“But Don’t I Need A Major Publisher’s Imprint To Look Credible?”

Often, people ask me if readers will take their book seriously if it is independently published, as opposed to getting a deal with one of the major New York publishers.

Invariably, my answer is that it doesn’t matter.

Here’s why.

The mega-publishers have essentially failed dramatically at making their brands count as part of the buying decision. Unless you’re in the publishing industry, it’s meaningless whether Simon & Schuster, Farrar Straus, or St. Martin’s Press published a given book.

Let’s compare this with the car industry, where the automakers have spent billions of dollars imprinting their brands on our minds.

We all know what a Honda is, and we all know what a Rolls Royce is. The brands make a difference in our thinking when we go to buy a car.

Not so with books. A small number of New York publishers held a virtual monopoly on the marketplace for decades, until the Internet and Amazon democratized book publishing. The publishers never felt a need to make their brands count for something in the minds of consumers, because they knew that your choices about which books to buy was strictly limited to those which bookstores stocked. And those were invariably the books they published.

But here we are in the Amazon era, and now it’s too late for the publishers to make their brands matter. On Amazon, an independently published book — that is, one that my company is responsible for — receives precisely the same marketing treatment that a book from Random House or HarperCollins gets. To the buyer, independently published books and books published by the major houses are all but indistinguishable.

The major publishers actually took things a step further to make their brands immaterial. Instead of giving their top editors raises, they would give them their own “imprints,” or mini-brands within the publishing house.

As a result, you have so many mini-imprints that it’s impossible to tell which is real and which is not.

So when a client says to me, “How do I know readers will take me seriously if I’m not published by a major house?” I ask them, “Of the following brands, which is real and which did I just make up?”

Then I give them choices. Broadway Books vs. Fifth Avenue Books. Riverhead Books vs. Riverside Books. Plume vs. Inkwell. In each pairing, one is real and one is made up. I think you get the point.

On its website, PenguinPutnam proudly describes itself as “the international home to nearly 250 editorially and creatively independent publishing imprints.” Honda, by contrast, sells only 12 types of vehicles in the United States, and the first name of each of those vehicles is…Honda.

The bottom line is that publishers have essentially trained readers to ignore who the publisher of a book is. Instead, the buying decision comes down to these questions:

1. Does this book solve a problem I face?

2. Does the author seem credible?

3. Do other people I respect, or whose job titles I respect, endorse the book on the back cover, so that I can be certain the book is worth reading?

4. Does the book look like it will be fun to read?

We write books that get yeses to all four of those questions. As a result, our books succeed in their marketplaces. They solve specific problems the readers face, and as a result, they are the perfect, unbeatable marketing tool for the 21st Century.

Nothing but a book allows you to tell your story in full — who you are, what problems you solve, how you serve, whom you serve.

You’re not going to get that with a white paper, a website, or any sort of marketing leave-behind.

That’s the magic and power of books, no matter who published them.

Shouldn’t we be writing yours?