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How can you tell where the real innovation in publishing is happening right now, and why is it emerging from the indie side first? How do you market your own book when you've spent 35 years marketing everyone else's? John Bond talks about Going Indie and what he's learned about authors who last.
In the intro, my thoughts on writing with AI, Charles Dickens and encouragement for the 3-year-old dancing to K-Pop at the wedding, UK copyright law, The end of an era — Hugh Howey; Notre Dame, Paris;
Today's show is sponsored by Bookfunnel, the essential tool for your author business. Whether it’s delivering your reader magnet, sending out advanced copies of your book, handing out ebooks at a conference, or fulfilling your digital sales to readers, BookFunnel does it all. Check it out at bookfunnel.com/thecreativepenn
This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn
John Bond is the co-founder of Whitefox, a premium publishing services agency, and has over 35 years in traditional publishing, from bookselling to marketing and management. He's also the co-author of Going Indie: Publishing Your Book Your Way, with James Silver.
You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.
Show Notes
- Why 2012 was a watershed moment for publishing in the UK
- Whether the snobbery around self-publishing has finally gone
- How to co-write a book with someone, and why there's no formula
- The pride swallowing involved in getting endorsement quotes for your own book
- The shadow economy of indie sales that no industry chart measures
- The hallmarks of writers who build a long-term career
You can find John at wearewhitefox.com.
Transcript of the interview with John Bond
Jo: John Bond is the co-founder of Whitefox, a premium publishing services agency, and has over 35 years in traditional publishing, from bookselling to marketing and management. He's also the co-author of Going Indie: Publishing Your Book Your Way, with James Silver.
So welcome back to the show, John.
John: Thank you, Jo. Thanks so much for having me.
Jo: You were last on the show in 2022. You've been on a couple of times, but just set the scene.
Tell people a bit more about you and your long background in publishing.
John: I suppose I could say I started as a marketing manager at Penguin back in the early 1990s in London, and that role eventually evolved into running sales and marketing, as it often does. I did that at Penguin and at HarperCollins.
Then I ran one of the publishing divisions at HarperCollins, including 4th Estate, and published Hilary Mantel and Jonathan Franzen and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and others.
I left that in 2011 and set up Whitefox in 2012, and it's a classic startup story. It was somebody I worked with at HarperCollins. We sat around a kitchen table, came up with an idea for a business, which was Whitefox, and that's grown into the creative agency that it is today.
Jo: So back then, did you think, “I can do this better”?
Was that the impetus, “I can do publishing better than Penguin and HarperCollins”?
John: No, I thought we would solve a problem. There's something very attractive about that whole startup mentality and beginning something from scratch.
I mean, I was in my early 50s. I'd had a long career in traditional publishing. On the plus side, I knew a lot of people, and I thought I could get meetings, people would reply to my phone calls or my emails. On the downside, I didn't necessarily have the energy of a 20 to 25-year-old.
I knew a lot of people and I knew quite a lot of things, and I also knew what problems something like Whitefox could solve.
We set up with this idea that if we could galvanise and organise the diaspora of freelancers in the publishing space and make them available to anybody that wanted to make a book, that that would be quite a powerful thing.
These incredibly creative, wonderful people who were below the radar and were not particularly valued or managed or utilised properly.
I thought if we could access that and make that available not just to traditional publishing people who know about these people, but to individual authors, businesses, brands, people that wanted to make a book, and if you added a layer of our expertise from traditional publishing, that could be quite powerful, I suppose.
That's what I was thinking back then.
Jo: It's funny, though. You said these wonderful freelancers who were not particularly valued or managed or utilised properly. That could also apply to a lot of authors in traditional publishing.
John: Totally. Totally. But if I'm honest, I don't think I was thinking about that.
What's really evolved since we started, even in that 2011, 2012 period, is so much has happened to independent writers, indie authors. The whole ecosystem has become much more vibrant, and what is accessible to those writers is much greater.
I'd like to think we've played a part in that. What that's done is put power back into writers' hands, and that quickly became apparent in the business as a byproduct of what we'd set up.
Jo: Yes, and 2012 I do think in the UK was a pivot point, because I got into self-publishing in 2006/2007 when the Americans did with the beginning of the Kindle and the iPhone. Really the American ecosystem grew first.
I happened to be in Australia, and so I think I was able to escape the negativity of the vortex in the UK, which took a number more years to embrace self-publishing as a force to be reckoned with as opposed to an embarrassing thing in the corner for vanity press.
Do you see 2012 as a changing point in UK publishing?
John: I think we'd just come out of the Kindle moment, hadn't we? There were all sorts of conversations going on about how that was going to change things forever. I think no one quite knew what the upshot of that was going to be, but we knew that it was incredibly disruptive.
In 2012, Penguin, as it was then, before Penguin Random House, had offered to buy Author Solutions for $115 million, presumably seen as some kind of defensive measure as to what the market was going to evolve into.
I think it felt like a real period of change. In the UK, James Daunt took over running Waterstones, and he was then ultimately going to run Barnes & Noble.
It felt like a bit of a watershed. I think we were lucky in that sense, that maybe in the UK and in London, what we were creating coincided with an opening up of opportunity and creativity, and people wanting access to more tools to be able to do things themselves.
Getting this idea that you invest in your own talent and what that could mean for your ability to do things quicker, better. Some of it was happenstance, but lucky for us.
As you say, we then became aware that in a sense a lot of these things had come to fruition earlier on the US side.
In London, that whole idea of setting up something that wasn't a traditional rights-owning model, but where you wanted to be working with people creatively, felt actually really exciting and timely.
Jo: And when you started to work with independent authors, probably a couple of years after that, you started to work with a lot more indie authors and things really started to change in terms of the business side.
Did you feel any of the snobbery from the traditional industry?
Like you mentioned, you have a lot of contacts, a lot of connections. I came to your wonderful launch party and there were just people from all over the industry. I wondered if you got any kickback, or if anyone raised their eyebrows a little bit at who you were choosing to work with?
John: Oh, definitely. And I would say I really think that's gone.
You may think differently, Jo, but from my perspective, I think there has been such an evolution in the nearly 15 years that we've been going. So any of that residual snobbery, looking down your nose at people that were going DIY, producing multiple books, learning from every single publication.
We've spoken about this before. I remember you sat on the panel of a FutureBook conference in the UK, which was run by a trade magazine, with this idea of looking at the, in quotes, “digital future of the business.” It felt like there were a lot of things being talked about, but not a lot of action on the traditional side.
I suppose some sort of awe that there was some magic going on with people who were making a success of self-publishing. But then quite a lot of people looking down their noses at things that shouldn't get through the gatekeepers.
I do think that's gone. Or if it's not completely gone, I can see it on the way out of the door, because there's no room for that when agents are struggling to sell books to publishers because publishers are looking at the next indie author, the next Freida McFadden, the next Sarah J. Maas, the next Rebecca Yarros.
So whoever it may be, or wherever they're publishing, whatever they're doing now, wherever they may be, knowing that a lot of those people will already be publishing and be on not their first, second, third or fourth, but potentially their 10th or 11th book.
It's a race to see who can help those authors, as a traditional publisher would see it, amplify what they're doing. I think the idea that there's an us and them, if it did exist then, which it certainly did in certain publishing quarters, is gone.
I used to go to those conferences, like the FutureBook Conference, and certain publishers would talk about publishing, and when they meant publishing, they meant a really tiny area of quite literary, traditional imprints. That's what publishing meant.
They didn't even mean publishing to mean educational publishing, or children's publishing, or academic publishing, and certainly not Kindle or POD or whatever. So I think that's had to change for very good, sound, commercial, economic reasons.
Jo: Yes, you're right. I definitely have heard, as we go to similar events sometimes, and you do hear agents used to talk a lot more about finding books very occasionally in a slush pile, or doing courses so you could meet people and do pitch events and all this.
Now it's often build an audience on BookTok or whatever, and sell lots of books, and traditional publishing as an amplifier, as you said. That's how I always hear them pitch it now, the question of—
What can traditional publishing still do when indie authors can do so much?
It does seem to be, well, we can amplify you, we can get you into traditional press, we can get you in traditional bookstores, we can help you with film and movie deals, that kind of thing. So that's really interesting, because that's actually changed quite a lot.
They don't now seem to say, “Oh, well, we can make sure we pay you,” or, “We are editorial success as such.”
John: I think they don't say editorial success or quality or indeed marketing, because that was what used to be said.
I think there's an understanding that a lot of indie writers are better marketeers of their own books than traditional publishers, and if you go into the publishing machine, then you'll get your slot. It lasts for a certain period of time and then that moves on to another book.
Whereas obviously if you're writing your own book and you're marketing your own book, you're able to do that yourself 24/7 wherever you are in the world, and you will know more about your readers and your audience and how that evolves than a traditional publisher would.
What they probably mean now is, as you said, as much as anything, distribution, or even physical distribution.
Because to be part of that process, I think that is still where a large conglomerate is able to wield some muscle, with this idea that if you physically want to see your book in bricks and mortar retailers in X outlets around the world, that's potentially easier to do if that is your aim, via a traditional publisher.
So it is constantly evolving, because it used to be that marketing was the silver bullet, and I don't think that's the case anymore.
Jo: No. We'll come back to marketing, shall we? Struggling with marketing.
So let's get into your book. You recently co-wrote Going Indie with James Silver, Publishing Your Book Your Way. Obviously you already knew a lot about indie authors, so I wonder, what did you discover in the process of researching the book and the interviews you did? And I was one of your interviews.
Did anything come up that surprised you, since you're already pretty embedded in the world?
John: I would say some of it was reinforcing what I knew. So how everything is so intertwined, how in some ways unlinear everything is.
People are doing lots of things in a different order to the way that traditionally writers would perceive this relay race of a manuscript gets passed to an editor, an editor passes on. That's just not how it is or needs to be anymore.
I still think there is—not even a misconception—but I think there's a received wisdom that when you're talking about self-publishing, you're talking about fiction.
The majority of books that Whitefox produces are not fiction, they're non-fiction. Some of them are quite mainstream, some of them are quite niche.
That idea of connecting to your audience and your followers, and being slightly more scientific about how you find readers in your non-fiction niche, I think is still unspoken about in a way, in that genre fiction tends to be what people automatically assume the conversation is about.
This probably doesn't surprise you, but I was pleasantly surprised to have it confirmed to me quite how much swapping and sharing there is of skills and knowledge in that space.
I'm not saying indie writing is egoless at all, but there's quite a lot of sharing of knowledge and what works, and collaboration, which I think is great to see.
Again, if you've, as I did many years ago, come out of corporate conglomerate publishing, traditional publishing, there's less of that by the very nature of the kind of organisation.
And look, we just talked about marketing a little while ago. I do think this whole idea that the cutting edge of experimentation, it's not traditional publishing, it's indie writers.
They are looking at not just how to find readers, but how to fulfil orders, how to make commercial sense of what they're doing from the absolute outset and get-go of what they're doing.
And just how now the lines are blurring between what would be classified as traditional digital publishers and the writers who are doing their own thing, or doing their own thing on behalf of a few other writers. Those lines have completely blurred.
There used to be this traditional hardback, paperback, X number of books a year, a year after hardback there's a paperback. This is the model we have been doing for centuries, and people doing things on their own.
I think that's blurring massively, and the Venn diagrams of people's areas of expertise are just overlapping massively.
Jo: Well, I think you're right there, and certainly the hardback special editions with sprayed edges and foil. A lot of us now are doing that first and not putting out the other, or putting out the rest of it at the same time.
I dare say probably there are more indie authors with sprayed edge hardbacks than there are traditionally published authors.
John: I'm sure that's right. And what's interesting is if you go to a traditional book printer, they are loving the direct communication with writers, that's not coming through traditional channels and traditional relationships. It's great business, it's interesting.
I think that's something that's even developed in the last couple of years, that cutting out of some of the middle men required.
Jo: Yes, and in terms of supporting freelancers and small publishing houses and printers and stuff, the other thing I've heard is that indie authors pay upfront, or they pay quickly, compared to some of these big publishers who are asking for long lead times and steep discounting.
So actually a lot of these independent businesses are doing better under indie author work than they were under traditional.
John: I think that's right, and that's what I mean also about the sharing of information and this collaborative idea of sharing creative knowledge. I mean, I'm making it sound like a kind of 19th century cooperative, which it isn't. I'm not suggesting that for a second.
It's this idea that there's a lot of people learning a lot of things and there's a keenness to share some of that information, because if you've developed your own readership for your unique creative product, some of those learnings are very exciting.
The printers I've spoken to love working on those kinds of things, because they are also being challenged to come up with new ways of developing ever more innovative physical product.
Jo: Yes, I think it's a fun, creative time for sure. Things like Kickstarter, which you came on and talked about crowdfunding years ago, and I've obviously done. I think, what am I on now? Seven? I've just done my seventh.
John: Wow.
Jo: It's so much fun. But now what's happening is traditional publishers are arriving on Kickstarter and all that kind of thing. So we really see a blurring.
Let's come back to your book, so Going Indie. You co-wrote it. Now obviously there are lots of positive sides of collaboration, but in terms of any challenges with collaboration and co-writing and the writing process of doing this? Because I've done this several times and I've found it very challenging.
So tell us about the collaborative writing process.
John: We thought a lot about it before we took it on. What I would say, having done it, is I am assuming there is no formula for how you do this.
At Penguin I worked with a married couple who were crime writers, and they wrote books together. They merged their names so it appeared to be one name. I could not tell you, and they didn't share what that process was, whether they were writing different chapters or … I don't know. So I can only speak from my own experience.
James is an established journalist. He's great with deadlines. He was very good at chivvying me along when I needed to be persuaded to hit the deadlines that I'd promised.
I write blogs, I write newsletters, I write content for our website, but this is my first book. I've never written anything of this length. So in a way it started with the structure. It started with this idea that we would play to what we perceived as our respective strengths in terms of writing.
We absolutely were not each writing every third word or anything like that. It was a process of trust in different parts. I thought, James had done some research and will be better at writing that. He deferred to me on areas that he took to be my areas of expertise.
We did every interview for the book together. We went over the notes from those before they became part of the interviews for the book. And some of the book's elements are diagrammatic, so those are very easy to collaborate on.
I think we tried to be professionally, creatively constructive with each other. So it was raising an eyebrow rather than shouting at each other if we didn't agree about something.
A lot of it was down to the editing, and I don't know what your experience was like with a co-writer, but a lot of it came down to: here is something which is quite baggy. How do we, between us, make this as tight as we possibly can?
I don't mean copy editing or proofreading. I mean the actual sort of, how do we get this into a pithy, usable, practical but discursive book? We didn't ever set out for this to be a pure reference book at all. We wanted to take a snapshot of what was going on.
So a lot of it was genuinely trying to do some research and get people to feed into what was going on from lots of different perspectives, which is why we wanted to get mainstream traditional publishers, we wanted to get agents, we wanted to get indie writers, we wanted to get people who have all sorts of experiences and perspectives.
That's what makes it what it is, which is, here's what we think are some of the interesting discussion points of what's going on now.
Jo: It is a fantastic snapshot. I think it's really interesting—and obviously you also have seen my book, Successful Self-Publishing, which is on its fourth edition—this is one of the difficult things with snapshot type books. So have you already thought about that?
I know this one has just come out, but have you thought, “Oh no, in five years we have to do it again”?
John: Well, I think we thought we're going to have to address AI, which we do in the book, and we really tried to caveat that with saying, look, so much may change so quickly, and here we are talking about what we know now.
We obviously tried to set the context for where we are now, and we tried as much as possible to make something which would last as long as we can.
I think what we did think was, we have tried to make it as international a perspective as possible. But at the same time, we are a London-based agency, and a lot of the views will be from people based in the UK.
So I think what I would like to explore is something that looks at potentially somewhere like the US, where I think there'll be different people that would perhaps have different perspectives on different things.
So I think we thought about potentially there being future iterations of the book, but not yet.
Jo: Not yet. This is the challenge with non-fiction, of course.
On that, I would say what you just said around the US and stuff, the successful UK authors all use the same systems as the US. So I wouldn't say that the US … I mean, we all have the US companies we all use.
I say Kobo is obviously Canadian, but I would say that we use the same ways of doing things. Obviously you might interview a different author, but …
John: That was all I meant. I meant interviewing. Because we've interviewed agents and authors and publishers and they are largely UK based. So it was the idea that maybe there are some perspectives on things rather than systemic.
Jo: Differences.
John: Yes. Just that.
Jo: So then I guess another challenge, we've kind of nodded to it so far, is marketing.
So let's talk about the challenges of getting this book out in terms of publishing and marketing.
Because you've been on the inner circle side, trying to do that for other people's books, but your own book, this is a whole nother thing. So tell us about that.
John: Well, how do you do it, Jo? I mean, honestly, I've loved some of it. I get how you become completely obsessed with your book and trying to make sure that you can get it into the hands of the people that you want to get it into the hands of.
We've got some great endorsement quotes, which was a task that, how can I say this? I would call it pride swallowing. The idea that you really try and get people to say nice things about your book and, if they don't reply, you think, “How much do I pester them? How much do I annoy them by asking them again nicely?”
And the absolute sheer unadulterated joy when they come back with something positive that you can use and utilise in some way. So that whole process of waiting for feedback, I suppose, and hoping that people are going to like what you've done and help you spread the word for it.
We had a launch event, we've given books away. We've published the book as ebook and POD. I think one of the great things about that is it's enabled us to be completely adaptable and make changes right up until the last minute.
That drove everybody in my team completely crazy because we were making changes up until the last minute. So, is the book definitely going to be available on publication date? What's it going to do? You know, all of that kind of stuff.
Also, just getting this idea that I suppose you can never stop. Is that a very obvious thing to say to a writer? It probably is. You just can't stop, because if you go, “Right, well, I've done it,” complacency is the enemy.
Just as soon as you've got that quote, or someone said that they're going to give you an opportunity to talk about it on a platform, it's just another day and you've got to keep thinking about how you can spread the word and tell people that it exists.
Jo: Yes, well, I think that's right, and particularly non-fiction, which unless it's very timely and you must get it out right now. But other than that—
Most books you just have to keep marketing for years.
Then just as you say, when do you stop? Well, you kind of never stop unless you want to, unless you want to retire and just give up, basically.
Dean Wesley Smith, who's a big writer in the US and a kind of a mentor of mine in past years, he talks about it as this massive sea of books. And when a book arrives, he pictures it coming down and landing on the water. So the day you launch, it's landed on the water, and then it begins to sink.
Then there are all these other books coming down. It's like this rain of books, and your book is sinking as soon as it lands. And your job is to keep it afloat somehow.
John: Keep it afloat.
Jo: Yes.
John: I think you're right, and it's such an interesting perspective for us, who work with a lot of people who have one book. You know, they've spent 10 years writing it. It's their life story. It's their memoir. It's their self-help book. It's their book that accompanies them on their speaking journey, or whatever.
Then there are the people who are writing constantly and can't stop writing because they're exercising that creative muscle all the time and wanting to get better, and wanting to improve and learn and understand why this works and why that hasn't worked.
Just getting a glimpse into what it must be like for that person for whom writing is not a hobby. I kept saying to myself, “This is not something you're doing as a hobby.”
I want this book to be of value to people, and if I'm investing that time and effort into something that I want to get out there, you've got to commit to whatever it is you need to do to make sure you're not sinking.
Jo: Yes.
John: I will now not be able to get that image out of my head.
Jo: Yes. I know there's people listening who don't have a mind's eye, which I always find fascinating, but for those of us with a mind's eye, you can now picture that and you will never forget it.
The other thing, I guess, is that, having done a lot, over 40 books now, the inevitable thing is you cannot keep pushing all of those books back up to the surface.
So when you do get the bug as such of writing, the most interesting thing for all of us is always the next book. It's always like, ooh, the next thing I'm doing, I'm very excited about. So you do have to pick your battles on marketing.
So have you got the bug, do you think? Are you thinking of other books in general?
Because as you said, you must be, I guess, in your 60s.
John: I am.
Jo: You could retire.
John: I am. You were talking about that long career. I could. I mean, I really love doing it, and I would love to do more.
I think one of the things that surprised me was just how many ideas came up while we were doing the book about tangents that one could take it.
I have no desire to write a novel. I don't want to do that. I wouldn't be very good at that.
I do think there are some interesting spaces around where there's a kind of intersection of creativity and learning, and how you can develop books that would help people who are trying to achieve different things in different sectors of publishing.
So without getting too granular about it, this book doesn't really address brands who want to become publishers, and I think that is something that our business has developed into working with, not just individuals, but businesses and brands.
I think there's definitely spin-offs of this book which are not about repeating what we've done so far. And this whole idea of what you've been doing for a long time, what we've been doing since 2011, 2012, it's evolving now at such a speed.
I mean, who would have known what was going to come out of TikTok? As you talk about TikTok to Shopify, that whole kind of new ways of finding readers, of taking books to market. As you said, Kickstarter, crowdfunding.
There's all sorts of things that I think will emerge, because in a funny sort of way traditional publishing at the moment feels quite conservative with a small c.
I mean, the bestsellers. Dan Brown is number one in the bestseller list this week in the UK as I speak, who has been a bestseller forever. And obviously new writers come along the whole time, but the market feels a little bit as if it's waiting now for innovation.
I think if that innovation's going to happen, it's probably going to happen in the indie space before it happens in mainstream publishing. So people are coming to us and thinking, does that represent a trend?
Does that represent something which could be a way of looking at something a little bit deeper, doing some research around and creating something which is not a long book, not a massive thesis, but something which is indicative of something which could be useful for people.
Jo: Just coming back on the Dan Brown is in the bestseller list.
I think this is completely to do with the way that traditional publishing measures things.
For many years, more than a decade, probably since the beginning of Kindle, certainly the beginning of Kindle Unlimited, there is a shadow economy, I call it, or a parallel economy.
I would say that almost zero of my own personal sales are measured by any industry standards. Anyone who makes any money from Kindle Unlimited or Kickstarter or Shopify, or selling direct in any form, or selling books at conventions, none of this is measured by any traditional things.
As you know, the New York Times list, for example, does not include Amazon sales in their bestseller list.
So you've got indie authors in the UK who are incredibly successful who have to decide, say, someone like LJ Ross, for example, decides, “Okay, I'm going to set up a proper imprint with Gardners or whatever so that I can get in bookstores so that I can hit a Sunday Times list or something.”
So I would say that seeing things like Dan Brown on a bestseller list has almost no meaning in the shadow indie economy.
John: No, you're absolutely right. We're not even able to see audiobook sales.
Jo: Yes, audio. Any kind of borrows, like Spotify.
John: No, you're completely right. I suppose I was making a broader cultural point, that it doesn't feel like there's an enormous amount of innovation going on or risk taking within what I would call mainstream trade publishing.
And there doesn't seem to be the need to be, because there will be more consolidation. Small companies will be bought by big companies, so there's growth through acquisition.
There's still a hope that something will take off that is a surprise, and there's still an enormous reliance on established brands who, even through the traditional metrics of how you measure them, are probably selling less, but still at the top of the pile. I suppose that's what I was meaning.
Jo: Yes, and I agree with what the industry looks at as signals. It's just, as we said, a lot of these signals are invisible.
So coming onto innovation, at London Book Fair this year there were a lot of sessions on AI, and you mentioned AI briefly, and there is a chapter in Going Indie on generative AI. And of course there's a lot of negativity and drama and lawsuits and this, that and the other.
But at the same time, at London Book Fair, a lot of traditional publishers talking about using it, and of course they always say, “Oh, we use AI only in marketing and business, not with the creative or editorial.” Everyone makes this distinction.
What are your thoughts on what's happening and where's it going with AI? Is a lot of this stuff not happening in public and just going on behind closed doors?
John: I think so. We do have a chapter in the book on AI. We've generated summaries of every chapter using AI, which we explicitly said in the book as well. We've got our Ten Commandments of what we think are useful guidelines.
I think that there has to be an enormous amount being done, whether it's experimentation or speeding up for efficiency's sake, or things that slow you down, within mainstream publishing.
There has to be more than just the guardrails around the creative process. And clearly when we're talking about metadata, book description, cover copy, presumably royalty calculations, presumably if you're trying to grow your newsletters. There has to be an enormous amount of activity going on.
We're driven by the market, so we do not commission. Writers come to us and they either want to work with us and we want to work with them, or that doesn't happen. So we're in a sense seeing what the market is seeing, and that is a whole range of things.
As I've said before, there's a lot of sweeping generalisations out there, which if you look back to that Kindle moment, we were talking a little while ago about what was going on in 2010/2011, about the enormous broad brush strokes that were being perceived as a result of Kindle.
Kindle has affected some areas of publishing, it's affected some not at all.
I think it will be absolutely fascinating when the sweeping generalisations stop and there becomes, I suppose, even more transparency. The thing that people are looking for, isn't it? A little bit less opaqueness as to what is really being done.
Because everybody's being so careful about what they say they're doing and what they're not doing. I suppose ElevenLabs is the one where people are openly engaging on the audio side. I mean, everyone is being so careful and cautious.
Jo: Me too.
John: What do you think? We spoke a bit about AI within the book, and I'm interested to know what you think.
Jo: Well, I've obviously been openly talking about it since 2016. I openly talk about using it, and I've got my Patreon community where we talk about how we're using it, and tips on how to use it.
But then, because I have been writing and publishing since 2007, 2008, I'm very strong in my creative voice. I'm very strong in my understanding of what I consider to be my level of output, and what I publish under my own name is what I publish under my own name.
John: Totally.
Jo: So the problem is for people who are less confident, I think, in what they're doing creatively perhaps. I know some people feel like they're scared it will take over or something.
When you're as strong-minded as me, it's not taking over anything.
John: It's not going to take over anything. And the other side of the coin is how many people are finding Whitefox using ChatGPT.
Jo: Mm.
John: I'm thrilled that we are emerging, through very detailed briefing of AI, as something that is worth engaging with.
Jo: Positive marketing.
John: Yes, exactly. As you say, I think there's a lot of negativity, and I think it will settle down eventually. I think less hysteria.
Jo: Yes, hopefully sooner rather than later.
So as we come to an end, you've been in the publishing industry a long time and seen a lot of people who have disappeared, but also those who've lasted. I wondered if maybe you could comment on those who last, because I definitely feel like I'm in my 50s now, and I want to keep doing this. I'm pretty obsessed with—
What are the hallmarks of people who have a long-term career?
So reflections on that.
John: Oh, that's such a good question. I think there's some common characteristics and themes. So I think authenticity, I think this idea of being continually curious.
I think there are people who can't help but create, and this idea that once you've sort of expelled once, that's enough. I think there's people that just can't stop creating, whatever you do with it. But this idea that the more you do, the better you get, the more you evolve and keep an open mind.
I think there's definitely entrepreneurial writers who love this idea of keeping their readers engaged, and how that conversation is something that evolves and that collaboration evolves, is fascinating. I think if you love that, and you listen, there's always an opportunity to keep building on what you do.
I love the writers who we work with. I can think of a writer who we're working on his fourth novel at the moment, and he is a bundle of positivity. No matter the trials and tribulations, the things that have gone wrong, his expectations definitely not being met with his first book.
He definitely has this idea that he wants to keep writing, he wants to get better, and he is getting better. It isn't a journey that has a beginning and an end. It's something that will continue for as long as he wants to write.
Every single book that he has published, he has learned and gained confidence, gained a network of connections that he's utilised himself now to not make the first half a dozen mistakes he made on the first book.
Who knows where it will end up? But certainly the satisfaction he's getting, and the sales he's getting, are growing as he becomes savvier and quicker to make the right choices and decisions.
So I think that's my honest answer to that. I think there are definitely people who think, “Phew, I have really wanted to do this book. Now I can rest easy. I've done my book.”
Then there are people who really, whatever their objective, whatever the definition of success is from the get-go, just can't help creating. I do love that and respect that.
I don't think our book falls quite into that category, because I think it's a slightly different thing. I think there are people who are still making a success of what they do and redefining that as they go on, and who are really open to ideas and input from different people and are not closed off. I love working with those people.
Jo: So where can people find Going Indie and everything you do online?
John: Well, Going Indie is available online at all good bookshops. It's available at Amazon and anywhere you buy books online as ebook and POD. Our website is wearewhitefox.com, and you'll find information about not just our book there, but a lot of other things that we're doing on that site.
Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, John. That was great.
John: Thank you so much, Jo. It's been a pleasure.