Going Indie, Publishing Innovation, And The Challenges Of Book Marketing With John Bond

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 publish