Should You Write That Book?

If you think you might have a book in you but aren't sure writing and publishing your own book as an entrepreneur is worth the effort, this episode is for you.

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The Rungs You Can Reach on the Ladder of Lead Generation

Transcript

David C. Baker: Blair, today, we're going to talk about, Should You Write That Book? We've talked about both of the books you've written, we've talked about the books I've written. We've talked about writing, but we haven't really specifically talked about whether our audience should write that book. You and I know lots of people who've written books who either are a part of our universe or a part of another universe, and I don't know anybody who regrets having written one.

I do know a lot of people who have thought about it and either aren't sure it's worth the effort, aren't sure about how to do it, but this is written for those people who think they might have a book in them. We've got lots of notes together. In fact, you put lots of stuff together. It made me nervous, it's like, "Who kidnapped Blair?" There's like all kinds of stuff in here, but it's going to be just a conversation about, Should You Write That Book? As we often start these things off, what prompted this for you? I'm always curious about that.

Blair Enns: For some reason, I thought we'd covered this topic.

David: This is what happens when you do a podcast as you get old. You have no idea what you've done.

Blair: Yes. Somebody was asking for guidance on this topic and I thought, "Oh, I'll go send them the 2Bob's episode," and I realized, "We haven't covered this." You and I have written about this, probably multiple articles. We've talked about it at events where we've shared a stage and at our own events. I just assumed that we had covered this. There's just so much to say on this.

I think as other media platforms and other forms of media rise in prominence, the question is always asked, "Is a book still relevant? Is it the ultimate as it has been for forever? Is it the ultimate expression of authority to write a book?" I think that question just keeps getting asked. You and I ask ourselves and each other that question all the time.

I thought it would be a good opportunity to just to put a bow around that question and then just talk about a bunch of the issues around why you might want to write a book. I think this might end up being a two-parter where we'll talk about the numerous different ways that you can approach the task of writing a book. We can do that in the future.

David: Since we're both, probably the world's leading experts on writing books.

Blair: Absolutely.

David: That will be very easy to do.

Bair: We're like New York Times number one best sellers. Of course, we're not.

David: I was talking with a prospect just before we started recording this today, and they were asking me, "How much of the time do I typically just recommend that people use content marketing to take their positioning to the marketplace?" I said, "Well, most of the time, but I don't think that's the only way to do it." In fact, I think it's a little bit inefficient.

I think the most effective, efficient business plan you have would be to write a really well-received book every three years and then speak on it twice a year. That would be enough to drive all kinds of fantastic business to you. Most of us don't have that level of access or notoriety and so we stepped down below, but the people who write a book, especially the first one, they're taking a pretty big step. It doesn't even matter how public that is.

It's more about, they're taking a big step in terms of their spending a lot of time with a topic and that's helping them, even if nobody ever reads the thing. You lead with that question, our books, what they used to be as marketing tools. Isn't this the same question we've asked every year for 30 years in a row and we keep thinking, "When's this going to stop?" It doesn't yet. Right?

Blair: Yes. Surely books have had their day and I just don't think they've had. I'm biased because I am a reader and a writer, but I recognize not everybody else is. You don't have to write a book to be an authority, but I don't know a better way to do it, even here in the middle of 2021. I don't see that changing. There's something about the permanence of a book.

Let's talk about it. Why is the book so important? Why is the book at the top of the ladder of lead-generation? We've done a podcast episode, we'll put it in the show notes on the ladder of lead generation, the idea that you can place on a ladder all of these activities that you can do to drive leads. Some of them are outreach, some of them are inbound. Some of them can be done quickly and have high immediacy. Some take time and have low immediacy.

You publish a book and it can take many months or even years to have the benefits accrue to you. There's low immediacy. All of those activities of unsolicited outreach to a blog post, to a guest post, to being interviewed on somebody's podcast, to having your podcast, to having your YouTube channel, to publishing the definitive book on the subject matter. Of all of those things, I still think publishing a book is at the very top of the ladder of lead generation. I don't see it being supplanted by anything else. Now, there are some caveats.

David: I agree. I could think of two things that might supplant it just in individual cases. Let's say you're invited to give a TED talk not a TEDx talk. Actually I think the time for the supremacy of TED talks is waning a little bit, but I could see one that gets millions of views and puts you on the map. Or I could see you being in some role, particularly appointed in some political administration that gives you all sorts of credibility in that could get translated into--

I could see those being substitutes for writing a book, but otherwise I don't. Why is it at the top of that ladder? In a way it's like a publicly available randomized control group. You're putting your thoughts out there that anybody can read. These are people that you don't know. These could be really smart people or idiots and they're going to publish all sorts of reviews.

There is something about that. There's something about the test of the public and that's the most terrifying moment where you see what people think of it. It's this massive risk that you're taking. You put it out there and you've done all sorts of testing, but you don't really know how it's going to be received. Writing is primarily a risk in many ways. That's how I think of it.

Blair: I would add that we increasingly live in this iterative world where you put something out there digitally and because it's just digital, you can iterate it. It's MVP, let's get something out there and then let's improve it once it's in the marketplace. A book is the old school antithesis to that. I think I've said this before when I was writing the manifesto, one of the people who was reviewing the early drafts was a novelist friend of mine who died a few years ago, but she kept saying to me, "You cannot unpublish. You cannot unpublish."

That was her way of saying, "Get this right. This isn't good enough. I think I've told the story previously too. She was an award-winning short story author and when she published her first novel it had a fair amount of critical acclaim, but it wasn't a big commercial success. Then, couple of years after the novel came out she showed up at my front door and she handed me a new book in a plain cover with a different title on it. She said, "This is the book I meant to write."

She had rewritten her novel which was already published by a major publisher. Rewritten it, retitled it, printed like 50 copies for friends and she handed them out and effectively said, "It was a mistake to publish early. I should've spent more time on it," whatever her other reasons were, but this is the book I wanted to publish. It was already in the market.

I wouldn't say it failed because I didn't think she had big dreams of commercial success, but that's just the testament to the book. It's like you put it out there. It's out. It's not exactly carved in stone, but it's almost carved in stone so you have to take your time. You have to think through this. If you don't get smarter in the process of writing this book then it's probably a book that didn't need to be published.

David: It's the possibility of shame that drives you to put more work into the book. That's what by risk-taking. It's tied up with this. Can we back up just a little bit and talk about the different kinds of books and the reasons why you might write them? Because so far we've just said, "Book." We haven't distinguished the types of books or why you might read them. There are legitimate reasons to do different things with books. Do you want to talk about that a minute?

Blair: I think as the owner of a knowledge-based business and ad agency designed for marketing firms, et cetera, where you're selling the contents of your brain, you feel like it would be a good idea to have a book out there as a stamp of my authority. The number one reason to write a book is, I call it the oversized business card or like the almost brochure. It's like you're an expert at something, you're an expert at what you do. There's some basic questions that fall on the, "Have you written a book?" Check.

You want to be able to hand over the book. You want to be able to point to the book. You want to be able to reference the fact that you've written a book, and it doesn't really matter if anybody reads it. That's the base level. I refer to that as an oversized business card appropriately or not.

David: That leads to the second reason why you might write a book and that speaking gigs. Here there is just a black and white difference between the speaking engagements you can get if you've written a book or you haven't written a book. We're going to talk later about should you self publish or not? Actually, I don't see any distinction here. Like if somebody is being asked to speak, to keynote an event and maybe it's a paid one, I don't think anybody cares whether it's self-published or not, but they really do care about whether it's a book that's been publicly available and received well enough. That'd be the second reason, speaking gigs. It's hard to get good ones without a book.

Blair: Yes, and it's understood in the publishing business that you publish a book, your fees go up. If you hit The New York Times Bestseller list, minimum speaking fee of $25,000. If you hit number one on the bestseller list, minimum speaking fee of $50,000. There are these thresholds. Now, the audience listening to this, you're almost certainly going to write a niche book and you're probably not aspiring.

We're going to talk about bestsellers in a few minutes, but you're probably not aspiring to be a New York Times Bestseller. There are some speaking gigs you're just not going to get unless you've written a book. You want to get that TED Talk? It's helpful to have a book. If you get a TED Talk without a book, you're going to be approached by acquisition editors to publish a book.

Interestingly enough, you said they don't care if they're self-published or not. I remember having dinner with a guy who runs an association. He'd invited me to speak. He's a friend of a friend. We've become friendly over the years. We're having dinner before I was going to speak and he was talking about my book. He said, "You'd have more credibility if you had somebody like," I won't name names, but fill in the blank publisher, publish your book." I almost spit out my food and I said, "I hear from those guys every quarter wanting me to write a book."

David: [laughs]

Blair: I was indignant. Screw them. I could've had a real proper publisher publish this book. I just went on this little tirade and I explain to him.

David: [laughs]

Blair: It's like, I would see that as failure having those guys publish my book." I feel like I set him straight on how the world had changed a little bit.

David: Yes. The book still wouldn't be out yet. You could've added that, right? It would've been edited by some snotty nose 20-year old who'd never written an article in their life, much less a book.

Blair: [laughs] They would've destroyed it.

David: I would've had to do all the marketing anyway, but other than that, it's a great idea. Thank you for your feedback.

Blair: How do we really feel about this topic, David? The publishing industry?

David: What are the other types of books that might qualify here? Oversized business card, something to get speaking gigs, what else?

Blair: Now, they're putting types of books and reasons to write a book in the same category here. I've heard you say this, I probably stole this from you. You write to catalyze or codify what you know, and then you also write to learn what you don't know. It's the same with articles, with blog posts, "I'm going to write about this because I have an idea, but it's not a fully fleshed out idea. You use writing to flesh out that idea. Another reason to write a book is you write a book to protect your IP.

David: I don't know what you mean by that one so talk to me about that.

Blair: What is intellectual property? I forgot what the legal definition of it is, but it's the legal protection of a product of your intellect. The forms of intellectual property that are legally protected are copyright, trademark. A book, the copyright is held by the author typically. Patent is another form. Now, you can't copyright ideas, but you can copyright expressions of ideas and you can copyright frameworks.

If you have a framework for how to do something that you've developed and you publish it in a book, it's publicly protected. I was talking to a friend of mine not too long ago and he was telling me he worked for an organization. The founder had written a book, the book had become famous, and it was a training company that trained based on the frameworks that were in the book.

He said they had a lawyer on staff who had a revenue goal of $1.5 million a year. How the lawyer became a profit center is when the salespeople were out trying to sell training to the large corporations, every once in a while, they would encounter a learning and development manager or an in-house training manager who would say, "Oh, yes, we've read the book and I've already built an internal training program based on that."

The salespeople were incentivized to report that to the in-house lawyer, that's like, "Oh, great, that's cool. How many people have you trained?" "3,000." "Okay, well, we charge $1,000 a head, that's $3 million," so turn it over the lawyer, the lawyer sends a letter, reaches out and says, "You owe us $3 million."

Then they would always end up settling where it's like they write a check for half-a-million or a quarter of a million dollars. I'd never heard of this before, but it's actually brilliant. If you are publishing frameworks, those frameworks are protected. When people start to build products around those frameworks, even for internal purposes, without paying you your royalties, then you have a legal recourse to go get paid for that.

David: Got it.

Blair: It's almost like a trap, isn't it? [laughs]

David: Yes. You're secretly loving this sneakiness here.

David: What kind of money should you expect from a book? Because that's obviously another reason to write a book. Whether it comes directly, you've made a lot more money from your books directly. I've made less money from my books directly and more money from the things that stem from it. What should somebody's expectations be?

Blair: You have to ask yourself, "Why am I writing this book?" Is it to be seen as an authority or is it to make money? I would suggest that you don't write a book to make money until you are already seen as the authority and you have an audience and then you have a book that's easily monetizable. In my instance, the Win Without Pitching manifesto is a $25 book that you buy on Amazon. It's meant to go out in the world and spread my ideology.

Then as my audience has built over the years, some people come to our website and buy my second book Pricing Creativity, which is priced at between $100 and $320 a copy. That book makes pretty good money. The manifesto makes money too, but that was never the intent. I keep saying to my team, "Let's just quit taking this profit. Let's plow," and that we're doing this now, we're still going to take some profit. "If we're going to plow most of the revenue back into pushing that book further out into the world."

We're working on a bunch of stuff on that front right now, including foreign language translations that we should have done years ago. You do have to ask yourself, "Is it my goal to make money?" If you don't have the audience and you're not already seen as the authority, and it's not a sizeable enough audience where you can charge enough for the book, then just forget about that altogether. Your first book typically, unless you're already kind of really famous within the markets you serve, your first book, really, the goal of that is not likely to make you money. It might cost you more.

David: It might. The typical person listening to this episode would write their first book and they would probably print-- I'm making some assumptions here, but they'd probably print 3000 copies and it would take them several years to sell that, and they may never reprint it. If they're going to sell it on Amazon, they're going to keep 45% of the list. Any discount Amazon will take out of their 55%. Then from that they're going to, not even thinking about their time, they're going to have printing costs, and design, and editing, and delivery.

It's very unlikely you're going to make any money directly from the book, but if the book catches on and it's going to catch on, not just because it's a great book, but because you already have a big audience, then you're going to reprint it and you're going to start making some significant money. Like you said, that's a foolish reason to write a book, unless you're like Dan Pink where it's almost guaranteed to be a bestseller every three years, and that is your primary livelihood. That's not where you and I are. That's not where our listeners are normally.

Blair: Under the subject of writing a book for money, should you, one of the reasons is, if you're in an agency, it's likely that you're running a customized services firm. You have a small number of clients where each engagement is bespoke. We've talked about this many times. I have this big beef about this tendency to productize and kind of quasi-pursue scale. I think that's a mistake.

There is something to be said about having some recurring revenue, some sources of recurring revenue to smooth out the bumps, where money just comes in from selling a product and the book can be that thing. Now, again, I think you only think of it that way if you're already seen as the authority, you already have the audience and you're able to self-publish and keep the bulk of the revenue.

You're earning more than the 1 or $2 a copy, or even the 8 or $9 a copy that you might earn if you self-published on Amazon. You can self-publish a more expensive book if the value is there and you're selling it into the right niche. It can provide, as it does in our business, and I'm not going to talk numbers here, but book revenue wouldn't kill us if it all went away, but it's a significant part of the business.

David: Right. We tend to have really strange expectations about how well a book has to sell before it's considered a success. One of the themes that you and I are talking about here is that the book could be a success completely unrelated to how many copies it sells, because if it just helps you think better, that's good. If it helps new business, that's good. Really, a book is considered a significant success if it sells, say 5,000 copies in Canada or 10,000 copies in the US. That's not a New York Times bestseller, but that is considered a bestseller. Very few B2B books, which is a completely different world than novels, very few B2B books, business books sell that many copies. It's a pyramid for sure. If you do care about selling a lot of books, my bet is that your expectations could probably be lower than you might even have. I hope that puts you a little bit at rest about how many books you need to sell to for it to really be a success.

Blair: I really like what you mapped out about like the typical listener to this podcast who is thinking of writing a book, you're probably print 3,000, probably take you a few years to sell them, and you'll probably give away a bunch of those few hundred of those as a marketing tool. That would probably serve you well, that would probably be success. Anything above that you would consider to be gravy. Now, let's talk about bestseller status here, because this is a bit of a game. Your most recent book, The Business of Expertise, you've hit bestseller status on Amazon.

David: Yes. Which is nearly meaningless.

Blair: Do you say Amazon bestseller? Do you make that claim?

David: I don't. At least not that I'm aware of. If it's anywhere in my literature than it was in a late night after two drinks, a decision. No, I don't. It's one of those games to me and it's so easy to be an Amazon best-selling, but because all you have to do is list a book and very narrow category, and then it has to be number one in that category for a brief period of time. I don't remember what it is?

Blair: A day?

David: 24 hours.

Blair: Or it might even be less than a day, just a few hours in the snapshot.

David: Amazon bestseller is the same thing as being on a recording where they say, "Your call is very important to us." They're both just bullshit.

Blair: I had a great hour-long conversation yesterday with quite a well-known in some circles, specialty retailer, who'd reached out to me, wanted to talk about books and book publishing. This is a very creative individual whose creative approach, the reason he wanted to talk, he wants to do things differently. Creative approach to what the book is going to look like, how he's going to sell it. Just brilliant. I learned so much from him.

When we talked about best seller status and I was explaining, it's Amazon bestseller status is a game. My book has hit number one and multiple like big categories sales and marketing in countries. Other than saying to my team, when it happened the first time, "I'm no longer Blair Enns, I am "Number One Bestselling Author" Blair Enns." That lasted a week. We don't put it. Maybe I'm saying this. I actually haven't looked at my website in while we might actually say that.

David: I'm going to look right now before you have a chance to change it. [chuckles]

Blair: I'm going to eat crow here. In anything, I do. I don't make that claim because it's meaningless. He had this great line. He said, "Yes, I don't want to be in company with that bunch of scam artists." What he was referring to is the people who say, "Amazon bestseller." It's like, "Yes, category of zero." Let's be more even handed here.

It's nice when it happens, it's nice to be able to make that claim. It makes you feel good. I'm not saying don't use it in your marketing, but people in the know increasingly more and more people, anybody who's written a book knows it's not a big deal. In fact, if you can't game the system to be number one on Amazon for a short period of time in a category, then you're not trying.

David: Then that's a problem if you can't gain the system. You know what's more important to me? If I just want a really quick test, what matters to me more is how many reviews are there on Amazon. That, of course, can be gamed as well, but that is way more indicative.

Blair: At a certain volume you know it's not gamed when it comes to a book. Yes, I agree with you. The New York Times bestseller list, it's not real. It's more real than Amazon and it carries more weight, but that is, there's a game there too.

David: Totally gamed.

Blair: Some books are legitimately just runaway bestsellers who are on the list for a long time. The books that like pop up to number one or are on there briefly, there's a way to game the system. There's a way the New York Times tries to catch you trying to game the system. It's a cat and mouse thing and not everybody who gets that status has like "earned" in air quotes that status the way like a Adam Grant or a Malcolm Gladwell, where their books get to number one and they stay on the list for multiple weeks. Those are the legitimate bestsellers.

David: Switching gears a little bit. How important is it to write a good book? Well, what is a good book? A good book is one that clarifies your thinking and benefits your business and, "Oh, if it makes money fine, but it's really not about the money." How important is it to write a good book? We could talk about this for several episodes because if you've been involved in writing a book or even just an article, you don't know when to let it go. You don't know how much to perfect it. What's that point and how important is it to write a good book? I've written five, I'm only proud of three of them. Fortunately the most recent three.

Blair: It tends to be the way it works, although not always.

David: How important is it to write a good book?

Blair: I think that is such a meaningful question. I think the answer is highly personal because I have read some books by people that I know, business owners that have written a book that are really bad books. I read it and I think, "This is a bad book. It doesn't need to exist, but it was probably worth it for the author," because for the reason we talked about at the top.

It's like, "Check the box, write a book. It doesn't matter that people aren't going to read it. I can hand it out." Just the fact that you've written a book, you finished it, you published it, you have the guts to put it out there, that is worth a lot. You do not have to write a good or a great book. The question of how important is it to write a good book, it's a highly personal question and you should ask yourself that question before you set out.

At the core of my being, I am a writer. If you had asked me at 18, if you could do anything, what would you want to do? I'd want to be a writer. I'm an entrepreneur but most of what I do is write. It's really important to me. I'm not saying I've succeeded. I'm pretty happy with the level of quality of the books, but it's really important to me to write a good book because I see myself as a writer. I don't want to speak for you, but I would imagine you're in the same camp.

David: Yes, but I just wince sometimes when I think about some parts of the books I've written. I don't know that you can ever get to the point where you're not going to wince.

That can't be an ultimate fear. When you're looking at a book and you say, "That's a good book," or you look at a book that maybe one of your clients writes and you think to yourself, "Aaah, not so good." What makes a book good and not good? What are some of the basic components that would throw a book into a good category? I know one of the things that's important to you is that it has to have a point of view, right?

Blair: Yes. It doesn't have to, but those are the better books, especially business books. You see a lot of business books that are just laundry lists of, "Here's how you do this, here's how you do this." Ask yourself the question, who else could have written this book? First ask yourself the question, "Is this book needed?" I wasn't going to write pricing creativity because I thought, "Well, there are a lot of great pricing books out there already."

Some many mutual friend of ours said to me, "Yes, your clients aren't going to read those books." I thought, "He's right." That was the moment I thought this book is needed. Ask yourself, "Is this book needed? Is it already covered elsewhere? Is this me just checking the box of he's written a book?" Again, that's okay, but to determine whether or not it's a good book, is it needed? Part of that is, does it have a point of view? Is it forcing the audience to think about things in a new way?

As I often to say about points of view, you don't have to be right. Point of view is a personal thing on how this should be done, a perspective or ideology on how you do what you do should be done. Those are the ones that really grab people, books with points of view. Then another test is, did you get smarter writing it? If you didn't get a lot smarter writing your book, if you didn't experience pain, if you didn't suffer--

David: [laughs]

Blair: I mean it, if you did not suffer and come through the other side a whole lot smarter, it's probably not a very good book. Again, that's okay. If it's important to you to write a good book, A, you should suffer, B, you should be a lot smarter when you're done.

David: The world doesn't need another book on branding. The world doesn't need another book on pricing or on sales, unless you really do have a different point of view. Or even if you don't, unless you're going to be a whole lot smarter writing it. The good news is that not that many people are going to read your book.

Blair: That's the good news.

David: Yes. In fact, a lot of people who buy it are not going to read it. You don't have to labor over every single-- They're not going to get a team of seven people and digest it and put it up on the board and figure out all the inconsistencies. People read books with a preconception that they're going to learn something, they're going to be challenged, they want two or three really unique different ways to think. If that's the goal, then it lowers that standard about, but you can't be afraid to have a point of view.

A lot of the books that I see written that I still think they were worth writing because it helps somebody be smarter and it's that business card, but in terms of how it moves the conversation forward, I don't think it did at all because all they're doing is describing how they do it or it's just a collection of case studies and why they should work with them. If you think of content marketing, it's not so much content. It's more marketing. I guess we're going to talk about that later. You need to pull me back from the rant that's coming on here. I haven't even gotten started.

Blair: I think that was your line, "There's not much content in your content marketing."

David: It's more marketing than anything. How are you going to leverage this book? We've talked a little bit about this. There is obviously maybe money, maybe speaking, maybe it turned into something else. One of the concepts that you and I have thought about for many years is that no content is ever an orphan. You're going to reuse things, put them in different packages, put them together. Talk about this just a little bit.

Blair: As you said that I was reminded of a Marshall McLuhan line, "Media travel in pairs."

David: Never heard that.

Blair: The media is always nested in another media. The idea that they travel in pairs and you think, in terms of a major and a minor from a marketing point of view, what's the major channel or activity that you're going to focus on? Then, what is the minor or what are the small number of minors that are going to support that major? The book is often the major and then how do you leverage the book? Speaking is the obvious one, right?

Today, we're recording this in the fall of 2021 and we're still in a global pandemic or epidemic depending on who you ask. There are still a very small number of events. People who speak for a living, their incomes have been cut and they're delivering most of these talks remotely. That's still a great pairing, a great minor in support of the major of writing the book. Speaking, you can launch a podcast. A lot of authors do this. They put their book out of the world and they launch a podcast at the same time shortly after, or even a little bit before. You can appear as guests on other podcasts, there are others, what have you got?

David: Well, this brings up one of the-- We probably ought to wrap this episode up and then cover publishing options and how to market and how to write a book. There's so much more to talk about. One of the biggest distinctions between getting a real publishing contract versus self publishing, there is an imprimatur. It's like some big publishers decided to take a chance on you, that must mean it's a better book.

Blair: Yes.

David: That is absolutely true. What you don't want to mistakenly believe is that somehow, it will automatically be a lot more widely accepted because it's published by one of these big firms because you are still going to be responsible for doing most of the marketing of your book. In fact, there's a maxim that I learned from one of my clients that you should give away one copy for every two that you sell because that's what it takes to market a book well.

If money isn't a big issue, if you're really just wanting to learn a lot and get smarter through the process, that's fantastic, but a book is not going to sell itself. If you don't already have an audience, then you're going to sell 300 copies and give away 700 and you're going to have 1,000 in your garage and your estate is going to be pissed off at you when they find it after you die. Sorry, you need to hold me back here, but writing the book is one thing. Leveraging a book with the right marketing plan, and that is almost more important than the content itself if you're looking for a great impact from the book. We'll have to talk about that.

Blair: Especially if you're writing a timely book.

David: Right. That's not evergreen.

Blair: You need to have your marketing plan ready before the book is ready. That's why I can't write timely books because I neglect the marketing until after the book is published. Okay, we've covered a lot here and I think what's left which we should do in part two would be, how do you write the book, different ways that you can go about it.

You think that might be an easy question with just a brute force, simple blunt answer, but it's not. There's so many different ways to do that. Then, we can also cover publishing options, how to navigate Amazon, self publishing versus going with any of the big boys and even some of the specialty publishers. We can cover all that in a second part, what do you think?

David: Yes, I think so. This isn't just for people who are thinking of writing a book. I think this is interesting stuff for people who want to see inside the world of book writing, who never intend to write a book too. I think we've got a lot of people listening here who are curious to see underneath the covers here about what this looks like. It's not quite as glamorous as they might think.

Blair: It's changing. It changed a lot in the last decade and it continues to change. Okay, this has been great.

David: This is a good start. Thank you, Blair.

Blair: Thanks, David.