Behind the Scenes at Ingenium Books

Behind the Scenes at Ingenium Books podcast transcript

John:

Okay. I think the broadcast is live. This is another Wednesday with an Ingenium Books Facebook live event. And I am John Wagner-Stafford. And you are ...

Boni:

Boni Wagner-Stafford. Did I get it right?

John:

And ... You did, yeah. We try to do this every week, whether it's Boni and I trying to offer as much helpful information to you, authors and others, or whether we have some of our guests, our authors, our suppliers industry experts come and help us with sharing as much as we can to just make it all feel good for everybody to get their books written and published.

Boni:

Nonfiction.

John:

Nonfiction books. And today we were kind of discussing, well, what are we going to talk about today? We, you know, what is it going to be? And we decided that we're going to share and call this week Behind the Scenes at Ingenium Books. And what that really is, is we have not talked too much about ourselves in these live events, but maybe it's time to talk a little bit about who we are, what we're doing - you know who we are - what we're doing, what's coming up and what are we all excited about and what you might get excited about. And I felt, I thought we might start with, Boni, with some of the basics about what books do we have on the go, what books do we have published and what books do we have on the go?

Boni:

Yeah, that sounds good. And I just, before we get into that if you've watched us before either live or on the replay, either on Facebook or YouTube, but you may have noticed that sometimes when John, when you and I do these things together, sometimes we're sitting beside one another at the, at the same desk. And I know that some of the episodes I've been all fuzzy. So for people who don't know, and this is part of behind the scenes, we are physically in Mexico at the moment. And it's fantastic. It's very hot. We have a beautiful view of the water, um out the window. We're facing the Sea of Cortez on the Pacific side of Mexico. That's all the good stuff. The not so good stuff is that it can be very difficult to get really solid internet on land. And we find that our cell or mobile signals are stronger. So today John and I are in the same room connected to two different advices devices. And so there might be some echoing that you hear of our voices because we are, you know, 25 feet away from one another, but in the same room, but we thought that we would do this anyway. So that is the contextual information 

John:

About our connectivity.

Boni:

Right, about our connectivity and a bit, you know. So if you hear a little bit of audio, echo of when one of us, you know, let us know, and hopefully it won't be too bothersome. 'Cause I think this is gonna work us now. So back to your question about what's, what's going on: so let me talk first about some of the books that we're working on that are coming up, will be published in, in the both near and medium term future. So we're pretty excited about "The Picture Wall" which is from author C.A. Gibbs. And we've been working with her for, for quite a while. This is a fantastic story about her journey as the mother of an adult child who came out as transgender. So it's, it's, it's not about the transgender experience, but it is about her experience as a mother and how she processed the information.

Boni:

And it's, it's fascinating. It's a wonderful intimate read and you know, you don't have to be a parent of a transgender to relate to this. It's, you know, it can be any motherhood issue anyway. So that's coming up probably in the next 60 to 90 days. We're just in the process of we're going out for editorial reviews and endorsements right now. So, and ...

John:

Sorry, that's a nonfiction memoir.

Boni:

That's a nonfiction memoir. Everything we do is nonfiction so yes, thank you. We never - well, we choose not to do fiction. Nonfiction, the true stories is in our blood. And so yes, it's nonfiction memoir. Thank you. And so then in addition, a little bit longer term, we've got some exciting projects coming up. We've got and many of these some of these that I'm going to talk about we haven't confirmed titles yet, but so another woman that we'd been working with for quite some time and we're very excited about her book is Alison Rapping and we're ... Her book is about how to build social movements.

Boni:

So we're all familiar with Black Lives Matter and the Me Too movements. Um those are movements, but there can also be movements more purposeful, created by people who build organizational structures around them. Nonprofit organizations is one example. And so, and Alison has been in that business for decades. And so her book is going to tell tell people who are passionate about making some positive change in the world, how they can create a social movement. So that one is probably coming up in the next six months. And then we've recently started working with Denise Collins in the UK and recently as in, you know, three or four months ago. And Denise's story is very a very challenging story of her journey as a widow after losing her husband and partner of 33 years to suicide. So we don't have a working title yet for that one. But we're well into the author coaching and manuscript development work on, on that one and very important book with an important message um and probably some tips and tools that will help other people who find themselves, unfortunately in the same situation.

Boni:

And then we have a brand new Trisha Johnson who I'm speaking with very shortly today. And Trisha is working on a book that helps inspire and support young girls between the ages of 12 and, say, 20 and, you know, tips and tricks on how to manage all of those things that come up in adolescents and you know, whether underprivileged or privileged, it doesn't really matter; all the women - and I, you know, this is actually universal, but in particular, this, this book is for girls - but you know, adolescence as a, as a female poses, some particular challenges. Uh so we won't get into all those details, but those are the things that we're, that are on our plates at the moment in terms of the books being developed and, you know, a couple other things that we'll have to come out and be able to talk about soon.

John:

And maybe another shout-out to a growing sector of the publishing industry, which is audiobooks, growing very rapidly and in terms of its growth curve anyway. And so we've got one audiobook that's in, you know, in, in, in the recording stage right now Dina Marie just finished her audiobook and that's published. We also have Pranathi who has just published a "Prescription Technology" audiobook which is, you know, from her book "Prescription Technology". And we'll be getting "Prescription Comedy" out there really soon. And Yvonne is in the, in the middle of recording her audiobook.

Boni:

Right. And were, and Steve Cederquist - so all of these are the author names, and we can quickly give a shout-out to the book names as well. So Pranathi Kondapaneni is a doctor; she's written "Prescription Technology". That is the audiobook that has just been published printed. The second book, "Prescription Comedy", is coming soon in audiobook. Dina Marie's book is "My Fat Pants Don't Fit". Yvonne Caputo's book is "Four Fridays" - excuse me, "Flying With Dad". And Cynthia Barlow is "Four Fridays". So Cynthia Barlow's "Four Fridays" audiobook is recently published in audio. And then we have also Steve Cederquist with "Get Out Alive". We are - and this is part of the frustrating thing about the COVID-19 situation, which is that ACX and the technical processing of the audiobooks is really long. It used to be between three and five weeks between the time that you submitted your final audio files to when it would be - the audiobook would appear live, but it is now taking upwards of 12 weeks. And there really isn't, you know ... We've had authors say to us, "Isn't there anything you can do? Can you go somewhere else?" And it's like, "Yeah, not really." so and, and also "One Million Readers", our own book about nonfiction marketing strategy, how you can take control of your, your own nonfiction book marketing: that audiobook will be coming soon.

John:

A couple of weeks, maybe.

Boni:

It's kind of relative. But yeah, so lots of things going on with projects that are on our plate nevermind the ones that are, that are in development

John:

And just a quick mention about the time delays: and we were listening to a podcast this morning of IngramSpark, and some of the people at Ingram were also saying during this period, the delay for print books is incredible as well. So everybody is suffering a little bit in terms of, you know, wanting to get products in their hands, in their homes and out to their friends and family or their readership. But it's taking quite a bit longer. So I think patience is, is something that we can hope for and, and be grateful for if we have some and things are coming they're on their way and they will be arriving.

Boni:

That's exactly right. Yeah.

John:

So we mentioned upcoming books and audiobooks. We also are working on a couple of things and, you know, I put in my little notes this morning. Then, which is really not the right term to use, but I'm going to use it anyway: Ingenium University. We are going to start working on generating digital, online courses. And maybe you can talk a little bit about that, Boni.

Boni:

Which is - thank you for reminding me, because we have Hendrik Mondrup's book that we recently published that is also out in audiobook and available now. And Henrik's book is about development of online courses that, uh result in behavior change. So not just information dumps, but but ways to craft and deliver online courses that actually help people translate the new knowledge into behaviors, in Henrik's book, targeted to on the job. So Henrik's book is we had, we've had busy year so far. There's just no question about that, but yeah, so we're - whether we call it Ingenium University or our courses or whatever it is - we are developing courses so that we can help more nonfiction authors do the work and work through the learning curve that's required in order to write high quality write and publish high quality nonfiction. So that, yeah, that's pretty exciting where, you know.

John:

And we're involved with coaching: author coaching and whatnot. And you do, in many cases, a one-on-one coaching,useries of work,ufor instance, what you're doing with Denise and others. Ubut we wanted to reach more people quicker and sooner. And so we thought that by developing some digital online courses,uyou'll be able to touch people at a certain level, not necessarily the same degree that you're doing your one-on-one coaching with, but it'll get people,uin a better, better situation for their writing and their publishing information and their state of publishing,uthat might get them further along and - or even get them more interested in one-on-one coaching, which is really the ultimate.

Boni:

Yeah. and that's a really good point. So we, we do work very intensively with each of our authors, and there's always some element of coaching. Um just waving at the gardener that's out taking care of the big oceanside patio. Thank you for Mexican gardeners 'cause that's a lot of work. We we have no more room to intake authors right through to the beginning of 2021. And while that is fantastic, in many ways, it also is, you know, unfortunate because we would like to be able to help more people. So I've just posted a link to it in case anybody is interested in exploring more about working with us with author coaching, which I highly recommend. And we'll talk about coaching in a, in a minute some more, but those courses allow us to help more people with - 'cause it, it really, it takes a, it takes quite a bit of time.

Boni:

And we were speaking with one of our business coaches in the last couple of weeks and he was saying, "Well, how come author coaching takes so much time? Isn't it just an hour, every couple of weeks?" And it's not because we are reading - we, and, and we are reading the materials that are written; we are providing drafts; we're providing guidance; we're - not drafts, providing drafts; we're providing feedback. We're creating assignments; we're monitoring the project timeline and making sure. So it is it is very labor intensive and rewarding work, but it does mean that we are limited by the nature of, we are only, you know, our, our small ... Yeah, at Ingenium Books there's only so much that we can do. And we really, you know, we believe strongly in the power of sharing important stories, all of the books that we've worked on, I feel like we've been incredibly fortunate and I'm grateful for the opportunity to work on every single one of our books. Each of them is important in its own right. And that's what we're passionate about is making sure that we can, you know, help as many people as possible. So the courses that we're developing and we'll, we can expect that we will be releasing some of those in the next several weeks: um those will be coming to help.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. And it's exciting, you know, I've been involved in coaching to a degree, but more, more developing courses. And in, you know, in-person learning: giving presentations you know, in the real estate industry and the audio industry. I actually was involved in teaching at McGill University for a little bit with my audio studio. And so learning and teaching is, is wonderful. I've got a passion for it. And so, you know, helping to get these courses developed so that we we feel gratitude from what we're able to bring to authors and have them, you know, move forward in the way that they want to move forward is just fantastic feeling. So it's, it brings tears to my eyes sometimes.

Boni:

Yeah. It's pretty fun. Yeah.

John:

That leads us to another topic. We might come back to the coaching thing, but we don't do this all by ourselves. We can't do this all by ourselves. We have a number of team members that help us in our publishing business and with coaching and with editing and, and creating all of the books and publishing the books that we do and something that we've been reaching out for and want to do for a while, and we have finally, you know, taken steps to do so - and you mentioned our, our business coach, Dan: we've gotten now on the go to lots of coaches to help us run our business and provide a better experience for our clients. And maybe you want to talk a little bit about Dan and Nick, if you just want to get ...

Boni:

Yeah, without going into too much boring detail for folks, but Dan Holstein from Canada he's working with us on, on one aspect of coaching our business. And then we've got Nick and Megan Unsworth from Life On Fire Coaching helping us with another aspect. And both of those are very - we think that there's a really nice dovetail for that. And we'll have some exciting stuff coming up as directly as it relate as it relates to the work that they've been helping us with. And it, you know, it, it the connection here is we believe strongly that author coaching is a huge benefit to people who want to write and publish high quality nonfiction. Absolutely. Do we believe that coaching in a bigger picture is beneficial for anyone who wishes to do anything? Absolutely. And so we knew that when we were developing our goals for Ingenium Books, 18 months ago, 12 months ago, we knew that we were going to want to avail ourselves of coaching. And it's actually, we've been looking and looking and looking and interviewing and trying things out. And we haven't just found the right thing until recently. So that's that's pretty exciting.

John:

Yeah. And you know, this all - business coaching or coaching in general - it, it all speaks to something that we are not always aware of in our lives and in our businesses. And you know, when you're publishing a book we've said this many times before: you are essentially sitting up a business, a small business, you are running a business. And if you're looking for success in becoming an author and publishing a book, you need to look at it to a certain degree - I believe to a large degree - from a business perspective. And one of the notions that we often don't pay too much attention to is that we don't know everything. We can't do everything ourselves. And you know, and I've lived this quite a bit where I'm, you know, "No, I can do this. I can do this." And I'm capable of doing things.

John:

So I used to, you know, bat my head against, "Nope, no, no, I don't need to pay money on for somebody else to get this done. I can do it." But what that does is it takes me and my focus away from what I'm really good at often. So, you know, I'm, I've got certain skills that are inherent in me and those are the things that I should be concentrating on. And I should be reaching out for help from others who have experience in other areas. So, you know, hence us getting some coaching for certain areas of our business, authors getting help from either a writing coach or from somebody to do the publishing end of their book, or, you know, doing their book cover: all of these tasks need to get done. And not every author can do all of those tasks by themselves with great success, which means freeing up their time to do what they do best, which might be writing.

Boni:

Yeah. And, and there's a lot more into the decision about - for an independent author - choosing help with the book journey. And a lot of it is, is really around leveraging expertise and time. And you know, authors today have never had so many options and choices for how they might choose a route to publishing and achieving the goals with their book. I wanted to switch back a little bit. You, you talked about where we're not doing this ourselves, and I wanted to make sure we're giving a shout-out to the team. So Ingenium Books, you know, you and I are the co-founders of Ingenium Books, but we've also had some incredible help from our team members. And I wanted to give a shout-out to Laura and Ruth and Rachel and Denise and Trina and Jessica and Amy. And Oh my goodness.

Boni:

I'm sure I'm forgetting, I'm sure I'm forgetting some, but, you know, really, really dedicated, fantastic, talented people that we ...

John:

Linell. Doug.

Boni:

Linell. Doug. Yes. And I mean, and, and what's kind of fun about these team members is, similar to our business - because we are one of those, you know, we, we consider ourselves kind of digital nomads because we do our business from wherever we are and we're, we're,ufortunate that that's worked out, but that was on purpose; I mean, we, we set out more than five years ago to,uto create those options for ourselves - but all these people that we work with, most of these people that we work with are also,udigital nomads, at least to a degree. And if they're not digital nomads, then they're, then they're, you know, all over the world: Philippines, Germany, Greece, the UK, Guatemala, Vancouver, Toronto, you know, all over the place. So, so yeah, we, a shout-out and a big thanks to,uto, to everyone,uthat we've mentioned. And if we forgot, so sorry.

John:

Yeah. You know, we, we here I know that we've not spoken about this too much, and I'm just reflecting on the podcast we listened to this morning, but how COVID has affected many people's businesses. It hasn't really affected us that much because we are already working online and our suppliers are online. And so we're already working at home for the most part. And, you know, we, we've been very, very busy either with, you know, new clients, existing projects. So a number of them coming to a head this spring and summer and, and closing out. But then we've also always got some business activity, you know, going on to further develop the business and whatnot. So COVID really hasn't been a big factor, I think, in our business, but I know that it has been in other businesses and other people's lives.

Boni:

Yeah. And it has a little bit. I mean, they're, there, we, we have had one of our big big clients had to put his project on hold, but really it's only one. So to say that there's been no impact is probably not quite right, but, but it's, I think we've been fortunate to to enjoy the activity that we have, you know, continued to enjoy. S.O yeah. Now I'm just looking: we're running down on our time, um but we've got some other things coming up too. Things that we're doing. I forget, John, did you have a list of those?

John:

Well, you know, one other thing that we've - you know, we've mentioned the online courses and training. We're also going to, I think, start some podcasting.

Boni:

Yes.

John:

Um you know, we, we, we listened to podcasts fairly regularly and, you know, one of our morning routines is to listen to two or three podcasts: various topics. And so I think we, we're going to be doing podcasts as well. Maybe some of that is coming from these live events. Maybe some of them are going to be very targeted and special information podcasts, but look for some podcasts to be coming out of our our hoppers pretty soon.

Boni:

That's right. Yeah. We're declaring here that we are we'll be launching, launching a podcast before the end of 2020. And we also we'll have a very exciting announcement and I'm not going to say any more about it than, than that, but a very exciting announcement within the next 60 to 70 days. I say 60 days but that clock actually starts next week. So it's 60 plus seven: 67 days. In 67 days, watch for something very exciting coming out for for a launch notion from from us at Ingenium Books. So now in the last five minutes, because it's behind the scenes, we also - so we've mentioned that we're looking out at the Sea of Cortez in this house in Mexico, but John, you want to tell us where we're at with our boat? The boat whose name is also Ingenium.

John:

Yeah. So just real briefly some may know, or may not know that we spend and do spend quite a bit of time on a sailing yacht, which is named Ingenium. It was our home day after day for a little over two years. And we, we took some time off, off the boat; went onto land; spent some seven months in France, but - so the boat: what we're doing with Ingenium is a couple of things. We are upgrading Ingenium. We are doing many repairs - boats take repairs all the time - but we're doing quite a few repairs that we've been wanting to do since we acquired Ingenium in 2015 and slowly but surely in the last number of weeks, we've been getting the workers in San Carlos and Marina San Carlos dry yard, who are excellent workers - just to shout-out to them - uh they've been doing quite a bit of work to get the boat ready for us to launch.

John:

So we were, we just discovered a few other new things that needed some repair which is going to be taking up the next two weeks. But hopefully in the next two weeks or three weeks, we will be putting Ingenium back in the water. And we will be moving back on Ingenium probably for three or four months. You know, maybe longer. We love living on the boat. We love living in the water. You get to go swimming; you get to see whales and dolphins and fish and you get to pick MoCo up out of the water when he falls in.

Boni:

That's our cat.

John:

And it's a really exciting life and we can continue working on our, you know, our business. We've got great cell phone and internet connectivity while we're on the boat. So nothing changes from the business perspective, except the environment: you're not going to see the fans in the background; you're going to see the Sea of Cortez and waves and the other boats, all the things. So we're going to be launching and relaunching Ingenium in the next two to three weeks, I presume. If that's what you wanted me to talk about.

Boni:

That is exactly what I wanted you to talk about, so thank you. And so I think that's a pretty good pretty good summary of what's going on behind the scenes at Ingenium Books. And we always encourage comments or questions, always encourage you to check out the website at Ingeniumbooks.com, encourage you to like and follow our Facebook pages, encourage you to subscribe to our YouTube channel encourage you to connect and follow us on Twitter at Ingenium Books Instagram as well, Pinterest. So, you know, we're everywhere. We're not on - what's the thing that the young people are using? We're not on, we're not on Snapchat. Maybe we should be, but um ...

John:

I have another thing I want to mention. One, one last thing; I see we've got another minute and a half or so. You, you, you asked me to mention this and I, I did not.

Boni:

Oh yeah. "Are You Still Afraid of the Dark?"

John:

Right. So many, many years ago I used to work in television and film and as a sound producer, a supervising sound editor. And basically my role was to bring together a creative team of sound recordists, sound editors, foley artists, and musicians to produce soundtracks for television advertising, television shows, films, feature films, films for television, et cetera. And one of the projects I was so fortunate to have the opportunity to work on was a show called, "Are You Afraid of the Dark?" And this was 30-some-odd years ago. And I've ... And, and so in, in staying connected with some of the people from that show over 30 years ago, one of the people, the writer and director of many of the shows and the creator of the show, Don, or D.J. Machale: uh he was interviewed just yesterday by some people in New York, um who are fans of "Are You Afraid of the Dark?" 20, 30 years later, now they're grownups. And to have a, an interview with Don about, you know, "Are You Still Afraid of the Dark?" And so I just spent an hour and a half or so watching a replay of a Facebook live event: Zoom, actually. A Zoom event. And I saw Don talking about the show and mentioning many good people: Richard Dumont, a friend of mine, and, and an audiobook narrator, in fact, as well who is an actor and a voice on many of those shows. So I had a great time reconnecting with some of those stories. And I'm actually going to go online wanting to watch a few of the watch a few of the episodes just to bring back some memories.

John:

So fantastic show: "Are You Afraid of the Dark?" "Are You Still Afraid of the Dark?" Maybe some of you or your kids used to watch it. My kids used to watch it and 30-some-odd years later, it's still alive.

Boni:

Yup. Fantastic. Well, this has been fun. And Richard Dumont that you mentioned, he's actually helping narrate the middle section of Yvonne Caputo's book because it's written in the voice still in the voice of her father. So Richard Dumont is actually - so you worked with him then and we're working with him now, which is kind of cool. So we're over time actually. Thanks for watching. If you're watching live or on the replay encourage you to like, follow, share reach out with questions, comments. Um we're, we are here and we'll be back next week. I think next week is I forget, but I think we're talking about marketing: book marketing. So, yeah. Excellent. Thanks so much.

John:

Bye everybody. Thank you so much.

Boni:

Bye.

John:

Bye bye.