Are you planning to go to a hybrid publisher instead of self-publishing? Let me tell you why hybrid publishing is wrong for you.
In today's topic, I'm going to discuss Why Hybrid Publishing Is Wrong For You. By the end of this article, you're going to know why hybrid publishing is not a great option for most people. You're going to have the steps necessary to identify whether the company you're considering is a good one or not.
You're going to feel great knowing you're going to make an informed decision when it comes to whether or not you decide to go with hybrid publishing. One of the things is after having sold 40,000 books, I began to find a pattern in terms of what it takes to get books to sell and which books do not sell.
I've done both of these types of books. Some of the books sell almost nothing and some of them sell an awful lot of copies. The patterns that I've figured out over the years, I put together into a Checklist. It’s free, so go ahead and just check that out. Just grab the free checklist.
The thing is that Jill had been going through my Content Marketing Course a while back. As she was going through it, she mentioned a couple of side problems that she also had. She was trying to get her books back from the hybrid publisher that she had.
Because if she was going to market them, she wanted to be able to see the exact sales that she was making. And the hybrid publisher was not interested in giving her that information. In addition, she noticed in her books, people complained about the formatting that was in there.
Some of the images were not exactly centered in the e-book. The table of contents was not working properly. Several things need to be fixed. When she first went with them, it seemed like such a good idea.
Because after all, you can just hand away your manuscript. You do the writing and they will just put a perfect thing on the market for you at a particular price. Then, that's it, right? Well, that wasn't exactly what Jill's experience was.
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And that made her doubt and consider maybe this was the wrong option for her in the first place. So that's one of the reasons why in today's article, I want to discuss why hybrid publishing is wrong for you.
Now, the first thing I want to say is I've gotten some hate on YouTube specifically for talking negatively about hybrid publishing. Now, I'm sure there are lots of fantastic hybrid publishing companies out there that I haven't been in contact with or none of my clients have worked with.
But for the most part, there's probably plenty. I'm referring to the bad actors, a hybrid publishing company. The way you can see it is that you're taking your book and you're paying them money to do the different phases of the process.
In traditional publishing, they would pay you to put for your book. In self-publishing, you don't pay anybody. You just do it all yourself and hire Freelancers for the different parts that you're going to need to have done to get your book on the market.
But the hybrid is sort of a mix between the two. Because they have the services like covers and editing, layout and design, and even marketing. They'll have these different aspects and packages that you can buy for thousands of dollars to get your book onto the market easily.
Because you're like, I don't have any technical ability, can I just pay you some money and you'll get this book published for me? Then, we're happy about it. Well, there are a couple of reasons why this could be a really bad idea. The first one is that they're going to hit you up and upsell you on almost everything.
That's the biggest complaint that I hear from most of my clients and students who have tried the hybrid publishing route. It's that, look, you want to make a little change? You have to pay them another hundred dollars. If you want to do this, you need to pay another hundred dollars.
Owning The Rights To Your Book
It just keeps pounding on, you already paid thousands of dollars. They said the thing was going to cost between one thousand and ten thousand dollars. And now, how many thousands of dollars are you already up to? They're ready to take more money from you.
You thought it would just be easy, right? You pay them and then you're done. But you know what? What if they deliver back to you and you're not happy with the way the book looks and feels? You want some changes. Well, they're going to charge you for those revisions, that's not going to come for free.
That's one reason you want to read the fine print. The second issue is that you lose control over the royalties. Many of these companies are not giving you the raw files. They will take their account and publish your files.
Now, I have many clients who will say, oh, don't worry I own the rights. I'm like, yes you own the rights. Can you please show me your sales dashboard for how many sales you're making a day through your books? And they would say, oh I don't have the information, the hybrid publishing company has it.
So I'm like, you have no control over this. When do they pay you? They're like, well, they pay me every three months. But they said I haven't earned that much, so they're not going to pay me. And I'm like, what kind of deal is this?
This is terrible and if you run ads you wouldn't even know which of those ads is resulting in sales. You could compare the sales dashboard in your ads. It's almost as if you thought it would work out so smoothly. They were like, look, you don't even need to figure out how to create a KDP account which takes about five minutes.
But you don't even have to do it, we'll just put it under our account. To send you those reports and the transfer of your royalties, they're going to need their share of that. Because that's an additional scope. That's additional work that they're going to need to do if you're going to get your royalties paid to you.
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Do you see? At the end of the day, you can say all you want. I own the rights to the book, I own the copyright. I will say, yes you completely own the copyright and they control every aspect of the book. They're continually dinging you for money and I would say that's probably not a good idea.
So, if you're going to go with a hybrid publisher, go with one that gives you the ability to give the raw files. That you can upload them to your account. So, that's important.
One other thing, I just want to make a side note. It wasn't one of the big three but it's such an important point when it comes to your books with these hybrid publishers. Make sure you find a website where people are promoting and saying, we had such a great time with this particular hybrid publisher.
Not somebody in the middle of the process but somebody's maybe going through once and now going to do their second book through them. This is a really important one. Maybe like a Facebook group, you're going onto Facebook and you'll find a group on Facebook where people went through this exact publisher you're considering.
They are glowing about how well it went and how wonderful the whole experience was. Because one of the things I find with my clients and students is that when they reach me, they've gone one round through it and they are not happy.
They go, I think I made a mistake. Then I asked them, can you please send me the web page where they're saying all the positive stuff about this hybrid publisher? Then they inform me that's the sales page of the hybrid publisher. And for some reason, any website that seems to say anything negative seems to have been taken down.
Maybe everybody who's discontent for some reason doesn't bother to post it anywhere. Most likely, they're being targeted for saying something negative. That's one reason I do not name names. I say nothing negative about any companies.
Doing The Formatting Yourself
Every Discovery Session I’ve had with my students, I've done thousands of sessions over the years and never a single one ever has resulted in somebody telling me, oh I've gone multiple times I'm just so happy. I just never met those people but they may exist out there.
So, if they do, please do let me know below in the comments. But let's get to our third point, the secret point of the day. The main reason I am telling you this is not a good route for you it's because when you come out with your books, you're going to be making changes.
That is when you come out with your very first book. Well, that's fine but then you're going to need to build an email list. You'll need to put some sort of elite generation thing to get people on your email list at the beginning of that book. You'll need to change that once we get the book on the market.
We're then going to make some changes to it. Well, how are you going to do that? Do you need to be able to format the book or are you planning on paying a hundred dollars to the hybrid publisher to add or change anything on the book?
Then comes the cycle of explaining what you want to do and then them doing the formatting incorrectly and not what you thought. What about when you come up with your second book? Well then, your first book at the end should be telling people about your amazing second book that came out.
Your second book should point to your first book. That's going to involve changes in your book. So, the question is at what point are you going to quit making editing and revisions where you don't need anybody else's help to format?
The answer is almost never. You're going to keep on formatting and reformatting this book. You can't change the title and the metadata, that's going to create some problems with some of this data. But for the most part, you're allowed to change the data that you have.
You're allowed to change the contents of your book. You can even change the cover. You can’t change the author and the title, they used to be much more strict. Much more lenient when it came to your ebook and would just be strict on your paperback version.
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But they have changed those rules over the years with Amazon KDP. So, what exactly am I suggesting? I'm suggesting you need to learn as an author how to do the formatting yourself. That's one of the reasons I have my Book Formatting Made Easy Course that breaks it down.
We go and follow the app where I go on a 1-On-1 Program with you. To make sure that you can specifically get your book formatted perfectly the first time. And if you have any questions and later when you're coming back to put your email thing in there, we talk through the process.
You go through the video course. You go through each of the lessons in the modules. As you go through it, use a program called Jutoh to do the formatting. By the time you're finished with the course, we go back and forth until we make sure your book has been formatted.
I haven't had a single student who's gone through the course where I've gone back and forth with them. Whether you're not having the result as they want it, I've never seen a single problem.
We can get the book to look identical to what you will find when you go onto Amazon and look at the absolute top best sellers. We can make your book look identical to those books. Some seriously important things as opposed to these hybrid publishers who give you garbage.
The thing is not even centered and aligned, it's just out. As a person who works as a developer too, I know what it's like when the designs just do not look correct. That is something that I think is important to get right the first time.
But one thing that you also should be paying attention to is that your book the first place is making sure that it is published in the correct niche. That's one of the reasons why you're going to check 3 Self-Publishing Niches That Will Pay You DAILY Within 1 Month (Easy Work At Home Jobs).