Why We Started New Degree Press
“Why should I trust my book to someone who doesn’t have 25 years of experience in the publishing industry?”
It was a question that struck me.
This author was about to release a book that was her message to the world, and she rightly wanted to ensure it was cared for in the same way she cared while creating it.
Why should she trust me? I ended up telling her that it was because four years ago, I released a book that failed.
Absolutely fell on its face.
And from then on, I dedicated myself to understanding exactly how and why my book wasn’t successful. The result was an approach and a platform that works for an up-and-coming community of authors and creatives in this modern era of publishing.
After hearing my story, Jen Marr, the author who asked me that question, decided to take a chance on us. With our support, she launched a successful pre-sale effort for Paws to Comfort that firmly anchored her in her community, and her work has since turned into important research on comfort and mental well-being. Following her book release, Jen was also invited to speak at The American Association of Suicidology (AAS) Annual Convention, and to this day, she continues to inspire and educate others on the importance of reaching out for help and serving as a comforter to others in times of need.
As with Jen and her book, we help each writer at New Degree Press produce the best writing they are capable of creating through guidance, coaching, and confidence-building. In the process, we help them build and engage their audience to create new outcomes and new opportunities, which ultimately helps each author develop a deeply personal — and profoundly impactful — voice.
A Non-Traditional Start into Publishing
In Fall 2016, I wrote the first draft of my book Indie Gaming: Finding Entrepreneurial Success in Video Games,a feat I admittedly accomplished without a professional editor. I wrote my book in “Launching the Venture,” an entrepreneurship course taught by Georgetown Professor Eric Koester. When I took the course, Professor Koester had his students write books as an experiment. The course has evolved dramatically since then and has so far produced over 200 Hoya Writers — students & alumni alike.
Early on, I met entrepreneur Shane Mac, a guest speaker in Professor Koester’s class. Mac’s guest lecture focused on this idea of signaling: “Most people don’t create their signal — they borrow it. From a college, from companies they’ve worked at. Very few people actually create their own signal. If you want to stand out in today’s world, you need to create your signal. You are creating your own signal as a creator and a writer here, and that should make you proud.”
At the time, I didn’t know what Signaling Theory was. Now, I know it can be boiled down into a single word: Credibility.
Mac’s point was simple: it didn’t matter what you created — a book, an audio show, an event series — it just mattered that you had the drive and the knowledge to make something happen. College degrees and job pedigrees were outdated. Schools, companies, and venture capitalists no longer cared about where you worked, they cared about what you could do.
In other words, your portfolio is the new degree.
A fellow classmate of mine at the time raised his hand and asked, “What happens if I fail? Isn’t publishing supposed to be reserved for the most talented writers?”
Without missing a beat, Mac said,“Publishing a book isn’t just about becoming a best seller. Writing a book is an exercise in learning, in developing your growth mindset, and in demonstrating your passions to the world in a meaningful way.”
Mac was talking about a different kind of currency and a new type of profit model: creating your own Signal (credibility) and building your own portfolio.
My classmate frowned, nodded, and then sat silent for the rest of the class — it was clear that he wasn’t satisfied with the answer.
After all, we were still in an entrepreneurship class. Even if our product would ultimately be a book, profit and success in the traditional sense still had to matter, right?
Many successful writers approach the process from a place of curiosity. In his first New York Times Best Selling book Outliers, and in every book he has written since, Malcolm Gladwell goes down seemingly random rabbit holes and writes only about what intrigues him regardless of what his critics may think or say. With each new work in his portfolio, he starts by reading the articles other authors write, and when he finds a thread he wants to pull, he keeps digging until he has enough stories, data & research to write a book on it.
Lin-Manuel Miranda similarly started his career by borrowing from and leaning into the creativity of others. He wrote Hamilton: An American Musical after reading Ron Chernow’s book Alexander Hamilton and performing a song demo at the at the White House in 2009. In May 2020, Miranda spoke to a class of high school AP Students, and in his Zoom Conversation, he shared that “11th Grade US History is the reason we’re talking — because I don’t think I would have picked Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton if I hadn’t written a paper about Alexander Hamilton in high school.”
Just as Gladwell and Miranda created their own “portfolio” of work by listening to their individual curiosities and learning from others, we were to dive deeper into own interests to discover, learn about, and ultimately lend our own voices to what really mattered to us. Of course, there are a million and one ways to find and cultivate that voice, but for many of us, including myself and those in Professor Koester’s course, writing and publishing a book was the way to go.
Take Control of Your Destiny
The problem with traditional publishing, and with most avenues for publishing today, is that you don’t control your destiny.
The two biggest offenders are traditional publishers and university presses.
At New Degree Press, we believe the world of traditional publishing is broken. After 2–4 years of pitching to literary agents and months of your agent beseeching publishers to look at your manuscript, you sign a deal with the publisher where they own the rights to you work, give you a loan to cover additional expenses & editorial costs before publishing your book (an “advance”), and then require you to pay the loan back to them if your book doesn’t reach its projected sales targets.
Unless you have achieved celebrity status; have a large, established audience; or have a story that publishers believe will sell at least 10,000 copies in the first year, the odds of signing traditional are very low. Traditional publishing prioritizes minimizing its own risk, and increasingly is taking fewer chances on new, unknown voices.
University presses, although slightly more accessible than traditional publishing, operate in a very different world. These publishers are set up for Professors and Academics, as opposed to creative authors or those unaffiliated with academia.
In the beginning, New Degree Press considered becoming a university press. We decided against it after learning these publishers typically charge between $15,000–20,000 to publish a book, and that authors still didn’t retain ownership of their books. Knowing most books on average sell very few copies, that cost is far too high for the average writer who is unaffiliated with academia.
There had to be a better way — one in which you owned the rights to your book and could publish at a price that wasn’t too high a burden to bear. As it turned out, there were two possible avenues for that: self-publishing and hybrid publishing.
Self-publishing is where you drive the publication of your book from start to finish. This option is an admirable path: you own the rights to your work, you make all of the profit, you are in charge of the creative process and the timeline for publication. With the advent of Amazon and other platforms, self-publishing has never been easier.
However, self-publishing also comes with a whole host of risks & challenges. You have to hire the editors, graphic designers, and marketers to support you on the journey; you also have to pay these costs before you publish and have any return on your investment. A recent Reedsy article projected that authors have to invest $4000 to self-publish a book. With 50% of self-publishing authors making less than the average lifetime sales of $500, this means that, on average, authors lose $3500 through self-publishing.
While many students at a Top 20 or Top 30 School like Georgetown University may come from a socio-economic background that can afford to self-publish, not everyone can afford to spend $4000 without any expectation on a return on their investment.
In other words, for many writers, the risk of self-publishing may not be worth it.
Of course, you can also write and self-publish a cost-affordable book if you do some things yourself, i.e. typeset your own manuscript, release it only as an E-book, and have an artist friend design your cover in Adobe Photoshop or Canva, among other things. But if you want to publish a book professionally, you need professional support.
That costs money.
Hybrid Publishing is Powerful
Hybrid publishing sits in between traditional publishing and self-publishing. Put simply, hybrid publishing is professionally-supported self-publishing. There are different versions of the hybrid publishing model.
The IBPA has 9 Specific Criteria that define a hybrid publisher. A publisher has to:
- Define a missions and vision for its publishing program
- Vet submissions
- Publish to industry standards
- Ensure editorial design and production quality
- Among other criteria…
A good hybrid publisher gives you the backing, credibility, and support of a publishing house while enabling you to have creative control and ownership of your book.
Hybrid publishing offers the best of both worlds, allowing for authors to borrow signal, while still creating their own credibility in the long-term.
The music industry is already seeing this shift.
Taylor Swift, for instance, owns her music and has been a strong advocate of artists owning their masters (their original work) and receiving fairer treatment from big labels and major companies. She recently signed with Universal Music Group, where a core component of the deal — unlike Big Machine Records — was she would own every song she made. That’s why Swift was able to release Folklore earlier this Summer without UMG knowing until hours before.
Chance the Rapper, on the other hand, made his start on Soundcloud and is still unsigned to any major record label. When he won his first Grammy in 2017, he made it a point to showcase that success was possible without the backing of any major record label. Subsequently, the Grammy Awards re-wrote their rules regarding record label deals because Chance was such a breakout success.
Inspired by trailblazers in the music industry and the possibility of a more entrepreneurial approach to traditional publishing, I reached out to Shane Mac after his guest lecture and asked, “If enough authors from our class were successful, could we start a hybrid publisher together?”
And that’s exactly what we did.
Hybrid Publishing is Attainable
Every form of publishing comes with risk. For traditional publishing, it’s giving up creative control without a guarantee of if and when you will publish your book. For self-publishing, it’s taking on financial and education-risks, hiring the right talent and learning how to publish, distribute and sell your book (oftentimes on your own). For hybrid publishing, the risks are mainly: (a) editorial standards, and (b) cost to publish.
Unlike vanity, hybrids publishers don’t accept every book into publication, there is selection through their process and they uphold specific quality standards.
As a hybrid publisher, our goal is to remove the risk from those areas in order to produce high-quality books and successful authors.
There are well-edited and poorly-edited books out there. According to Bowker, the combined total of self-published print books and e-books with registered ISBNs grew from almost 1.2 million in 2017 to more than 1.6 million in 2018 — a 40% increase in one year alone. Undoubtedly, that number has only continued to grow.
Every good publisher’s job is to help each author create the best book that author can create. But not all publisher’s are created equal. Indeed, there are publishers that “scam” authors on a daily basis. Platforms such as Writer’s Beware, Reedsy, and the Kobo Writing Life Podcast are excellent resources for educating yourself on the industry and getting a better understanding of the publishing landscape.
Hybrid Publishing is Different from “Vanity” Publishing
Oftentimes when people look at hybrid publishing, they think of the term “vanity.” But hybrid publishing is different from a vanity press.
Of course, at its core, all publishing is vanity — even traditional publishing. This is because publishing is all about creating a product that other people consume. You may publish a book to give a voice to the under-heard, to educate others on an important topic/issue, or simply to share your love for writing and its craft. You may publish for all of the “right” reasons, but in the end, publishing also comes with personal benefits — financial, reputation or otherwise — and that makes publishing vanity.
In the common use of the word “vanity,” people mean scam-publishing: where you pay a company thousands or tens of thousands of dollars expecting quality and then not getting the result you expect.
Publishing a book is an investment. You are creating an asset that can be bought and sold. What matters is that you produce a quality product and the right resources and support systems in place to help you get there.
The larger the investment, the greater the responsibility the publisher has to uphold to those standards and work collaboratively with each author.
Editorial Standards Matter
At New Degree Press, we ask authors two questions — “Is it relevant?” and “Is it engaging?” — to kickstart the creation of effective books with a compelling story.
When any author submits a manuscript to NDP, we review their work based on those two questions, as well as looking at each of their chapter and story elements. Our Acquiring Editor Department reviews every manuscript before it moves forward to publishing — and on average, fewer than half of the manuscripts we receive make it through.
Unlike vanity presses, we don’t accept every book submission into New Degree Press.
Instead, we accept manuscripts that are well-structured drafts falling in line with our in-house editorial criteria. When looking at any submission, we look at the author’s potential and come to a holistic decision on whether if — with additional editing, comprehensive marketing and revisions support, and ongoing author coaching — we can help them turn their draft into a high-quality book.
New Degree Press accepts manuscripts from two primary avenues: our book writing accelerator program and unsolicited submissions.
Through our book writing accelerator program (Create Programs), less than 50% of the authors are usually approved to move forward with the publishing process (i.e., “green-lit”) in a cohort. Following those same editorial standards, less than 15% of unsolicited manuscripts have been accepted into publishing.
In 2019 and 2020, we invested over $220,000 into our Developmental Editing and Writing Programs to further subsidize the editing our authors receive from working with their Developmental Editor. By investing more in our Create Programs through additional training, coaching of both our editors and our authors, the quality of first draft manuscripts as only improved, and our standards as a publisher are increasing proportionally.
In other words, our iterative process and dedication to continuous improvement ensures manuscripts meet contemporary editorial standards and addresses the risk of “poor editorial support” for submitting authors.
A No-Lose Scenario for Authors
By making our editorial standards transparent and increasingly selective, authors are motivated to level up their writing for better first draft manuscripts. Editing does not have to be a mystical or romanticized idea — it simply needs to be practical and accessible. That way, authors can become better writers, and the quality of each book improves.
So far, we’ve reaped the results of those benefits:
- S. Mayumi Grigsby wrote an article on Medium reflecting positively on her experiences with New Degree Press. Some of Grigsby’s writing was recently selected to feature in the June 2021 release of Chicken Soup for the Soul.
- Nicole Spindler also shared some reflections on what she learned & valued in working with her fellow authors and NDP publishing team. In short, “There is no shortage of gratitude…” and has since landed over a dozen speaking engagements.
- Joseph Minani, Author of The Mindset of a Refugee(Publication: July 2020) won a SABA National Book Award as Best New Author of 2020.
- Kyle Garman, Author of The Entrepreneurial Mindset(Publication: July 2020) won theAuthor of the Year Book Award with the International Association of Top Professionals (IAOTP).
We have not invested in actively submitting for book awards (yet), although that is under consideration for 2022. Even so, to date, we have worked with 8 authors who have gone onto become National Book Award Winners/Finalists:
- Joseph Minani, 2020 SABA Book Awards
- Nikki Groom, 2020 SABA Book Award Finalist
- Kyle Garman, 2020 IATOP ‘Author of the Year’
- S. Mayumi Grigsby, 2021 International Book Awards
- Valeria Aloe, Golden Book Award Finalist(2021)
- Carol Yee, Military Writers Society of America Finalist(2021)
- Cole Brown (Create Program Alum, Published with Skyhorse), NAACP Image Awards Finalist
Supporting a manuscript that isn’t a complete first draft and needs rigorous revision and editorial support incurs high costs. From that perspective, letting any writer who wants to publish with us publish without any rigor is actively against our interests as a publisher. If a manuscript needs additional editing time, we’ll support the writer through those challenges, but we will only publish works that reach a certain level of quality, as any serious publisher should.
Writing and editing a book should not be a ‘black box’. You should be able use data, pattern-recognition, and coaching from your editors to become a better storyteller and writer.
Hybrid Publishing is Financially Accessible
After looking at hundreds of annual college budgets, the growing $1.6 trillion student-debt crisis, and the outdated publishing models for young and older writers alike, it is clear that we need to rethink how to make publishing accessible for all writers to have a voice. Hybrid publishing can serve as that bridge because it is an affordable alternative to traditional models and thus financially accessible for everyone.
Traditional publishing currently requires that enough books be sold to support their employees. That’s why traditional publishers rarely publish new authors. It’s not just about having high editorial standards, it’s about protecting their bottom line.
Penguin Random House recently acquired Simon & Schuster, turning the Big 5 traditional publishing houses into the Big 4. Random House has over 10,000 employees and publishes 85,000 books annually (Statista 2019). Simon has reportedly over 1,400 employees and publishes 2,000 books annually (Statista 2019). Industry consolidation, as well as a growing employee base to support, has made traditional publishers even more hesitant to take a chance on debut authors, which goes against the trend of more and more writers wanting to use their voice for good.
So, how can a hybrid publisher reduce its risks while supporting high-quality writers and creators who may have never published before? Determining whether or not there is an audience for their books — and subsequently helping them build and grow those audience — is the key.
Community-owned Publishing is the Answer
As a hybrid publisher, our goal is to help you raise community capital and build your community. Our pre-sale model allows us to hire quality editors, coaches, and administrators to support a growing base of authors. Our business works because we help authors engage in grassroots community building before the publication process (revisions, editing, cover design, layout) even begins. By asking our authors to complete their pre-sale effort upfront, we help authors accomplish several things at once: (1) build, activate and organize their community, (2) fund their book production costs, and 3) establish their brand as an author.
We operate as a public benefit corporation — B Corp (Certification Pending 2021) — which means that although we do not take grants, donations, or outside funding like a nonprofit, we prioritize impact and social good over profit as a business (e.g., Patagonia, Ben & Jerry’s, Tillamook).
The model is straightforward — authors make a $300 deposit to confirm their commitment to our publishing process and to joining our publishing community; the deposit is then refunded for authors who publish their book as a softcover, ebook, hardcover, and audiobook. For each author, we do a deep review of their manuscript and provide detailed feedback (including sample revised chapters as a tactical guide in their revisions), produce a promotional video (or book trailer) and also support them in their pre-sale effort. There’s no catch, either. You either reach your pre-sale goal and publish, or you refund your preorders and decide to not publish.
You can also decide to self-fund your remaining book production costs if you want to. However, we do not encourage authors to self-contribute unless there is already a clear plan to recoup those costs through paid speaking engagements or other opportunities including new career paths, education opportunities, or other outcomes.
Whether the author decides to self-fund or do a presale, we give each author the tools, coaching, and support to grow and activate their community.
Before each other creates a crowdfunding campaign, we provide a pre-sale bootcamp with weekly sessions supported by Marketing Editors, Author Coaches (previous authors who have succeeded through our process), and dozens of detailed tools & templates authors can use to accelerate their outreach efforts. The authors who follow our process — that is, attend the weekly bootcamp sessions, leverage our Marketing Editors and Author Coaches, and use our tools — are those who succeed.
Some authors who are coaches and entrepreneurs use our pre-sale model as a way to reduce the cost-burden and then self-fund what they don’t reach. It’s a powerful framework to offset marketing expenses and invest more in growing their business. But in most cases, most authors leverage their communities to help them raise the funds required for publishing. We use IndieGoGo to do these campaigns because they enable each author to add video trailers, personalized images, secret perks, bundle packages, flexible funding, and the ability to extend a presale by 30 days if needed, among other benefits.
Throughout the process, what we’re most proud of is that we are helping each author build their own reader community. In other words, it’s not NDP’s audience — it’s the author’s community. And because of our cost model, we are a non-royalty based publisher — meaning our authors make 100% of all book sale profits when they publish. They own their work, so it’s only right they get the upside as well.
Our authors are our community, and we want to empower each creator to succeed as they create their community, publish their book, and grow their platform. When authors within our community succeed, that is the best form of proof for new authors to work with us.
The Economic Case for Pre-selling
By approaching our model through a pre-sale campaign effort, we create a whole set of new possibilities and opportunities.
IndieGoGo takes 5% off the top of each of our author’s campaigns, plus 2.9% + $0.30 per individual per preorder. That means that, on average, IndieGoGo’ takes 8–10% of the total raise. Financially, this is not advantageous for us as a publisher, but we use IndieGoGo as our pre-sale platform because we’ve found it to have a better author and buyer user-experience than Kickstarter or other platforms.
IndieGoGo is by no means perfect as far as retail platforms. Based on author feedback, we are in the early stages of developing our own preselling and crowdfunding platform that solves those challenges so we can offer more creative control and better empower our authors to succeed.
If we were another hybrid publisher or publishing services company (e.g., Greenleaf or Scribe), authors might pay between $10–30K to publish their books. With New Degree Press, authors can expect to pay between $6000 and $10000 to publish. The more support and services you offer, the higher the cost to publish. But a book isn’t inherently better or worse because the author paid $5K vs. $30K to publish their book or went traditional while making 5–10% in royalties.
At NDP, where we pre-sell first without making any revenue, we can and will do everything needed to help authors build their audience, including hiring previous authors as coaches, having career fundraisers as guest speakers, running tactical marketing workshops, and developing robust tools & templates including email language, DM Language and other marketing assets to best prepare an author for the post-publishing life.
If you don’t build your platform and grow your community, you won’t publish.
“It takes a community to publish a book.”
When bulk pre-orders arrive, we also help authors negotiate larger deals with nonprofits, businesses, universities, and other organizations so they can land paid speaking engagements, speaking engagements and workshops. Bulk orders have helped a number of authors raise well beyond what they need to publish.
How We’ve Grown
Before the shift in our model to preselling/crowdfunding in 2019, New Degree Press worked with fewer than 30 authors a year. Through an iterative process that took into account cohorts’ feedback, we improved and expanded our business model to be able to work with at least 500 authors a year. In Summer 2021, we published our 1,000th creator.
From 2020 onwards, we also began working with authors specializing in works of fiction and poetry. Until the fall of 2019, New Degree Press specialized exclusively in nonfiction business and self-help books. It wasn’t until the December 2019 publishing cycle that we began adapting our materials and resources and hiring specialized Marketing & Revisions Editors for authors interested in poetry, fiction, personal essays, and memoir-style writing — whose themes ranged from fantasy novels to horror stories, from traveling the world to surviving trauma, from race & identity to mental health.
In 2020, we published our first books beyond nonfiction. Fiction and poetry made up less than 20% of the books in that first publishing cycle. Today, close to 35% of the books we publish include Poetry, Fiction, and Creative Nonfiction (including Memoir/Anthologies/Essay Collections).
Though we only began working with creative authors in 2020, several of them have achieved astounding success in their own ways. Here are two stories from recent authors:
- Haley Newlin published Not Another Sarah Halls in 2020. Haley then released the Hardcover Edition of her book on Halloween and released her second book Take Your Turn, Teddy a year later. Newlin did an Instagram Live with Actress Jamie Lee Curtis to talk about Horror and the Halloween movie franchise. Since publishing her first two books with us, Newlin has been approached by Cemetery Dance, Crystal Lake Publishing, and Penguin Random House to pitch future books.
- Jaclyn DiGregorio published Stop Getting in Your Own Way, a nonfiction book with strong memoir elements inspired largely by The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson. Since publishing her first book with us in Spring 2017, Jaclyn has used both of her books to build a six-figure coaching & consulting business empowering female entrepreneurs.
How We’re Learning
While fiction was not a space we were as familiar with as a new publisher, we put in the work to give creative authors the tools they needed to succeed. Like any publisher first entering into a space, we made mistakes and could have done better. Like any quality publisher committed to growth and transparency, we own these failures and have grown from them.
Over the past 18 months (since December 2019), we’ve made a concerted effort to improve our process and ‘level’ as a publisher:
- We’ve hired new Acquiring Editors, Marketing & Revision Editors, Copy Editors, & Proofreaders who specialize in fiction (Fantasy, Horror, New Age, and other sub-genres), Poetry, and Creative Nonfiction & Memoir.
- We’ve improved our Acquiring Editor Manuscript Feedback to be more tactical and personal, given feedback from prior authors that this step in the process used to feel too “high level.” We’ve revamped our process for giving feedback by focusing on each chapter and each chapter element (primary interviews, stories, research, data, character development, etc.). In addition to detailed chapter notes, we also provide an evaluation of each chapter element based on a simple but visually powerful scale: “effective — not effective — missing, need to add — missing, and intentional.”
- We now have a team Author Coaches, who are previously published authors specializing in both nonfiction and creative works, as well as seasoned professionals/executives to help support authors through each phase of publishing (pre-sale effort, audience building, launch & promotion, etc.). We’ve seen that authors have different needs in terms of both genre and life experience, so we’ve built this team to better meet every author. Several of these author coaches also support authors through our Create Programs, one of the several ways we sponsor their creator programs.
- We’ve increased the quantity and quality of our author tools and templates. In 2019, we had fewer than 15 different tools & templates authors could use during the presale phase (Email and DM Language, Audience Building Activities, Press Kit Materials, etc.). We now have over 45 different tools, templates, strategies & frameworks specific to the presale phase, with over 180+ detailed, step-by-step tools and templates from securing early praise to landing podcast interviews and partnering with nonprofits and events on bulk sales and speaking opportunities, and more.
- Starting with our July 2020 Publishing Cycle, we piloted a Post-Launch “Author Life Workshop Series“ that happens 2x in the first year after publication (1 month, 6 month). We’re also developing a “continuing education library” which includes recordings, worksheets, and other tools & resources for our authors to have access to in the longer-term
- Piloting our own podcast (the NDP Creator Community), featuring interviews with authors from our community as well as industry experts, who share practical advice you can use to build your community, improve your writing and sell more books through hybrid publishing. This pilot has also helped teach authors how to audition, prepare for, and interview on different podcasts & radio shows and drive more outcomes earlier.
- And more…
Publishing a book is just the start. There is so much more to do once an author’s book is out in the world, and we want to help them discover and use their voice to create the impact they seek.
The evolutions and innovations that we have made over the past few years have helped us do just that, leading to improved author outcomes both in their pre-sale efforts (audience building) and in their post-release lives. To name a few authors who had successful crowdfunding campaigns and are now off on speaking tours, landing podcast interviews, working in their dream professions, and inspiring others to find their own voices:
- Ty Pinkins (23 Miles & Running, Memoir; Spring 2020): https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/23-miles-and-running#/
- Amy Dong (Twenty-One Years Young, Essay Collection; Fall 2020): https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/twenty-one-years-young-by-amy-dong/x/20638625#/
- Amnoni Myers (You Are the Prize, Memoir; Fall 2020): https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/you-are-the-prize-by-amnoni-myers/x/20638625#/
- Belinda Lei (Not That Rich, Fiction; Fall 2020): https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/not-that-rich-coming-your-way-december-2020#/
- Bridget Smith (Summer Twilight, Fiction; Fall 2020): https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/summer-twilight-by-bridget-smith#/
Our Proudest Moments
As a publisher, New Degree Press has grown immensely since December 2019 when we published our 100th author. Only a year later, we published our 600th author, and in the summer of 2021, we broke the “1000 Authors Published“ milestone.
These metrics sound wonderful — and they are — but what we’re most proud of is the fact that we help authors use their books as tools to land dream jobs and develop the self-confidence to do impactful, meaningful work. Some examples include:
- Shiv Jhanghiani published 1.3 Billion: A Footballing Revolution in the Making(Published: Spring 2017) and subsequently was hired to work as a full-time soccer scout to develop football scouting projects in India.
- Jerome Smalls published Small Talk: One Youth. Seven Stories. Countless Lessons.(Published: Spring 2018) and used his book to go on two books tours in public & charter schools (in South Carolina and Washington, DC), run professional development training for educators, give a TEDx Talk, and receive an invitation to speak at SXSW in 2020 (before the pandemic cancelled the conference). Currently, he runs Small Talk Workshops & Mentorship Groups that have empowered hundreds of middle school and high school students.
- Kate Owens published her bookRootless(Published: Summer 2019) is now a Project Coordinator at EXOS@Google.
- Udit Dave used his book Hidden Heroes: The Role of Physicians in Sports (Published: Summer 2019) to be admitted into Tulane Medical School and was subsequently interviewed by ESPN for his research.
- Abra Sitler published Seeing the Biopharma Future(Published: Fall 2019) and developed the confidence to land her dream job in Biotech immediately afterwards. Since then, Abra has also made the commitment to donate the proceeds of all book sales to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as to degenerative eye disease relief (her book was inspired by her own experiences with a degenerative eye condition).
- Rahul Rana used his book Moonshots to land a dream internship at Luxe Capital before it came out in Fall 2020.
- And many others…
Publishing your book is important. So is achieving the personal, longer-term goals you have after your book is out in the world. We at New Degree Press recognize the importance of both, which is why we have developed the following mantra amongst our leadership team: “New Degree Press is the world’s first community-owned publisher AND human incubator.”
Authorship, in the end, is entrepreneurship. You have to face and learn from failure (negative reviews), adapt to change (change in audience preferences based on your genre, and Beta Reader Feedback), and bring an idea to fruition over countless nights of hard work and ideation (the actual writing process, as well as the subsequent marketing & revisions process), and at various points along that journey, the process can feel lonely.
At New Degree Press, our goal is to help you round out that author journey and make it a worthwhile, long-term investment in your personal and professional life. We will support you every step of the publishing process so that you can: (1) Cover your book production costs through a book pre-sale campaign so that when you publish, your book is profitable from day 1; (2) Create the best possible book YOU can create; and (3) Use your book as a tool to create new life opportunities, such as landing your dream job, securing paid speaking engagements and podcast interviews, starting or growing your business, giving a TEDx Talk, getting into your top-choice schools and fellowship programs, and more.
How We Plan to Grow over the Next Year
New Degree Press is always seeking new publishing mediums and opportunities, and we update our strategic goals and decisions looking at a 12–18 month horizon:
- Graphic Novels. In Summer 2021, we released our first 2 graphic novels. We don’t predict that our Graphic Novels Imprint will publish more than 30–40 graphic novels each year, however, given how intensive they are to work on & produce.
- Early Reader Books, Video Courses, and Audio Shows. Starting in Fall 2021, we will move into publishing Young Reader Books (Audience: Ages 7–13), as well as produce & publish Audio Shows and Video Courses through New Degree Production — our video & audio production arm that has already worked with hundreds of authors to produce promotional videos, audiobooks, video series on LinkedIn, and other audio shows.
- Social Media Marketing & Demonstrating Our Expertise. As a relatively new publisher, we recognize our social media presence is lacking. Most of the information you can find about New Degree Press (aside from press & media coverage of our authors) is on Reddit — which is not a great source for learning about any publisher. We’ve started to celebrate the successes of our authors, and over the next year, our plan is to to: (1) document more our author’s stories and how we’ve helped them as a publisher, (2) celebrate more of our authors’ successes, and (3) tell our story with more transparency and consistency to demonstrate our expertise in publishing, starting with this article series.
We will innovate and iterate our existing publishing programs cycle to cycle. Already in the past six to eight months, our innovations with the Author Coaches, strengthening Editorial Feedback Loops, and offering new tools, templates and feedback processes, have started to pay off.
For example, a recent author Robert Longyear signed with Academic Publisher Taylor & Francis for his second book A Virtual Care Blueprint based on the success of his first book Innovating for Wellness with New Degree Press. Some of Mayumi S. Grigsby’s writing was also recently selected to feature in the June 2021 release of Chicken Soup for the Soul, among other improved author writing outcomes.
All in all, we will continue to grow as a publisher and ‘level-up’ what we do every time we receive feedback, both positive and constructive, in the hopes that we can put our best foot forward as an accessible hybrid publisher looking to help authors develop and use their voice for meaningful and sustainable impact.
My Role
Take a look at my LinkedIn Profile and your first reaction may be, “This kid is young. Also, he’s young. How is *he* qualified to be in this role at such a young age?”
Yes, I am young — only 3 years out of college at the time of writing this, to be exact. But many entrepreneurs are young. Before I started at New Degree Press, I had an apprenticeship through Book in a Box (now Scribe) to learn the ins-and-outs of their operation and make New Degree Press a better publisher for our authors. Although Scribe has an entirely different model and is not a hybrid publisher (they are self-publishing services), I learned a ton about book publishing and project management. I’ve been working on how to apply what I learned there to New Degree Press, actively seeking feedback from my team and my authors alike, and welcome and appreciate every opportunity I have for constructive feedback. All I can do is learn fast and iterate as NDP continues to grow.
A part of that learning means hiring Editors, Designers and Talent with more experience than I have and leveraging their expertise to help make New Degree Press a better company. That’s why we’ve hired Department Heads (Head of Acquisitions, Head of Marketing Editors, Head of Copy Editing), an Art Director, and Lead Editors — people who already have years of experience in publishing.
We’ve also been able to recruit great members to our Board (Advisory Council) to surround ourselves with, including:
- Shane Mac (cofounder of Assist and bestselling author) — Chairman of the Advisory Council
- Daniel Houghton (former CEO of Lonely Planet)
- Catherine Spence (cofounder and COO, Murmur)
- David Marquet (President of Intent-Based Leadership Institute and bestselling creator)
- Chase Jarvis (CEO, CreativeLive and bestselling author of Creative Calling)
- Christina Mallon (Managing Partner, Open Style Lab)
- Josh Schwartz (CEO, Pubvendo)
- Robert Stephens (CTO, BestBuy and Founder, The Geek Squad)
- Megan O’Connor (CEO, Clark)
- Adam Brotman (CDO, Starbucks, and CEO, Brightloom)
We’re working to grow and further develop our Advisory Council as well. One of the things I’m most proud of about New Degree Press is how we’ve become a platform for diverse creators. A core objective of ours following 2021 is to embed our Advisory Council with more diverse and underrepresented voices in both creating and publishing.
We’ve grown a lot in such a short time and are iterating daily. We’re still young and early in the process, and that’s the best part — knowing that we’ve brought value to our authors but still have a long way to go even with 22 Cohorts under our belt. So, as long as we stay on that path of growing, iterating, and openly communicating those lessons & learnings along the way — I’m sure we can and will continue to support our authors in 2021 and beyond.
This is truly just the beginning — and there is so much more to come.
There is a real gap in the publishing industry between self-publishing and traditional publishing. The “Author-As-Owner” movement is growing, and we’re going to continue to champion and move the needle forward every chance we get.
As a recent author once told me, “Onward and Upwards!”
Brian
Head of Publishing at New Degree Press
Relevant Sources:
Connelly, Brian L., S. Trevis Certo, R. Duane Ireland, and Christopher R. Reutzel. “Signaling Theory: A Review and Assessment.” Journal of Management 37, no. 1 (January 2011): 39–67. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206310388419.
