246: Publish Your Book Like a Pro with Michele DeFilippo

23
Sep

Michele DeFilippo, Founder of 1106 Design, is driven by a passion to help authors publish their books like a pro by correcting misinformation about self-publishing and offering professional guidance.

We learn about Michele’s Professional Publishing Blueprint, which includes structural editing, copyediting, cover design, typesetting, proofreading, and the final print and e-book launch. She explains how this framework helps authors produce books that meet traditional publishing standards while retaining full control over their work and royalties. Michele emphasizes that professional publishing services ensure a polished, market-ready book, allowing authors to focus on their message and audience.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Publish Your Book Like a Pro with Michele DeFilippo

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Michele DeFilippo, the founder of 1106 Design, a company helping non-fiction authors get professionally published. Michele, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, Steve. I appreciate being here.

Well, let’s start with my favorite question, which is, what is your personal “Why?” And what are you doing to manifest it in your business?

Okay, well, that’s a great question, because I started doing these podcasts in January. And the reason for it is, was that I just couldn’t stand anymore, all of the misinformation that’s swirling around in self publishing. And the field has become very complicated, unnecessarily so, in the last 20 years. And the complications have not been to the benefit of the author. So I conquered my fear of public speaking, and I’m just going to speak out now and tell people what we do and how we do it and what authors should think about when they go out searching for a service provider for their book.

Okay, so the terminology can be really important here. You mentioned service provider, you mentioned confusion that authors have. So what is the confusion? What is a service provider? You know, people also talk about traditional publishers. You also talk about professional publishing and there’s book service. What do these terms mean and what is the confusion that is being created?

Okay, well the major, I have to just kind of give a little history first to explain what I’m what I’m where I’m going with this. In traditional publishing, we’re all familiar with that. A traditional publisher will buy the rights to produce the manuscript for an author. They will hire the experts to produce the book and then when a book is sold, they will take most of the money from sales in order to recoup that investment. It’s a solid business decision. They have always been and still are known for producing top-quality books, and the author pays nothing under that business model. So that has always been the way publishing has been run for hundreds of years. When self-publishing first came on the scene in around 20 something years ago, Amazon created an earthquake in the publishing world. All of a sudden, it was possible for authors to produce their own books, distribute those books to the public without needing to go through a publisher first, and then reaping all of the profits from book sales when a book was sold. In the intervening 20 years, it’s gotten complicated. Now, if you go online and look for self-publishing assistants, you’re going to find self-publishing companies, hybrid publishers, independent publishing companies are now simply publishers. And what they’re doing is charging the author to produce the book and also taking some of their money on the back end when a book is sold. That’s not really advantageous to the author. The original self-publishing model was that the author would hire the experts, the author would be the publisher, and then in return for the author making that investment, the author would get all of the money from book sales. So it’s gotten all mixed up, and in many other ways too, and it’s not really working out too well for authors. And that’s why I decided to start speaking up about it.

So there are publishers that are not traditional publishers. They are kind of book service companies. Nevertheless, they still take part of the royalties as well as charging a fee?

Exactly. So I think authors need to ask, if you’re charging me to produce the book and you have no investment whatsoever in my book, why am I sharing my profits with you? It’s really not logical at all. So, the alternative to all this confusion is to use an author services company like mine. You could consider us project, publishing project managers to help you through the whole process and to assemble a team on your behalf to provide all the quality services you need. But we do not take any money out of your pocket when a book is sold. All of the revenue goes directly to you when you sell that book. And you have complete control over the process. You never cede control of your book or your book files or your distribution channels to anyone else. You’re in charge.

Yeah, that’s great. So what does it take to actually publish a book? So it’s kind of, I mean, I published a few books, so I kind of know the answer, but for the benefit of our listeners, how complex it is if I’m a self-published author and I have an idea, I have a plan, an outline, I’m creating this book. What kind of support do I need in order for this book to hit the proverbial shelves at Amazon or maybe at my regular bookstores?

Well, the first thing you need absolutely is for a book to be well prepared according to traditional publisher standards. And that’s what we do. Self-publishing has become highly misunderstood. Now, the narrative online is that the author should produce their own cover, they should format their own pages in Microsoft Word, they should do everything themselves, whether or not they have any experience at all. And of course, if they do and they don’t have any experience, then the result is never going to be the same level as professional work. So why should they spend money on professional work? Because buyers know the difference. What you create yourself without experience may look just fine to you, but buyers are familiar with bestselling books put out by major publishers. They instinctively know when a book is produced well and when it is not. And they have a lot of power. They can leave reviews for you. And if they leave a bad review, then you can’t ever get that taken off Amazon. It’s there forever. So it’s really risky to do things yourself if you’re not qualified to do those tasks.

So what are these tasks? You know, maybe an ignorant person writes the book and then it’s printed and that’s it. Maybe there’s a cover. So what are the things that go into a professional level publishing?

Well, the first thing an author should do, they have to do themselves, and that is research. Share on X Who’s going to be interested in their book? Who’s your market? Who do you want to attract? Who are you giving advice to? Nonfiction books are pretty easy to determine that because you can identify a problem that a lot of people are experiencing, and then you can go about and solve that problem in your book, and that automatically finds your target audience, and it makes it easy for you to market that book.

After that, the next service that we would normally start with is manuscript editing, and we will start with an editorial evaluation to just get a big picture view of the quality of the manuscript, the quality of your writing, and where you might need a little bit of assistance. And then after that, we would go into almost always copy editing, because most business authors especially are pretty good at organizing material and writing pretty well. So what an editor does is fixes the things that you didn’t notice in your own writing, maybe offer some fresh eyes. Because when you’ve been working a manuscript over and over again, you stop seeing it after a while and you kind of can lose your way a little bit. And an editor who has fresh eyes will go in there and say, wait a minute, you didn’t quite explain yourself there. I think you need to do something else. And so that's the benefit of editing. Share on X After that, we launch into the design phases. Covered design is especially important. Some artists, designers will ask the author, the first question they ask is, what do you want? And that sounds like a great question, but the real question authors should be asking is what do my buyers want? What do the competitive titles on the market to mine look like? What are people expecting when they are looking for a good business book? Different kinds of business books have different looks to them. And you can easily see that if you just go on Amazon and you just search for best-selling books in your category. Sales books and business books like yours behind you there are often red and black. I don’t know why that developed but it did so now, that would be a good rule for you to follow to your book looks as good as a best-selling book.

Let’s talk about targeting the book, okay, that’s important. That’s before we even write the book, it’s important that there’s a clear target market that is gonna want to have that problem solution if it’s a non-fiction book. Then you talked about obviously creating the manuscript and then editing, structural editing, I think you said, which is basically big picture, is this book structured well? What are the changes that needs to happen? I know because I went through that and I was kind of shocked how many mistakes I made and how the structure, how uneven it was and how the chapters didn’t flow together and I had to fix that. And then you talk about the copy editing. So when the structure is fixed, then you have to get this text flowing really well, and be smooth, and logical, and clear. Everything is explained well. And then we talked about cover design, obviously important. So what else are we done? So we got the book is edited, copy edited, cover design. Are we ready to go to the printer or some other things?

Oh, no. And that’s where self-publishing advice that you find online has really gone off the rails. The next thing you’re likely to find online is that you shouldn’t format your manuscript in Microsoft Word. That’s not how major publishers design book pages. There’s a whole field called typesetting, book page composition it’s called. And it’s very detailed, very meticulous, and a lot of attention is paid to how those pages are arranged, the fonts that are used, the line spacing that’s used, how each paragraph, each heading, each subheading, each sidebar, each quotation, whatever elements your book contains, they have to be designed in order to look nicely done. The other reason we do that is for reading comprehension, because if your book, if you format it in Word, it’s going to have spacing issues that are very distracting to the reader. All of those little distractions add up and they prevent the reader from really concentrating on your message. So you need a good book designer, a good typesetter, not a formatter, who understands all these rules and knows how to apply them to produce a book that looks as good as a bestseller for you.

Okay. So we got the typesetting after the cover design. Because often I think the typesetters take their clues from the cover as well. So they want a harmonious product, right, with the cover.

Yes.

So, what else? So I’ve got the editing done, the copy editing done, the cover, inside, outside. Are we then done? We’re ready to go to the printer or there’s still some more work to be done?

Not quite. Our next step is proofreading because for some reason, after a book is properly typeset, a ton of mistakes show up that were not visible in Word. It’s truly remarkable. But we always finish formatting the pages and then we send it off to you and to a proofreader so that we can have one last look at the final product before it is uploaded to a printer. It’s remarkable because the proofreader is not only looking for errors that everyone missed along the way, proofreader is looking for the quality of the typesetting, the adherence to the book page composition rules that I just mentioned. This is it. This is the final chance to make sure the final product is as good as it can be.

The proofreaders, are they working in a PDF document or a hard copy?

Usually, a PDF document anymore. We used to ship hard copies of books around the country, and that was really cumbersome, as you might imagine, and once in a while one would get lost. So as soon as it became possible to work on PDFs, we started doing that paperless workflow.

Okay, so that’s good to know that they need to work from the PDF, not from a draft pre-typeset version because there could be other changes.

Absolutely. Now you should proofread the book as many times as you think is necessary before you begin production. It doesn’t eliminate the need for you to do that. But this is the final proofreading before production.

Yeah. I mean, that’s a very tricky thing. I mean even with the proofreader there are some typos that sneak in somehow that we find later and that can be very irritating.

Even after we finish, there’s a joke in publishing that when you open that box of books and you lovingly hold the first copy of your book in your hand, it will automatically open to the page with the typo. It’s just a rule.

I can relate to that.

So the good thing is now we have print-on-demand printing, so it’s very easy to fix that.

Yeah, you just upload the new version and hopefully not too many people spot the previous version’s typo.

Right.

All right. So we talked about traditional publishing, self-publishing, and then professional publishing when someone uses a book service company like yours, who will make sure that everything is done professionally, but you don’t need to go to traditional publishing. So, what are the benefits of, even the benefits of traditional publishing, if you can get the same quality book outside of traditional publishing, why would someone wait for two years to get their book published and work at the pace of the traditional publisher and then forego the royalties, or most of the royalties? How does it even make sense?

Well, I think it comes down to how busy the author is. Well, in the first place, authors don’t choose traditional publishing. Traditional publishers choose authors. So, it’s not something you can just go out and shop for. I mean, you can send your manuscript to an agent and have it shopped around, but the publisher, the traditional publisher, makes the final decision about whether or not to accept your book. And typically, traditional publishers, the big publishing houses anyway, want to work with authors who already have a huge platform, the talk show hosts, the superstars, the celebrities of all kinds, because, not because they’re bad people, but because they have a lot of expenses. They have distribution networks with the physical bookstore set up. They have to deal with returns when somebody returns a book to a bookstore. They have warehouses and all of that. So they have a lot of expenses to cover. They can’t afford to risk working with an author who is not pretty much guaranteed to sell a lot of books.

So, okay, but then if the traditional publishers would not find my book publishing worthy, then why would it make sense for me to do it? So if they judge me inadequate as an author, why would I try to prove them wrong?

Well, in traditional publishing, there’s another issue that comes into play, and that is they will produce your book and they’ll promote it a little bit or push it for six to nine months. Then they’re off to the next thing. So if they lose interest after a while, your book will go to the backlist and then nothing will happen. When you self-publish, you can promote your book for as long as you want to. It can be, I have a little book that we’ll talk about later, you can use it to promote yourself or your business or your consulting practice, your speaking practice, whatever it might be. You can use it indefinitely and you can change it up anytime you want to. So, it all remains within your control and you don’t have to depend on anybody else to decide whether or not it’s still interesting.

So if I traditionally publish, then I cannot advertise my book? It’s only the publisher to do it?

You can absolutely. In fact, publishers expect the author to market their books. So that kind of argues, well, if I’m going to do all the marketing or most of the marketing and you’re going to still keep most of the money. Why shouldn’t I do this all for myself and work with my own?

Not economical. So yeah, that’s a good point. So I would then have to rely on the publisher to do it because for me, it would be prohibitive to do it. And then probably none of us will do it. And then basically the book is just going to disappear in the bellows of the Amazon monster. It’s not a good thing. Okay, so what about hybrid publishing? What is hybrid? People throw around these terms, hybrid publishing. Is it the same thing as the kind of the professional, the one taking the royalties, part of the royalties? Is that the hybrid?

Hybrid publishing is the latest entry into the book publishing scene. We started out with self-publishing companies, and it wasn’t long before they got a bad reputation. And so, a rebranding occurred, if you want to call it that. Publishers started calling themselves hybrid publishers, but it’s the same thing. They charge the author to produce the book, and they take money out of the author’s pocket on the back end. Now, to be fair, some hybrid publishers actually do participate in some way with the expenses, the might, for example, charge the author for book design ad production and editing, but then they’ll maybe pick up some of the tab on marketing. So if you can find that kind of hybrid publisher and you believe that what they offer is a fair trade in return for the extra royalty they will take of your pocket when a book is sold, then that’s shared risk. So, that’s kind of okay. But a lot of people are calling themselves hybrid publishers and they’re not doing anything for the author except except taking the money out of their pocket.

So what is the KPI? So if I’m thinking about writing a book and publishing it, what kind of KPI should I have in mind in order to make it successful? Because just to come up with the idea, oh, I’m going to have a business card and it’s going to open a bunch of doors and I’m going to be successful. I don’t think it happens for everyone. Some people write the book and then the book ends up with five reviews and four stars or whatever and people just stop buying the book and it never goes anywhere. And if you start with the two reviews, then it might die on the line. So is there like some best practice rules of thumb that if I’m an author, that I want to go through a professional service I should shoot for?

Well, in my opinion, the very first and most important step for marketing is to create a product that is worth marketing. So, because like I said, buyers are smart. But after that, I talked to any number of people and there are all sorts of definitions for success. We’ve done books for older authors who just want to leave a legacy behind, their life story for their family and friends. They don’t care if they ever sell a book. Other authors just want to use the book for their own sales prospects to attract customers and so forth. Again, retail sales are not important to that model. But if you want to sell books, a really serious marketing effort is necessary because we all see hundreds or thousands of messages every day on our phones and on our screens. So you have to get people’s attention. Nobody can buy a product that they haven’t heard about. So, if I have talked to authors who say, oh, I’m just a writer. I’m an introvert. I want to I want to produce this book, but I don’t want to market it. I can’t get out there in front of people and market it. Well, you should really rethink that, because if that’s really who you are and that’s what you’re willing to do, not much is going to happen.

That’s unfortunately or fortunately true. It still has to be promoted and even the good service needs to be touted about so that people are even aware of it. What do you recommend, Michele, if there is someone listening to this and they are, first of all, who are the people that most benefit from a non-fiction book? This is kind of my first question. And the second question is, what should they do when they have this desire to write this book? Are you the first call for them? Or first, they have to talk to someone else to actually formulate the idea. So where does the service start and where does it end?

Well, typically authors come to us when they have a completed manuscript. And that’s when we’ll determine what level of editing is needed next. And sometimes it’s copy editing, sometimes it’s a more substantive editing. But the business authors are usually pretty good writers and professional people are pretty good writers. So that’s not typically a barrier. But if you need help writing the book, you haven’t started yet, all you have is a book idea, I can still talk to you and I can recommend some good people who may be able to help.

Okay, like ghostwriters or coaches?

Yeah, ghostwriters are fairly expensive and more so depending on how much you want them to do. Ghostwriting can be anywhere from $30,000 to $100,000. And that’s really kind of difficult to make up no matter how many books you sell. But some people still do it. I know writing coaches. I know substantive editors who are like a combination of a substantive editor and a writing coach. So, they can get you through the whole process as to where you have a final manuscript that’s ready for copy editing.

What about voice recording a book? Is that a thing?

Oh, yeah. We can help people with audiobook narration. You know, I know AI is becoming a big part of that. I still hear the difference between AI narration and professional narrator. So my advice is always to go with a professional narrator for your audiobook. Now, it’s one thing to have an AI do a short YouTube video or to do that yourself, but if you’re asking for people’s attention for nine or ten or twelve hours, you don’t want to annoy them. You want to make it as easy as possible for them to listen to you.

What if someone doesn’t consider themselves a good writer, but they are a good talker, and they want to voice record the draft of the manuscript. Is this a possibility?

Well, I think there’s this software out there that will let you speak your manuscript and it will type it. I think, what is it, Dragon or something? I seem to remember that name, Dragon software. And once you get it down on paper, it can always be fixed by an editor. But if you don’t like to type or you don’t like to write per se, and you think it will capture your authentic voice to speak it, that’s fine. It’ll need a little more cleanup than if you sit down and write it.

Yeah, I find that the writing really forces one to clarify their thinking.

Yes.

It’s easy to talk and it’s much harder to write. Somehow on paper it looks, yeah, it’s going to be more organized. Okay, so very good. So, Michele, sounds like you have a great framework that you put together to help the authors who already have a finished manuscript, at least draft manuscript, to polish it into a good book, a professional-level book. So, if people would like to learn more about your craft and would like to connect with you, where should they go?

They should go to 1106design.com. And if they go there, they will see I will offer a free copy of my book, Published Like the Pros, in return for an email address. And you can also click a button and request a free consultation. We do not engage in high-pressure sales at all. We will just have a friendly conversation with you to see if we’re a good fit. And I promise you, you will not start getting three emails a day in your inbox after you contact us. We don’t believe in that sort of marketing either. We’re a serious business. We like to work for serious authors who are professionals themselves and together we’ll make a great book for you.

Yeah, fantastic. Well, it sounds like this is a great opportunity. So if you’re out there listening to this podcast and you’re thinking about writing that book that you always dreamed about, now you have a professional service that will make sure that it’s going to be a polish product in the end. So, Michele, thank you for sharing your secrets of the trade of self-publishing professionally and those of you that enjoyed this episode, please like and follow us on YouTube and review us on Apple Podcast. We love to hear from you and stay tuned because we have a couple of episodes every week coming out with great entrepreneurs like Michele DeFilippo, the Founder of 1106 Design. Michele, thanks for coming and thanks for listening.

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

 

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