https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uxf_r12BwBE
Transcript
Ron Pramschufer: This is Ron Pramschufer, and welcome to Publishing Basics Radio, where, weekly, we help you navigate the self-publishing minefield. Publishing Basics Radio is sponsored by SelfPublishing.com, the Internet’s only self-publishing superstore. Think you’re ready to publish a book? Try SelfPublishing.com. Now, on with the program.
Today we’re talking to Kristin Godsey, editor of Writer’s Digest Magazine. Kristin, editor of Writer’s Digest, that sounds like a pretty neat job. Tell us a little bit about your background, how you got to where you are right now.
Kristin Godsey: I’ve been working in magazines for about 15 years now. I – oh, gosh, I’ve been at a lot of different places. I have a master’s degree in magazine journalism from Northwestern. I worked in New York . I was a reporter for Fortune. I worked for a magazine called Success. I worked for Good Housekeeping as an editor. I worked on the dot com side for a site called Club Mom. And then I ended up back in Cincinnati , where I was an editor at the Artist’s Magazine. And for about two and a half years now I’ve been editor of Writer’s Digest.
Ron Pramschufer: It may sound like kind of a dumb question, but are you a writer yourself?
Kristin Godsey: Oh, sure. Non-fiction is my focus, and I’ve got – I’ve tried my hand at some fiction, but – and I’ve got the outline in a drawer somewhere for my great American novel. But –
Ron Pramschufer: Mm-hmm.
Kristin Godsey: Most of the writing I do is journalism.
Ron Pramschufer: I tell you, I mean, Writer’s Digest has been around forever, right?
Kristin Godsey: Oh, yeah, it’s – this is our 86th year.
Ron Pramschufer: What kind of circulation does it have?
Kristin Godsey: We’re about 120,000.
Ron Pramschufer: That’s pretty good, because, it’s funny, the fact that keeps being bantered around is that there’s like 195,000 new titles published every year.
Kristin Godsey: Right. Yeah.
Ron Pramschufer: Or last year.
Kristin Godsey: Right.
Ron Pramschufer: I’m just curious how many of the authors of these titles do you think subscribe to Writer’s Digest?
Kristin Godsey: Oh, I don’t know. All of them, how about that?
Ron Pramschufer: Yeah, no, everybody I talk to, I mean, Writer’s Digest is like the writer’s magazine. The subscription rate’s like, you know, it’s low enough that there’s nobody that won’t subscribe because it’s too expensive.
Kristin Godsey: Right. Right.
Ron Pramschufer: And I’ve noticed now, editorially, now, I don’t know whether it’s always been this way, but editorially it really seems to emphasize writing and guiding writers towards traditional publishing.
Kristin Godsey: That’s true. That’s correct. Because that’s really – that is still by far the main goal of the people that we’re speaking to. That’s what they want.
Ron Pramschufer: Out of these 195,000 titles as we were just talking about –
Kristin Godsey: Mm-hmm.
Ron Pramschufer: Some other like ridiculous amount, like 150,000 of them, are like people that have self-published in some form or another.
Kristin Godsey: Right. It’s a pretty high percentage.
Ron Pramschufer: So all these people that aspire to be published writers actually end up published through some other means other than a traditional publisher.
Kristin Godsey: Mm-hmm. It’s very hard to get traditionally published.
Ron Pramschufer: ‘Cause I looked over, like, just the last year, December had, like, the wrap-up of like all the different articles that you did.
Kristin Godsey: Mm-hmm.
Ron Pramschufer: There seemed to be very few articles on self-publishing, yet it’s funny, it seems like over half your advertising are people that are looking to publish books for people.
Kristin Godsey: Right. Well, that’s true, I mean, a large percentage of our audience are beginning writers.
Ron Pramschufer: Mm-hmm.
Kristin Godsey: And that’s really the target market for a lot of these POD companies. So we’re a good vehicle for them to reach those types of writers.
Ron Pramschufer: Now, you’ve been around the block a couple of times. If I say the word “vanity publishing,” what’s that mean to you?
Kristin Godsey: Well, that means to me that you’re not getting edited, that you’re doing it yourself. There is a stigma attached to that, there’s no question about that. And some people think it’s an outright fraud. So it’s difficult. Self-publishing is something that’s become a lot cheaper, which is why you’re seeing this kind of proliferation and why there are so many books out there that are self-published. But there is still a stigma attached to it, although that’s lessening somewhat.
Ron Pramschufer: It’s funny, I had a copy of Writer’s Digest from, oh, probably ten years ago that I was looking at the other day.
Kristin Godsey: Mm-hmm.
Ron Pramschufer: And the advertisers from ten years ago and the advertisers today, it’s funny, like there’s one company in particular, Vantage Press, who’s probably been an advertiser for all 89 years you’ve been around.
Kristin Godsey: May be.
Ron Pramschufer: They’re a traditional vanity publisher. Everybody knows it. They know it. They say they know it.
Kristin Godsey: Right. They’re very upfront about what they do.
Ron Pramschufer: And yet today you pick up the magazine, okay, and you still see a Vantage ad. Okay, there it is, they got their third of a page. But yet you’ve got all these ads from these other publishers.
Kristin Godsey: Right.
Ron Pramschufer: Places like iUniverse and Outskirts and Infinity and all, as well as Vantage.
Kristin Godsey: Mm-hmm.
Ron Pramschufer: Do you see a particular difference between them? You say there is a difference, and this is kind of what we’re all wrestling with in 2006 now anyhow. What do you see is the difference between them?
Kristin Godsey: Well, everything’s changing so much, and I wouldn’t say that I’m completely up to speed on every aspect of it, but I know that print on demand is the center of all of this. And it’s the way by which – it’s the technology by which these books are printed. So when you have – when you talk about a typical subsidy publisher, like which is what Vantage Press is, I think what they’re generally doing is they’re doing offset printing. So you have to buy a certain number of books from them. The reason why it’s so difficult is that it’s very expensive. It’s much more expensive than POD route. And a lot of times people will end up with just boxes and boxes of books that sit in their garage unsold.
Ron Pramschufer: Mm-hmm.
Kristin Godsey: But the POD model, it’s less expensive. They’re using the print on demand technology so that if you want one book they can print you one book. So it’s a matter of expense, really.
Ron Pramschufer: But you’re still paying to be published.
Kristin Godsey: That’s right.
Ron Pramschufer: I get really like mixed feelings, like somehow, I mean, I know the old vanity press, I used to deal with people that would take second mortgages to get their book published.
Kristin Godsey: Yeah, right.
Ron Pramschufer: So I have a hard time sometimes figuring out what the difference is between charging hundreds of people thousands of dollars or thousands of people hundreds of dollars.
Kristin Godsey: Yeah.
Ron Pramschufer: If it’s all pretty much the same end.
Kristin Godsey: That’s why this technology has advanced so much, that just so many more people are able to do it. And when you get that many people, that’s a nice business to be in, I’d say.
Ron Pramschufer: This is what brings us to an article that you wrote in the February issue of Writer’s Digest.
Kristin Godsey: Mm-hmm.
Ron Pramschufer: And the article was titled “Setting the Standard.”
Kristin Godsey: Mm-hmm.
Ron Pramschufer: Where you pretty much addressed not the Vantage Press traditional vanity press.
Kristin Godsey: Right.
Ron Pramschufer: But these new print on demand publishers, okay, that say they’re – they all say the same thing, that they’re something different. They’re not a vanity press, they are whatever it is that they say they are.
Kristin Godsey: Yeah.
Ron Pramschufer: Now, tell us a little bit about the background, what went into doing this article.
Kristin Godsey: Well, I was invited to an event that Tom Gregory of Infinity Publishing, which is a POD publisher, launched this past fall. It was called Book Summit. And the idea of it was to get people together in the industry, in the self-publishing industry, to have a little roundtable discussion about all the issues facing their industry. And I was invited to that as an observer, and you, Ron, were on the panel and had a lot of interesting things to say.
But when this – when you introduced this idea of whether or not POD companies or self-publishing in general needs some sort of code of ethics to monitor what they’re doing. Because the problem with this – with these companies, there are companies that have crept up who really are just flat out taking advantage of people and making promises that there’s no way they can keep about the success of their books and what they can do for them. And that’s where a lot of the stigma comes in.
So this idea of a code of ethics was really interesting to me, because I see it, I hear the comments about what this kind of publishing is. There are some pretty well known bad examples of people who actually – of companies that actually are just flat out ripping people off. So it was interesting to me to kind of follow up with the principles involved in this Book Summit to talk to them about this idea and what they thought of it and where they thought it should go.
Ron Pramschufer: Yeah, ‘cause the whole thing seemed like sort of a no brainer to me. I mean, it’s like pretty much any industry sector has rules that they adhere to.
Kristin Godsey: Mm-hmm.
Ron Pramschufer: You know, it’s like even Writer’s Digest, now, you’ve got an audited circulation, right?
Kristin Godsey: Mm-hmm.
Ron Pramschufer: Okay, so you’ve subscribed to a certain set of rules that basically say your whatever, your circulation is what it is so you can, oh, sell advertising.
Kristin Godsey: Right. Right.
Ron Pramschufer: Right? I mean, you’ve got a set of rules for – you probably use Second Class Mail.
Kristin Godsey: Mm-hmm. Right.
Ron Pramschufer: The post office has a set of rules.
Kristin Godsey: Mm-hmm.
Ron Pramschufer: And it’s not – you don’t make up your own rules, you go by the post office rules.
Kristin Godsey: Mm-hmm.
Ron Pramschufer: I mean, it’s not a big deal, but that’s what it is. And so the magazine industry is pretty much driven by – not necessarily the small magazines, but the larger magazines are driven by that, right? I mean, I’m in the printing industry.
Kristin Godsey: Right.
Ron Pramschufer: I mean, we’ve got trade customs that go back a million years.
Kristin Godsey: Mm-hmm.
Ron Pramschufer: And we all kind of just adhere to them. So when you got into this, did the results that you get surprise you at all?
Kristin Godsey: I wasn’t really surprised. I – it was interesting. You know, people had fairly different perspectives on it. Some were more open to the idea than others. I think part of the difficulty comes from the idea of what print on demand is. And the people that I talked to all sort of object to that terminology, that it’s just a technology, that it’s just a way of printing books, and so how can you actually create a code of ethics that’s just referring to a technology, you know. That there’s not really anything that completely binds these companies together for which they could draw up a code of ethics, you know, that they’re all kind of –
Ron Pramschufer: I mean, print on demand is a –
Kristin Godsey: Yeah.
Respondent: Technology.
Kristin Godsey: And some suggested – Susan Driscoll, the CEO of iUniverse, suggested that she felt that this was a good idea, but that it should probably be something that applies to all methods of self-publishing and not just focus on the print on demand industry. But that opens up a whole other – I mean, there are just so many different factors to it that I can see how – I can see the objections thinking that it would just be too difficult to come up with useful guidelines.
Ron Pramschufer: But what Susan said, I mean, it made sense, you know, as long as you deal with a neutral party. Like I probably wouldn’t be a good neutral party –
Kristin Godsey: That’s right.
Ron Pramschufer: ‘Cause I’m fairly opinionated. Writer’s Digest probably wouldn’t be, ‘cause you take advertising.
Kristin Godsey: Yeah.
Ron Pramschufer: So even though you could say you’re neutral, I mean, yeah, maybe you would, maybe you wouldn’t be.
Kristin Godsey: Mm-hmm.
Ron Pramschufer: But it seems like there could be neutral parties around. As far as the print on demand, I mean, it’s really a type of publishing, I think, that we’re talking about. I mean, if in fact they’re different. I mean, if they’re just – the vanity presses, and there’s still plenty of them around, it really is the wild west. I forget who you said –
Kristin Godsey: Right. It is. Yeah, Penny Sansevieri said that. What’s so difficult is just what it comes down to is there’s – is the perception of what you actually get if you self-publish your book. If you have the expectation that it’s gonna allow you to compete head to head with traditionally published books, you’re kidding yourself. And that’s what it comes down to. And that’s where people are objecting. And that’s where the stigma comes from. People feel that some of these companies are misleading in what they’re – in the promises that they’re making.
Ron Pramschufer: You know, I mean, that’s always been my gripe.
Kristin Godsey: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Ron Pramschufer: And they all do it to a certain extent. I mean, some of them are, like I say, I mean, I don’t see how they stay out of jail. Other ones, you could call it marketing. But there’s enough left out. It’s not necessarily what they say, but it’s what they don’t say.
Kristin Godsey: Right.
Ron Pramschufer: And with as many subscribers and all as you have, I mean, do you find you get a lot of letters about this, or –
Kristin Godsey: Honestly, I don’t get – I don’t get that many from people who say that they’ve – who write to me to tell me that they’ve worked with a particular company and they were complete misled. I really don’t see a lot of those. We do – I do get them sometimes.
I mean, it’s difficult for us. We’re – what we try to do – I mean, the advertising that we accept in the magazine is vetted in terms of whether or not the claims they’re making in the ad they can actually stand behind. We just want to make sure that they’re not making outright claims that just are false. And, like, you said, it’s difficult drawing that line.
You know, with the wild west situation, everything’s changing so much and so fast, and people are coming up with different models that, well, is it – can they now call themselves traditional publishers, or can they not? You know, it’s –
Ron Pramschufer: Or the real, I’ve heard like farm system for traditional publishing. You know, I mean, iUniverse is one of the examples. I mean, I think they really are trying. At least they’ve got people with publishing background. I mean, you look at the executives at half of these places, I mean, they don’t even have any publishing experience.
Kristin Godsey: Yeah.
Ron Pramschufer: They’re like Kinko’s with the name of publisher or whatever in front of them.
Kristin Godsey: Right.
Ron Pramschufer: And they’re really just s elli ng services, and there’s no end in sight. It’s just keep s elli ng new people. And I was a little surprised – well, I wasn’t surprised by some of the comments where they just wanted to make up their own rules. I mean, the – Infinity surprised me a little bit, ‘cause they’ve got this huge ad in your magazine every month where they basically point out like the wrong things about other publishers.
Kristin Godsey: Mm-hmm.
Ron Pramschufer: And what’s good about them. And they just wanted to pledge a service. But did you find it strange that pretty much all of the non-POD publishers thought it was a good idea?
Kristin Godsey: I didn’t find it strange. I mean, if that makes sense. I wasn’t exactly surprised by that. What I was a little surprised, though, was that there seemed to be a reluctance at the Summit to recognize that there even is a stigma with this kind of publishing with some of the people. You know, I think that these companies have to be aware of that and have to be doing what they can to be honest and straightforward about what they do and what they really can promise.
The thing that I try to stress the most, what we try to stress the most in the magazine when we write for people who might be considering this kind of publishing is, first of all, think about the type of book you’re doing. What are your goals? If your goal is to – if your goal is to sell a million copies and get on Oprah, this is not the route to go.
If you’re like – if you’re writing a family history or a cookbook or a book of poetry or maybe a non-fiction book like a reference book that has a very narrow audience, and you’re perhaps trying to build a platform, these are all viable and legitimate avenues that self-publishing might be a good route for you.
But it’s not for – it’s very difficult for fiction, extremely difficult for fiction, for a novel. And there are success stories, but that leads to my second point. If you are gonna self-publish, you’ve got to be prepared to work yourself to death in terms of marketing and getting out there and being the one to really sell the book.
Ron Pramschufer: We’ve been using the word “self-publishing, self-publishing,” but traditional self-publishing is where you yourself are the publisher.
Kristin Godsey: Right.
Ron Pramschufer: I mean, just the root of the word, right?
Kristin Godsey: Right.
Ron Pramschufer: It says you’re the publisher.
Kristin Godsey: Right.
Ron Pramschufer: Okay. And it’s the difference between being a published author and being a self-publisher. I teach a little course, you know, where the first line of the course is “Writing’s a love, publishing’s a business.”
Kristin Godsey: Mm-hmm. That’s right.
Ron Pramschufer: Okay? And if you’re going to be a self-publisher, you’re entering the publishing business.
Kristin Godsey: Mm-hmm.
Ron Pramschufer: Which is not necessarily the case if you’re just sending in money and you’re coming up with a few books. Or even better. I mean, Lulu’s free. Lulu’s free as long as you don’t order any books.
Kristin Godsey: Yeah. Well, they’re trying to be the middleman. They’re trying to like establish a middle ground there. But the fact is that if you think that going through a POD publisher is gonna get you all the marketing background and all the editing help and all the high-quality graphics and everything that you’re expecting, you’re gonna be disappointed.
Ron Pramschufer: I mean, it was a very good article.
Kristin Godsey: Thanks.
Ron Pramschufer: Hopefully everyone’ll read it. I’m just curious, how many letters to the editor do you think you’ll get from this article?
Kristin Godsey: I have no idea. I’m really curious to see. The magazine has just hit newsstands this week. I think subscribers have had it for a little while. But I’ll be interested to see what kind of feedback we get. People are very passionate about this subject, which is why this idea of a code of ethics is so intriguing. People are really passionate for and against. So I’ll be curious to see.
Ron Pramschufer: So what do you think’s the next step?
Kristin Godsey: You know what? We actually have something. We did something in our newsletter this week, our email newsletter, kind of asking people to comment on this idea of a code of ethics, and do that on the site, in our forum.
Ron Pramschufer: Oh, neat.
Kristin Godsey: So I’ll be interested to see what kind of comments we get there. I’ll be looking through those and trying to see if there’s something we might do with this. I didn’t really feel after the summit that there was gonna be any great rush from these companies to band together and establish anything.
Ron Pramschufer: It’s gonna come from the consumer level.
Kristin Godsey: Right. It may have to.
Ron Pramschufer: You know, if you push, just like Underwriters Laboratory, once the consumer pushes are you a member of so-and-so, are you –
Kristin Godsey: Right.
Ron Pramschufer: Then they’ll do it. I mean, they’re not gonna do it on their own. So you’ll come by after you get all these responses back in and everything, you’ll come back on the show?
Kristin Godsey: Sure.
Ron Pramschufer: Tell us how you made out.
Kristin Godsey: Sure.
Ron Pramschufer: Well, thanks a lot for visiting with me today.
Kristin Godsey: You’re welcome.
Ron Pramschufer: Okay, and I’ll hopefully talk to you soon.
Kristin Godsey: All right. Thanks, Ron.
Ron Pramschufer: Take care. For Publishing Basics Radio and SelfPublishing.com, this is Ron Pramschufer. See you next week.
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