This episode’s guest is David Morris of Lake Drive Books.

In today’s interview, David tells us more about Lake Drive’s mission, publishing practices, and unconventional financial model. David also offers his takes on how to determine what works for you when it comes to choosing a publishing path and gives some platform-building insights for authors.

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• Publishing Disrupted - Podcast - Apple Podcasts
• Hyponymous Literary
• Free 30-Day Plottr Trial
• Hybrid Pub Scout's Bookshop.org Shop
• Lake Drive Books | Spirituality, Self Help, Wholeness
• IBPA’s Hybrid Publishing Criteria

Hybrid publishing has a bit of a nebulous definition at the moment, but as authors are becoming more disenchanted with traditional publishing and discovering how grueling self publishing can be, they’re becoming more relevant.

Since it’s been the standard for such a long time, people are used to the traditional publishing model. They expect that:

1. Publishers pay for everything
2. Authors get advances and royalties
3. Publishers take care of book promotion and marketing

But here’s a few problems (among others):

1. The “everything” that publishers pay for has a big asterisk attached to it, even in trad
2. Advances and royalties are more underwhelming than ever (or maybe “less whelming”?)
3. Book promotion and marketing mostly falls on the author now (see point 1)

I’ve seen a lot of talk about hybrid publishing being predatory and no different from vanity presses, and in some cases…sure. But when you don’t have a major corporation paying all the up front costs, there are some practicalities to consider. Namely, who’s going to pay for all these professionals to do the work of making a book?

If you listened to the show before, hopefully you’ve gotten the message of how hard ghostwriters, editors, designers, marketers, and other publishing professionals work to create the best book possible. And that work needs to be compensated. But, authors, obviously, should get the best deal possible for their work, too.

So where does that leave us?

How do we bring books into the world while making sure it’s fair to everyone, especially when everyone who isn’t a CEO of a major corporation has such a tight budget? And how do you, as an author, know the money and effort you spend on the publishing side is going to get you to your goal?

The Independent Book Publisher’s Association (or IBPA) has tried to set up some standards for hybrid presses in the last several years. At last look, these are what the IBPA says a good hybrid publisher should do:

1. Define a mission and vision for its publishing program.
2. Vet submissions.
3. Commit to truth and transparency in business practices.
4. Provide a negotiable, easy-to-understand contract for each book published.
5. Publish under its own imprint(s) and ISBNs.
6. Publish to industry standards.
7. Ensure editorial, design, and production quality.
8. Pursue and manage a range of publishing rights.
9. Provide distribution services.
10. Demonstrate respectable sales.
11. Pay authors a higher-than-standard royalty.

As you may have noticed, there’s considerable wiggle room in there for these definitions (for example, you as the author are responsible for deciding how to define things like “respectable sales”). And the definitions are constantly evolving. So, that’s a big part of what we’ll be looking at in this and upcoming episodes.