Author: Stuart Grant

Speaker 1 (00:00:03):
Publishing is changing. No more gatekeepers, no more barriers, no one standing between you and your readers. This is the Self-Publishing Show. There's never been a better time to be a writer.
James Blatch (00:00:19):
Hello and welcome to the Self-Publishing Show with me James Blatch here on a Friday. This is episode 432. We've been going for I think the best part of eight years. I've done 400 interviews, just over 400 interviews, which is a lot of interviews. We have a massive archive with a lot of history. I think we've charted a lot of the progression of the indie industry, indie writing industry over the last few years. But all good things come to an end and I've got a lot going on at the moment and I'm going to take a step back from this podcast. So that will be it for a while. We'll keep this channel open, so keep your subscriptions there. We might do the odd series in the future, particularly around the live show next year, maybe at Christmas we'll do a special who knows. And if you search the web, I'm sure you'll find me if you really need a dose of me at some point in the future, but I do want to say a few thank yous and I'll do that at the end of this show when I sign off.
(00:01:18):
But we have two great interviewees for you. We have the man responsible for the world's largest gathering of indie authors, and we're going to talk to him about what's going to happen in November in Vegas or how it's going to be different from previous years, how you can get involved and particularly the reader event. And then we are going to have our final guest and our final guest will be the most listened to two guests we've ever had, which seems appropriate, right? So that will be our final guest after Joe in a moment before then I want to mention a couple of things. First of all, the digital version of the Self Publishing Show Live that took place in London last month is now live itself. And if you went to the show, you are automatically going to be enrolled in this if you didn't go to the show, you want to watch it.
(00:02:02):
Not only will you get every session from this year, but you'll get every session from the previous years, 23, 22 and 2020. We have to skip one for Covid in 21. So that is many hours of listening to the leaders of our industry and some people with inspiration and practical advice stuff to really help you move your career along. And it's $99, so it couldn't be better priced. I think for all those hours you get in addition to the conference sessions, which are professionally recorded by our friends at Dead ready here in London and they look great. By the way. In addition to that, there are some bonus sessions. There's a couple up already. I think we're going to add a third. There may be a fourth as well in the next week or so. So if you want to sign up, if you haven't done already, head over to learn self-publishing dot com slash digital, and we have put one of the sessions free and that is on YouTube, so you can go across to YouTube and you can watch the session where I interview Lucy Score and El l James, two of the biggest names in Romance Publishing.
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It's a fun interview. It goes in some unusual directions, and I can tell you now NSFW probably if you are playing it out loud here and there. But anyway, I think you are going to enjoy it. And I know lots of people wanted to see Lucy and Erica, and so not necessarily just authors either. So we've put that free onto YouTube so everyone can access that. And actually it's a quick link to get there, which is learn self publishing.com/free preview. That will take you directly to that session. Okay, let me come on to my penultimate interview of the Self-Publishing Show. So Joe Solari took over 20 books, Vegas. He's rebranded it as Author Nation takes place in the same venue at the same time, at least for the next few years. And that is going to be at the Horseshoe in Las Vegas in November.
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It is the world's largest gathering of indie authors. And in addition to that, there is a reader event that Joe's really focusing on, and the idea is, as he explains in the interview, that you are going to spend a couple of thousand dollars in reality going to this show, but if you could attend a reader event where there are lots of readers there to buy your books on the last day, you can offset a lot of those costs. I'm actually quite excited about potentially doing a reader event. I've only got three books. These three, I mean I've got more than three copies of them, but I think I might do it just because when I do that reader event, I get stopped a lot by lots of authors who want to have a chat, which is great. I love it. Selfies and all the rest of it, but if I had my stall, they could all come to me. I could even have a Lucy score type queue going to my stall, maybe not Lucy score type queue. I'm not there yet. Anyway, so that is the reader event. This is Joe Solari and I'll be back with our final interview after we've heard from Joe.
Speaker 1 (00:04:58):
This is the Self-Publishing Show. There's never been a better time to be a writer.
James Blatch (00:05:03):
Okay, Joe Solari, welcome to the Self-Publishing Show. Fantastic to have you on here. You are a well-known figure in independent author circles, but you're going to be an icon of our age because you are the man now heading up the world's largest indie author conference. Congratulations
Joe Solari (00:05:23):
Icon. Thank you. Thank you. Is that kind of like misery loves company after just coming off a show? You just figured there'd be somebody that would be dumber than you.
James Blatch (00:05:34):
Keep running these things. Nobody has more sympathy for you, Joe, than me and Catherine where we are right now, and we were lying in a darkened room for a few days after. I mean, honestly, it's a lot of effort, but the thing I'll tell you is when you get there, it's immediately all worth it because of the feedback you get from people, the goodwill you get from people seeing what you've created and Slog Day by you're a long way from there. Now you're in the foothills, you're a Basecamp at Everest, but when you get to the
Joe Solari (00:06:04):
Yeah, yeah, I'm still acclimating to this altitude.
James Blatch (00:06:09):
Yeah, you are. But you better explain a bit about this. So 20 books, two 50 K Spawn, 20 books, Vegas Conference, a few other conferences around the world, but 20 books, Vegas was the big one, the one everyone went to, and you have taken over because it came to the end of its time with Craig and you have decided to do what with the conference, Joe?
Joe Solari (00:06:31):
Sure. So yeah, Craig came to me actually we first started talking about it in Spain a couple years ago, him with his health issues and just kind of where things were that he was looking for some way to go with the conference. And long story short, I took over the contracts and rebranded the show. The whole idea being is I wanted to help Craig out with that financial responsibility, but I also wanted to really keep the spirit of what he had built with Michael going, I thought it was really important I could physically put my fingers on relationships and opportunities that came out of that show that were massive opportunities. And a lot of the people that I was working with had similar situations because when they heard that I'd taken over the show and they're like, why would you take on such a monumental task? Would say, well, where did you meet your co-writer? It was at 20 books Vegas. Where did you come up with that idea to do X? Oh, yeah, we were sitting around the bar at 20 books Vegas. So I know you don't feel it's as necessary because you're at this point, but we don't want to lose that situation for new people and people that are kind of figuring out their deal. I think that it is such a massive opportunity to help people scale up the learning curve that I wanted to see it keep going.
James Blatch (00:08:02):
And I think it's absolutely right because we can do our bit in London, we can have a show, it's got its own sort of feel and brand, but there needs to be a single global show, and I think that's likely that it should be in the States. That's where the most independent authors are, and Vegas is probably the best connected city in the states budget. Airlines fly there. You can get hotel rooms going from a hundred bucks a night to a thousand bucks a night and what you and spend and more, and it just seems like the right fit for me. Having said that, you've inherited, I guess you've inherited a lot of what was already set up, so how much can you imprint your own vision on the conference?
Joe Solari (00:08:41):
Yeah, so what I did take on and what isn't going to change for the next three years is the location, the dates, the space. In some respects, we are going to make some changes to the space as we expand. It's funny how the hotel is more than accommodating when you want more square footage and they can add more costs, but that was the crux of what the deal was is Craig had signed into 2026, so we are taking 24, 25, 26. So that part stays the same. There's no negotiation. And I too agree with you, Vegas offers a fantastic opportunity when you think about the accessibility, the entertainment options there. And then for some of the stuff we'll talk about on this call around what we're doing with Rave, we are in a market where we have Los Angeles, Phoenix, and the Las Vegas proper market of consumers that we want to bring to the show. That's over 15 million people that are within a couple hours drive of that place that regularly go to Las Vegas for a long weekend.
James Blatch (00:09:55):
Yeah, well, we'll talk about Raid now. I want to talk about that and I would say that you are in a catchment area far bigger than that because I think Vegas is one of these places where people in New York will think, we'll hop on a Southwest, we'll stay in our favourite little off strip hotel and I get to meet my favourite author. And I don't think that's a big deal for a lot of the readers who go to these conferences and go to meet their author. So that brings us on to Rave You better tell us about Rave.
Joe Solari (00:10:22):
Sure. Our, so this gets to kind of your earlier question, what are the things that I can imprint on the show? And for me it was like I had this phenomenal foundation of people regularly coming to the show, authors that saw this as part of their identity and how they were going into market. I wanted to help them. They had this great community. How could we overlay on that an equally awesome reader community and connect these things up in a way where they positively feed off of each other? And so there's this kind of core idea of what if we took the show, which right now is an expense and a pretty significant one. Let's be realistic, airfare, hotel meals in Vegas, you're in for two grand. What if we could turn it into a profit centre? You go there, you get all the author education, you get the networking, you get to then get new readers and find a really unique type of reader that you can't find online.
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And over time, I'm not saying it's going to happen the first show for everybody, but over time you switch from it becoming an expense every year to actually making you money. So that brought us to the idea of what can we do to make rave better? So Rave is the reader Author Vegas event. It's always been kind of an add-on to the show. Last year we got involved in the marketing and we doubled the size of attendees and we've been really focused since then on marketing into this year. But one of the big, big projects that we've been working on and why we've been kind of quiet because we needed this to work before we could really talk about it was we built a platform that essentially takes all the friction points out of live selling. So it gives, let's come at it from the reader experience first because this is real important.
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The readers come there, they can see their ticket options, buy a ticket, and then they're told if they spend a hundred dollars on books, they will get a $25 discount on their ticket. So that means based on our ticket pricing, they could get into the show for free. But what we're doing is we're focusing on a unified experience that's really focused on book sales. And so a reader comes in and says, oh, I'm going to buy my general admission ticket. If I buy a hundred dollars worth of books here and I can see all the authors at Rave on the store, I pick four or five books and I get to a hundred dollars. Now I can get into the show for free, which means I get cool stuff, I get to go see my authors, I get to pick up my books, I get to go to panels.
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I'm going to get a bag that we have. Ag Riddle is going to be at the show, and he's committed to everyone getting a copy. If you're a general admission person, it'll just be an unsigned copy of his Atlantis gene. The VIP bags will have signed copies, but there's already, you're getting a tonne of value. So for the reader, you're going to have this opportunity to kind segment themselves based on ticket price. So we have this low price ticket, we have a ticket that costs $250, we have a ticket that costs $500, and people might be like, well, why would you charge somebody so much for that? It's like it's a marketing strategy where we can identify the best of the best readers. And getting to your point, I want to bring the people that are going to fly into Vegas on their private jet. I want people that are going to come in and when they see a bunch of amazing fantasy authors, they just buy all the books.
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There's all kinds of cool ways to find discount shoppers, people that want to do certain things, but tapping into a high spending reader that really connects their identity to the reading and listening experience, to the point that they're willing to show up and have this bigger experience. Those are people that are really hard to find. And then with that list, because you'll get the information of the people that buy your books, you can go and find more people like that because now let's switch to the author side real quick. While it's easy to get to Vegas yourself getting stuff there is not cool shipping stuff in what these hotels want to charge. It can get really pricey quick. So we built this platform from the ground up in a way that if you load your books in with your interior and exterior files, that product will be on pre-order and then when we shut down, you can put in an additional order for what you want for stock for the show, and then we go and get that all printed and delivered to the event so you don't have to get boxes there. That's a massive, massive change
James Blatch (00:15:41):
That really does take the headache out a bit. I know people, we immediately thinking, well, what sort of costs, how was that compared to say, print on demand or book vaults here in the uk?
Joe Solari (00:15:53):
Sure, sure. So we're not adding any cost in to the book printing process other than we've come up with an average cost for the LTL shipping and the hotel handling fee because the hotel handling fee is $400 a pallet. So we know, I know it's a big number, but when you divide that by 900 and something paperbacks, it drops down versus you paying to ship a box from Amazon into that facility and getting hit for 20 to $50 based on how the weight of that box comes out. So there's going to be somewhere between 85 cents and $2 if you're doing hardcovers, that gets added in there. And when you go in and it's like any kind of POD process where we go and validate the files against an API and come back with information. When you see those costs, your first inclination may be, well, doing this on Amazon is cheaper. Well, not after you add in what Amazon's going to charge to ship it there and what you may have to pay to get that box delivered to the right location. So that's the part you need to think through. But here's the thing, James, if you want to bring your own stuff, God bless. Yeah, I was just
James Blatch (00:17:23):
Going to say that if you want to do that, they can, but this makes it an easy, convenient, low entry point for authors like me with three books, I'm probably not used to doing that sort of thing. It suddenly makes it quite tempting to actually add on 25 books and turn up
Joe Solari (00:17:38):
And when. Here's the cool thing is the reality is selling. Let's go back to that earlier premise. I want you to be able to cover $2,000 in cost. So that means, let's just say a book costs 10 bucks to print. You're going to sell it for 20 bucks. That means you got to sell $4,000 worth of books, 200 books. You do the math, but what if you're not just trying to sell that on that day of the show, but a hundred days before the show or six months before the show, and we're actively all marketing together to get people to the store to do this, well then you're only talking maybe a book or two a day.
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It's a really easy hill to climb when you do it that way. So that's the other part is we have this unified store where we can all send our customers, they end up helping us to get more marketing data so we can find more people like that where this becomes another big feedback loop and now we can get you that sales that you need. And we know this before the show, you'll know, oh, I sold 104 books, so maybe I just need 10 of each order they get delivered. And then for those folks that decide, well, this, I've got a bunch of inventory. I live in Las Vegas, I'm just going to bring them in, park in the garage, and you can do that and you have two options. You can run it through the store we talked about where we still act as the merchant of record.
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You get all that massive marketing power we have. We collect all the sales taxes, we do all that point of sale stuff before and during the show. Or if you're a hardcore live seller and you're driving around in your RV and you have your setup and you use your square reader and all that, do that, come and do that. We're not going to tell you to change your process. You'll still have to collect sales tax and pay it to us because I'm on the hook for that. But we want to make it so that this is truly an indie experience. However you want to do it, you can do it. If we lock arms and do it in a way that I think is more deliberate, we can take this thing to a whole nother level.
James Blatch (00:20:03):
I don't like sales tax in the UK 20%, but we don't charge it on books because people should be able to read books. They should do that in Nevada.
Joe Solari (00:20:14):
And Nevada's a really interesting city. Everything is run off of gambling and tourist taxes, so the state gets paid for. It's just how one of the things that they're really focused on is it's like an 8.35% sales tax on any sales.
James Blatch (00:20:34):
Is that high America, isn't it?
Joe Solari (00:20:40):
I live in Illinois in Cook County, so no, it doesn't seem that high, and I pay income on top of that. So it's all
James Blatch (00:20:50):
Around, we're going to the states in a couple of weeks and my wife's American friend in Virginia's told her, because we're going through Delaware, that's where we should do our shopping.
Joe Solari (00:21:01):
Yeah, yeah. There's these weird spots like Portland, Oregon doesn't have sales tax and just the other side of the river is Washington and they don't have income tax. They have all these people that live in Vancouver, Washington and drive over and buy their gas and their groceries and then drive.
James Blatch (00:21:20):
We should do that, Joe. Well, this sounds great. So just explain. We'll go back to the conference a bit in a minute about speakers and so on, but for the rave, just explain how it works for authors and talk to me as an author who's never done anything like this before.
Joe Solari (00:21:34):
Yeah, so let me just preface this. If you haven't launched a book or you think, oh, this might be a great place for me to launch that first book, no, it's not. Stop, come to the show, check it out. Let us help you explore the idea of live selling. But this is really for folks that have several books out and are comfortable running through a POD process and are comfortable with technology and really, if you've sold live before, know what's involved. It's perfect for you. And we've got it set up where you can start out small with just a half a table and that gets you a selling location at Rave. It gets you lunch that day and it gets you access to this signing store that we have set up once you have to attend Author Nation. Of course, this is only open to live Author Nation ticket holders if they come get approved for a table.
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And really the big thing for approval on the table is we want you to be successful. So don't apply and think you're going to be different just because what? It's my first book, but this is different. You're going to be too stressed out. It's not going to work, and it's not the best way to build an audience. So for those of you that do this, you then go through a process where you upload your books like I explained. So you set up your account, we turn it on for you, and then we go, you go through a process, it's pretty straightforward. It's like loading a book on any platform. The one big difference that we just make sure people understand is that if you've never used Book Vault or Lulu to load a book into their POD process, you're probably going to have an issue with your cover. And that's because Book Vault and lulu tend to use a higher quality paper that gives them a slightly different trim. So they both ask for a different trim size, but if you've loaded on any of those platforms, you'll be fine. It's just if you've been a pure Amazon person that you'll have issues. If your books are thinner, you're not going to have an issue. If you've got a Whopper page count, those
James Blatch (00:23:58):
Epic Fantasy authors. Those Epic fantasy authors,
Joe Solari (00:24:03):
Yeah, yeah, those guys. So then we will be, for the next three months, we're going to be having this really cool process together where we're marketing the store. We're going to be doing some stuff with our email list. We're actively advertising the store for ticket sales and book sales. So we're putting our money behind getting reach on this, and then from there, we've got some videos for people to watch to help them. In your case, if you're saying you've never done it, here's some things you probably want to have. You probably want to have a table covering. You probably want to have a QR code, some things to help you be prepared for the day of selling. So that day you're really going to know by the mix of sales what your day is going to be like because there's only the nine to four selling time.
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So if you have a lot of sales, you may be spending the whole time signing and handing out books, which that's a high class problem, but also being able to sell your books and meet new people. So I think that gives you a feel for the expo part of it. We've added a lot to rave in the sense of we have these VIP tickets, first off, the two higher end VIP tickets, get people into the Thursday evening Kevin Smith event. So we've brought Kevin Smith, the film director in as a speaker, not because we think he's a guru of indie publishing, but because we're looking to bring his audience to the rave event so that we can sell him books. That's the real purpose of that. I've had a lot of people like, why Kevin Smith? He is a director. He hasn't done anything cool in this many years.
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It's like he's got a massive audience and he's a very entertaining person and I want to bring him so I can get his fans for you to sell books to. That's why. So that's why the ticket prices are higher for those people that would be there. Then also on that Friday, there's going to be some VIP events with smaller panels, specialised events with certain authors, and then we also have on Friday evening a fantasy party that's like the last blowout where it'll be readers and authors hanging out. Now, if you're an author that's just got an Author Nation ticket, you've kind of this weird hybrid ticket for Rave. You can get in to the panels, not the VIP panels, but to the regular panels. You can get into the expo where the books are being sold, and you can go to the Kevin Smith event that's part of that, some of the VIP stuff and that Fantasy party comes with the other tickets. So if you're an author and you want to go to the Fantasy Party, that would be a separate ticketed event that you would have to buy a ticket for, and that particular event will be in the Versailles room over in Paris because we had to expand our space.
James Blatch (00:27:23):
Alright, and people can find all this out, I guess if they go to author nation.com, hopefully all this is set out.
Joe Solari (00:27:31):
Well, it's Author Nation Live.
James Blatch (00:27:33):
Live,
Joe Solari (00:27:34):
Yeah.
James Blatch (00:27:35):
Okay. Author nation.live. We'll stick that in the show notes as well. Yeah, and you say that if it's your first book or you're trying to launch your first book, this is not the right place for that, but do you have a minimum criteria how many books somebody should have out?
Joe Solari (00:27:52):
I mean, we're seeing people with one or two books that are doing this that know they've got some stuff coming out and they've want to embrace this, so we don't want to be like, oh, you can't do it because you're not a big deal. We're trying to get a really good mix of emerging authors and established authors, and I've called in a lot of favours. I mean, we've got some really big deals that'll be showing up to speak and sign at Rave.
James Blatch (00:28:19):
Great. Well, I know I'm half joking about doing this. I've got three books and right in my fourth, but do you know what? When I go to the reader event, it takes me half a day to go round because obviously I don't see people that often and people like to talk to me because of the show and the background. So I get stopped a lot. I do a lot of selfies. I go and chat. So I'm thinking, do you know what? If I have APO with my books on, they can come to me.
Joe Solari (00:28:45):
That's true. There's true, and if you've been to any of these live events, you'll see some of these authors have some real big setups where they've got photo booths and backgrounds and they really understand about how to be on brand for it. So it might be a good idea. I've been cautious as our team got early exposure to this thing basically as the Guinea pigs to test it out, and there was a lot of 'em like, oh, I got to do this. And I'm like, remember, you're a volunteer at the show. This is Friday. I get it, you're an author. Let's think this through because it is going to be a pretty compelling proposition to do it, but it's also going to be a pretty intensive thing to do. Now, nothing like this has ever been done before. We're out in the blue ocean on this. So there's going to be some things for us to work through and we're really trying to address all the issues, but we really believe that if we can create the same kind of community that created around 20 books for readers and we just happen to be hanging around those people selling 'em what they want, that's a good thing.
James Blatch (00:30:09):
One more thing occurs to me about this rave because of the way you've set it up with your POD thing, you could actually do. In fact, why would you not do a special edition for rave of your book? You don't have to change a lot in it, but you can have a imprint at the front, a little extra picture, something at the back. This is a one-off version of this book that seems like,
Joe Solari (00:30:27):
Oh yeah,
Joe Solari (00:30:30):
Where is it here?
Joe Solari (00:30:34):
Of course I don't
Joe Solari (00:30:34):
Have it right in front of me right this minute. Oh, here.
Joe Solari (00:30:37):
So first off, the store is set up for physical product where people are at, what about eBooks? We had to climb this massive first mountain that nobody did first eBooks audio. That stuff is going to be easy to go back on. But what I believe, and this is kind of an underlying important thing about why live events matter, and you'll get this because you're similar age. When we were growing up, you could own something of your artist that you loved. You could buy an album and open it up and have that record smell and read the liner notes. You could have a cassettes or cd. There's a whole generation of people that have been on subscriptions their whole life and they don't have anything they own, and they've been mistreated because, well, Netflix decided your favourite series, we're not going to pay for it anymore. So you actually don't have that anymore. So we're seeing you've been around this a long, long time. So to go to past James and say there's going to be a day where the best new readers are going to be found live selling in the physical event, you'd probably be like, no, no, it's not going to happen. But that's where we're at. But what I want to show you is so Sound Booth Theatre. For folks that don't know who Sound Booth Theatre is, they are.
James Blatch (00:32:09):
Maybe put it back next to your head where the focus point is, I think. There we go.
Joe Solari (00:32:14):
There we go. So Sound Booth Theatre is a narration company that does cinematic audio. It's owned by Jeff Hayes. These are the guys that do Dungeon Crawler Carl. They're really fast growing, amazing company. They're sponsoring the show. One of the things they're going to be doing at the event is they're going to have these cassettes.
James Blatch (00:32:35):
My kids would not know what you've just held up.
Joe Solari (00:32:39):
That's a SB
James Blatch (00:32:40):
Channel working on YouTube. Joe's held up like a C 90 cassette, the old cas where you have a cassette player, but it's got a clever little USB steel that comes out of it.
Joe Solari (00:32:54):
And this has got a bunch of their, what they call their greatest hits. So it's a bunch of shorts and snippets and stuff. Think about this, if you're a narrator, you come and you have something like this, or I've got another one that's basically looks like a credit card, but it's a USB connector. You put a short story on here as a narrator. Maybe you partner with an author that is one of your favourite authors that you record for, and you guys have been building a business together and you sell the physical thing on the signing store and you have a Sharpie that signs on this. So you can have memorabilia on electronic products is my point is there's cool stuff that we can do with this whole idea at the store. And to your point about the idea of a special edition, if you just change the cover, you can upload that or maybe you got some magnets or a coffee cup and you want to do a special buy, these three books, you also get the coffee cup. Well, we can POD, the three books, you just take a picture of the books and you have a coffee cup with it. You'll know, you'll see your orders that you need to bring 16 coffee cups, you got to bring your coffee cups. I'm not going to deal with that for you, but there's ways that you can play with this that are really fun and cool that can make it so your best fans become revealed to you. Yes.
James Blatch (00:34:29):
Love it. Love it, Joe. So people go to Author Nation Live and they'll find out how to get a stall at Rave. They'll find out how to get tickets, dates and everything you need. And there's a deal with the hotel for accommodation, I believe.
Joe Solari (00:34:45):
Yeah, we've got the same great deal that Craig negotiated Mid covid. So hotel rooms at $99 a pop on the strip at basically the biggest corner on the strip.
James Blatch (00:34:59):
Yeah, you've got the Bellagio Paris next door is really nice. You've got Bellagio over the road and Caesar's just down the road. I tend to stay a little bit further away. I quite like the walk up and down, which is quite nice because otherwise you're in the conference centre all day. So that's one of my tips. Drink lots of water and go for a walk and get some fresh air. But I'm excited about it. I'm really excited about Rave. Joe, I think you're doing a tremendous job and Su, I know Suzy's working, your wife's working really hard in the background as well for this A Power Couple. Love you both. Thank you very much for taking this on. And we are, I think all as a community going to hopefully make this work.
Joe Solari (00:35:37):
Yeah, we're really having an amazingly fun time with this. I know it's been hard for the community as a whole to deal with the change, and there's some people that have been like, well, I really liked how it was and what we were focused on, but we're in an industry that's got enormous change. And I think it was kind of metaphoric that the show was going through similarly shocking changes and that it's like, we'll show you how we adapt, right? We're going to make this thing ready for the future. And so we've really focused, we talked a lot about Rave because that's one of the things I'm most excited about, but we've really focused a lot, Susan and I, on going outside of our community and bringing in people that didn't even know this industry existed. We brought in folks, we went to Social Media Marketing World and we poached a bunch of their speakers because we would get with them and we'd talk to 'em and tell 'em about what we're doing in the indie publishing world, and they're like, oh wow, that's amazing.
(00:36:43):
And it's like, help me think through ways you could help them and I'll get you exposed to them. So we've got folks that are coming that are going to be presenting stuff. Some of this is more mastermind level kind of stuff, people that are more experienced, but really challenging how you think and track your customer journey and make it better. And I know this stuff is amazing because this one person, Julie Brady, who's going to be doing a presentation on Microsoft Clarity, she helped me with the signing store, she helped with the user experience and she walked me through this. I'm like, holy cow, this is never how I would think about it because I'm always thinking a marketer and not like a reader on the other side of that user experience and how painful or obtuse it might be. So that's the kind of stuff we're changing and bringing to the show along with, like I said, sound Booth is sponsoring, they're doing entertainment, so they're going to do a live variety show that authors get to write the skits for.
(00:37:55):
So I'll give you a link for people to sign up for that. We've got this other event called Story Wars, which is a way for you to win Ticket Hotel and airfare to the show ahead of time. So we're starting that contest and it's sponsored by Lulu Kickstarter, IngramSpark and Book Funnel. And so they're paying that. We've got, they're think of the kind of like Formula One or nascar, they got their company logos on this team that's coming. We're going to have regional winners, they're going to come to the show, and then we're going to have a grand final on Wednesday night where we pick somebody to win. We'll maybe even pull a few people out of the audience for this. They will then compete to win a full ride to the 2025 show. Wow. So fun stuff like that. And we just did a dry run of this where it's kind of like improv. You pull a prompt out and everyone writes to it and then you read it and people, they vote on what they like the best. It is fun is so much fun. Your face was hurting from smiling and laughing through the whole thing and at the end you recognise, wow, I just wrote three stories in 15 minutes. I actually got this creative spark in a different way.
James Blatch (00:39:32):
That's great, Joe. Well, like I said at the beginning, I think it's important that there is a global event for indie publishing. The industry is growing. It's changing. You're right. And I know that over the last year that has felt unsettling for some people and things have changed in your conference, things have changed in my organisation, but that's part of what we do is nobody has the right to a consistent outlook for their whole life. Things will happen, and we were the disruptive influence on publishing 15 years ago. So it's time now for us to adapt quickly to the next stage
Joe Solari (00:40:10):
Stage. That's such a massively important point that you just hit on and somewhat of a cautionary tale because I know there's a lot of people that are like, ah, I got everything I could ever get out of the Self-Publishing show, or I got everything I could out of that. I'm going to go hang out with my people over here and I'm going to do my special stuff. And you are isolating yourself from what's coming. You don't know in your genre who the next big thing is going to be. And for you to not come to a show like ours and hang out and watch the talent pool develop and help and mentor those people, if you're a big deal to sit in that room and talk to a few people in your genre and help coach them up for all you know, you could help somebody that you're going to have to lean on in a few years because they've got a list three times the size of yours and they're the big deal. Don't think about this. This is the penultimate of the industry. You have to always be expanding your network and thinking about how you can help others so that when you need help, they're ready to help you. I know that sounds a little
James Blatch (00:41:26):
Transactional. Absolutely. Well, everything's transactional. It's the next chapter. That's what this is. Turn the, okay, look Joe, it's been brilliant. You were in our last episode of the show for some time. I mean maybe, I dunno how long, but probably a while. And it's you and Darren Hardy from KDP in this episode, so I couldn't have two better guests. So thank you so much indeed for coming on. I will see you in Las Vegas.
Joe Solari (00:41:53):
I will see you there. This
Speaker 1 (00:41:54):
Is the Self-Publishing Show. There's never been a better time to be a writer.
James Blatch (00:41:59):
There you go, Joe Solari. Don't forget, you can go to Author Nation Live and to find out all the information that Joe gave out there. I am definitely going to Las Vegas in November, so I look forward to seeing you there if you're going to be there. I think the reader event, we'll see, I'm thinking about it. I've got a lot on my plate, one of the reasons why I'm not doing the podcast in the future, but we'll see if I've got time to organise something along that front. Okay, I've got one more thing to mention before we come on to our final interview, and that is Damon Freeman set up a book design service, book cover design service, but he's offering as part of that a free critique review my cover.com. I don't normally plug these. We get a lot of emails like this, but I had a chat with Damon and I had a look at his site.
(00:42:43):
I actually think this is worthwhile and it's a bit of a bug bear of mine over at Vinci Books. We're getting lots of submissions at the moment and I'm seeing more often than you'd want to see. I'm seeing book covers that are not doing the job that they should be doing. In other words, setting the book. And it's disappointing that indie authors don't maximise their potential, don't reach as many readers as they could do through simple errors like that. And it is an error when you've got a book cover that doesn't clearly signal the genre or in some cases the genre is signalled by the image and something different is signalled by the tagline and the title. And those are the things that will stop your book selling. So it is a bit of a thing of mine is to try and improve that type of thing.
(00:43:26):
The book package and Damon does this service, it's free review my cover.com. If you go in there, you can upload your cover and you'll get a professional from his team, him or one of his team to give you a critical review of your cover and let you know whether it's doing the job you need to do, which is to sell your book. And then if you then go to a professional designer like Stuart Bass who I use and we use it, Vinci or Damon and his team, what you'll get back is a book that is focused on the commercial aspect. You won't necessarily get the cover you imagined you thought you'd like to see. You might have a particular scene in your book you think would be great for the front cover, but that's just you as the writer who it's your baby. So every aspect of the story, the book cover is not trying to tell the story or trying to impart information about the character.
(00:44:13):
It's trying to sell the genre. It's trying to tell people this is a crime mystery thriller. This is a cosy mystery, this is a science fiction book. This is a epic fantasy. And that cover needs to first and foremost just do that job. Secondly, then a bit of a nuance within there, but you've got to get that first bit. So I think that's a service well worth doing and good luck to Damon and his team over at Za, I think is the name of their company. It is time for our last interview on the Self-Publishing show, and it's a man who drew a crowd last time we had him and he's been promoted since then. So the last time we spoke to him, he was the head of KDP in the uk. He's now the head of KDP across Europe. I suspect the world is next and then maybe Mars.
(00:44:59):
It is of course Darren Hardy, he's been a friend to this show, particularly a friend of the live show, super nice bloke and he is very approachable. If you come to our live show, I'm sure you perhaps would've had a chat with him. And it's been important for us as an industry, isn't it? Amazon, you can knock them and people do knock them. But the truth is, without Amazon's transformation of the publishing industry, back in sort of oh nine 10 when they came up with the Kindle and Independent Publishing and KDP, most of us wouldn't be writers. That's the truth of it. You can say what somebody else would've done, it would. I mean, this is what Amazon did and they've got it right and they have a fantastic ecosystem that we use. And so hearing from them is important for us. I hope you enjoy this. I hope you enjoy the fact that Darren is returning from the top of the charts where he sits at the moment. So please enjoy our final interview with Darren Hardy. I'll be back to say goodbye at the end.
Speaker 1 (00:45:57):
This is the Self-Publishing Show. There's never been a better time to be a writer.
James Blatch (00:46:03):
Darren Hardy. You are our most listened to guest. How does that feel?
Darren Hardy (00:46:10):
What an amazing stat. Yes. Well, I think it's probably Kindle Direct Publishing is the most listened to guest, but I'm very happy to be the face of that. That's very exciting.
James Blatch (00:46:19):
I think it's your star quality. I think I counted 400 and this will be the 402nd interview out of 432.
Darren Hardy (00:46:28):
That's amazing
James Blatch (00:46:29):
Episodes. And we've had lots of her peaks, but yeah, obviously people are into ENA and kps. It seemed very fitting for the last interview on Self-Publishing show to have you back. So I'm delighted to have you. I want to say first of all, thank you for your support for our endeavours all the way through, particularly for the Self-Publishing Show, which really, I think probably started with the conversation that we had at London Book Fair a few years ago when you were talking about what would be an ideal scenario for your team to meet authors. And it probably wasn't stuck at the end of a hall in Olympia, it was more of a purpose dedicated show. And that was one of the reasons I think we started the Self-Publishing Show.
Darren Hardy (00:47:10):
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that sort of interest, that demand author interest in an event like that has shown no signs of slowing down because like you say, London Book Fair, it's a great industry event, very, very sort of broad, lots of things to do, but for an author trying to find out very practical information about their writing and their business, I mean the show been a phenomenal success ticking those boxes. And so thank you as well for that. It is been something that we've really enjoyed coming along to.
James Blatch (00:47:37):
You're very welcome. Well, we've just freshly come back from last weekend's show. I keep calling it weekend, it was weekday show. How is it from your point of view? It's very difficult for me because I'm backstage. I mean, this time I was basically introducing every session, taking a few as well. So I was slightly befuddled the whole time. But from your point of view, I know you are very diligent. You and your team are watching all the sessions. How did you feel? And you don't have to be polite here.
Darren Hardy (00:48:03):
No, I thought it was amazing. Well, I mean, first of all, it was hot. I mean it was amazing. I dunno how you do it. You seem to have some kind of way of scheduling the event around bright sunshine on London South Bank and that was incredible. So yeah, it was very hot. But yeah, really interesting sessions as ever. Some really interesting people talking about their experiences and sort of giving advice. I mean, we talk about this a lot, how generous the community is with its advice and sort of talking about their experiences and saying, well, I tried this that didn't work, but you might want to try this. And just being very open about the experiences they've had to help other authors along the way and a really interesting range of sessions. And then as crucially for us as well, those breakout times where everybody's in the walking around meeting each other and coming up to chat to the team and sometimes coming up to say thank you, which is absolutely amazing sometimes coming up to ask a very specific technical question, a few people with a few sort of bits of feedback that they want to give us.
(00:49:00):
And that's absolutely great. It's one of the really great things about an event like that is you get to meet lots of different authors and hear about their experiences and that enables us to take some of that information, bring it back to the teams here, and sort of feed it all back out to everybody else around the business. And it sparks whole loads of new ideas. So it's really valuable, really exciting.
James Blatch (00:49:23):
That is one of the modern phenomena with large tech companies, of which Amazon is definitely one, is that the sheer volume of users makes it so the customer service is very different from how it was 20 years ago when organisations could deal on a more personal level with people. So it's pretty rare, I think to have a chance to speak to somebody from Amazon, from eBay or any of these big tech companies. And I hope people made the most of it, having an opportunity to create a relationship and talk firsthand to the people at the coalface on the inside.
Darren Hardy (00:49:54):
Yeah, absolutely. And it's something that my team spend a lot of time doing across Europe. We're out at events and like London Book Fair, as you mentioned before and other events. And increasingly I think trying to support those smaller events for indie author specifically, or maybe a particular genre of writers because it is really important for us. We spend a lot of time as a company looking at metrics and looking at Excel spreadsheets and all of those kind of things. But within Amazon, there's a accepted practise that yes, you look at the data, but you also look for anecdotes. You look for the data point of an experience that might not be shown by the data. And if you've got a data point that says everything's great, and you've got an anecdote that says, actually we could do better believe the anecdotes start from that point and go and have a look at that in some detail.
(00:50:40):
And I mean, you often see me at these events. I have a blue notebook, I'm writing down the sort of examples that people have given me or the situations they've been in. And we come back, we start looking at those and see if there's something else that we should be doing. And it is really valuable for us to have that mix of looking at data on a day by day basis, but also talking to individuals, hearing about their experiences. And sometimes it might just spark something that we hadn't thought of and maybe even the author we're talking to hasn't thought of, but they're talking about a situation and you think, oh, hang on a minute. I wonder if this means we should have a look at something else. And away you go. And it's really valuable, really, and really enjoyable as well. I mean I'm sure you do, James, when you go to these events, you meet so many different people from so many different backgrounds and experiences and it's just fascinating hearing about what they've been doing, what their ideas are, the great books they've been writing, the networks they're forming. It's really energising.
James Blatch (00:51:33):
It really is. And it is a very positive environment. As you said, there's a lot of sharing that goes on. And we have El l James as some hundred 70 million books, was happy to sit on stage and talk about whatever came up. And quite a few interesting things did come up. Anyway, I guess we've learned what that blue book is all about that you make. So I assume you're making notes for your next novel.
Darren Hardy (00:51:53):
Sadly. No. The inches of dust that are on those notes I've made about my novel are getting thicker and thicker sadly. But it's always good to check in on your progress because I think when we first started S ps said, you just published the first book, I think weren't you? And I think
James Blatch (00:52:08):
Maybe thinking about Think I even published when we started first one, I was still in the talk. In fact, I definitely haven't because it was an interview with Jenny Nash that kind of unlocked the method that I needed to follow. And I've got a book coach, so I'm now two and a half books in. So yeah, two novels, one novella working on book four, slight change, but I get so little time to work on my own books. But I've actually had, since I did the German translations, which I did relatively cheaply using fiverr.com rather than the kind of $10,000 charge that a lot of people were using. But I also used the German copy editor and it's gone surprisingly well. In fact, it's gone really well. My big takeaway this year, I'm making profit every month with just two novel on a novella is quite hard.
(00:52:53):
But I made 550 pounds last month in June, so just tossing that all up, which is not a bad, that's Energy Bills paid for. It's a bill paid every week just from my writing. And I know if I've got 10, 12 books down the line, that's starting to become significant money, which is exactly what we teach people about. And that is all using KDP. So that's in Kindle Unlimited in Germany and in the uk. But the German books have really put me into profit. And so far some nervously looking at the first reviews, because I did use people a cheaper translation service, but they've done a great job. The copy editors picked up anything that wasn't done initially, and I'm getting some good reviews. So yeah, my book's going well. I'm working on book four, I'll let you know when that's quite, it had not happened on it this year I can tell you, but it's a slow, so we are going to do a new podcast, which I'm going to mention on this podcast if people want to come and follow me called the Indie Writers Club.
(00:53:53):
And partly that is, it's almost designed around trying to get me writing because we're going to have this open word count. And I felt this is exactly a community thing. There's a lot of accountability in the community. You get an accountability partner where you pass your word counts every day or every week or whatever you want to do. And it's enough for you to know that on Tuesday I'm telling X how many words I've written. That in itself is enough for you to make sure you've got those words done, which is such an important small device. So the Indie Writers Club podcast will have a word count coughing up moment for me and anybody else who wants to take part in that as well. So that's genuinely, I'm quite excited about that aspect of it. I want to, you can, however busy you are, you can ultimately find time for anything. And then I will prioritise again. I love writing everything that's happened. It's the best thing I feel I've done is write novels. Yeah, absolutely. I hope everyone listening feels that as well. It's quite an undertaking and yeah.
Darren Hardy (00:54:53):
Yeah, and I think you're right. Having that spur to keep you going, especially, I mean, it's such a creative process and with the joys come, the frustrations of sometimes you reach a block or something intrude in your real world as it were. Having that kind of mechanism to keep you going is really important. It's partly, actually, it's one of the reasons why we launched our storyteller contest, which we talked about briefly on the show. But that idea that you have a summer of writing that this is your moment to get your book done. And you see that across the business where people just need that goal. They just need something to aim for. And so that idea that between May and the end of August you can submit your book for a storyteller contest in English, and we do them in German actually. So maybe you should think about German James and French Italian or Spanish, just that spur to get the book done because it can be such a sort of frustrating process. And having that goal to aim for I think can sometimes be really important.
James Blatch (00:55:48):
Yeah. Well let's talk about the K Storyteller award because it's been going a few years now. It's quite well established. And as you say, the book must have been published in May to end of August,
Darren Hardy (00:55:58):
Is it? That's right between the 1st of May and the end of August. If it is published during those dates, then you can enter it into the contest. You just add, there's a keyword that you can add and there's details on the website. You can go to amazon.co.uk/storyteller, and there's lots of information about how to enter. But yes, for any new book previously unpublished in English for the UK contest published between those dates, you can submit your book in and you're in with a chance. And as you say, we've been running it for a number of years now. 2017 I think was the first year we ran it in the uk. And some really interesting entries, people that have made it through to the final, a real mix as well. It's not just a bestseller competition. We are not just running the numbers and seeing which book has sold the most and therefore that's the winner kind of thing.
(00:56:44):
We look at lots of different variables. Sales is an important part of it, but we look at pages Red and Kindle Unlimited. We look at the reviews for the books, we look at the strength of the reviews, which is a really interesting aspect to it. Maybe you don't have as many reviews as another author, but if all of your reviews are your customers saying, this is such a great book, this is such a great writer, then we try and take account for that. And so yes, we have had some big names in the shortlist, but we've also had some first timers and we've had a mix of fiction and nonfiction in the lists over the years. I think we've had a finalist who as a concert musician, a percussionist, we've had a windsurfer who'd sort of winds surfed around the UK and written his autobiography about that experience as well as the crime, the romance sci-fi, all sorts of different genre fiction areas as well. But we're looking forward to it. Yeah, we're sort of midway through for 2024 and it's looking very exciting.
James Blatch (00:57:38):
It couldn't be easy to answer because I noticed, because I'm in the KDP account a lot for Vinci Books, and at the point of putting the keywords in, there is a line on top of that, so you can actually just copy and paste the keyword you need to put into your book.
Darren Hardy (00:57:52):
20,000 pounds. You could win that prize though. Very exciting. Very exciting.
James Blatch (00:57:58):
Who says writing doesn't pay? There you go. And who are the judges? Have you announced the judges for this
Darren Hardy (00:58:02):
Year? We've announced some of the judges, yet we have Sarah Cox and Vic Hope, who have joined us as our sort of celebrity ambassadors, for want of a better phrase. They've joined the judging panel alongside members of the Amazon Books team. We usually have some representatives from the indie author community. We'll have our previous winner, GJ Ogden will be joining us, so he'll join us to judge as well. And every year, the previous year's winner joins us in the judging panels that they get to see what happens sort of behind the closed doors kind of thing, which is always very interesting. And yeah, we'll be meeting up later in the year to look at this selected finalists. We sort of compile the finalists on the basis of customer feedback, so the sales, the reviews, the pages read, and then our judging panel will read the usually five shortlisted books for the finalists and they will then choose the winner and we'll announce the winner later in the year in a ceremony, which is very exciting as well.
(00:58:57):
And that's also a fun part of it, a little bit like your event as well, where actually authors can just get together, they can just meet each other and it's as much a sort of social networking event as it is obviously an important sort of moment to announce the winner. But with all the different past participants coming along and other members of the community, it's just great seeing everybody come together and catch up. And as ever when you get authors meeting in a room, swapping tips, marketing advice, editing advice, all those other kind of things that crop up in those kind of conversations.
James Blatch (00:59:26):
Yeah, it's always a fun night. The awards night, and we've been in various locations over the years House of Commons as
Darren Hardy (00:59:31):
Well. That's right, yeah, we've been in the House of Commons a few years. I think we are probably going to avoid the House of Commons this year just because there's quite a lot going on in the world of politics. And I think in the past couple of years whenever we've been there, it's coincided with a resignation or some event going on, which is always interesting. But yeah, we'll probably find a different venue this year I think.
James Blatch (00:59:52):
Great. Well look, we want to talk a bit about what may have changed in the time that we've been running the show and you've been on it, but one of the things that's changed is your role has changed a bit, Darren, so I think you were uk, what is in your empire now?
Darren Hardy (01:00:07):
Yes. My role has expanded slightly over the last year or so where previously I think when we last spoke, I used to help look after Kindle rep publishing in the uk. So obviously there's teams working on our services and KDP is one of those all around the world. But we have a local team as well. So the team here is based just near Liverpool Street Station in London actually. And I think when we last spoke, I was running the UK side of that and my role has now expanded slightly just to take in Europe. So for us that means Germany, France, Italy, and Spain where we have dedicated KDP resource on the ground, attending events, working with local authors where there may be sometimes we get the media contact us and they want a story or they want to talk to somebody to understand what the author experience is like.
(01:00:55):
And that's what my team do. So spend a lot of time on the ground at those events a little bit like we did in your show last week, sort of explaining what we do, listening to the feedback and yeah, it's great fun. And I mean my language skills, I can barely speak English sometimes, so I'm not offering a huge amount of practical advice on the ground when it comes to being in Germany or Italy or Spain. But I'm there sort of helping the team and really just spreading best practise, understanding how we can work more efficiently as a team and connecting some of those dots. If we hear, like we've talked about earlier, an anecdote from an author in Germany and it's similar to one we are hearing from an author in the uk, they may be completely oblivious to each other, but that might enable us to form a connection as to, well, is there another opportunity here that these two sort of anecdotes have shown to us? That's my role.
James Blatch (01:01:43):
Yeah, I mean I do think this is such an exciting thing for independent authors. I mean Germany's seems to be a very dynamic and vibrant and growing market certainly. I mean I write Cold War thriller, so maybe that particularly lends itself to Germany, but I know lots of thriller authors do well in Germany, France is now the big sort of buzzword. People are talking about that. And when we go back to talk about writing a novel is hard, having gone through all that pain and agony to produce a novel, it's such a shame not to then take advantage of these other places to sell it, even if it does involve an investment upfront. But that's easy way to add a multiplier to your sales as far as I can see.
Darren Hardy (01:02:23):
Absolutely. And I think that is a theme that emerged last week, and I think it's a theme that we've seen over the last year or two authors, independent authors becoming very aware of the opportunities around their intellectual property, their book. And I think in the past it would perhaps have been seen, yes, write your book, publish it, do some marketing, you get to the charts and you are done kind of thing. But now it's the audio books, you think about your licencing rights, you think about your translations, and one book can suddenly become four or five or more opportunities to earn money from that. And given the amount of work that goes into writing a book, it seems only right that you look to maximise your income from that as much as possible. And yes, we see that across marketplaces. Germany, I think as you say, have been mentioned a lot.
(01:03:06):
Italy and Spain I think are also interesting, although I think sometimes that's sort of coupled with the opportunity maybe for a research trip to go to Rome for a couple of days as a research trip, that kind of thing. There's lots of opportunities. That's it. Lots of opportunities, but absolutely worth thinking about that. And I think I should imagine that's probably something that will only increase authors thinking about what are the opportunities to use this book that I've written to try and generate some income. And obviously if you are independently publishing, if you're publishing through KDP, all the rights are yours. So you are completely free to decide how you want to go and exploit that, how you want to try and exploit those rights to generate an income. So yeah, really interesting.
James Blatch (01:03:46):
And that was an interesting experience for me actually putting my book into Germany this year and the mechanics of it. So you create a separate book in your KDP bookshelf, obviously it is a separate book, some different language, but I do wonder if at some point in the future whether you will think on the inside of KDP of having the book and then the versions of it, which would not only enable us to have the German version, the French version was all part of the same title if you like, but you could also version it for the US because the US and UK spelling is a bit of an issue for some of us who write story set in both. Which way you go with that? Is that anything? I know you can't always talk about stuff that's going to be, that's the sort of thing that you consider sometimes.
Darren Hardy (01:04:29):
Well, that's a really interesting point both in terms of the author experience but also the customer experience as well. And as you say that US English spelling is something that pops up a lot and obviously it's not unique to independent publishing either. It's within all forms of art in a way as sort of culture and how you treat it. And I think there's that anecdote about the fact that the US and the UK are divided by a common language, think it's not necessarily that it brings us together because there are things like that. And you can imagine with police procedural thrillers or whatever where the terminology can be so important and so different that it's the kind of anecdote like we were talking about earlier, that gives us some really interesting sort of pause thinking actually yes, what could we do? Can we help with this? In some cases, actually we don't need to. In some cases the authors, the readers, they kind of sort it out for themselves. They understand what the situation is and the fact that something is in us spelling, if you're reading a crime novel, you're a UK reader reading a crime novel set in New York, whatever you want the US spelling. So it's not like there's a one sort of fix to every one of these situations, but it's a good opportunity to pause and think about is there something that we could do here and to improve things.
James Blatch (01:05:38):
And in terms of your time at KDP and what you've witnessed, you've been there a while. When did you join Darren?
Darren Hardy (01:05:44):
That's a great, well, I'm coming up to my 20th anniversary at Amazon, so yes, it's like been the blink of an eye. It's incredible. Although it's slightly this hair now and more lines, I think they're sort of growing. But yeah, over the 20 years that I've been at Amazon, and I can't actually remember when I joined KDP now, but it's a good few years. But I think the changes have been amazing. I think the professionalism, the indie author community has always been professional and always been treat your customers with your readers with respect, treat each other with respect and sort of work together. But I think that the level of professionalism is just increasing, increasing and the ideas that we hear when we're at an event author say, well, I was thinking about marketing my books in this way, or as you were talking about there, getting some translations done and going in this direction is just incredible. Authors are really taking the opportunities to run their businesses, take control of them and have ever more sophisticated ideas about how they can do. And that has been very noticeable I think over the last few years. And events like yours and events like others where they come together and share those ideas in an ever more sophisticated way, I think shows that's probably only going to increase really.
James Blatch (01:06:57):
Yeah, and I was also trying to think about what's changed or what's happened during that time. And I think one of the things I love about indie publishing is its impact on why the publishing, the explosion of sub genres, romance in particular where we've seen these micro genres which are invented by indie authors. We had El l James on stage, she effectively invented Dark Romance, but she always says you can find it before, but it really, if you look at, I think later in the day at the show, Alex Newton who digs into the data of book sales, he showed the rise of that dark romance on the back of 50 shades and it's never gone down again since. But when we think about billionaires, the other one, I suppose the me cute, the enemies to lovers stuff that may have been around forever but has been defined by these indie authors, I think that's been a brilliant aspect of indie publishing. You can see the knock on effect happening. Romanticism no one, you can see the knock on effect happening in the traditional publishing. I love it when indie's lead first.
Darren Hardy (01:08:00):
Yeah, absolutely. And there's so many examples of that. I think actually regional crime, I think, I haven't done any research on this, but you saw so many indie authors succeed with regional crime and cosy crime and all those different areas of crime publishing as well that have now just part and parcel of the industry. And lots of people are doing that. And I think it's because you have the ability to experiment. There's nobody saying whether or not you can publish this book. And I certainly remember in the past authors coming up to me with a book and saying, Hey look, I've been trying to publish this. I've been told there's no market for this book. I've been told there's no interest in this book, but I've published it and hey, look, I got into the top 100 or whatever it might be. And that just goes to show that there is, and Claire Leiden who was on one of the panels last week as well saying for Lesbian Romance, she was told so many times, there is no market for this where two women meet and live happily ever after. She was just told, no, you won't be able to publish that book. And she's done so phenomenally successfully and so many examples of that and hopefully we'll see more of it because are the only limitation is your imagination and finding a reader who'll go with you on that journey. And there are a lot of readers out there who want to be sort of try something different, so why not?
James Blatch (01:09:11):
Yeah, that's a really good point. So I say it's author led, but actually the point about the indie writers is it's reader led. They're so well connected with readers. So Claire, you're right, I've had this conversation with her before. Lesbian fiction tended to be dark and slightly troubled. There's always a kind of troubled storyline that's just simply how the genre sat and the publishers bought into that and she wanted to do happy ever after Lesbian Romance as you say, and that's reader led. That's her seeing the demand. And that's something again, that indies have done, which is brilliant. For me, that's some of the most pleasing aspects of the revolution that's happening in publishing at the moment is the reader is being put first, the author's second and the publishers are third,
Darren Hardy (01:09:53):
Which is great. And it could be so quick as well, like author meets a reader at an event or receives an email and obviously you've got to write the book and that may be a quick process, it may be a longer process, but the publishing process, you can have that book up in a few days in hours in some cases, and you can grab that moment and all it takes is an event in the real world that you feel, actually I can put a book around this. And Claire Leiden, I think she was talking last week about the fact she has a romance book that's got a football theme to it, which is perfect with the euros going on. Not that she wrote it for that, but it's a perfect opportunity to tap into a reader moment and you have so much freedom and flexibility to grab those opportunities if you're doing it independently.
James Blatch (01:10:34):
And Kara Claire, my new cohost for the new show is with a couple of other authors, has decided to do Mafia Vampire Romance, I think they've invented, but she says there's nothing more mafia than vampires, right? That's true. Absolutely perfect combination. And that's again, that's one of the really fun aspects of that. And there will be an audience for that. You can absolutely guarantee it. So yeah, I dunno what's next for you? You're going to expand your empire to the rest of the world and we're going to see you taking on Asia and North America and at some point we won't going to talk to you anymore.
Darren Hardy (01:11:10):
Well James, my door is always open to you. You'll always be to send me an email and have a conversation. I mean for me personally, I think we're having a great year getting the team together, looking at how we can learn across Europe and obviously working with our colleagues in the US We have teams in Brazil, Japan, very different marketplaces all over again where we can learn so much from them. But no, I'm hoping we will continue to be popping up at events. We have a number of events sort just bubbling under, we're trying to pull together for the rest of the year in the UK and continue to learn what else we could do, what's working well at events. So that's my immediate focus over the next sort of year or so.
James Blatch (01:11:51):
Good. And although this podcast will finish, we will still email people most weeks and so we will definitely let people know when there's events that they can come and meet you in person and have a chat. You're a very friendly, approachable man we could say. So people should absolutely take that opportunity.
Darren Hardy (01:12:08):
Yeah, absolutely. And I think some people expect to be very, I dunno, to not necessarily have meet real people. I think there's this sort of suggestion that we're all, that's it. We're all just robots somewhere, but we are people. We enjoy meeting other people and understanding how the authors are using our tools and services. We have our own lives and we bring all of that to these conversations. And I think last week, so many people where my daughter had just been to see Taylor Swift at concert, all these other people whose daughters had also just been to see Taylor Swift at concert. You see there's all these fascinating things, the way we all come together and overlap and it's really exciting. Great fun,
James Blatch (01:12:46):
Great fun. Yeah. And we should finally say a thank you to McKayla Parks who's been working with us since you moved up a little bit. McKayla's been our sort of contact point here at Learn Self-Publishing and she's been brilliant and I sort of, I gave her an accountability moment on the stage where we told everybody that she had to announce she's leaving to write a novel, which is so exciting, but I'm going to say it on this podcast as well.
Darren Hardy (01:13:11):
And so many people came up to her afterwards and said, good luck with the novel. Let us know how it goes. So you are right. She has a lot of accountability there and is really looking forward to it and we are looking forward to seeing how she gets on. She got so many great ideas and she's such a great writer. She deserves every success.
James Blatch (01:13:27):
Yeah, she'll be brilliant. I'm sure it won't take her the 10 years it took me to do my first one, but there's nothing wrong with that if it does by
Darren Hardy (01:13:33):
All that's it. Just got to get it on.
James Blatch (01:13:36):
Darren, we draw to a close on the Self-Publishing Show. Thank you very much for being a part of it. Thank you for coming back and chatting to us and yeah, we'll let people know via email if there's an opportunity to come and see you in person at some point, but I hope people'll do that.
Darren Hardy (01:13:50):
Well that's great and thank you for having me back as well and thank you for everything that this podcast has done over the years. It's been a fascinating listen that I've learned a lot through it and I get the sense there's a lot of authors out there who have had a really positive influence from it, so thank you for that too.
Speaker 1 (01:14:04):
This is the Self-Publishing show. There's never been a better time to be a writer
James Blatch (01:14:10):
There. That is Darren Hardy, always a pleasure to speak to. Darren actually went into Amazon and had a chat with him over some other things about two weeks ago and always enjoyed catching up with him and very grateful to him and his team for their support for this show and particularly for the live show. I'm still hoping that live show will take place next year. We are looking at the options at the moment, still dealing with this year's show. I mean, it is colossally expensive. I can't tell you how expensive it is to put on this show. It is ridiculous. We've just had having spent, I think I'll give you the figures, I don't think they're confidential. I think we spent just on the hire of the hall before we got any photography, any video work, lots of other things to go on top of.
(01:14:53):
This was 58,000 pounds and you'd think that includes things like cleaning the hall because you're hiring the hall. No, we've had a bill this week for 19,000 pounds for things like security and cleaning. It's a third of the bill. Again, this is what happens when you run a live show. So we have to think very carefully about what we're going to do and where we're going to do it next year. I do like the South Bank Centre, absolutely love it, but it is a very expensive venue and we want to do something that's as accessible as possible for as many authors as possible. So that's what we're doing at the moment. I do want something to happen next year. My personal guarantee to you is there'll be something next year. We're just not sure what it is and we're going to announce that as soon as we possibly can.
(01:15:40):
The survey that we sent out a few weeks ago was very useful. Thank you very much indeed. Gave us some ideas of what there is an appetite for. Okay, this is it. I think we're going to say goodbye. I'm going to say goodbye. I want to say a huge thank you to Catherine and Tom and Stuart and John and John and Sarah, the people who've contributed to this show over the years, who've created its design, its sound, its editing in the background, the promotional material, distributing it to all the various platforms. It's been quite an operation. I just sit here at the top of the pin and do the speaking. And so a good team. It's been a good podcast. We'll keep the channel open as I say. So keep your subscriptions live. We'll pop back from time to time, but for a regular show, that's going to be it for now. Have a look around the web and the groups. If you can find me elsewhere, you'll get your dose of me, I promise. Thank you very much indeed for listening. It's couldn't have happened without you listening, so pat yourself on the back for 432 episodes. You did the long haul. That's it all. That remains for me to say, is this a goodbye from me?
Speaker 1 (01:16:47):
Publishing is changing, so get your words into the world and join the revolution with the self publish show.