#478 The 3 publishing myths holding writers back from success and how to fix them, with 60-time author Terry Whalin.

Have you ever dreamed of writing a book but felt overwhelmed by the myths and challenges of publishing?

Many aspiring authors believe that getting a book published guarantees success, but the reality is far more complex. In this episode, we debunk common publishing myths with Terry Whalin, an acquisitions editor, bestselling author, and industry expert with decades of experience. Discover the real path to publishing success and how to take control of your own writing journey.

1. Learn why taking 100% responsibility for your book’s success is the key to thriving in publishing.
2. Discover the difference between self-publishing, traditional publishing, and independent publishing, and how to choose the best path for you.
3. Uncover actionable strategies to market your book effectively, build your author platform, and avoid common publishing pitfalls.

Don’t let publishing myths hold you back! Tune in now to learn how to take charge of your writing career and set yourself up for success.

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KEY POINTS AND TIMESTAMPS:

02:59 - The Wake-Up Moment: Taking Responsibility for Book Success

07:21 - The Power of Consistency in Writing and Blogging

13:30 - Self-Publishing vs. Traditional Publishing: Weighing the Options

18:39 - Debunking Publishing Myths: Making Money from Books

25:31 - Actionable Steps for Book Marketing and Promotion

27:25 - Are You a Writer Only If You Publish a Book?

29:16 - Turning Blog Entries into a Book

30:56 - Where to Find More Resources on Publishing

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MEMORABLE QUOTE:

"Talk less and listen more. There's a lot of wisdom that we can gain from other people rather than talking ourselves."

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VALUABLE RESOURCES:

Mastery Seekers Tribe: https://masteryseekerstribe.com

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Want to be a guest on Personal Development Mastery?

Send Agi Keramidas a message on PodMatch, here: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/personaldevelopmentmastery

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Personal development inspiration, insights, and actions to implement for living with purpose.

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Transcript

Agi Keramidas: 0:00

Have you ever dreamed of writing a book but felt overwhelmed by the myths and challenges of publishing? Then this episode, 478 is for you. Welcome to personal development mastery, the podcast that helps intelligent, busy men and women develop self mastery and discover their calling so you can thrive in a fulfilling, purposeful life. I'm your host, Agi Keramidas. By listening to this episode, you are going to discover some common publishing myths. You will learn why taking 100% responsibility for your book's success is the key to thriving in publishing, and you will discover how to choose the best path for you between traditional publishing, independent and self publishing. Before we dive in, remember, my fellow mastery seeker. If you want to go deeper into the episode, join us at our free community. Mastery seekers tribe, for more, go to mastery seekers tribe.com, now let's get started today. It is my real pleasure to speak with Terry Whalin. Terry, you are an acquisitions editor and a prolific author with over 60 books to your name, with a rich background as a former literary agent and magazine editor. You share your insights on your blog, which boasts over 1700 posts. You are passionate about guiding others on their writing and publishing journeys, empowering them with realistic expectations and actionable steps to succeed. Terry, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to speak with you

Terry Whalin: 1:56

today. Agi, wonderful to talk to you today. I'm

Agi Keramidas: 1:59

looking forward to exploring some of the common publishing myths with you today, and also some other elements of writing and publishing a book, as I'm quite sure that many of the mastery seekers listening have thought, let's I will just put it like that, the idea of writing a book has crossed their mind. Maybe they have done more than that, but I have the this kind of feeling. So before we go there, what there is one thing I wanted to ask of you regarding your your story or a transition that you mentioned having a as an author, a wake up moment. So can you tell us what happens? So let's start with that to get a little bit of background. Yeah,

Terry Whalin: 2:53

sure, yeah. I had a little literary agency in in Scottsdale, Arizona a few years ago, and in 2007 mark, Victor Hansen, the co author on Chicken Soup for the Soul, invited me to come out to Los Angeles. He was having mega book marketing University, and I went out there. I took pitches from people during the conference, but I also sat there with all 400 people that were sitting there, we had these big notebooks, and we were going through it, listening to different speakers and everything. And at that point in my life, Agi, I'd written about 50 books for traditional publishers, so I'd gotten advances. Publishers were making pretty books, they were putting them in the bookstore. All that kind of thing was going on. But earning wise, my books were in the negative category because either once or you sometimes quarterly, the publisher will send you a statement about how your book is doing. And all of my statements were in the minus category. I wasn't making any additional money other than the advance, whatever it was that I got. So I wasn't sure what what I was doing wrong in that in that process. So I listened to these speakers, and one of the speakers was Jack Canfield, the other co author on Chicken Soup for the Soul and Jack, has written this book that I have on my shelf up there called the success principles. And it is about he studied success. What does it take to be successful? The very first success principle says that I will take 100% responsibility for my own success, and none of us want to take 100% responsibility. We want somebody else to do it. We want our publisher, our publicist, a marketing person, somebody other than us. But during that event, I realized how little I. Was doing myself in order to promote my own books. Sure, I had a terry whalen.com website, but I I wasn't doing anything else. I wasn't, you know, I wasn't writing magazine articles or newspaper articles or blogs or really anything in order to be able to tell people about my book, and so I decided during this conference that I was going to take 100% responsibility for my own success. No matter what my publisher did, I was going to be doing something. And so back then that I started blogging on a regular basis. That's why my blog has over 1700 entries, and about a year ago, I found an article that said that I was one of the top 27 content producers in the blog sphere. I mean, they say there's over 600 million blogs, so there's a lot of blogs, but they chose me in that article, along with Seth Godin and Ryan Holiday and well known people like that, because of all the volume of material that I have out there. And so I really started to take take action to tell people about my book. And you know, really, what we've learned over the years is that somebody has to hear about your book, seven, eight, maybe even a dozen times before they actually decide to buy that book. And so, so that's part of, part of the reason publishers are always so interested in your social media numbers and what what you're doing. It's not that those sell books particularly, but they do show people the book, tell them about the benefits of the book, and sort of nudge them along in that process of actually, actually buying the book. And so it was really a wake up moment for me. So when social media came along, I started doing that. That's why I have 175,000 followers on X or Twitter. I have over 19,400 connections on LinkedIn. And I started actively doing something to to tell people about about my book, and that's that's why we're here on this podcast. I've started doing guest podcasting like this,

Agi Keramidas: 7:22

assuming 100% responsibility for one's success, or generally, for everything is it's paramount. And you know, there is before I go into the publishing, since you mentioned your your blog and this volume, you know this is you've been blogging for a very long time, since 2004 if I'm not mistaken, so, and what's impressive is the consistency, really, for all these, you know, 2021, years You have been, if I'm correct, blogging every week consistently. Hence the, you know, 1700s post. So what I wanted to ask you specifically about that is, what is the ingredient for that consistency? Where do you think this consistency comes from in this case, so perhaps the listener can also find some element. Because, you know, consistency is not something that everyone can do, especially, you know, for this very long periods of time as you have, that's

Terry Whalin: 8:37

a great question. Agi, I think, I think my consistency comes from from several factors. One, I have a specific audience that I'm that I'm writing to my blog. I'm not just writing for everybody. I'm really writing for people that are interested in in publishing and writing and communication, all those kinds of things. So I have a, I have a very target audience that I'm trying to reach. And then I I also do it as a it's kind of a way of documenting my own, my own journey in this in this process. So that's that's another reason for my consistency. It's like, oh, that was a strange experience. I bet a lot of people have strange experience like that, and maybe they would identify with me if I wrote about my strange experience. And so I do that too. You know, I meet people at a Writers Conference, and they ask me a question. I figure they're not the only person with that question, there are probably lots of other people that have that question, so if I answer that question, that'll help lots of people out there. So that's that's part of my intention, and why I've been so consistent in in doing these, these blog entries. There. Every week. And I have, I have a little subscription list. I have about 400 people that get get those entries on their email.

Agi Keramidas: 10:09

Let me this is great, but let me take you back. There was something more. I will ask you something more specifically. Over the all these years that you've been blogging, have you ever found yourself in a position that I don't really want, I don't feel like doing it this week, and if that has ever happened, actually, that's what I was looking for to find the what keeps that that consistency when you know life happens, or with emotional turmoil happens, or whatever else might be them. You're

Terry Whalin: 10:46

absolutely you're absolutely right there. There are times that I do not want to do it, but I do it anyway. And so that's that, I think that's the key, is there's, there's a lot of stuff in the writing world that I don't really want to do but I know that it's necessary to do it, and so I do it anyway. And I think that's that's one of the keys is whether you feel like doing it or not, you still made a decision to do this. So I think you should figure out how to do it and get it done. And, you know, I've, I've written these blog posts all kinds of places. I mean, I I travel, I've written, I've written them on, you know, my little alpha, smart that I have. It's old technology. It's a, it's a full size keyboard that holds like, over 100 pages of text. And, you know, I bought it on eBay for like, 30 bucks. So, you know, there's, there's a lot of these tools figure, Figure out how, what, how to get the right tool for you. But I've, I've written stuff, you know, on an airplane, all kinds of places through the years. And it's just because I I know I need to get it done, so I just pull it out and get it done.

Agi Keramidas: 12:12

Absolutely. Thank you for this. And it reminded me, you know, the this I mentioned that in specific what I said, it's what Steven Pressfield caused, the resistance. It's that, you know, the resistance to sit down on your desk and do the work anyway. I will leave this for now, and because I really want to discuss some of the publishing myths. What I would like to do as an introduction, because obviously, we're mostly talking about the traditional publishing. So let me start with asking you, what is your perspective on self publishing versus traditional publishing, and how can one determine which path is the best for them?

Terry Whalin: 13:07

Well, I think, I think you should explore all of it. You know, is as an option. And sure, self publishing is exploding, I understand that more and more books are getting better in the self publishing area, there's, there's a lot of junk, frankly, that's published in the in the self publishing area. And people are all on their own when they do that. So, you know, they they get involved in designing a cover and and maybe they don't design a very good cover. They they write their own back cover. They don't know how to do their barcode. That's on the back of the book that they do that wrong. I mean, there's, there's all kinds of what. They don't get an editor to help them really shape the words to to pull it together. There's, there's a lot involved in really doing an excellent, excellent book through the years. So, you know, sure, self publishing is an option. They say that, on average, the average self published book sells, say, 200 copies over the lifetime of the book. Okay? So if you want to go that route, you know, more more power to you, you know. And then traditional publishing is at the other end. You basically sign over all your rights and control of the book to somebody else. They pick the title, they pick the cover, they get the book out there into the bookstore. All those kinds of things happen on their side. They're they're in control. But I've, I've seen mistakes that they make in the in the process as well. So now. Nobody's infallible in this process. The middle ground in that, in those two extremes, is really kind of what we do at Morgan James, we're one of the top independent publishers in the country. The the author retains their rights to the book for one thing, but they give us exclusive right to sell it in the bookstore, whether it be the brick and mortar or the online bookstores, our books are sold into 98% of the bookstores in North America, including the brick and mortar stores. Amazon is a big customer of Morgan James, but they're only 24% of our overall business. So the way I look at it, you publish with Amazon, you're missing 76% of what we do for the book out there. I mean, we're, we're at, we sell@target.com for example, as well as all kinds of other other bookstores out there. So, you know, there is a middle ground, and we've been doing this for we're starting our 21st year as a publisher. We produced over 6000 titles, 29 times on the New York Times list, over 200 times on the Wall Street Journal list. You can't do that kind of thing if you're not selling books in the brick and mortar bookstores. So, you know, look at the track record of who it is you're going with. I mean, I have met authors Agi that have self published, and they've gone with a company that's hounded them and hounded them to to sign with them. But when you really look into that company. You know, they only sell books online. They sell no books in brick and mortar bookstores. I mean, I have met authors who have spent $20,000 self publishing their book, which is, which is criminal in the way I look at it, because they'll never earn back those $20,000 so, you know, try to be wise about what you're doing, whatever company you're working with. That's, that's one of the hints I give in the very first chapter of my my 10 publishing Miss book is, you know, use a tool like Google that you have to type that publishers name in and and the word complaints or scam and see, see what comes up. And if, if pages and pages of information come up, then that should be a warning to you, you know, not, not to go with that company. I mean,

Agi Keramidas: 17:35

due diligence when you work with someone is it's necessary. And you know something you were saying, it's very obvious from your answer. And actually, the word self publishing implies a lot when you think about it. So there is not, I don't want, let's not remain in this and let's move on. And actually, for someone that is following the traditional publishing, what the independent, which is more the brick and mortar, as you said, having your book in the bookstores, you wrote a book about the 10 publishing myths. So I would like to discuss maybe a couple of them. And I think the you already mentioned that you had so many books earlier on, before that event that you went on, and you were not making money out of them. So I believe that's one of the myths that you talk about, if probably the first one. So let's, let's talk about this. And if we have time, we can all I would also like to discuss one more, which I will probably leave that to you with, whatever you feel it's relevant. But let's talk about this. You know, some will say, now I think about it, and I laugh when you think, when I think about writing a book and making money of it, I think of someone like JK Rowling, or someone like that that really have earned a fortune from or you mentioned Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hanser, who have sold close to 1 billion books. So tell me about this making money from the book. How realistic is that? Well,

Terry Whalin: 19:30

it's very common that authors believe that they will make a lot of money from their book. But the reality is that you may make money from your book, but part of the reason you do a book is for the for the authority and the expertise that it it gives you. So that's, that's one of the reasons you want to, you want to do the book. And you know, I mean, you. You mentioned Mark Victor, Hansen and Jack Canfield, Agi people, people forget that those books that they they published were rejected. You know, like 160 times, it took them a long time to find anybody to publish their book. And once they found some a publisher that was a little publisher in Florida, they told their publisher that they were going to sell a million books in the first year, and their publisher laughed at them. They thought, How ridiculous is that they'd never sold a million copies anything at that point in their their existence. But you know, Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen followed what they called the Rule of five. So they got up every day and they said, Okay, we're going to do five things to tell people about our book. We're going to a newspaper article, a magazine article, a blog post, book signing, a radio interview, something to be telling people. And they they did that day after day, back to that consistency we were talking about earlier. And it did. It took them a year and a half to sell their first million copies of Chicken Soup for the Soul. I mean, you mentioned JK Rowling people. People forget JK Rowling had no idea about how publishing works or how this business works. I mean, she she was a single mom, you know that that had had no idea how publishing works, so she went to a library and looked up literary agents, and she found this litter agent called Christopher little, she said, Oh, that sounds like a children's agent. I'll send him. I'll send him my book. Well, Christopher little didn't do children's books. He was actually somebody that sold thrillers. You know, novels is what he did for a living. He told his assistant, just reject all these children's books because there's no money in children's books. Well, then this, this big black binder came into his office, and the assistant was intrigued with it, so she took that home and read that, and she said, Chris, I think I think you should do something with this book. See if, see if you can sell this. This is really a good book. So on the encouragement of his assistant, he sold the book for like, I think, a minimal kind of advance, like $1,000 to a to a publisher over there in the UK. They, in turn, sold it for like, a lot of money advance from Scholastic and the rest is history. What's happened with those Harry Potter books? I mean, JK Rowling didn't start out knowing what the scoop was about publishing either.

Agi Keramidas: 22:53

Let's go back to the someone writing a book. How realistic is it to expect to make money of it, or is it a matter of, as you said, the keeping promoting it five times a day, every day, until that happens? Well,

Terry Whalin: 23:12

that's, that's, that's part of the process is to, you know, be be consistent in in telling people about your book. And so what I did in in my 10 publishing myths book, there's, there's so much of the process that's outside of the author's control. I mean, I talk to authors all the time, they say, well, well, I build my I build my group of people on Facebook, or I build my group of people on LinkedIn or YouTube or whatever it is. Well, in the business, we call those platforms rented platforms, because I don't control Facebook, I don't control LinkedIn or YouTube. Matter of fact, unknowingly, I could violate their terms and get kicked off of those things tomorrow if they chose to do that. So that's really not a good place for authors to build their presence out there. I always encourage people to have their own website, their own blog, their own newsletter list, because those are all things that they can control and they can take into their own hands, no matter what happens out there. So people just have to be be thinking and really smart and wise about about what they doing. So in each chapter of my 10 publishing myths book, I have what I call it, a myth buster action, an MBA, which is a practical step that every author can take to do something with the content of that particular chapter, something practical as

Agi Keramidas: 24:59

you. Know, I'm very big on actionable thing on the podcast. So what would be the that particular one for this myth?

Terry Whalin: 26:00

I guess, I guess the myth would be to to actively work at marketing your your book, whatever action that is, whether you're encouraging people to to write reviews of your book or to any of those kinds of things. I mean, everybody that reads can go over to Amazon, whether they bought the book there or not, and write a review for you. So Robert Cal Dini, the best selling author wrote the book Influence, has said out there that that 80 or 90% of the people that purchase a product online have read a review before they buy the book, before they buy that product. So it's a tragedy. I think I go buy authors websites all the time. They have two reviews or no reviews on Amazon. Well, they're not encouraging people to purchase their book by getting those reviews. So you know, get your friends or your family or somebody out there to to help you in that area.

Agi Keramidas: 27:17

That's very useful and practical and thank you, and that can be applied also, I think, to others endeavors as well. Do you want to briefly discuss one other common myth that you feel it's relevant to this conversation? Yeah,

Terry Whalin: 27:36

I a relevant myth, I think, is that some people don't think that they're really a writer unless they write a book which really isn't true, because if you've, if you've written for magazines or online or something, I think you should call yourself a writer, really, in the book business, if you sell 5000 copies of your book in The lifetime of the book. That's that's a good number for you to do that in the magazine world, one of the reasons I've written for magazines consistently over the years is you can reach 1000s of people with your magazine article that you'll that can learn about your book at the bottom because it says Terry Whalen, author of 10 publishing myths, it's very easy in the magazine world to reach 100,000 200,000 300,000 people, and you work with a shorter piece of writing. A magazine article may be 1000 words or 1200 words. You learn the writing process by doing that. You learn how to write for a particular target. You learn how to write a headline, how to have a beginning, a middle and an end, how to have a takeaway, what we call a single point to your article. Those are all valuable skills that you can learn practicing with a magazine article, as opposed to a 50 to 100,000 word book that you're doing. I

Agi Keramidas: 29:14

suppose writing a blog is also very similar, and you can use that as well. You are, it

Terry Whalin: 29:24

is, it's the same kind of thing. And actually, in the business, there's, there's a term called book where you take your blog entries and then make those into a book. I've done that once I did this book that I actually self published. It's the only book I've ever self published called jump start your publishing dreams inside secrets to skyrocket your success. I self published that book. It was really from my blog entries. That's a lot of work to take all those random entries and then organize those into chapters of a book to write the transitions, all those kinds of things, but I did that. I actually got Mark Victor Hansen to write the forward for that book, and I got endorsements. The book sold pretty well, but now the updated edition is with Morgan James, so it's out there in bookstores everywhere. But yeah, there's there are ways to take blog entries and turn those into a book.

Agi Keramidas: 30:29

I've had the pleasure to speak with Mark Victor Hansen on my podcast a few years ago. So I do remember the conversation, Terry, I want to thank you very much. This has been a really useful conversation. And interesting. Before I wrap up with my usual quick questions I have at the end, where will you direct a listener that wants to find out more about you?

Terry Whalin: 31:00

Yeah, thanks, Agi. I really encourage people to get the book directly from me. They can get this print book. If they go to publishing offer.com they can get the book for $10 and that includes the shipping, along with over $200 worth of bonuses that they can get from me. I also have another way that they can get a free 11th myth from me, one of my friends, Alice Crider, who was an acquisitions editor David C Cook, when she wrote back her endorsement, she said, Terry, you're missing the 11th myth. I'm like, okay, Alice, what's the 11th myth? She said, Well, the 11th myth should be, if I send my book to Oprah, she'll book me on her show. And I'm like, Well, yeah, that's a that's a pretty good myth. And so what I decided to do is I decided to write that chapter, and we, when we designed the book, we designed that chapter to look exactly like the rest of the chapter. And somebody can get that from me for free by going to Terry links.com it's plural, Terry, links.com, forward, slash 11th one, one, th myth, and that'll take you to a to my website. You can get that 11th myth for free from me. That's

Agi Keramidas: 32:19

great. And Terry, my, my two final quick questions. The first one is, what does personal development mean to you?

Terry Whalin: 32:30

Oh, personal personal development is very important. Agi it means that I've never arrived as an author. I've met authors who have, you know they figure, they've they've done it, they've done it all. They don't need to learn anything else but personal development, to me, means that I'm going to continue growing learning. There's a whole world out there of all kinds of things that I explore. So personal development means having a level of curiosity and continuing to look for ways that you can improve and learn about new things.

Agi Keramidas: 33:13

And hypothetical question, if you could go back in time and meet your 18 year old self, what's one piece of advice you would give him?

Terry Whalin: 33:23

I would I would tell them to talk less and listen more. There's a lot of wisdom that we can gain from other people rather than talking ourselves these days.

Agi Keramidas: 33:45

So true, so true. Thank you. Yes, we, as they say, we have two ears and one mouth for a reason.

Terry Whalin: 33:52

That's right. That's right. Very much. So I want to thank

Agi Keramidas: 33:55

you very much for this conversation today and what you shared with with us and wishing you the very best. I will leave it to you for your last part. In words,

Terry Whalin: 34:09

yeah, Agi, you know what I would encourage authors is that there's a lot of rejection. We here know a lot as authors, but through my travels, I've been in some of the top publishing literary agencies in New York. And when I go visit these people, the interesting thing to me is that they're all asking me, Where's, where's the next best seller? Where's the next Joel Osteen or Rick Warren, or left behind, or you name, you name the best seller. They're looking for that. So they may be telling you, no, no, thanks. My agency's full. I'm not taking any more clients all those things. But the reality is, they're reading their email, they're looking at their fiscal mail that comes in, and they're actively looking for that diamond in the rough. I know I am as an Acquisition editor, and so I really encourage people to reach out to me if I can help them.

Agi Keramidas: 35:15

I hope you have found this episode enlightening, and I ask for one simple, quick favor, if you like this podcast, think of someone else you know who might find it useful and share it with them by doing so you'll not only help the podcast grow, but also add value to people you care about. So thank you, and until next time, stand out. Don't fit in.