-hmm.

Michele DeFilippo (05:17.421)
can provide all of the services that authors need, just like a publisher, except we do not take any of their revenue from sales on the back end. We charge for our services and then we're done. So that's the distinction.

Christian Brim (05:27.203)
Right.

Yeah, and that was that was largely the model. I mean, they did have a publishing model where they would do marketing and promotion and then split the royalties. But most of the work they did was just a fee for service kind of arrangement. I found it interesting when I got close to the time to publishing that talking to the publisher, quote unquote, your your counterpart.

Michele DeFilippo (05:45.282)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (06:00.415)
She said well now now is the hard part like now you have to market it and I I remember feeling very deflated in that moment because it had taken so much effort to write the book But one of the things that I said to her from the outset And I think this is probably even more true 18 months on is that I wanted a book that Had value

Michele DeFilippo (06:04.331)
Yes.

Christian Brim (06:29.271)
standalone. I did not want it to be a book that was your traditional book as a business card. So, you know, I'm going to make you aware of the problem so that you come by my service. That's not what I wanted. I wanted something that was, you know, you paid 20 bucks for the book. You got good value for that. You had something that you could use. And I wanted it to be a good book, you know, well written.

The process definitely taught me how bad my writing was. I did not enjoy my experience with my developmental editor or the final editor. It was tedious and awful. I felt like eighth grade where I kept getting the paper back with red pencil all over it. I did not enjoy that process. In any case, the point I was trying to make is that it

It seems like there's just so much garbage published out there. And I think it's probably gotten worse in 18 months. How do you help an author make sure that they've got something that's one worthwhile, but two that that people can find that they can they can actually, you know, receive value from?

Michele DeFilippo (07:55.438)
Well, answer to that is that authors should always hire people who have a lot of experience in the business. Publishing is no different. Editing and design are no different than any other job. You get better with experience. You get better if you've been trained in the first place and you're not just buying an iPad and telling the world that you can knock out cover design. It's just not the way it works. So hire people who have experience.

Christian Brim (08:18.127)
Mm-hmm.

Michele DeFilippo (08:24.823)
The key thing to remember about today's publishers is that now if your publisher, for example, paid for the marketing and the promotion, then that's perfectly fine. That's what you would call a hybrid publisher because they're participating financially in the outcome and then they deserve to have a share of the profits. But a lot of the publishers that are in the space today are charging the author for every service.

Christian Brim (08:32.175)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (08:37.903)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (08:51.649)
Yes.

Michele DeFilippo (08:52.395)
and yet they're still sharing the profits on the back end. that's, so that's, that's my message. But if authors think they, they need a publisher, of course they can do that, but they should ask enough questions so that they make sure what they're actually getting themselves into.

Christian Brim (09:08.847)
How has the business aspect, not like the external factors and the technology changes, but like the business model itself, how has that changed for you over the last 20 years?

Michele DeFilippo (09:23.885)
Well, there's a lot more belief. don't know how to put this. There's the narrative in the marketplace that authors should do it themselves, or they should find somebody very cheap on Fiverr to do the various tasks that need to be done. Now, you may get lucky if you do that. You may find someone experienced on Fiverr, but for the most part, you're not finding people who are really thoroughly qualified to do the job because

we can't compete at the rates those people charge, right? And we get the calls every day, every week from people who wound up with a cover design that wouldn't upload to the printer or a designer who disappeared if they requested too many revisions. And so it's not a good thing. It's really risky for authors to try to go it alone, especially if they don't have any experience managing a designer and editorial team. To me, this seems like common sense, but

Christian Brim (09:56.292)
Mm-hmm.

Michele DeFilippo (10:21.965)
but I suppose the pull of saving money is a strong one.

Christian Brim (10:28.559)
It is, but we have very similar businesses in that we provide professional services. And what I've, stick with me here because this analogy may not hold, it might not be obvious. When I started in the accounting and finance space in 1997,

prior century, QuickBooks didn't exist. Quicken was around, but QuickBooks didn't exist. And I remember when QuickBooks came out, all of my colleagues were like, my God, we're going to go out of business. you know, they're going to eliminate our jobs. And what was fascinating to me, I was way too young. I didn't have any experience. So I'm like, well, I don't know what you're talking about, but okay, we'll see what happens.

What happened was that the technology where people would do it themselves, it actually created more work for accountants. And the reality is that QuickBooks or any other software doesn't make you an accountant. It does some facsimile of accounting things, but it doesn't make you an accountant. And so if you don't know

Michele DeFilippo (11:43.725)
You

Christian Brim (11:54.959)
What you're looking at it doesn't you you have no idea whether it's doing it, right? And and and I see some I see a lot of similarities from what I went through 20 years ago to today's environment with creatives whether whether it's design or writing or Now photography videography, know like all of these things that AI has encroached on the technology has dropped the cost where people can do it for themselves

for very cheaply or free, but it doesn't make them an author. It does not make them an editor, a designer, a photographer, a videographer. It doesn't make you any of those things.

Michele DeFilippo (12:33.441)
That's right. That's right. I had a colleague a long time ago who used to say, buying a hammer does not make one a carpenter. Right? And it's the same. Software has moved a lot of administrative tasks on to owners that used to be done by somebody else, administrative assistants, bookkeepers, and customer service people. It's all now coming, funneling back to the owner, which is difficult sometimes.

Christian Brim (12:41.775)
No.

Christian Brim (12:54.681)
Mm-hmm.

Michele DeFilippo (13:01.837)
But your analogy holds up. The expertise is human. An editor will always make better judgments than any kind of software. And now, I mean, we've been fighting that for 20 years design-wise too. But now it's even got kicked up to a higher level because now everybody thinks AI is going to be the expert. And I don't know where it's going to end up.

Christian Brim (13:24.792)
Mm-hmm.

Michele DeFilippo (13:31.605)
I like to think that people still like to interact with humans and have consulting, one-on-one consulting based on their unique needs because software can only recognize, and AI in particular, can only recognize general big categories, not the unique needs of an individual.

Christian Brim (13:55.053)
Yeah, it reminds me of the very first conversation I had with the publisher was like, you know, she essentially said, I want you to brain dump. do not want you to try and edit. just want you to write. And, you know, I don't remember how many words it was, maybe 5,000. And she read it and then she just started asking questions.

And what she did was she pulled out the gold of what I was trying to communicate, like the theme of the book, like who my, who my listener really was. And that was just the initial thing. It's. And there there's value in that. And I guess what, what I'm, what I'm seeing though is, is that a lot of people say, well, okay, I'm going to

Michele DeFilippo (14:29.889)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (14:51.203)
I'm going to write a book. Why? Like, do you even know why you're writing a book? Like, what's the purpose behind this? Do you expect the book to make money? Like, do you think that you're going to sell 100,000 copies and, you know, put money in the bank? Like, that's not the majority of books anymore. Like, there's got to be, you got to be real clear on why you're writing in the first place.

Michele DeFilippo (15:17.057)
That's absolutely true, but that's always been true. Even traditional publishers, they're probably lucky if one out of 20 of the books they release is a bestseller. Publishing has always been a difficult business. A publisher I talked to long ago said of every 10 books he released, three or four of them would not make back their costs.

would make it back their costs with a very little bit of profit and maybe one or two would do really well. It's just the nature of the business.

Christian Brim (15:51.203)
Well, and let me throw this onto you and see what you think. Because I was having this conversation with an agency, it was on the podcast, agency owner that specializes in podcast production. And he had earned his chops in the music industry. And he's of a similar age. And we were talking about how like the

He had a band and like, you know, trying to get radio time, etc. And, know, you had to go through the program director and you had to get them to get your song to play on their on their station. And you mentioned publishers that like, OK, we're making an investment of time and money to publish a book. We got to pick the winners and losers. And we're not always right. Right. But what what has happened with

Michele DeFilippo (16:44.023)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (16:47.991)
the cost of producing anything essentially going to zero, not saying the production is the same, but like someone can pick up and produce content, song, video, written word for nothing. mean, the technology has given us the tools that anybody can produce anything for nothing. What's missing now is that human element. And it's completely evaporated because the

Michele DeFilippo (17:13.41)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (17:17.731)
the cost is nothing. But I think the the human element of, you know, like the publisher saying, I don't think this book is good enough. Like it needs it needs more work. Or this this song is not good enough. It needs more work. That's what you need. And if you're sitting there saying to yourself, Well, I just want to write a book, I don't want to do the work. Well, that's fine. But you're going to get what you pay for, which is nothing.

Michele DeFilippo (17:29.697)
Mm-hmm.

Michele DeFilippo (17:47.062)
Yeah, and in the before self-publishing existed, we could always count on traditional publishers to put out good books. Now, it might do well or it might not do well, depending on the interests of the market, which nobody can predict. But that book was always a good book, well edited, well designed, proofread, know, done to traditional publishing standards. And so that's what we try to maintain, just because we were all trained that way at 1106.

You know, like you said, content, we're all drowning in content. You just can't possibly read everything that comes across your screen or comes to your attention. So it's difficult to sell, maybe more difficult than it ever was to make money in publishing because now people have, a book isn't anything special anymore.

Christian Brim (18:23.003)
this is just awful.

Michele DeFilippo (18:42.413)
If you're in the past, if you heard about a new release from a major publisher, maybe you heard of 10 books a month. If you that maybe would be a lot. Now you're hearing about 10 books a minute. So it's no longer even considered. It's just like a distraction. It's like, you know, delete, delete, delete,

Christian Brim (19:02.241)
Right. But even like five years ago, you know, the idea of, okay, I'm going to do a book as a business card concept where, know, yeah, you didn't have to meet traditional publishing standards, but it wasn't as easy as it is now with technology where you can literally produce something in a couple of hours and get it uploaded to Amazon, right?

Michele DeFilippo (19:12.013)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (19:29.039)
And so now that has completely gone out the window. think the power of creatives like yourself, I think the power now is to become the curators of the content by reasserting that gatekeeper role. Even though the majority of people will not want to be curated and will not want to pay the price of admission.

But there's value in being a content creator to say what we put out is worth reading.

Michele DeFilippo (20:05.325)
The role of the creative is not to judge whether the content is worthwhile, I don't think. Even for editors and designers, I think our job is to work with the author to make sure it's presented as well as it can be, both editorially and design-wise. Maybe twice in the last 25 years, I've turned away a book, but for the most part,

Any book, the author is open-minded, any book can be made into a good book with enough time and effort on the editorial and design side. So I think authors worry about creatives changing their ideas. They worry a lot about editing. They don't want the editor to change their writing.

A good editor won't change your voice or your style. A good editor will honor your content and make it better. Make sure you've explained yourself enough. Make sure that you're not redundant in what you're saying.

Christian Brim (21:03.487)
yeah, that development.

That developmental editor kicked my ass. mean, literally it was like, and it was just simple notes. It's like, why?

Michele DeFilippo (21:11.053)
you

Michele DeFilippo (21:17.066)
Mm-hmm, exactly.

Christian Brim (21:18.403)
like, what do mean why it's very it's I wrote it the way I wrote it it's you know, but having someone coming at it from that angle is critical because I'm in my own head. don't I I know especially if you're writing a professional book or a knowledge book, not a novel, like I'm I'm I'm writing it as I understand it. That doesn't mean that's how Michelle reads it.

Michele DeFilippo (21:31.68)
Exactly. Yeah.

Michele DeFilippo (21:45.674)
Exactly, and that's the role of the editor to be that objective set of eyes that will catch the things that we can't catch in our own writing because we know what we mean to say but that doesn't mean it came across in your manuscript. Yeah.

Christian Brim (21:55.374)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (22:00.365)
Right. Well, going back to my accounting analogy, here's what I have seen in 20 years. So I already stipulated that I saw that the technology did not transfer a skill. And I don't think AI is going to transfer any skills either. It's just going to make people think that they just like QuickBooks may.

QuickBooks spent god awful amounts of money convincing business owners that they didn't need an accountant and they could be their own bookkeeper. So AI is doing the same thing. They're pushing it to people saying, well, you can do all of this yourself. Right? What did happen was, I saw that the technology changes allowed us as accountants to be more efficient.

And an example of that would be, man, this is rough numbers. Over the course of 20 years, I saw productivity double. So that a bookkeeper could handle a hundred clients instead of 50 clients, something like that, right? And I think technology, I'm looking in our space, I think we'll get another exponential lift. I'm looking at some

Michele DeFilippo (23:19.469)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (23:28.889)
technology now to help leverage a bookkeeper time using machine learning. And I think that it will get another double in efficiency. It never is going to replace the bookkeeper, right? Never ever, ever, ever, not once.

Michele DeFilippo (23:43.317)
Nope. Nope. I use QuickBooks and send the file to my accountant every year at text time. Yeah, there's no way I would ever want to be him. Yeah.

Christian Brim (23:55.191)
Right, right. Okay, so let's talk about who your ideal client or customer is. Who is it that you look for?

Michele DeFilippo (24:07.053)
We look for authors who want to do their book as a business, as a lead generation tool, or because they understand that publishing is a business and it does take a lot of time and effort to create a good book. And we've been really successful. can't complain, knock on my little wooden head. We've done 4,000 books so far in the last 25 years. Yeah, so we know what we're doing and we appreciate authors who understand that

Christian Brim (24:14.479)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (24:30.851)
That's impressive.

Michele DeFilippo (24:36.769)
that yes, they could create something that sort of looks like a book with technology, but it's not gonna be the kind of book you find in a bookstore. We do bookstore level books. And I think a lot of authors should spend more time in a bookstore so that they can see that this thing that they created with some automated system doesn't look anything like the book pages of a professionally produced book. And then they should think about what they want. Now,

Christian Brim (24:47.823)
Mm-hmm.

Michele DeFilippo (25:03.795)
If the author is a hobbyist, I'm not saying they shouldn't do it. But then the quality is less important than if they are going to release this to the public and they do want the public to post good reviews. So that's really the dividing line. A lot of times, people who... There's nothing wrong with either path, hobbyist or professional.

But when you get mixed up and you try to take the hobbyist approach to release a professional book, then you're creating problems. And problems that you maybe even can't see or can't anticipate until those reviews start coming in. If you want a professional book, you've got to hire professionals to do it, or you should.

Christian Brim (25:50.125)
Well, if you're if you're if you're writing a book to promote your business or promote yourself, I would think that was an absolute table stakes like it has to be professional because it reflects on me.

Michele DeFilippo (26:06.047)
Absolutely. I'm actually having a conversation with a prospective client today who is insisting he does not need us to proofread the after we do the layout. And now that has been the standard workflow in publishing for generations. Proofread five, six, seven times and you always find something every time you proofread. And so this author is telling me I've run it through software. I don't anticipate making any changes.

And that may be true, but if a human being proofreads your book, I promise you we're going to find things that ought to change. So it's just an interesting world now.

Christian Brim (26:40.761)
Ciao!

Christian Brim (26:45.623)
Yeah, and and and that that is what I go back to how the the Technology changes the expectation I give you an example. So I went to hear a speaker that specialized in in sales and marketing and He said your your Competition now is Amazon

And I'm like, what do you mean? I don't sell a product. He said, that's not the point. The point is the ease with which you buy something on Amazon is the level of friction that people expect doing business everywhere. that, the technology changes people's expectations, right? And so it's fascinating to me.

Michele DeFilippo (27:32.023)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Michele DeFilippo (27:37.879)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (27:42.455)
Like at the end of the day, the people that are hobbyists, I don't care about like that. That's fine. Do your thing. I'm not interested in, in doing business with you, but it's the people that are trying to be professional and trying to, run a business that just like 20 years ago, they thought, well now I don't need an accountant. I'm my own accountant. Right? Like it, it, it's that same thing all over again.

Michele DeFilippo (28:08.725)
Yeah. Yeah. think every technology has, of course, increased productivity, even in the design field. Right. When I when I first got into the business, we used to cut and paste strips of paper into a book and send those boards to the printer. And the printer would take a picture of it and then print a book. And when we look back on that now, it's just like, how did we ever get anything done?

Christian Brim (28:18.063)
Sure.

Michele DeFilippo (28:35.009)
So we can do much more work in much less time than ever before. But that's not a substitute for the human judgment that goes into everything. Yeah.

Christian Brim (28:43.831)
No, it's a tool. You talk about cutting and pasting. That's actually what CPA stands for. A lot of people don't know that. Cut, paste, and attach. Because back when I started my career, that was a lot of what we did. It would be make copies of what the client had. I was working as an auditor. But you'd take copies of what they had, and then you'd tape it or staple it or whatever onto your work paper.

Michele DeFilippo (28:51.019)
Hahaha.

Christian Brim (29:08.791)
You know, it is laughable when you look back through the lens of technology and say, how did we ever do that that way? How did we use 12 commoner paper? like, you know, right? Like, how did we do that? But but it's what is a fascinating thing to me is what I noticed very early on in my career was that as the technology expanded, the expectation shifted with it.

Michele DeFilippo (29:19.085)
I remember that.

Christian Brim (29:37.943)
So like when I was working as an auditor, we were just starting with laptops. And they were putting all of this stuff in a digital format that used to be paper. And it was going to be so much more efficient. Well, what happened was as soon as they got it all digitized, and we were doing it on a computer rather than paper forms and paper checklists and worksheets, the partners

And the managers would say, well, you know what, let's add, let's add this one more worksheet. Let's, let's add this one more checklist because you've got the time. Right. And, and, and it's, it's fascinating to me. Like another example of that would be, you know, telephones. You and I remember back when you got charged by the minute, right. And, and then mobile phones and it was the same thing. And God forbid you'd be out of area and get a roaming charge. Right.

And the cost has dropped to deliver that. But what's happened to the amount that people spend on telephone service as a whole? It's gone up. Right? I mean, because no one's ever satisfied with what they want, what they have now cheaper. like, well, no, I'm spending $200. I'll go ahead and spend $200. I want more.

Michele DeFilippo (30:52.108)
Mm-hmm.

Michele DeFilippo (31:04.013)
and across all industries, think of what technology has done. Now companies have millions of customers to deal with, where they might have had far fewer than that in the past because you couldn't possibly handle millions of customers with the traditional method. So yeah, it's interesting. It's an interesting world we live in.

Christian Brim (31:27.459)
Yeah, and to your point, is confusing to try and navigate, like, what does the future look like? And I was actually on the phone with one of my colleagues that we were talking AI in the accounting space. And what does this look like? And how does this tool, how do we use it? And there's so much uncertainty.

I use the analogy of like, at the beginning of the industrial age when we're starting to use electricity and like, nobody's agreed on a standard, like, okay, is this 110 or is this 220? like, I wired it up for 70. know. Like now I got to rip all this shit out and come back because, you know, there's no standards. Like that's the area of chaos that we're in. There's great uncertainty. And what I find

in those periods of uncertainty, it's uber-critical to stick to principles, because those aren't going to change.

Michele DeFilippo (32:25.602)
Yes.

Christian Brim (32:30.285)
The tools will change, but the principles will not.

Michele DeFilippo (32:34.029)
And that's exactly what drives us too. We want to create traditional publisher quality books. We don't want to produce junk. But the burden of explaining that becomes increasingly difficult because, as you said, people expect more for less, they think. A lot of people who approach us for service think that we just click a few buttons and that manuscript file somehow magically becomes a book. And that's not the case.

Christian Brim (33:00.963)
Tell me about it. Do know how many people have said, you just put those numbers in the computer. mean, it's nothing. Why don't you just charge me less for a text? I'm like, honey, you don't understand. If you want to go do TurboText, do TurboText. That's not what this is.

Michele DeFilippo (33:14.061)
Yeah.

Michele DeFilippo (33:18.613)
Yeah, that's our battle too. And many people understand it, but just as many more don't. So to be frank about it, we have to waste our time talking to those people. And they always come back and say, no, it's too expensive, because they don't understand we're spending 150 hours to make your book.

Christian Brim (33:37.807)
Right. Well, and so then maybe the solution to that is, you know, being upfront with your pricing to the, I mean, you it might sound counterintuitive, but like the reality is good marketing should attract the right people, but it should also drive the wrong people away. And, yeah.

Michele DeFilippo (34:01.962)
Yeah, we're completely transparent about that. I have all of my prices on our website. you know, we will hear the one thing that drives us mad is these newfangled publishers that promise authors they will have a best seller. That's not going to happen. It's just a flat out lie. So we will never do things like that to people. We will just say, the only promise I can make you is that we're going to produce a traditional publisher quality book. That's it. That's all we know about.

Christian Brim (34:29.583)
Well, know that, okay, so you hit on something that I weren't. You you get into things and you don't know anything and I knew nothing about book publishing. The term bestseller, right? Okay, well, I actually did work with an agency that their job is to promote books. They're a marketing agency, but they promote books. And they,

tweak some things and ran some ads and all of a sudden it was like, you're a best seller and got the little badge on Amazon. And I'm like, huh? And I'm like, well, that wasn't what I thought it was. Right. And so now I can say I'm a best seller author legitimately, but like what that actually means versus what the public thinks it means.

is not the same thing.

Michele DeFilippo (35:29.982)
On the flip side, they've destroyed, by doing things like that, they've destroyed the meaning of the word bestseller, right? Because you're at 10 times a week now, you'll encounter somebody you never heard of who claims to be a bestselling author. So what happens? You don't believe it. In fact, you're even suspicious that, does this guy think I'm that naive?

Christian Brim (35:36.107)
Exactly. Exactly.

Christian Brim (35:50.094)
Right.

Well, you, you, you, because you're in the business, right? But like, I had no idea what best seller meant.

Michele DeFilippo (35:56.246)
Yeah, yeah, well that's right. Yeah, yeah, it's an emotional play because of course everybody wants that but like I said even traditional publishers know that's really rare and in a lot of ways out of the hands of the publisher because nobody can predict market behavior.

Christian Brim (36:02.348)
Exactly.

Christian Brim (36:15.663)
100 % I was listening to an interview with Donald Miller, author of story brand, and, you know, it was a bestseller. But he had other books I had never read never heard of. And he'd gone he was a traditional publisher route. But like how many of his books were not bestsellers. And there was no rhyme or reason to it in his head. Like he's like, I don't know why this one was more popular than this one.

Michele DeFilippo (36:46.145)
Well, and that's why the only thing that is under your control is to produce that quality book. Then you know you've done your best to put out a product that the market will at least not trash with bad reviews, right?

Christian Brim (36:53.795)
Correct.

Christian Brim (36:59.983)
Well, New York Times is going to trash it anyway, right? mean, if they don't...

Michele DeFilippo (37:02.541)
Well, but I mean, after that, it really is out of your hands and you just have to hope for the best because nobody knows what the market will respond to. can make educated guesses, but we really don't know. And it's random.

Christian Brim (37:19.427)
Yeah, people are unpredictable, unfortunately. I've tried to make them predictable, but they're not. It reminds me when I, before I wrote, in writing my book, I interviewed Todd Henry, who's another author. He wrote, the Accidental Creative was his most popular, but he's many books. And at the time, he's like, well, I'm writing a new book, but I'm going to self-publish this time. I had, all of my books had been, you know, publisher.

Michele DeFilippo (37:22.583)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (37:49.325)
written where, you know, he got an advance and then got residual royalties. But he said, you know, I from a business standpoint, and he's talking, he's talking about Todd Henry, Inc. like him, his business. He was like, I don't like the model that the publishers have because there are so many restrictions on what I can and can't do. Now, if I want to do a giveaway, you know, or package the book with something else, like, you know, I'm limited.

And so he was like, I'm thinking about doing this one self publishing. He, he since has self published that book. but it w it was interesting to me seeing someone coming from that realm saying, you know, maybe I want to take more control back for myself.

Michele DeFilippo (38:35.927)
We get that all the time actually because authors don't think the publisher paid them enough money or again, like you said, wouldn't let them express their vision in the way they thought it should be expressed and actually got in the way in terms of collateral. can't market your book anywhere else because when you work with a traditional publisher, it is actually no longer your book, it is their book. And so that's why self-publishing, independent publishing,

Christian Brim (38:58.819)
Right. Right.

Michele DeFilippo (39:03.981)
has grown to the extent it has because it does give people that freedom. But then the pendulum swung too far the other way where it gave people the freedom to produce a terrible book. So that's the territory we're in now.

Christian Brim (39:16.772)
Yeah.

Christian Brim (39:20.183)
Yeah. And I know you as a publisher or as an editor don't want to, you know, that, that, that paradigm of, don't want to be critical of the work. Right. But I, I I still think that there's a need in the marketplace for someone to wade through all of this crap and say, this is, this is what's worth reading.

And I'm not talking about another computer program like Goodreads where it's like, you know, this is what everybody else thinks. you know, people that like, if you work with business owners, right. And that's your niche of like, okay, if you want to know the real truth, the real best in this subject, you know, it's published by me, right? Like, cause I'm not going to...

I'm not saying that's what you should do or what I'm just saying that like there's this I see this gap because it is overwhelming like there's there's no way to get to Well, I say no way it seems like harder and harder to get to the truth and and and get to the quality and The humans are the only ones that are going to restore sanity to this

Michele DeFilippo (40:41.279)
Yes, I think you're right. we always give authors the best advice we can. It's ultimately up to them whether they want to accept it or not. But self-publishing is freedom, really. And that's why it is so popular. But hopefully we find the middle ground where we're working with an author who says, yeah, you your editor's right. I really could have improved that manuscript. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know what

Christian Brim (40:54.542)
Yes.

Christian Brim (41:04.559)
I really should proofread this. Because I've noticed a couple of errors in my book, and it went through.

Michele DeFilippo (41:13.633)
You can't, it can't be, in fact, there's a joke in publishing that when you, when you open the box and you take out the first book that from the printer, it will automatically open to the page with the typo. It's human nature.

Christian Brim (41:24.719)
I love it. I love it.

Yeah, well, there's yeah, perfection is an illusion. Michelle, how do people find 1106 design if they want to learn more?

Michele DeFilippo (41:36.069)
My website is 1106design.com and you'll find, hope all the information you need there. Like I said, all of our pricing is there. We've got tons of blog posts, educational articles. You can download my free book called Publish Like the Pros in PDF format. It's a quick 88 page read. It's just a summary of the things I say on these podcasts. And you can request a consultation. We are not going to spam your...

Christian Brim (41:51.961)
Hmm.

Michele DeFilippo (42:03.967)
inbox with five messages a day because you contacted us. We don't do business that way. We're respectful. We'll have nice consultation with you if that's what you want and we hopefully will be a good fit for you. We're going to teach you how to publish your book under your own name so that you get all the revenue from sales when it's sold.

Christian Brim (42:24.153)
Well, except for Amazon. They take a cut.

Michele DeFilippo (42:26.145)
Well, yeah, that's unavoidable. And printing costs are unavoidable, but you don't want to pay extra to a third party unless they're also participating financially in the project with you.

Christian Brim (42:30.359)
Right. No, no, you do not.

Christian Brim (42:38.191)
listeners will have those links in the show notes. If you like what you've heard, please rate the podcast, share the podcast, subscribe to the podcast. If you don't like what you've heard, shoot us a message, tell us what you'd like to hear and we'll get rid of Michelle. Until next time, ta ta for now.

Michele DeFilippo (42:51.789)
Ha