Episode 19: Scott Miller on Publishing at FranklinCovey

In our last episode for 2021, we are joined by Scott Miller, Former CMO and EVP of Business Development at the FranklinCovey Company, and now their senior advisor on thought leadership and publishing strategy. In addition to running the publishing program at FranklinCovey, Scott is a best-selling author in his own right, as well as the host of the “On Leadership” podcast (https://resources.franklincovey.com/on-leadership-with-scott-miller), which has between 6 and 7 million listeners every week. 

Scott talks with me about the publishing process at FranklinCovey, including how authors are chosen, how book topics are refined, and the general development schedule for new titles. He discusses the company’s focus on social media platforms, and some of the strategies they engage when launching a new title. The topic of backlist sales comes up (it seems to be a pretty common topic on the podcast!), and Scott discusses how aggressive his team is about selling subrights, continuing the marketing of other titles, and connecting to businesses for B2B sales. 

Scott’s latest book, Master Mentors: 30 Transformative Insights from Our Greatest Minds (https://www.franklincovey.com/master-mentors/), is a great read, with engaging thoughts and insights condensed from interviews with some of his podcast guests. I was able to listen to the audiobook over the last few weeks, and found the content to be quite inspiring. Please take a look!

The Magic Number: https://bardpress.com/the-magic-number/ [The first episode in January will actually be an interview of Todd Sattersten on this topic!]

Transcript

Joshua Tallent 

Before we dive into this week’s podcast, I wanted to say a brief thank you to everyone who has been listening to the BookSmarts podcast. I know many of you have been listening since the very beginning. And I’m really grateful to you that you’ve taken the time to listen every couple of weeks and keep up with what’s going on. It’s been really great to talk to all the people that I’ve talked to so far, to have these conversations about publishing and about what really matters in publishing. And I really hope that it’s inspired you, I hope that it’s encouraged you, I hope that it’s challenged you, and that as you listen to the podcast, you’re getting valuable information, actionable insights, that you can use to make your publishing process even better.

We’re going to continue in the next year, this will be the last show for 2021. But we’ll be back in January doing more interviews, more discussions. And if you have suggestions about who you think I should bring on, or topics you think I should be discussing, I would love to hear that I’m planning to bring some of the people that I’ve already interviewed back and talk about other things and dive deeper into some of the topics. But I also want to bring in new voices. And I would love to hear what your thoughts are about what’s important to you, and what challenges you’re running into your publishing business. So let’s come together, talk about some of those things. And I would love to bring those topics out.

So we’ll jump into this week’s podcast with Scott Miller. I’m really excited to talk with Scott, I think he’s got some great things to say about how he does publishing and how publishing works for his company, and some other things. So this is going to be a great episode. And I hope that you enjoy it. And we’ll see you guys again in the new year. Thank you very much.

Oh, and also a quick note about my audio this week. Apparently, my recording software decided to record the microphone from my webcam instead of my actual microphone. So things don’t sound quite as nice as they normally do. But we have that fixed in the future. And hopefully you’ll still be able to hear everything well. Thanks a lot.

Joshua Tallent 

This week on the BookSmarts podcast, I have former CMO and EVP of Business Development at FranklinCovey Company, and now [he] serves as an advisor in thought leadership and publishing strategy: Scott Miller. Thank you, Scott, for coming on the show it really appreciate you joining me.

Scott Miller 

Joshua, my delight, thank you for the platform today. Looking forward to our conversation.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, this is great. So you’ve actually been—you have your own podcast, On Leadership, where you’ve interviewed very interesting people. So we can talk about that. At some point, if you’d like. I would love to talk about the publishing strategies that you guys are doing at Franklin Covey, and what you’ve been working on. You publish a lot of books, you have quite a few really awesome titles that you are currently working on and published recently. So that’s really great. And all of our listeners on the BookSmarts podcast are in some way connected to the book publishing industry. Most are mid-size or larger publishers, or work at mid-sized or larger publishers. We have distributors, we have basically everybody kind of across the board. So tell me just a little bit about the publishing process at Franklin Covey and how you approach finding the right authors, finding the right topics, and kind of coming up with your ideas.

Scott Miller 

Sure, so we have some cred in this area. We’ve sold close to 60 million copies of our many titles, of course, the most substantial being The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People translated into nearly 60 languages. And that book alone has sold close to 42 million copies and continues to be robust every day. We have about 10 critically acclaimed bestsellers, whether they are New York Times or Wall Street Journal, I myself had been privileged to author four books that have either been Wall Street Journal or Amazon number one bestsellers. We’re quite deliberate about both the topics in the authors which we conscript if you will or invite to author those books. We’re very deliberate about the quote, circumstance our clients are in. We are a leadership development company based in Salt Lake City with a global reach. And so we really are very congruent when it comes to creating solutions that our clients will adopt and implement, you know, whether it be a module or some kind of self-paced learning or a stand-up live training. We often will write a book around that topic—sometimes in advance of the course or the training or sometimes posthumously, but we typically are very careful to launch three books a year, sometimes it’s two, sometimes it’s four, but our sweet spot tends to be about three. One large we might call a seminal book, and then maybe two smaller, more strategic books on smaller markets or smaller business opportunities. When it comes to creating authorship opportunities, we do a very thorough job of looking at the diversity of authorship, whether it be through race or gender or experience or even geography or cultural or, you know, citizenship, we want to have authors that represent our clients, because our client base is more diverse than our employee bases being a Utah-based company. I think in addition to obviously, someone’s credibility—expertise on a topic. Honestly, it’s less can they write, because quite frankly, most people don’t write as good as they think they do. I don’t need someone to be able to write. We can do that we can hire a ghostwriter. We can interview them, we can do anything with their expertise, right? They don’t need to be able to sit down for five hours and type it out. Right. It isn’t to say, they don’t do that, many of them do do that. First and foremost, it’s do they have expertise, and do they have thought leadership on this topic? And then quite secondly, is how good are they going to be at promoting the book? Because we all know that writing a book is about 10% of the process. Promoting and launching a book is 90% or 95% of the process. Do so do they have the ability to speak on stage? Do they have the social media platforms? Are they willing to grow them, nurture them and build them? Do they have the charisma and the articulation to be able to be on 150 podcasts and 50 radio programs? So it’s important that authorship begins at writing your expertise down, and the vast majority is your ability to distribute it, maintain it, and support it for long tail benefit of that book and other books in our backlist?

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, yeah. And that’s important you, you look at book publishing, and I bring this up probably on every podcast record. You know, publishing is heavily weighted to the backlist. 69% of all book sales happen in the backlist seems to be even more important in business books specifically. Because it’s, you know, when you write a good book that can meet the needs of many different types of people over the course of many different years, backlist is going to be even more powerful than say a novel might be. So I actually love this idea of launching a book with someone who has all these different things. How do you take that launch in that first year? Can you walk us through, say, the first year of a book launch? What are you thinking about? What are you doing? What kind of strategies are you enacting?

Scott Miller 

I’d even rewind it further than that. Joshua, I think you know—right now, I literally just hung up the phone with the chairman of the board, talking about a book that I am thinking about, for the company for 2025. It’s now 2021, still right around the time of this taping. And so for us, it usually takes somewhere between minimum 12 months, and usually more like 18 months to write a book. If you talk with a Seth Godin, or a Jim Collins, or a Brené Brown, they’re going to tell you, it might take them more like two or three years. Now, Seth is a little more nimble, but a Dan Pink, and a Jim Collins they’re gonna tell you, they probably check out for some between 18 and 24 months, and they go write a book. And they leave $100,000 a day on the table, no keynotes for nine months. So they leave millions of dollars of revenue on the table, because they are all in on their research, their focus, their interviews, and their writing. Jim Collins will disappear for two years. That’s not our process, but that is a good process. If you look at the books that are the seminal books out there, these authors have often done this similarly. So we spend somewhere between 12 and 18 months writing a book. It then takes as you know, a minimum of once you have submitted your final manuscript to a publisher, it is a minimum of nine months between the time that happens and your book is launched. Oftentimes, it’s closer to about 12 months. Sometimes now even longer with the post-pandemic reality I mean, printing presses went bankrupt, there are books that are you know, delayed because they literally cannot get them printed. And of course, Ingram and others that are distributors, it’s harder to get the books out to the retailers. So I would say from conception to launch, minimum 24 months. And then we’re doing a whole variety of things. We are building that author’s social media, right, we are building their keynote speaking business, we’re making sure that they’re on every possible platform engaging with their audience and growing it—you know, Instagram: 50,000 followers; LinkedIn: 30,000 connections; Facebook public and private, both maxed out. Should they move to TikTok? Should they be in Clubhouse? Should they be on YouTube? Are they on Twitter? I don’t subscribe to the idea of pick one platform. I think we should be on many platforms because quite frankly, you might have people that are a different demographics on different platforms, but they all might buy your book. I was at a—I did a keynote yesterday for my new book Master Mentors to a large realtor conference in Dallas. It was interesting. They had a woman there talking how this this year she’s going to have $300 million of sales in real estate. $300 million in real estate. And she’s on Instagram. I’m on Instagram, but quite frankly, most people over the age of 50, I think are still on Facebook and even LinkedIn, I would suggest that. So, know where your audience is. But we have, you know, we have publicists and agents that help us book ourselves on a minimum of 100 podcasts. For every book that I launch I will appear on at least 100 podcasts in the first 90 days, at least. You have a lot of authors that say, well only give me the top 1% of podcasts. Well, good luck with that. Because last time I checked, Joe Rogan’s booked, and good luck getting on his podcast, right? So I think the wise authors do anything and everything that comes their way to build credibility, build an audience because you never know, when a small podcast is going to have someone from a large company. And they choose to order 1,000 books and have you give a keynote. So I pick up every opportunity possible, when I as an author am launching a book, and I coach and insist that all of our authors do the same.

Joshua Tallent 

That’s great. And then long tail maintenance is obviously important as well, you’re taking advantage of the platforms these authors have, and that you have to build out that that sales funnel and really get people to see the book more often. Let’s talk a little bit about sales. One of the interesting things that I’ve seen recently talking with a publisher named Todd Sattersten, who is publisher at Bard Press in Portland. And Todd wrote a really interesting article last year that I will be recording a podcast with him about very soon, called The Magic Number. And the idea and the research that he’s done looking at a couple of thousand business books over the course of a couple of years, is to—when you can reach 10,000 titles sold in the first year, that is a breakeven point for being able to even succeed at the 25,000—you have a 42% chance of reaching 25,000 in lifetime sales. But if you don’t hit that 10,000 in the first year, you have like a 2% chance of reaching 25,000. in the lifetime of the book. So that first year is obviously really important, and it builds that process for the long tail. So any thoughts about that looking at your publishing processes, looking at your successes, and even any failures that you’ve had? Have you seen that kind of pattern and any other thoughts you have on that?

Scott Miller 

I had not heard those numbers, but they seem reasonable, intuitive. And by the way, 10,000 copies of a book is a blockbuster—that is a lot of copies. You know, most publishers would be quite delighted with three-and-a-half to 4,000 copies the first year, kind of a break even for them. Obviously, the publishing business, they don’t make money on the majority of their books, they make their big money on the select few that go, you know, massively large. Although like you say that the publishing business is a long term bet, right? This is a multi- multi-year process. When I tend to write books, I tend to retain my foreign rights. I have a aggressive team, my book, I had two books yesterday, one sold in Georgian, like whatever language the people that live in the country of Georgia speak, maybe it’s a version of Russian I’m not sure. I had another book sell in Arabic yesterday. So in any given day, I am selling my books’ foreign rights and foreign languages. And I am still on podcasts for books that I’ve authored two and three years ago, weekly. Building the backlist. I do anything and everything to continue to keep that backlist moving, including refreshing books, rewriting them, re-editing them re-releasing them, talking about each of my books in my other books as well. And highlighting them all. It’s it’s it’s—10,000 is a lot of books. I think a lot of people think they’re going to sell a lot of books and they realize okay, well their Christmas card list is 87 people, their friends and family is 42 people and their high school—you get it right. And you know, you might scratch your way to 300 Because only half of the people who say they will buy their book will actually buy your book. And your book isn’t for everyone. We’ve had some failures. We had a book on customer loyalty, It debuted at I think number three in the Wall Street Journal list. It fell off the cliff, because everybody who was the Chief Customer Service Officer bought that book the first week. And then no one else bought it. I had someone come to me last week in Australia who wants to write a book aimed at teenage boys to connect the value of physical fitness with their life self esteem. I said, That’s a great book. I just don’t think your reader is your buyer. Your buyer is the dad or the mom. And I don’t know that there’s that many people looking for that title. We would be very, very thoughtful. I said, That’s a tough audience. Now, if you’re writing a book about chemical engineers, that’s a tough audience. How many of them are there out there? I don’t know. 400,000? And how many will buy your book? 400? So you’ve got to know your market, you got to check your ego as an author, as a branding agent, to really understand not everybody is in the business to buy your book. I had someone approached me two weeks ago that wants to write a leadership book through the lens—I’m laughing—through the lens of an Idaho parent. And I said, I’ll bet that’s lovely. But unless your name is Oprah Winfrey, not many people care about your memoir. Memoirs don’t sell unless you are a major celebrity, and you’ve just extracted yourself from Scientology. Otherwise, no one cares. I don’t think there are people out there that really care about—now tell that to Ree Drummond. Ree Drummond was an Oklahoma, you know, lady who had YouTube videos on how to grill a steak. And that has become amazing—Ree Drummond as a lifestyle expert in her TV program or cookbooks. So I don’t mean to dissuade people, but you’ve got a strike, you got to strike gold. And I don’t know very many people that strike gold. They’re very few and far between.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so let’s, let’s transition a little bit. Let’s talk about the future of book readership. A lot of what you’re doing now is not necessarily, quote unquote, books, right? How books are being understood and how we think of the format of a book has changed. We obviously have had a ton of audiobooks that have come out and in the last couple of years—massive sales and massive changes in that industry. So tell me a little bit about what you’re thinking about, about book readership in the future and what you’re working on that front.

Scott Miller 

You know, there’s several different markets to buy books, right. You know, there’s the individual, you know, consumer market, we’ll call it B2C. And then there’s the course the B2B market, the majority of my books are sold B2B: a company buys 1,500 of them, and I go and speak, right? or they buy for 400, or they buy 100, I get on a plane from Salt Lake and I fly to Chicago, because someone bought 120 books, and I show up for it, and I hopefully crush it, because now I built you know, 150 ambassadors to evangelize my book and maybe take their photographs and put them on Instagram of me and that kind of thing, right? So, book selling is still happened, you know, one book at a time. If you know, Rick Warren, who of course wrote the book, The Purpose Driven Life, I read once where he cashed out his entire equity in his home, bought up every book, the publisher printed and drove around the nation in a van, giving out books to small town pastors. And literally, the very end is when that book hit a tipping point. The future of book readership is obviously changing with demographics, I think right now, roughly about north of 85% of all books are still sold on Amazon. I think it’s somewhere north of about 50 to 60% of books are sold in print, still—print is still a very robust modality. I think that digital is strong and holding, but not growing exponentially, audio is on a steep increase, right? So audio has been exponential. With the pandemic, leadership and business books have quite frankly, been flat. Children’s books and cookbooks and romance and fiction have been high for obvious reasons. That is changing a little bit right now. But still people are buying books, quote, The old fashioned format in print, they’re just buying them online. Yeah, less than 15% of all books are sold in any other retailer than Amazon. And that’s really important to think about in terms of your Google Analytics, your search words, and your ads, and your social media, and where you’re driving. And yes, your love for your independent bookstore is important, but facts are facts, right. I think what is insightful about the future of the book industry, is that I have recently signed a deal with a new publisher to take all of my existing books from other publishers and reformat them in video books. This particular book publisher has raised a substantial amount of money because they think that the YouTube generation of you know, 10, and 20 year olds will be consuming books via video in the future. Now, I’m not spelling or sounding out the, the depth of the print or audio or video book by any means. But I am at now licensing all of my books to a new publisher that will turn my books into an hour long video. What that means is that I will on a green screen narrate and talk out my book, but this publisher will we create it, and video, we’ll pick out three or four the big highlights of the story and go recreate them and re interview those people or perhaps create those with stock footage or still photographs and create a compelling hour-long video book in probably 10 or 12, eight minute segments, something like that. And I think you’re going to see that format become an increasing format. I think traditional publishers—HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster—need to be thinking about what they are doing to meet that YouTube generation in the future. I don’t know that this is going to be a blockbuster. But it’s something certainly that’s going to be a disruptive technology that will find itself where it kind of emerges, right? The original—the deliberate strategy won’t be the emergent strategy on this. But I, as an author, and as a leader of Franklin Covey’s books are very much interested in leading out on this to see where this ends up.

Joshua Tallent 

That’s interesting. Yeah, it’s almost like a—you know, a serialized TED talk in a way: that ability to have those have those little clips to watch the piece that really matters to you, or watch the whole thing in sequence and—

Scott Miller 

it’s like a documentary, but cut up in a chapter. So someone can, you know, perhaps even pay the same price, they can just become more intimate with the author, or intimate with the story, be visually, viscerally engaged in the key points of the story. Of course, not the entire book, you can’t convert 50,000 words into one hour by any stretch, but to highlight some of the key stories curated by the author and brought to life by, you know, a really remarkable MasterClass-style video company. I think it’s got some legs to it.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, that’s a great idea. Awesome. So Scott, give me the pitch on Master Mentors and what you’re doing. This sounds like a really great book, so give me give me the highlights on that.

Scott Miller 

How gracious of you. So I’ve just signed a 10 year-10 volume deal with HarperCollins Leadership to write a book about my podcast. Like you, I’m privileged to host a podcast called “On Leadership with Scott Miller.” It is now the world’s largest weekly leadership podcast hitting between six and 7 million each Tuesday where I interview business authors, CEOs, celebrities, business titans, broadly around the topic of leadership. I include that to be culture, career, marketing, branding, financial awareness—It’s a broad podcast under the lens of leadership. What I did was I took 30 of our first 100 interviews and selected people that I thought had a transformative insight to share. And I named this book Master Mentors: 30 Transformative Insights from Our Greatest Minds. It’s kind of like Chicken Soup for the Leadership Soul. It’s fast, it’s easy, it’s breezy, one thought leader per chapter, one big idea per chapter. You can start anywhere, go everywhere. A publisher first passed on, because they thought it was too episodic, and I said, You’re missing the point. That is the point. One chapter is with an acclaimed psychiatrist on brain health. The next one is with a master marketer on messaging. Then I go back to a celebrity on managing your brand and go over to somebody on when to use PowerPoint. And it is quite episodic, but it generally is aimed at the business community. It’s funny, it’s witty. I share stories around how I rose to the occasion—or didn’t—to be properly mentored by this person. I just finished the second volume, Master Mentors: Volume Two with 30 new mentors and 30 new insights that’ll launch in 2022. This is an audio book that I’ve read—digital and print and it is one of the first books I will be translating into this video book format. It’s done well, It debuted at number one on Amazon, it’s selling strong. And I’m keynoting, three and four times a week on it now because I think most organizations are fixated on retention. And they’re very focused on mentoring and building careers, hopefully, inside their organizations. So thank you for the spotlight on Master Mentors.

Joshua Tallent 

No, that’s great. And I’m really excited to read it myself. I think it’s, it’s got some great people. I love Donald Miller and Seth Godin, and Stephen Covey. And these are—these are people that really know their stuff. So it’s really great to—

Scott Miller 

And not everybody is a celebrity. Some people are people that I put in the podcast, because they had an insight to share, yet they weren’t a household name. So it’s not like a People magazine or Us Magazine, right? There are some people that perhaps you haven’t learned of that maybe you’ll decide to buy their books or follow them. It really was meant to be a spotlight on these mentors that I’ve interviewed that I think have a transformative ability to make a big impact on everyone who reads it. And it will hit—it’ll hit readers differently, right. Some readers will like four chapters, and some will love fourteen chapters. But I think if you read the book, you’ll find something transformative for wherever you are in your particular journey.

Joshua Tallent 

Awesome! Scott, thanks for coming on the BookSmarts podcast, I really appreciate your time. And for those of you listening, if you want to check out his book, I’ll have a link in the show notes you can go grab that.

That’s it for this episode of the BookSmarts podcast. If you’d like what you’ve heard, please leave a review or rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen to the podcast. And also please share this podcast with your colleagues. If you have topic suggestions or feedback about the show, please email me at joshua@firebrandtech.com. And be sure to fill out the listener survey at booksmartspodcast.com/survey. Thanks for joining me and getting smarter about your books.