This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hello there and greetings, friends, listeners, side hustle school community. Welcome back, my name is Chris Guillebeau. And today, at least the day that this episode is being published on, is St. Patrick's Day. I hope you have a lucky charm somewhere, or if you don't have one, you'll find one today.
Here's some St. Patrick's Day advice from me, never iron a four leaf clover because you don't wanna press your luck. That's right, you can take that one to the bank, along with today's story. How about that for a second way? Okay, so yesterday we talked about proofreading.
Today is about publishing. In fact, it's about an Australian freelance designer who starts her own publishing company and decides to hire herself. She does this at least initially because she is a graphic designer, she wants to do more book design jobs. So in order to facilitate that, she creates her own publishing company, how about that? In this story, I'll tell you how she got that idea, how she made it happen, what she learned along the way, and perhaps a couple of things that she might do to improve.
So let's say thank you to today's sponsor who brings us our luck, or at least helps us keep the lights on, and then I'll tell you all about how this works. [Music]
Tess McCabe from Melbourne, Australia was in a creative rut. As a freelance graphic designer, she wasn't attracting the kind of work she loved, which was book design and layout. It was a classic chicken and egg scenario, her portfolio didn't have much book design and layout work in it, but she couldn't get that kind of work because she hadn't done much of it. So like many stories on South Essel School, Tess turned her creative rut into creativity.
She approached the one person she was absolutely sure would hire her, herself. Tess founded Creative Minds Publishing, where she publishes books for smartworking creatives. But why a publishing company, and where did this idea come from? Well, it all started long ago, when she joined a community called Creative Women's Circle. They host events around Australia featuring female creatives who speak about their career paths, business lessons learned and advice for others.
When the founder decided to shut down the group, Tess said, "Hey, wait, I'll do it, I'll take over." Before she took over, the events were either free or low cost. But as its new leader, Tess created a searchable database so that members could locate other professionals. And to fund this feature, Tess added a paid membership option. She also wanted to bring the essence of Creative Women's Circle's in-person events to people who were unable to attend. A book seemed like a natural extension, and that's how Creative Minds Publishing came to be.
It was a win-win for Tess. She'd have book design and layout experience to add to her portfolio, and she'd reach creatives who couldn't attend those offline events. Tess now self-publishes her own books and collaborates with other authors. Her first title, "Conversations with Creative Women," sold out of its 650-copy print run in a matter of months. She sold them primarily through Creative Women's Circle's online store, and she also did a couple craft and design markets and got a few retail stores to stock those books.
She makes around $24,000 a year selling books through the website and bookstores with around $10,000 in expenses. Those expenses largely depend on if books are first-runner reprints or if she has to make royalty payments. She says self-publishing does have its challenges. You have to be careful to catch all the errors before pressing the expensive print button. There's also the important decision of how many books to print.
To make this decision, Tess starts with the retail price she deems fair, and she works backward to determine how many units will make the run feasible. She aims to print only enough books to last about two years. For the excess inventory, she keeps most of them at a storage facility and a small supply and a cupboard at home to fulfill website orders. Now here's something interesting. Tess doesn't sell her books through online booksellers like Amazon.com, a decision which may puzzle other self-publishers.
She found that there were a lot of restrictive conditions around selling books. She even had a large UK-based book distributor offer one of her books for pre-order without her permission. So at least for now, she's decided she's gonna do most of it herself. She does work with one book distributor called Books at Manic. They handle wholesale inquiries from libraries and retailers.
For doing this, they get an extra 10% commission, but she says it's worth it. All right, so what's next for Tess and Creative Minds Publishing? Well, she wants to find publishing partners for one of her popular titles owning it in the US and UK markets. She's also excited about print-on-demand technology. She thinks it will reduce the amount of inventory she holds and lower the cost to reprint older titles.
But what about her original goal? Did creating a publishing company increase the amount of book design and layout work she gets? Well, these days, about half of her freelance graphic design projects are book and publication design work. And many more clients are now aware of her work through those books. You might say her schedule is all booked up.
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All right, as an author, I appreciated this story. I went to take a look at Tess's website as well. She really is a great designer, like some of the design and layout looks really, really nice. And I did wonder a couple of things. Obviously, she's doing well.
She's created this great project. What could she do differently or better? Especially since the design is so good. She's got this clear focus, not just in terms of the aesthetic, but also the content and messaging of it. It feels very clear.
I guess one thing I wondered is that she's pricing an Australian dollars and primarily aiming at an Australian market, which of course is not bad at all. She knows her market. However, I also think like, why not find a way to market more toward a worldwide market, especially like a US market? And in saying this, I'm just referring to kind of a business reality here, or let's say a population reality. It's not like the US market is so much better than Australia or anywhere else.
But in Australia, there's about 24 million people. In the US, last I checked, there was something like 320 million people. So because of this reality, because of this imbalance, there are a lot of small businesses in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Canada, elsewhere, who primarily serve the US market, or the majority of their clients or customers are based in the States. Now the challenge with books, and of course Tess is aware of this, the challenge with books is that shipping from Australia to the States or elsewhere is pretty expensive. Like I went to go and purchase a book on our site and I saw that it was $18 to ship to the US.
And of course that's gonna be really hard to compete with Amazon and other booksellers because we essentially get free shipping, or the shipping is very low cost. So that's why I like that she is looking at finding a partner for at least one of her titles to be able to sell more in the US and UK. That also just seems like a logical extension to go down in general. How can you take this success in one place and then replicate it elsewhere? I also wondered a little bit about eBooks.
Like why not eBooks? Like all of her books appear to be print books, which as an author, I love print books, but I also think eBooks are good too. And since she is a designer, you can still have a beautifully designed ebook. So why not provide both options? Like perhaps she has a good reason for why she doesn't wanna do it.
But if you're operating this business and you're looking to increase income, that does seem like another logical extension to go down. And it's not that much more difficult once you already have the content, you have the design, and it is just a couple of other steps to go and say, okay, I'm now gonna have an ebook version of whatever this print book is. Those are just a couple of observations or maybe suggestions I had in looking through her work. As I said, it looks really great. And I also admire the creative hustle in saying, I wanna be more of a book designer, but nobody's hiring me for it.
Well, I'll hire myself and I'll create my own publishing company so that I can then do more book design, which will hopefully lead to other freelance gigs. And that's exactly what's happened as we see in this story. So good work Tess, congratulations. We'll be sure to link up your store on our show notes page. Those notes will be at sidehustleschool.com/441.
And for everybody else out there, remember inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. Thank you for listening. We are approaching the end of the week. I will be back tomorrow with the weekly recap and a whole other set of new stories coming up next week. I hope you'll join me for them.
I am Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]
