Ever thought about adding author to your bio?
Want to publish your book and boost your business but not sure how?
Adding ‘author’ to your bio can quickly elevate you to expert status and provide instant credibility, but the process of writing and actually publishing a book might have seemed overwhelming and caused you to shelf that idea.
Publish Your Book and Tell Your Story
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In this episode I chat with Chrissy Wiginton, who is a nonfiction publishing strategist for entrepreneurs. With 15 years of experience working in a traditional publishing house, she saw hundreds of book proposals sent in that weren’t a good fit for that specific publisher… but she was unable to help those authors understand what kind of publishing route would be best for their project.
She now provides the guidance and resources to help first-time authors get their material published, based on their specific project and goals and helps them choose the best publishing path so that they can be successful.
Connect with Chrissy
Chrissy’s free Facebook group, the Publish with Clarity Club:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/thepublishwithclarityclub/
Get Chrissy’s Virtual D.I.Y. Publishing Strategy Workshop!
https://metabookdevelopment.com/virtualworkshop
Episode Transcript
Welcome, everyone. I am here with Chrissy Wiginton and she’s a nonfiction publishing strategist for entrepreneurs who are ready to write and publish a book that will boost their career, amplify their impact and super serve their readers.
Welcome Chrissy. Thanks so much for having me. I am so excited to talk to you today about publishing strategies.
For a lot of people, writing a book is like, oh my God, I could never do that. Right. It’s so I can’t even picture myself doing something at that level.
Can we talk a little bit about what it is exactly, your title is and what that means? So, I am a nonfiction publishing strategist. And what that means is that I work with entrepreneurs mostly. So I help entrepreneurs who are writing their first nonfiction book, figure out the best way to publish their book.
So given their own projects, goals and their specific needs and desires and who their audience is. So all of those things come into play when you’re considering the best way to publish your book, whether you choose self-publishing or whether you choose to go the traditional publishing path. So the work that I do with entrepreneurs is really helping them identify those foundational pieces, get to know their project and get those kinds of insights and then make a decision about publishing path based in that kind of self-knowledge and insight.
So you’re like a publishing sherpa. Yeah, I like to talk about myself as like, you know, in real estate, how there are like sellers agents and buyers agents. So I’m like a buyer’s agent for people who want to publish a book.
That’s that’s clear. OK, it’s immaterial to me. Which route you take.
I have no skin in the game. I’m not I’m not pushing any product. Really, what I want to be sure of is that someone who is writing their first nonfiction book understands what the needs of their specific project are and then what their goals are.
Like, what do they want to achieve from writing and publishing this book and then chooses the most direct path to getting there. So, like, for instance, if you were a health coach and you wanted to write a book to give to your clients who sign on to a coaching program to give them like a sense of your four main coaching practices or things that you’re talking about, the kinds of things that you repeat over and over to clients you work with. So you want to give them something as an onboarding tool.
If that was your goal, a quick e-book or a PDF or something that you sold self published and sold on Amazon would be perfectly appropriate and would actually really serve you. So that would be the most efficient way to get those needs met. If that was your goal and you were pursuing a traditional publishing path, like you’ve just extended your timeline by three years and maybe your clients aren’t going to it’s kind of an overkill without insight into exactly what you want.
It’s easy to go a direction based on the millions of web articles out there about how to publish a book and how to self publish. And like, you can take a lot of advice that’s really good for some people, but not necessarily right for you. So that’s really helpful because you don’t know what you don’t know and you don’t know that that group may not even be what you need or even even completely going to waste your time, money, energy going down that path.
Got it. One of the things, how did you get to the to be in this place where this is what you do? So I worked in a traditional publishing house for about 15 years, nonfiction publisher, and part of my role was as an acquisitions editor. So an acquisitions editor receives all of the proposals from authors and agents who would like that publishing house to publish their book.
In the 15 years that I worked there, I reviewed thousands of book proposals and interacted with hundreds of potential authors and something that I saw over and over again were authors who were reaching out to us with an incredible book idea. Like I read their proposal and was like, this could be an amazing book. Really spectacular, but they were pitching it to the wrong person.
Like this, this wasn’t something that my trade publishing house would publish because it wasn’t a good fit for our list or so like they needed some guidance. Like they should have been pitching to Hay House or something and, or it just wasn’t quite developed enough. So they’re pitching something as a children’s book and it’s a great children’s book, but we don’t publish children’s books, right? Or they are, they have an idea that’s maybe three quarters developed.
And if they were working with an agent or someone ahead of time, it could have been more fully developed. But so after seeing all of these book proposals and in my position, I can’t give that feedback, it wasn’t my place as the acquisitions editor for this nonfiction publisher to give developmental feedback or reroute specifically the folks who are sending proposals in, right? So you couldn’t even send them like an anonymous note. Well, but in the hundreds, so, you know, like, and I was in the mid-level management, so I would be the one deciding the fate of all of these baby book ideas and then my editorial assistant would send them all very neutral rejection letter.
And like, this isn’t a great fit for our list, thanks so much, right? But it was over time, it really began to weigh on me as I was thinking about all of the years of development and thinking and working, of course, that goes into create these kind of creative projects that maybe should have been a magazine article or could have been self-published or needed to go to a university press or whatever. And as I was looking around, like, I wonder if there are some links or some resources where we could send these authors like as an addendum or something that could help them get more clear about what actually makes sense for publishing their material. And it was like a ghost town.
There is no data to help authors that I could ever find either on the Internet or in the written word that could help authors develop this kind of nuanced understanding of, like, what they actually want from their book project, who specifically they’re writing it for and how to combine the two of those things into an actionable plan. Like a little flow chart that you could just kind of be like, if you do you want this, go here. Right.
If you want this, go here. Because you have to imagine, like, getting that one rejection letter for a lot of people was probably very disheartening and that that was it. Like they were just like, well, like, I guess, OK, they don’t want it.
I guess it’s garbage. I give up. Right.
And no matter how nicely we phrase it, like, this is a really interesting I would give a little paragraph, right? This was I was compelled by your voice. This was very interesting. However, this isn’t a fit for our list at this time.
And we wish you well. Right. It’s horrible.
So anyway, whenever I decided to transition into running my own business, I knew that working with authors and potential authors early in their process to really ground themselves in the needs and goals for their specific book projects to develop a really specific, responsive publishing plan was how I wanted to spend my time. That was about August 2019 and have been going strong ever since. You were in a place where you kept having to like send out these rejection letters for years, breaking your heart.
And you’re like, I know that that if there was one stop right before here that could kind of help direct traffic and say, listen, here’s what to do instead, here’s how to know the right thing to do. You could actually, you know, save a lot of heartbreak and also help people get published and choose the right route for what they wanted. So I love that.
I love that you saw that there was like a need and you just kind of jumped in. I’m doing this. This is this is my calling.
I need to help these people. I get really inspired by and fired up by other people’s kind of creativity and creative ideas. So I love talking to authors and potential authors about kind of their project idea and what they’re thinking.
And so it was particularly and personally for me. Soul crushing like the thousand letters that you send out. Right.
So, yes. Well, let me ask you, let me ask you a side effect of this now is so when I started a podcast, I now have conversations with people and I see episodes in the making. I’m like, oh, this would make a great episode.
Let’s talk about this. When you talk to people, just anybody, yeah, people who have no they’ve never said anything about writing a book. You’re like, oh, my God, you should write a book.
You should publish something about whatever you’re telling me. I never tell people they should write a book. OK, for a published book.
You know, so I just have a big mouth. So I’m just like, oh, you know, you should do. I’m captain unsolicited advice over here.
No, great. If you did. I’m really great at directing traffic.
I like what other people should do what you should do. You know, be great, but but I’m one of those like I feel sometimes people don’t see the value in what they’re what they’re sharing or what they’re what they’re working on to them. It’s just their life or their, you know, like whatever.
It’s it’s not a thing. But looking at it, that objectively like from the outside, you’re like, oh, wow, that’s a really inspiring story. Yeah, you know what would be great, right? So why don’t you why don’t you ever tell anybody do you feel like that’s a lot of pressure? Well, I think that.
So like writing and publishing a book are different things. OK, writing a book is a creative process and publishing a book is a business enterprise. So.
Depending on how people are connecting with that, some people just like they don’t they’re not that into long form content. OK. And they don’t care to do it.
Like some people know and I know, but I’m sure some people don’t like to read. So, you know, some people don’t like to write. And they’re they communicate best in podcasts or in video or, you know, whatever.
So I wouldn’t I never tell people you should write. Oh, OK. OK, maybe what maybe the way that I share is OK, this is incredible content.
OK, how are you communicating that to your audience? And I think, you know, kind of to transition into how having a book, having a published book can support businesses and entrepreneurs, if that’s something. If an entrepreneur is interested, has some long form content or is interested in creating some long form content, a book can be a fabulous way to kind of capture that content and package it for their reader or for their audience and potentially turn it into a profit, a revenue stream as well. I love that you just broke it down to the writing the book and the publishing the book.
So to me, in my mind, because I know nothing about this, it’s all one big thing. Yeah. Like, why would you write a book and then not share it? Or, you know, you know, they obviously are like one big thing.
But you’re you’re absolutely correct in that those are two completely different processes and somebody who enjoys one may not be interested in the other. Right. I guess it’s kind of like a puzzle piece.
You have the writing the book and then the publishing the book. And you want to fit with the various types of publishing. You want to fit your writing piece into the right spot so that you can, like, then carry on in a fully functional way.
One thing that you just said, somebody might not be interested in creating long form content or creating a writing. But what if like they have content that’s maybe in different formats or they have a lot of like maybe blog posts or things like that that could be consolidated into one thing and maybe they just need help kind of sewing it all together. One hundred percent.
One of the reasons that I love working with entrepreneurs and business people who are like kind of heart centered and, you know, really in their work through passion and to help people in many ways that that can look like is because they one already are thinking about audience. You know, the key to success in writing and publishing a book. So it’s critical to both of those pieces is understanding exactly who you’re writing for.
And there are some analogs in the business world, you know, when you’re thinking and identifying exactly who you’re serving. So the question about who you’re writing for can be an extension of the kind of questioning and thinking that we as business people do when we’re identifying who our ideal client is and who our ideal audience is. And so, you know, that is something fabulous that I think all entrepreneurs have going for them when they’re approaching the idea of potentially wanting to write and publish a book.
If you have a lot of content already existing, you can absolutely utilize that content as a foundation for a book that you write. And a lot of entrepreneurs have a lot of content if they’re doing any kind of content based marketing. Or in their trainings, they’ve got a lot of things written down.
I would encourage anyone who is considering utilizing this, their body of work, repackaging it into a book to first set that aside for the moment and kind of go back to think strategically about what it is that would serve their clients or what they specifically want to write a book about. So it could be that once you get into specifically what you want your book to be about and how it will serve the people you’re writing it for, when that’s clear, then you can begin to kind of pull and organize content and see like where the holes might be and do some rewriting. If that appeals to you, great.
But I wouldn’t start with like letting the content that was generated lead because then what I find is that you get like kind of an amalgam of content that is useful individually but can be confusing for a reader altogether. So there has to be a strategy that leads the process versus the content leading the process. Right, exactly.
Let’s talk about what are the benefits of for a business owner to publish a book? Like why would this be a goal of a business owner? Sure. So we can publish like you can publish either self publish or publish traditionally. And a little bit later in our conversation, I can kind of tease out what those differences are.
But either way that you end up publishing, it can be really useful for entrepreneurs because kind of the body of your body of work is now available to give to clients. So instead of or kind of to support perhaps discovery calls and like a lot of the getting to know you factor, you can get no like trust pretty quickly because people can read your content on their own time. So I think that that can be really useful for business people.
It also in our current world is kind of instant credibility. Some people want to publish a book so that they have author in their tagline. There’s nothing wrong with that.
That just is the world that we’re in. So even if you don’t aren’t compelled in some way to like, you haven’t had a lifelong dream of writing a book, but you think it could be useful to your clients and you’d like to be able to say you’re an author. I think that’s a perfectly appropriate reason for a business person to publish a book.
And it can also be an additional revenue stream. This is all in the business world. There are some sunk costs associated.
It takes a certain kind of publishing plan and marketing team to make hundreds of thousands of dollars from a published book. But people who write books and are marketing them either independently if they self publish or with the help of a publishing house, if they traditionally publish, do generally net some ongoing revenue and that can be great. Is it the easiest way to monetize your content? Probably not.
Is it the most rewarding? Yes, for some. So that’s a decision that each person needs to make for themselves. We have covered the benefits like why somebody wants to start this process.
Tell me what the difference is or what self publishing means and when and if that’s a good option for an entrepreneur. As I mentioned earlier, publishing is the kind of business enterprise of publishing a book is a business enterprise. So the person who publishes the book invests the money in producing and marketing the book.
So producing and marketing can include editing various levels, designing a cover, typesetting the book, which means like transferring it from a manuscript into a book design, printing the book. If that’s something that’s being done and it’s not digital only and distributing the book, which is how the book gets out to your audience physically. Like I’m going to print it and hold it in a warehouse.
And then if bookstores or an individual client orders it, I’m going to send it to them. That’s distribution. And then also marketing the book, which is letting people know that your book is out there.
So a publisher does all of those things. So when you self publish, it means that you are responsible for doing all of those things. Got it.
If you are working with a traditional publisher of the various ways, they are responsible for doing all of those things supposedly. You will have to help with the marketing. OK.
To circle back to self-publishing. We all like think that in the mele of our kind of working knowledge, many of us know like you can self publish on Amazon through Kindle. You can self publish like Barnes and Nobles has a self-publishing arm.
There are there are several ways, several kind of companies who facilitate a self-publishing model and make it pretty easy and quick, depending on what you want for your final product. But you as the you as the person who is self-publishing your book, you don’t have to do all the editing and design and you don’t have to do it all yourself. There are people who have built their businesses around helping folks who self publish, complete those tasks.
But you are the one who is essentially responsible for OK, getting it from manuscript to whatever its final form is and then selling it. OK, so you can you can write it. You can hire an editor.
You can hire a graphic designer. One hundred percent. I write all this.
You can hire a packager who helps you do the whole thing. Yeah, you’re the project manager. Right.
Or you can do it yourself. So it all just depends on what your what your goal is. For the look and feel of the book and the resources you have available and your capability.
So self-publishing is a great can be a great fit for entrepreneurs who who are used, who want their books to be available on a pretty quick timeline. So, you know, you have your own you have your control over the schedules. The actual manufacturing of a self-published book is really quick, so you have a lot more control over timing.
So if you want your content available quickly, self-publishing can be a great fit. If you already have a platform for sales, that’s pretty strong. You have a lot of clients and a big following and you’re already selling things and you have a built in audience.
You can get a pretty good pickup on sales for self-publishing kind of right off the bat. And if your clients access information this way, like if they’re going to download things onto a Kindle or if they if this is an easy fix for them in terms of access, self-publishing can be a great fit. If you want to utilize the book as a tool to advance your business in a certain way, self-publishing can be a great fit for you.
So, for instance, I worked with a client who she owns and runs like 18 hardware stores and she’s like moving and shaking and doing all these things. And she wants to she wants to have a published book to sell at her speaking gigs. I loved her clarity because she wasn’t fired up about the process of writing the book.
She just wanted to get that done efficiently and well. But like that’s not where her heart was singing. She wanted to have a published book that she could sell at her speaking gigs.
And that is what she did by self-publishing. She has a distribution channel already because she runs 18 hardware stores. So for her, though, she could have gotten a traditional publishing deal, surely.
Self-publishing was the perfect fit because she was able to, you know, utilize her skills, have the book written. It will soon be self-published and it’ll be available immediately and she can distribute it in her stores and sell it. So that is an example of how self-publishing when you’re using the book.
Really specifically to to advance your business in certain ways is a great fit. So she wanted it as an asset for building credibility and having an income stream or just something for people to walk away with. Correct.
And when the people arranging the speaking gigs asked, as they always did, do you have a book you’d like us to sell? She was tired of saying no. Oh, OK. She had another she had another incentive there.
She wanted to say yes. That is the perfect, I think, kind of picture of how identifying what’s important to you early can help kind of rocket you through to what’s going to be ultimately really useful and serve you in your business. And I would also I always say this because I think it’s really important.
And I hope that all of your listeners can take a moment to just really hear this. Self-publishing can be a wonderful tool. Do not think it is the only way you can get published if in your true heart desires is to have a book available in all of the bookstores and be on a New York Times bestseller list or whatever the case may be.
If this is really your heart’s desire, that’s possible with the appropriate publishing plan. Whenever you’re asking yourself, how do I want to publish my book or what makes sense for me? Don’t think about what you’ll accept. Think about what you want.
Like, don’t make your dreams smaller because it seems easier and more approachable. I think that self-publishing and traditional publishing are both wonderful tools for entrepreneurs. And if your heart’s desire is to be published by a traditional publisher from what I’ve seen and in my known experience, you will never feel successful self-publishing, no matter how many books you sell.
You could sell 25,000. You’ll be rolling in money. But you could sell 25,000 books on your own and self-publishing.
And it will still be kind of haunting you. But I’m not, you know, but I really wish X. So early on in the early stages, when you’re creating your publishing strategy, be honest with yourself about what you want. What do you really want? There are no right or wrong answers.
Only what’s real and true for you. Everyone’s publishing journey and writing journey is going to be different. It’s as different as we are as humans and as different as our businesses are and our clients are.
For some people, like the ones you just mentioned, who for them, having a published book is like their goal. Are they looking for some validation? Are they looking for somebody to say, yes? Yes. Yes, I think this is a good.
And self-publishing, while you could have that conviction and say, I know people need to see this. Some people need to hear it from somebody else to say, yeah, I think this is good. You should do that.
I want to put money into this. I want to invest in this and help you do this. Is that what they’re looking for? I think that all people who are writing their first book need to have and crave and need to have reflected back to them that it’s possible for them to do that.
But they already have what they need inside of them to create this work and that what they have to say is valuable. I think we all need to hear that though. One hundred percent.
But you know, being an entrepreneur and writing a book, there are a lot of parallels because mainly in my mind, for a long time, it’s a very it can be a very solitary process for a long time. Both of the things start with an idea and your self-belief that it can be something and that’s it. And it’s that self-belief.
And that as you’re working in silence and laboring behind the scenes, like it’s this creative process. It can be very solitary. You’re working a lot in isolation to make what’s in your mind real in the physical world and getting support and being in community with people while you’re in that all the time, really.
But while you’re in this initial kind of development stage can make the difference between fizzling out and getting tired and like things stalling and moving forward to the next step. And again, that is what having a publishing strategy can help you navigate through because instead of it being, you know, like a house size block of just tasks, right, like first I have to get an outline and then I have to write 20,000 words and then I have to find a publisher. And it’s all this like mishmash of things that need to be done.
You can feel confident. OK, I know what I’m writing. I know who I’m writing it to.
I know what my goals are. And I know this very next step and folks who work with me are in community with other entrepreneurs.
