Angela Engel: Partnership Publishing

Our interview of Angela Engel for “The Creative Influencer” podcast is available today for download on iTunes, Spotify, and premier platforms everywhere..

Angela is publisher and founder of the Collective Book Studio, which is a partnership publisher.

Angela discusses the important role that print publishers play as distributors, marketers and salespeople in the digital age, and the impact of social media. We walk through the process of publishing and promoting a book and what makes the model of a partnership publisher different.

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A transcript of the episode follows:

Jon Pfeiffer:
I'm joined today by Angela Engel. Well, welcome to the podcast.

Angela Engel:
Hi, I'm glad to be here.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So you are the founder and publisher of the Collective Book Studio. It is a woman owned partnership publisher. So the first question is what is a partnership publisher?

Angela Engel:
That is a great question. I think a partnership publishing house really looks at the client and develops a budget and a P&L with the entrepreneur, the author, the creator, to make a book, to publish content.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And I'm going to walk you through that process. Not yet, but I'm going to walk you through that process as if one of my clients came to you and said, "I want to write a book." What do you do?

Angela Engel:
Oh, that's fun.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So let's set the scene in the publishing world first. So we won't be able to tell what you are until we find out the landscape. Can you explain traditional publishing, what model they use?

Angela Engel:
Yeah, sure. So traditional model, let's take the big four, right? Simon & Schuster, Random House, Hachette, Scholastic, your listeners might know of, they would give you an advance on your royalties. Meaning I am going to make the next Harry Potter book, okay, here you go, we want to give you $100,000 to write your book. It's almost a loan because it's the money that they're using then they won't pay you any more money on your book sales until you've earned that money back. That is a traditional model. In addition, the royalty rates typically are pretty small. They're anywhere between 10% and 15% off of net. Yes, can Danielle Steel or JK Rowling negotiate much higher? Sure. But let's just take it on an average.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Okay. And then, what? 10 years ago, they started to get a challenge from Amazon and self-publishing. How does that work?

Angela Engel:
I giggled slightly if people could hear me on this podcast, because how does that work? I honestly don't know. All I do know is that I started in publishing over 20 years ago and there was, at that time Amazon was a book retailer if everybody recalls, with Walden Pond and Borders in the mall. And then there was something called lightning source and print on demand that was coming up and Amazon, and it was just like, what is this tech world? And now it's really boomed. Amazon platform allows someone literally to upload a PDF and just get the book printed.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Right. I've done it.

Angela Engel:
Oh, okay. So there you go.

Jon Pfeiffer:
There you go. But tell me about your model, how that's different from those two models.

Angela Engel:
Yeah. So in the self-publishing world, there's no guard, right? There's no guard, there's no editor, there's no submission process, there's nothing. And the creator owns all the content so that's their kind of upside. I always kind of play devil's advocate and go, "Yes, you own the content, but who really is the dominant retailer?" Right? So you're really kind of giving over your IP to Amazon, let's be honest, because who else are you really going to sell it to? It's not like you can understand how the book world and distribution world works.
In addition, imagine a librarian who sees there was 1 million titles published I believe last year, that includes self-publishing. And if you're a buyer, how are you going to wade through all of that? You're going to wade through it by reputable companies who are really looking for quality control. And so yes, we have quality control. We have a real submissions process like a traditional model would. We really vet our submissions. We have categories that we know that we're really good at and strong in like cooking and children's, lifestyle, self-help, business light I call it, some of the stuff we do, non-fiction. And so I really encourage people who are looking at a publisher to look at the categories they're strong in and know your brand. And if your brand aligns with what we do, then definitely submit.

Jon Pfeiffer:
I've heard you describe yourself as a rebel, or at least others have described yourself as a rebel. How is your model a rebel model compared to traditional publishers?

Angela Engel:
Yeah. Two reasons. I don't acquire the IP, the intellectual property, for life. That's a huge difference. My contract is anywhere between three and five years. I ask to take on the creator or the author or the illustrator's IP. Somewhere I have a couple contracts that are 10 years and that's based on my own investment. Why I call myself a partnership publisher and not that kind of traditional hybrid space people have heard about is because I do invest quite a bit of my own resources, time, and often money into projects. I have full distribution, a warehouse, a sales team, we do traditional trade shows. So I guess my question for... I hope I answered your question. I think I did. I guess the bigger question, what I really do is I've been called a revel because I offer what traditional publishing offers, right? In sales staff, in marketing, in access to the trade magazines, which that's the library journals and Publishers Weekly, but I don't actually acquire the person's IP for life.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Say you decide to go forward with a potential offer. How many books can you anticipate selling? How many does it take to break even?

Angela Engel:
That is such a great question. So I think that's really-

Jon Pfeiffer:
I've been lucky every once in a while.

Angela Engel:
Yeah. That is a really good question. I don't think I've ever been asked this, on a podcast at least. I think it really depends on the genre, right? It's going to be different for a nonfiction that you're doing black and white and the print run is so much lower than a cookbook for example. A cookbook is extremely hard to be completely honest because you've got the photography fees, it's higher design fees, the print cost is higher. So the break even is that much... There's much more at stake of how many books you need to actually sell of a cookbook than possibly maybe your business leadership book.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Let's take business leadership book. So just the traditional words on a page book.

Angela Engel:
Okay. Okay. So I would say that you roughly, to work with me, you need to feel very confident you can sell 3,000 to 4,000 copies just to break even. That's what you need to do. You're not going to make any money unless you reprint. And when you reprint, that's when you're going to make money, just like in a traditional world. And I'm honestly, I get this all the time, "Can we only print 1,000 with you?" That's not worth my staff's time. It is very rare that I would really take on a project where I think like, "Hmm, this book, I can't do more than 4,000 units with." Unless it was like a high end art book with a really high retail.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So that's the average first run for you guys is 4,000 books.

Angela Engel:
Yeah. But we've printed up to 15,000.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So one of my clients comes to you and you decide I'd like to work with this influencer. She is, let's say hypothetically in the fitness and wellness space.

Angela Engel:
Okay.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Take me through, what's your first step on whether you decide if you're going to work with them in the first place?

Angela Engel:
Yeah. So, our first thing is going to be, what is it? What is the book? What is the vision? What's the synopsis? What is the concept essentially? People always talk about a book proposal. I don't need a finished manuscript. It's very different, my advice for a debut author in the fiction or who's writing a novel. I don't do that. I really want to be clear. So with a non-fiction book, you don't need to have a finished manuscript at all. What you do need to have is a great idea and to be able to solve a problem. And so first, I would look at what... If people just come to me, which they do all the time, "Can I have a phone call? I have this course."
And I'm like, "No. You need to look at your course and you need to write down what this book is." Even so rough as what could be a table of contents? And then when people say I don't know, I go, "Oh, don't just look on Amazon, please. Go walk a bookstore, go to the section you believe your book should be in, go grab it off the shelf, look at that table of contents." Like, what is your book like? How is it different? What's your comparative research? Is really what I would offer advice for.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And say they come to you and they've done their homework. They come with a great outline, and you say, "That's unique. I haven't seen that before. I'll take a shot with you." What's the next step?

Angela Engel:
Cool. So our next step is to have a developmental editor take a look at it and say, "Hey, is this an idea you think is cool? Would you be interested in looking at it?" We have a pool of really cool developmental editors. Most of us are from the West Coast publishing scene, Chronicle Books and Weldon Owen and Harper Collins used to have a San Francisco office out here. So we've got just a great pool of developmental editors. And we're very bespoke, so we might take that, I already think like, "Oh, I take that yoga idea and I'd send it to one of my developmental editors who's done kind of those projects maybe at Weldon Owen." And she would be like, "Ooh, this is it and I can see it like this and that."

Angela Engel:
Then they give us a creative bit. I can give somebody kind of an idea of what it would cost to work with, but I never want to give a contract to anybody until I've had an editor to really take a look at. Because you'd be surprised. Sometimes somebody needs such a heavy lift that they need a real writer, and that's when it gets really expensive. And we tend to actually tell that person to go off and work on the writer and then come back to us. And we're a full service house once it comes back to us in more of a decent shape. We can hire ghost writers for sure. We recommend them and kind of tag team with them, but we prefer, that's really a marriage between the author and this ghost writer.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Right. Take a step back a second. The books that are published today, just in general, what percent are written by ghost writers?

Angela Engel:
Oh, God, I have no idea. Because I think the majority of the celebrity books and the politician books, those are. And they get quite a lot, that's a traditional model. I think that there's a lot to be said for book coaches. I think that a lot of the non-fiction have at least minimum a book coach.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Okay. So you get the bid back, get myself back on track, so we get the bid back from the developmental editor. And then is that when you start to develop a budget?

Angela Engel:
Yes. Yeah. Because we can really do copyediting, proofreading by word count. That's really easy. It's just by word. And so that's just really formulaic. So we estimate a 40,000 to 50,000 word manuscript, we'll estimate, we know our designer, we kind of know the aesthetic. We love when authors come to us with their aesthetic, their idea, their comparable research, really helps us kind of understand what designer we might choose for the particular project. We kind of know the range of a cover designer. We really feel pretty strongly of who we like to use and what our aesthetic is. And I think the clients who come to us know that and want that from us. And then we come up with a creative bid. Maybe this book would be $15,000 creative all in. There's really no markup for me, Angela Engel, because my idea in partnership is that I'm really asking the person to help offset all of what it costs to actually hire these experts.
And if they think about how many people have to actually touch it to make it a book, it's a pretty... If you think $15,000, you can spend that on an advertising campaign when you're self published, and people do all over Amazon. They're like, "Oh, look, I'm a number one bests seller across 13 categories. I'm number one in Kindle at Washington Street Journal." But their print sales are nothing. But the fact is that they've just spent a ridiculous amount of money on advertising through Amazon. And instead, why aren't they investing that in really making a tangible product that then they can use to propel their career forward, their speaking career forward, maybe their yoga business forward, maybe they're looking at other kinds of ways to do revenue.
Because the way that I work too is that they can sell it on their own websites, they can sell it through their studio, they can do it through their talks, and it's up to them. It's always economy of scale, right? So let's say they can only sell 1,000 on their own. But with wholesale, the power of wholesale, we sell like 3,000, the print run is 4,000, they're going to get a lot better print pricing. They're probably going to get the same if they actually, they did the math, by the time they combine the creative fee with the cost to print 4,000 books, they probably would've spent just that much money to print 1,000 or 500.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yeah. Okay. So you've developed the budget, it sounds like the risk to you is your time.

Angela Engel:
Oh, yeah. Isn't that every salesperson's time? The fact is I've been a salesperson for 20 years and I don't think people really understand unless you're like, I hope some sales and business development people are listening right now, and probably PR and marketing people chuckling. Time is really valuable and people don't know. Like for example, we work off spec, right? I am pitching now books to Kinkos, to Whole Foods, to Anthropologie, to Urban Outfitters. We just got our first sale into Paper Source, that took months. Months and months and months. None of that... Oh, Michael's, we almost had a sale into Michael's. How much time we've taken to Michael's craft supplies. I'm telling my clients we don't know and that is all... We are just trying. Continually time. Again today I went back to Barnes and Noble with a whole pitch. That is what I'm supposed to be doing. And once you're part of our sort of author family, you're not getting charged extra for that. That's what I'm doing. And my entire team

Jon Pfeiffer:
To promote the book, how much of it do you use social to promote analog?

Angela Engel:
Well, so social is... Yeah, social, you have to. You just need to embrace social media. How? That is an ever-changing, I'm going to laugh, an algorithm, right? An ever changing algorithm. And I think the most important thing for authors or people to do is to really develop your website, your supplemental, and your email list. I actually am really always remind authors that we can get obsessed with do I have 2,000 followers? Do I have 10,000 followers? But so far too often that doesn't convert to sales. And when you can really actually get people to be part of your email list, to be part of your really close face groups, part of your courses, when you're talking a non-fiction author, that's going to convert to sales. So that would be my biggest advice for the yoga person is to develop those and not to worry that they need to be 10,000 plus followers and the next content creator.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Do you have your authors do mini book tours, show up at a bookstore?

Angela Engel:
Oh yes, absolutely. It's great for social. And not to say that I don't love social, it's just how... Twitter's good. Obviously BookTok has blown up and TikTok and all of these things, but the thing is that in the end, yes, the bookstore scene is really important I think. But again, the bookstores do really rely on the author's community. So the best turnout is usually where either the author has a family or fan base.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Okay. So then what's the next step after we've gotten that far? What happens next for our new yoga author?

Angela Engel:
Okay. So we have designed it, printed it, it's this gorgeous book I would say, right? It's a two color, shows all the greatest yoga theories. Okay, great. Okay. So we've presented to the sales team and at this point we've decided that whether that's... What I would say to that author is they're the best way of telling us where they think their book fits. So I always say if you're walking down the Santa Monica and you see 10 yoga studios, don't just write them down, go in, tell us where.

Jon Pfeiffer:
In that three block square.

Angela Engel:
Yeah. In that three block square of Santa Monica, you know what I'm saying? I get these emails like, "Oh, I think my book would be really good. I went over here." And then I'm like, "Well, did you remember the store name?" And the authors are like, "No." I'm like, "Okay. Our sales team doesn't understand." Exactly. Because there's 70 on that same block. So what I would say to that author is when you feel that your book really works in a certain location, write the name of the store down, write the location of the store, maybe get somebody's clerk message. Send it to us, because I guarantee you, the cool part is we have reps all over the country and it actually works.
We have gotten orders from authors walking in, like we just got an order today for over 40 copies from the de Young Museum here in San Francisco because an author walked in and just talked to the store manager. They said, "Oh, could you get your rep?" And our rep called the store and there you go, they bought 48 copies of a book. And now we're going to have the author go in and sign the stack and everything else. And so just like traditional publishing, just like self-publishing, just like hybrid publishing, hybrid partnership publishing, ultimately you have to do the work when you're an author. You really just do.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yeah. That's something that a lot of authors don't know until they've started this process.

Angela Engel:
Yeah.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Unfortunately.

Angela Engel:
Yeah. The thing is an audience wants to connect with the author.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yeah. So of the authors that have the first run, how many make it to a second run of prints?

Angela Engel:
Well, gosh, how many? Gosh, I think-

Jon Pfeiffer:
Just a percentage, are you talking 25% are able to make it to a second printing?

Angela Engel:
Oh, yeah. I think on small, we just went back to print for two of our children's books that one was just published in February, it just sold out. One was published in November. We went back to print on our cookbook because it sold out in three weeks. So how our 52 Shabbats cookbook sold out in three weeks because it was kind of a snowball. LA Times picked it up and thought it was like one of two best books to buy for Hanukkah. And then The Washington Post said it was gorgeous. Then the New York Times picked it up. And so we just got a snowball effect from these newspapers and we sold out in six weeks and then it was just demand. So I guess that is also my biggest advice to all authors is that also look traditional print, newspapers and also radio sell books still often more than a fleeting story in an Instagram post.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Well, because if you're reading a newspaper, you're likely to read a book.

Angela Engel:
Correct. And they have these really good digital platforms now, right? Where like the New York Times app, the cool part is when the story runs, it can link to the book and the author page. And it's great. And then on their author page, you always, when you're traditionally published or you're partnership published like us, you're sold where all books are sold. So the cool part is not just an Amazon link, but it's a bookshop.org link or it's a Barnes and Noble link. And that is really key for a lot of traditional media. They're looking for that because then they know that the book is really in stock and can be available for their readership.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So shifting gears a second, how do you consume your content? Reading versus scrolling. What's your percentage?

Angela Engel:
I'm a real article reader I think. For example, I was reading Bloomberg. I had found this really interesting a friend sent me and I was really into this business article. And I love reading, that type of reading. I do read it on my phone, articles a lot. But when I want to read a book, a novel or a non-fiction, I'm all about the print. I really have a hard time reading on a digital device.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So it's rare that I get to ask a mother about monitoring their children's use of social media. On the podcast at least. I heard you say publicly that you have three children, the oldest is 13. How do you monitor what she looks at online?

Angela Engel:
Oh, that's an ever-changing discussion I think her and I have together. I know she likes TikTok a lot and we've had conversations about TikTok in particular. And she knows that I'm highly visible on Instagram because we're such a visual company and LinkedIn. And she's funny because we did just open up a TikTok account, which I don't manage, my intern manages and my marketing manager who are quite a bit younger than me. I'm going to be honest on this podcast, I'm in my mid forties. So my 13-year-old has told me specifically I am not allowed to get on TikTok. Which is really funny as a business owner. And then I'm like, "Well, all these 40 some year old mothers are on TikTok doing all kinds of crazy things."
So I respected that boundary to be completely honest. I let my social media team run our Collective Book Studio and play around with TikTok or whatever, because I don't feel as a mother I need to be monitoring if I can build that trust with my daughter. So we've talked about boundaries, we've talked about trust. Every once in a while I'll be like, "Hey, what are you watching?" I really recommend mothers doing that. I'll go in her room, I just did this yesterday, I sat down on her bed and I was like, "Hey, do you mind sharing with me what you watch?" And she didn't mind because she knows I'm not on there. And she showed me several things and we talked a little bit about language and what was appropriate and what wasn't appropriate.
She also, honestly, has been really good, because we had an incident with my middle and she actually did not know. My middle is almost 11 and she does have some friends on TikTok, were taking some pictures and my oldest one caught it and I was able to tell the parent. And they were really embarrassed and took it down. So in some way, giving your oldest child the ability to figure out how to also help if anything's happening with your younger children's really nice. We have kind of this set rule in our house for us an age when our middle one's even able to. So she wasn't even able to go on those until about 12 years old.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Okay. So shifting gears again, I know you're working on a secret project because you were a comparative lit major at Oregon and you have a book that you are working on, a cookbook, and if you're not I'm trying to prod you to start, about your grandparents and the Italian and Jewish cookbook that everybody's waiting for.

Angela Engel:
How did you know that?

Jon Pfeiffer:
I told you, I do a deep dive of my guests. I read it in an article.

Angela Engel:
Oh my God. That is so funny. Oh my God. Okay. First of all, and I know I kind of went off on the social, but I do let my kids watch YouTube, which I know you love YouTube, and we watch YouTube. Me and my little ones watch YouTube. That's how we got to Legoland. We watched so many little YouTube videos. So I love this question. I tried to defer it here I guess on my cookbook is why I went back to social media and YouTube. I would love to write that. My grandmother immigrated from Italy and she was an amazing, amazing cook. She would hand do the pasta, and I was the oldest child of three, and my grandmother moved in with us when my grandfather passed away. And I think I was about six or seven years old.
And she moved in with us and I would have to come home from school and shake out every pasta noodle. And then I would actually hang it over a towel rack for it to dry. And at the same time, my mother was born in Israel and she came over at seven. And she would make hummus, beet salad, and matzah ball soup. And so we would have dinner with meatballs, hummus, matzah ball soup. It was like the craziest dinners. And so I would love to figure out a cookbook that's very eclectic by being Jewish, Italian cookbook.

Jon Pfeiffer:
I could introduce you to a publisher.

Angela Engel:
I know. I have to gather all my grandmother's recipes, because her ravioli were so amazing.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So last question for you, where can people find your company on the internet?

Angela Engel:
Okay. That's really easy. Everyone should have a website. Okay? Everybody. And we do too. So it's just thecollectivebook.studio. Not .com. It's just thecollectivebook.studio. And then I also am really active Angela Engel on LinkedIn. And then I love Instagram. I'm still a big fan of it. And we're just @thecollectivebookstudio on Instagram. I know we're on Twitter and we're also on TikTok, like I said. But if you want to reach out to me directly, I often really strongly, I will even DM you back on Instagram. You can just say, "Angela, this is a message for you."

Jon Pfeiffer:
Well, thank you. This has been fun.

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