on about books, we delve into the latest news about the publishing industry with interesting insider interviews with publishing industry experts. we'll also give you updates on

current nonfiction authors and books. thebook reviews and we'll talk about the current nonfiction books feature on c-span spoke t welcome to about. now in a few minutes, we'll learn about self-publishing. what the head of the country's largest association of independent publishers. but first, here's some news from the publishing world. well, missouri republican senator josh hawley is set to join the ranks as being one of the most prolific writers in the us senate. according to business insider, senator hawley is in the process of writing his fourth book. this one is entitled the awakening the religious revivals that made america and why we need another. he is currently running for a second term in the senate this fall. the missouri republicans other three books have focused on tech and manhood and masculinity.

just nine sitting u.s. senators have written four books or more. the sitting setowith the most books to her name is . she has 14 vermont independent bernie sanders is next with seven titles and another upcoming book to note, former german chancellor angela merkel will release her memoirs later this year. according to her publisher, the memoir will explore ms. merkel's childhood in east germany, the fall of the berlin wall, her rise to political power, and her 16 years as chancellor of germany. the book is entitled freedom. released november 22nd, and that will conversation about the world of independent publishers and self-publishing. and now joining us is andrea fleck-nisbet, who is ceo of a group called the independent book publier association, which is what ms. fleck nesbit.

good morning, and thank you for having me on. so the indendent book publisher association is a nonprofit association of about 3500 independent publisher, was located primarily in the united states. but we do have some global members as well. and our members are really a diverse group. so they range in size, background publishing program. we serve everyone from author publishers. to me just be starting out publishing their own book all the way through large, establish to independent publishers. so what is an independent publisher? you know that is such a great question, peter, and everyone defines it a little bit differently. and actually, we do have a document, if anyone's ever interested in reviewing the detail of it on the ibp website, we have a document that goes into tail of how we define different types of publishers. so an independent publisher

versus, for example, a corporate publisher. and in the united states, there are five major corporate trade publishers. and so it's anyone who is not a corporate publisher or a university press, which would be attached to a university or a higher educational institution. so what this includes self publishing. that's a really greatstion as well. we some folks do decide it that way. we don't. so i ibp about a third of our membersd those are individuals o are working with other people to create their own book and put it out into the marketplace. they are not publishing other works. so an independent publisher is someone who is actively acquiring content from an author or developing b an author to write that content. then they put the package

together and distribute it out into theketplace. so that's really the differentiation. as an author, publisher, as someone who's producing their own work, along with experts, we're helping them and an independent publisher is someone who is acquiring the work of an author. so andrea fleck-nisbet said, if you and i decided to create a so-called independent publishin company, what would be the steps we would take? so the first stei always tell everyone when they're starting out to creating an independent publisher, just like any small business is, to create a mission statement. so why are you creating this organization, and who are you hoping to reach? what type of content are you looking to put out in the world? and then to create a really strong and detailed financial statement. so you want to put together that paning of the process so you really understand and what kind of funds and resources you're going to need up front. and then how are you planning to

get those books to the market and what is the cost going to be associated with that? and there are a lot of different moving parts that are part of a panel for a book publisher. you have to look at acquiring the content producing the content, distributing the content. so it's really important for folks as they're looking to put a business together to have that business plan in place, to know who they're trying to reach and to have their finances really shored up as they're looking to launom if somebody writes a boo, how do they get it into the marketplace? is itvailable on amazon, etc.? available on amazon. and there are many different ways that you can actually get your book into the marketplace. so again, the first thing you need to determine is who is your reader? where are they shopping? where they congregating either online and in person. and then you can start to put

together the plan of how you're going to get your book in front of them and where they're actually going to purchase that book. typically, if it's an author, a publisher, they are going to put their book together and then either they can post it directly to amazon once they have purchased what's called an isbn, which is and identifier number that we in the publishing industry use to identify a unique book. so they can upload the book directly to it, to azon through a program called kindle and this is typically what we recommend. they can use a platform like ingram, sparc or lulu press or a platform that will allow them to post that book with the files and all of the metadata that surrounds that file. and then the file gets transmitted to aman, barnes and noble. all of the trading part of the online trading partners that visible.

then once it's online and a consumer can purchase it, the consumer purchase that book and then on the back end, the book actually gets produced. so in that particular model, the book is not getting printed until a consumer purchases it. and that's something that we call print on demand and the technology and the software out there for publishing a book has advanced quite a bit in the last ten years, hasn't it? it's never been easier to create a book and put the book into the marketplace. and it's never been harder to sell a book because to your point about the technology suddenly making it much easier and more accessible for any individual to create a book, to create their own work and put it we've seen a proliferation of books come onto the market, so the number of sf- that are

now available on the marketplace have gone up around 500% in the past decade. so that's a huge number of titles that are suddenly out into the market now. how many self-published or independent books are written and published every year? you know, that's a really hard statistic to get a bead on because there's an■s organizatin in that called belker that where folks go to purchase their isbn. and so the only real way that we can track at information is by the number of isbninto the markl those isbn necessarily get used and something to know about the publishing industry is that we don't actually have a lot of good data around how many books are sold. every single year because we don't have one clear system for tracking every single transaction. so i actually couldn't give you a number of how many author

published books are produced, cause we don't have a lot of accurate data out there to tell us exactly how many arinmarket. can you go back to the isbn, the international standard business, our book number and its importance? so an isbn is critical to a book being able to be discovered and purchased out in the world without an isbn. unless you're selling a book website or your hand selling a book at events, for example, you can actually sell a book through amazon and barnes noble. any trade retaispace without an isp on. and one thing we always remind our author publishers and our new publisher starting out is that it's really critical for the author publisher to own their own isbn. so when you set up a book through kindle direct publishing, for example, there is an option to get a free isbn

through them. but you never want to do that because the isbn then doesn't belong to you and you can't take that. isbn anywhere else. so as an author publisher we always recommend that you go directly through our and we actually have a discount through our membership where our author publishers can get a discount off of purchasing that isbn. but it's really critical that if you want to put your book up for sale in any retail space, you have to purchase an isbn. now andrea fleck-nisbet before forming the independent book publishers association, you have a background in corporate publishing, correct? ■uyes, that is correct. and actually, i will say i did not form the independent book publishers association, so i've been here for about two years. but the organization was actually founded by a woman named jann nathan in 1983. so we have been around for a long time. we just celebrated our 40th anniversary last year and the organization has grown quite

significantly in those four decades. i myself have been working in e publishing industry for a little over 20 years, so i at af the largest independent publishers was at the time in the united states working in publishing. and then fm therworked at ingram content group, which is a wholesaler or distributor and technology company that is really critical to our industry. and then i was at harpercollins, which is one of those big corporate publishers where i ran a start up imprint for three years called harper horizon. and then after that, i decided i really wanted to be working with independent publishers. this is where there's a lot of growth in our industry. so it's been a really fun and educational time working here at ibp. well, what were some of the frustrations that chan mason had 40 years ago when she founded the organization and some of the frustrations maybe you had in

corporate publishing? sure. that's a really good question. certainly the industry has become quite a bit more complex in the past 40 years. so our members facing unique that they didn't have to face then. but one of the through lines from for the past four decades is that in-de do not have the se resourceso typically a corporate publisher has is either publicly traded by harpercollins, for example, is owned by news corp, or there's a set of investors that are investing in that corporate publisher with an independent publisher. you have to think of it as a small business. oftentimes it's a family business. and so one the having the resources to be able to compete with corporate really challenging for those indie publishers. and also just being able to access the market. and that's actually become even more complex.

so wendy and nathan founded ibp in 1983. the goal was it was really around marketing and trade and marketing and pooling the ■íresource of indie publishers into one organized nation and one entity, and to leverage the shared value and the shared strength of those independent publishers together. we still do that today. we offer a lot of great marketing programs, but it's actually become even more challenging for books to be discovered and to convert them to sale than it was 40 years ago, simply because there are so many books on the market. so does the independent book publishers association offer more marketing andfor first timr independent auors? say we are and an association that supports the business of publishing, not the craft of publishing. and so what we mean by that is.

if an individual is looking for help around editing the production process, we do some of that work. but really our focus is on once the book is created and the author, publisher or the independent publishers looking to get that book into the servid education on how to do that. so it's really about the business of a book publishing in terms of what we provide as an it's certainly marketing, trade, marketing programs, discounts on services that folks who service our industry provide. but it's also about education and advocacy. and those are two really missing critical things, things that we do at ibp. so by education, what i mean is teaching author publishers or teaching more established publishers the best way to get their books in front of people? the mosttable way to run

their business and sort of how to protect that are themselves and their businesses against either bad actors in the industry or against services that may not actually be educat. and then in terms of advocacy, we actually have an advocacy committee that works with other associations, firms like the american association of publishers to work on things like a book banning o e which ma publisher's copyright rights. so not only are we provid also n and advocacy as well. can you give us a couple of examples of some of your members, maybe success stories that i've had? yeah. so one of the things that we like to say is that doing our jy as an ass to grow up alongside

of organization and have limited knowledge about how the industry works and in using our tools and our systems and organization, when we advocate for them, they should be able to grow their business over time. and one good example of also have an awards program which was just rebranded to it was called the ben franklin awards. and we just rebranded it to the ivp book awards. and that's a big part of what we do as well. we have one publishing member there called kim cat books and kim cat was started in 2019 by wayne lemon, who had a passion for reading and wanted to get books out into the world. and in a very short period of time, sue has naged to grow her business into a very successfindependent publishing .

so she went from being very small and just starting out and not having a lot of information. she didn't have a background in publishing to our most award winning publisher as part of our awards program. so that's just one example of how when a member enters our ecosystem and they take advantage of the services in education, they can grow their business over time. andrea fleck-nisbet bit at the beginning of this interview, you said that you don't use the term self-publish. why not? we don't use that term because no one can publish aei book on their own, right? so an author can write a book and they can put it out into the market. but we like to say to our author publishers, if no one would pay you to do this active, you shouldn't do it yourself, by which you mean if no one's going to pay youo ver, then you need n expert in the market to design that cover for you because you

want to create the most professional, polished book that you possibly can. you spent all this time writing it and working on it, and you want to get it out into the world and to do that, you really need to surround yourself with a team of experts. and that's somethin help guide e through the different types of that they're going to need in order to professional. we publi■,jssh a book. we also have a checklist online for publishers who are just :arting out who may not know all of the different steps and all the different details of what a p published book is. so we have an industry standards checklt through to make sure thr book includes all of the different elements needed in order to make that book professionally published. we often the importance of distribution, don't we? we do. we do. and it's a confusing ter distribution can mean different things to different folks, depending on how you're using i.

could you explain that a little bit mo? be happy to. so the active distribute, i think of it like little d versus big d distribution. so to distribute a book means to put it out into the market in a way that is discoverable to the end user. and one of the things we ao like to say at ibp is that a publisher should make sure that their book is available in every format, in every market that a reader may wan to access that titles. so we do talk a lot about accessibility and our association as well. and so that level of distributi can mean posting the book on amazon and selling the book through your own website, right? posting the book on a platform like ingram sparc, which will then distribute your book into the market. but that'■md's really passive distribution and that's just about availability in the market.t about driving sales or driving barnes noble or

another retailer to actually discover your book andit up and say, yes, i want to put this on my bookshelf. so big d distribute auction is when an independent publisher is picked up by either a distributor or a large corporate publisher that does diso simon and schuster, england random house. hachette, all of those corporate publishers distribute other small publishers. and when they do that, not only do they bring the dataor tt book into their systems, they bring the books into their warehouses, and they have a sales team that is actively selling those titles. so that's between small d passive distributor ocean and big d full sales or active distribution. what's your take on the impact of i on pubin this is a very ho. i just came from the us book was the first thing that we

actually talked on it a couple of times at conferenc in the past few months. there's a lot of fear, as there alwayss when technology evolves and essentially that's what this is. this is an evolution of technology. you know, it's a rapidly evolving technology. so there are two different pieces of. one is generative ai, and that's when l looms or large language models are being taught essentially to output based on material. and the concern for publishers from a perspective of is that their copyrighted material, their their book, the content of their books are being put into these plans to train them. and then the output is potentially a book that is competitive with the original ties. so the concern is from a copyright perspective, but then also from a competition perspective. and there is real concern there.

that is a valid concern. it's something that at ibp, again, from a legislative perspective, we work with organizations like the authors guild and ap to learn how we can help to protect our members rights and how we can help our members educate themselves. on the flip side ofhatools and i technology judges allow that can actually help our members. with efficiencies in their businesses and economies of scale. so we started this conversation. we were talking about how challenging it is for ders to compete with corporate publishers. well, new age technologies, whether 's in marketing or helping to write copy, can actually aid independent publishers to be able to run their businesses more i can potentially benefit our members. but the most important thing for ibp is that we continue to educate r members both on the concerns around artificial

intelligence, but also on the benefits andrea fleck-nisbet is the chief executive officer of the independent book publishers association. we appreciate your spending a few minutes with us here on book tv. thank you for inviting me. it was a pleasure. and you're watching about books, a program and podcast produced by c-span's book tv. well, it's on tuesdays that new books are usually published. here's a few coming ujune 6th mh anniversary of the 1944 allied landings in normandy, france, and to mark the occasion, author garrett graff is releasing when the sea came alive an oral history of d-day. mr. graff has previously an oral history of the 911 attacks and his most recent book is watergate a new history. that was the final for the pulitzer prize in history. also this week, baruch college professor cary mead publishes the hidden history of the white house power struggle, scandals

and defining moments. the book was written in collaboration with the american history tellers podcast and includes a foreword by new york bestselling author kate anderson, who wrote the residents inside the private world of the white house. and one other book to note, former philadelphia magazine editor in chief tom mcgrath is ■areleasing triumph of the yupps america, the eighties and the creation of an unequal nation. tom mcgrath's previous book was about the cultural significance of music television. it was in titled mtv the making of a revolution. well, this week on book tv's afterwards program, health reporter shefali■ luthra looks t the impact of the 2022 supreme court versus wade. she was interviewed by julie rovner, a longtime health reporter who is currently with thehere's a look.

aboron for a long time. and part of that is what means to get health care in this country in general, abortions are expensive. they are an inherently expense. and even before the jobs decision, most insurance plans, especially medicaid, did not cover abortion, which means you ve you definitionally did not expect to. and it will, at a nihundreds of. but it can be thousands if you are later in pregnancy. it can be tens of thousands of dollars. and where we are now is the stakes are evenre traveling outf state for care, you need to find potentially child care. you need time off from work. you need someone potentially to come with you if you are having a later abortion and it is more advanced, you might to rent a car, find plane tickets, a hotel, figure outow to get around in a place you've never been to before. these are incredible barriers, even for people with great means. and what it speaks to is just

abortion has never been easy to come. but now, even with a right that is protected in some states, it will become more difficult and has become more difficult us. and a reminder that after words airs every sunday night at 10 p.m. on c-span's book tv. well, thanks for joining us for about books x, a program and podcast produced by c-span's booktvbooktv will continue to bg you publishing news and author programs. and a reminder that you can get podcasts on our c-span now app. you can also watch online any time all of book tv's programs at booktv dot org.

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