Scott Hoffman

• Scott Hoffman is a globally known and respected literary agent.
• Hoffman spent time as a lobbyist in Washington, D.C. before moving into the publishing industry.
• He co-founded Folio Literary Management 12 years ago which currently has 20 agents.
• Since its inception, Folio has sold close to 2,000 titles and had more than 200 New York Times bestsellers.

• https://www.benbellabooks.com/
• http://foliolit.com/

Glenn Yeffeth: Welcome to the Building Books Podcast. I'm Glenn Yeffeth, publisher of Ben Bella Books, and on this podcast, we will talk about ideas, authors, and how publishing really works.

Glenn Yeffeth: Welcome. Well, I'm extremely excited today to be talking to Scott Hoffman. Scott Hoffman is not only one of the top agents in New York and actually int eh world, but he is also the co-founder of Folio Literary, on of the top agencies. So, it's very exciting to have you here, Scott.

Scott Hoffman: You didn't mention my boyish good looks and my [inaudible 00:00:35] charm. And there's probably a reason for that because I'm the perfect podcast guest because I have a face made for radio.

Glenn Yeffeth: Well, you're actually.

Scott Hoffman: My goal is to break Glenn up as much as possible during this interview.

Glenn Yeffeth: You're doing a good job so far. Well Scott, and full disclosure, Scott and I have done a number of deals together and worked together over the years. And he's one of the sharpest minds out there. So, I'm really excited to talk to him. And we're going to get into lots of stories and lots of questions about the industry, but maybe just start a little bit with how you got into this great business.

Scott Hoffman: Sure. Happy to. Publishing is a second career for me. My first career was in politics. I started out as a lobbyist in Washington D.C., and if you've ever seen House of Cards, it's a very, very [inaudible 00:01:21] portrayal of what things are like down there.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: It's a slimy business. Every story you've heard about politics is true, and it's probably only half the story. And so, when I left politics, the way that I got into publishing, I figured that since I'd already sold my soul once, I think perfect investment banker. I went back to grad school. I got an MBA in finance, and I was all set to take a banking job, and I realized that I didn't want that life. I didn't want to spend 18 hours a day, seven days a week staring at spreadsheets in a cubicle-
Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: No much how much it's going to pay me. And one of the things that I did when I was in D.C. and I was really disillusioned with the world and my job was that I started writing a novel. And it was the typical thinly-veiled, semi-autobiographical [inaudible 00:01:57].

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: That every 27-year-old kid writes. And at that point I had no idea how books got made. I'd read so many books in my lifetime, but I had no idea what the sausage-making process was like, so to speak, right? So, I talked to a friend whose husband was a best-selling novelist and I said how did he get his first book published? She said, "It's a good question. I don't know the details. Why don't you talk to him?" So, I took the guy out for a beer and he said, "Well heck, I just wrote the damn thing and my agent did the rest." I said, "Your agent? What are you, like a movie star? You have an agent?" And he said, "No, my literary agent. The woman who does all my book deals." I was flabbergasted I said-

Glenn Yeffeth: You'd never heard of this career.

Scott Hoffman: Right, exactly. I said, "That's a job?" He said, "Yeah." I said, "Can you make a living doing that?" And he said, "Well, she makes 15% of everything I make, and she's got 49 other clients." And that's when the light bulb went off in my head and I realized that my two favorite things on the planet were books and deals. And here was this career where I could do book deals for a living. Right?

Scott Hoffman: So, when I was done with grad school, I basically just shotgunned out resumes to every agency in New York and said, "I'll come work for you for free [inaudible 00:02:57] business." I got one response. I got an internship at this small agency. Worked there for about 18 months, and then 12 years ago started Folio. And it's been a great run. We're 20 agents right now. We've sold close to 2000 titles. We've had more than 200 New York Times bestsellers. We do everything from literary fiction to kids picture books, nonfiction. Actually, I'm really, really of us. Just this year for the first time in our history, we've sold two poetry books.

Glenn Yeffeth: Wow.

Scott Hoffman: Yeah, two-

Glenn Yeffeth: That's not easy.

Scott Hoffman: Not at all. And not only do we sell poetry books, we sold them for a nontrivial amount of money. These are both Instagram poets. Both people who have got a fantastic following on Instagram after Milk and Honey, the lady at Milk and Honey [inaudible 00:03:35]

Glenn Yeffeth: That's right.

Scott Hoffman: Was a huge trailblazer, and it turns out that no matter what you're writing, no matter how niche-y you might think it is, if there's going to be a group of people who care about what you have to say. And if you're good at it, there's a place for you in the traditional publishing world.

Glenn Yeffeth: So, this is something where the internet really has transformed, that you can find our niche and then you can prove it to a publisher who could say, "Okay that's real, I can now pursue that.

Scott Hoffman: It's extraordinary. And when I talk to other agents and particularly a little bit longer ago, maybe five or six years ago, New York City publishers were terrified of self-publishing. Terrified of the internet. They were worried that they were going to be disintermediated out of the process. And what's happened is is exactly the opposite of that, right? There's certain things that publishers are good at, and here are other things that publishers are not very good at. You and I, as a publisher, you know this. One of the things that they're not particularly good at is figuring out where the market is going to be, versus where the market is.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: And so, what I found and what my agent and colleagues have found is that the self-publishing world almost serves as a spectacular [inaudible 00:04:34] team for talent, and there are all kinds of people who have these remarkable followings who've gone on to sell literally millions of copies of their books who never in a million years would have been picked up by a traditional publisher before they were published.

Glenn Yeffeth: Everyone has trouble predicting the future, but if you've got a huge bunch of people crowdsourcing what the future is-

Scott Hoffman: Exactly.

Glenn Yeffeth: You can find those when there's-

Scott Hoffman: Yeah, exactly. When there's somebody like you like you, Howie and [inaudible 00:04:57] ins science fiction.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: Even in the nonfiction world, right? Like the model for a, let's say a diet book used to be find a doctor who's to a program, collect your before and afters, figure out what's going to happen there. Promote the person's credentials. Get the person traditional publicity. And bang, it's going to work. That model, if you look at what the bestselling diet books have been over the past couple of years, okay sure. One of them is like let's say, The 17-Day Diet, Mike Morena-

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: [inaudible 00:05:22] Dr. Phil ecosystem. But one of my authors is this woman named J.J. Smith. And she came from absolutely nowhere, right? And her book, the reason that she decided to write a diet book was based on her personal experience. She was a management consultant. She was working for, I think it was [inaudible 00:05:40]

Glenn Yeffeth: Okay.

Scott Hoffman: Or one of your former colleagues.

Glenn Yeffeth: Yeah, that's right.

Scott Hoffman: And she got very, very ill. She had a devastating illness that laid her up. In fact, it was so bad she thought she wasn't going to make it. And her friends were looking at her and saying, "J.J. what's going on? You're [inaudible 00:05:55]." None of the doctors could figure out what was wrong with her. And she started putting all of her affairs in order, because she thought that she might not be long for this Earth.

Glenn Yeffeth: Wow.

Scott Hoffman: And she happened to be a creature of habit. And so, she went to the dentist for her normal semiannual dentist appointment, and the dentist said, "J.J., you look horrible." She said, "I know. I feel horrible. Nobody knows what's going on." He said, "Okay, let's do your cleaning and then we'll talk. And so the dentist was poking around in her mouth, he said, "While you're here, do you want me to replace those fillings?" Oh my goodness, you lost a mercury amalgam filling. You have heavy metal poisoning." Wow. They took her right from the dentist office to the hospital. She stayed in the hospital for six months. They put her on heavy chelation therapy. And it started to work. She got out of the hospital. She'd been taking courses in nutrition because she was a big healthy eater. And she figured, she thought that diet might be the way to cure herself. And when she came out, she said, "What I want to do is I want to kind of reset for myself. And so, I'm going to eat nothing but raw food for ten days."

Scott Hoffman: And she went on her own personal Facebook page. She had maybe 200-

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: 20 Facebook fans. She didn't have a huge platform. This is something that virtually, literally anybody in the world could do. And she said, "Can I get ten friends to do this program with me for ten days." She said, "Here's the deal: I don't like salads, but I want to eat raw food. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to do, take 60% leafy green vegetables and 40% fruit, I'm going to throw them in the blender and we're going to make green smoothies."

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: And her friends were so happy that she was alive that 100 of them said, "J.J., we'll do this for you."

Glenn Yeffeth: That's great.

Scott Hoffman: And so they did. And they started having these unbelievable results. They were all eating the standard American diets, so they were eating lots of salt, they were eating lots of carbohydrates. They had these cravings for sugar. And after eating green smoothies for ten days, some of them lost ten pounds. Some of them lost 12 pounds. Some of them lost an inch off their waist. And they said, "J.J," of course, when something like this happens to you, what's your response? Your response is, "J.J., you've got to write a book."

Glenn Yeffeth: That's right.

Scott Hoffman: And so she did. And she self-published it. Because she had to like, she didn't come from a traditional publishing. She didn't know any agents. She didn't know any publishers. So, she uploaded-

Glenn Yeffeth: And she probably would have had a hard time finding an agent.

Scott Hoffman: Correct. No credentials. Exactly. No credentials, no track record, no platform. So, she publishes this thing and it starts to take off. She sells 40,000 copies on her own, which is-

Glenn Yeffeth: No, that's very respectable.

Scott Hoffman: Which is not bad at all. And one day, she's sitting in her home office and she gets this phone call. And she answers the phone, and the voice on the other end goes, "Is this J.J. Smith?" And she says, "Yes, who is this?" "Steve Harvey. I host Family Feud. I'm a comedian." And she recognizes the voice. "Yes sir, Mr. Harvey. What can I do for you?" And so, Steve Harvey does the program. He has spectacular results with it. And he's like, he says, "You know what, J.J.? This works so well for me I want to have you on my radio show."

Scott Hoffman: And he does. And she goes on the radio show. Before she's done, before her hour on the Steve Harvey Show is over, she sold 10,000 copies.

Glenn Yeffeth: Wow.

Scott Hoffman: So, she's doing great. She has no interest in the traditional publishing world. And all of a sudden, she starts this Facebook group, it starts to grow 5000 people, 10,000 people, 20,000 people. And then the number one picture in the Facebook group starts to be, "J.J., I was in Barnes and Noble. I was in Walmart."

Glenn Yeffeth: I couldn't find you book.

Scott Hoffman: "I couldn't find your book." And she didn't want to say, "Well, that's because as I wrote the thing and then my brother designed the cover and we uploaded it to Amazon."

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: And so, I'd met her at an event where I'm speaking, and she said, "It might be time to bring out a partner in this." And so, took her around New York, talked to all the publishers, and wound up doing a deal with Simon and Schuster for her. It was, and you know how slow the book business traditionally is, right?

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: Like for people listening, the way that things usually work, you do a book deal today, that book winds up on the shelves 18 months from now. We set a land speed record on this. we did a deal with S&S on Friday, we had the contract signed on Saturday. On Monday, the S&S e-book edition replaced her e-book edition on Amazon, and they were shipping the paperback ten days later.

Glenn Yeffeth: Wow.

Scott Hoffman: We wanted to capitalize momentum.

Glenn Yeffeth: So, they just took it over. They didn't re-edit it. They just took it over.

Scott Hoffman: They just, right. They didn't do anything. In fact, to this day, if you looked at it, the only difference between the original self-published edition and Simon and Schuster edition which is now in its gosh, 25th printing or something, is that there's a great big banner on the Simon and Schuster edition that says number one New York Times bestseller. And she's since gone on to sell over two million copies of the book.

Glenn Yeffeth: That's amazing.

Scott Hoffman: Here's this woman who faced personal adversity who did something for herself and for her friends, and then found that it was so valuable, she wanted to share it with the world.

Glenn Yeffeth: And that's something that you couldn't have done 20 years ago, I mean, or even ten years ago.

Scott Hoffman: It wouldn't have been possible, exactly. It wouldn't have been possible. Just wouldn't have happened. And that's why the self-publishing world and the fact that, and publishers serve, they have a lot of value to add to the process. But their role as gatekeeper is really, it's disappearing. And so, the old days where Mr. Simon and Mr. Schuster and Mr. Random or Mr. House-

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: Might point and say, "You are the anointed one. You are going to be a bestseller," doesn't really exist anymore.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right. And one of the things that I like to say, would-be authors ask me, "Should I self-publish?" I say every book is self-published in the sense that you've got to think about your book as a product in the marketplace out there that's going to win and have a strategy to make it win. And then you got to decide do I want a publisher to [inaudible 00:11:03] with me, to add some value to what I'm doing, and take their cut? Or do I want to do it myself? But the old morel of, "Okay, I wrote a book. Now publisher, make it happen," that's kind of old school. It doesn't happen anymore.

Scott Hoffman: Completely true. In my career I've been fortunate enough to represent four New York Times number one bestselling authors. And two of them started out [inaudible 00:11:24].

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: So, J.J. self-published and Brendan Burchard originally self-published his book called Millionaire Messenger. So, he did a book when he was in college and it was a book student leadership guide that he basically self-published as well. But it's extraordinary, the thing about publishing, and this is particularly relevant to you and your audience is that as you know, the publishing world is mostly based in New York City. And throughout the history of publishing, publisher and editors have wanted to acquire and publish the kinds of books that are important to them. They think they [inaudible 00:11:53]. And there's nothing wrong with that, right?

Scott Hoffman: So, in the 1950s when the industry was run by a bunch of educated white guys, they published a lot of Saul Bellows and John Updikes and those kinds of books. And now the industry is largely run by college educated upper middle class white women who live in Manhattan and Brooklyn, you get lots of Tiger Moms, and lots of life-changing magic's of tidying up, and there's nothing wrong with that. But the problem is is that it's the rare publisher who understands the market outside of themselves and their circle.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: And so, if you have a publisher who happens to be based in the real world, in a place like let's say, oh I don't know, Dallas, Texas. It's a gigantic advantage. People might look at it, in the past it might have been a disadvantage because we didn't have the tools to communicate that we do now.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right. Now it's so easy.

Scott Hoffman: Exactly. I'll go out there and I'll make a crazy prediction. I will say that in the next ten years, one of the big I've publishers is going to relocate. They're going to leave Manhattan and go to a place where cost of living is lower, where property is less expensive, and where tax is lower. So, I think they're going to come to a place like Dallas, like Amazon, they may open a second headquarters.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: They might go to a place like Omaha. They might go to a place because you can be at the center of the culture right now without being geographically present.

Glenn Yeffeth: That's right. In publishing, there's such a push now for diversity, which is so important.

Scott Hoffman: Huge.

Glenn Yeffeth: But it needs to be als diversity of perspective, and background.

Scott Hoffman: Yeah.

Glenn Yeffeth: Because publishing can't just be publishing for publishing types.

Scott Hoffman: Yeah, and the publishing industry has, there's always been this myth in the publishing industry that "those people don't buy books," right? And those people have changed over the years, right?

Glenn Yeffeth: That's right.

Scott Hoffman: So, for a while, so those people used to be people without college degrees. Right? Those people used to be African American women. And African American women who don't buy books. And what happened? You had this amazing generation of people like [inaudible 00:13:39] who self-published, who were literally selling books out of trunks of their cars, and who were selling tens of thousands of copies.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: [inaudible 00:13:46] world woke up and said oh my gosh, maybe those people do buy books. Right? "Those people," used to be "conservatives," and then all of a sudden this guy named Rush Limbaugh comes along and [inaudible 00:13:57] Simon and Schuster, and sells millions of copies. Oh wait, maybe "those people" do buy books.

Glenn Yeffeth: That's right.

Scott Hoffman: Right? And so, it's really hard to know everything. It's really hard to have a perspective that's different from your own. And that's one of the reasons why the self-publishing world, which is so important because you can see what the whole world does. And there's that proof that comes from sales. Right? You don't have to take a bet. You can bet on the winner.

Glenn Yeffeth: That's right.

Scott Hoffman: And when publishers add fuel to the fire, they're really, really good at that. When it comes to picking winners and losers, that's good.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right. You're probably familiar with the black swan. This is a black swan business in which, I look at, we've done 450 books. If you take out our ten biggest books, there's no business.

Scott Hoffman: Right.

Glenn Yeffeth: And when I look at even the biggest publishers, it's the same thing. We had a bad year because we didn't have a 50 Shades of Gray book.

Scott Hoffman: Right.

Glenn Yeffeth: But no one knows what those books are going to be up front.

Scott Hoffman: Yeah. Never in a million years would have thought that a vegan diet book would sell how many copies now for [inaudible 00:14:55]?

Glenn Yeffeth: We're pushing three million.

Scott Hoffman: Three million copies of this extraordinary, the book and the plan are amazing. But it's a little bit on the academic side, and yet, more than three million people have bought this thing, have read it, have implemented it, have lost tons of weight as a result of it. You don't see those things coming, right?

Glenn Yeffeth: That's right.

Scott Hoffman: You just never know.

Glenn Yeffeth: Between the book, the sequel, the cookbooks, it really is a, and when we first brought out the China Study, vegan was some kind of communist.

Scott Hoffman: Right.

Glenn Yeffeth: It was not a mainstream thing. And you'll notice, vegan never appears in that book.

Scott Hoffman: Right.

Glenn Yeffeth: Part of it is how important the target market is in understanding that. We aimed that book at the baby boomers, and the people getting older and to be healthy. And we got a lot of that market, but the core market was the vegan. And that one turned out to be a very growing group.

Scott Hoffman: And they're extraordinary evangelists. How do you tell a vegan or a Cross fitter? They'll tell you [inaudible 00:15:50].

Glenn Yeffeth: That's right.

Scott Hoffman: It's completely true though. And it's, I'm so optimistic about the state of the book business just because there's so many ways to reach people, and there are so many communities that have not been served by the traditional publishing business who now all of a sudden have the opportunity to get the information and the entertainment [inaudible 00:16:07]

Glenn Yeffeth: So Scott, if you got a new job. You're now the head of Penguin Random House, what would you do? What do you think, what are the big opportunities the publishers are missing?

Scott Hoffman: They need to trust their editors. Honestly. I think the first thing that they need to recognize is that they don't know everything. And for me it was interesting because I came in, politics is such a data-driven culture, and pollsters control everything. When I first got into this business I was having a conversation with the CFO of [inaudible 00:16:32] House. And I said, "One of the things as an agent that would really help me with my job would be if I had access to the market research." And he said-

Glenn Yeffeth: Whoa, what market research?

Scott Hoffman: I said, "Wait a minute, this is a 20 billion dollar industry in the United States, right? You're telling me you don't have research that tells you that women between the ages of 30 and 50 like to read thrillers with female protagonists in months of June, July and August?" He said, "Here's our market. We publish 2000 books a year. Some of them work, some of them don't. The ones that work, we try to publish more of. the ones that don't, we try to publish fewer.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right. So, every book is a market test.

Scott Hoffman: Right. And so, and it's fascinating to me. What I would do is I would hire a diverse group of vendors, people who come from backgrounds very different from mine and say, "What's important in your community? What kind of books would you like to read?" And whether those people are from whether it's geographical diversity, whether it is racial diversity, whether it's educational diversity, whether it's political diversity, sexual orientation, whatever, I want people who care deeply about their own communities and can figure out the books that are important to people like them.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: And of course, it's really hard to do that when you have a business that's do geographically compressed in Manhattan or Brooklyn where you can't live there unless you're rich, or unless you're living with 12 roommates-

Glenn Yeffeth: That's right.

Scott Hoffman: And they have a 90-minutes commute to Queens. So, I think that a lot of the industry is going to be about getting out of metropolitan areas, getting off the coasts, and figuring out what people in between, in "flyover country" want to read. 18 months ago we went completely virtual.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: And so, I'd say more than half the people are still in Dallas, but we've got people around the country. We can hire people anywhere. And it works very well. Obviously our authors that we're working hand and glove with, they're already everywhere.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: So, it really doesn't disrupt anything. And it's something that the publishers could do very easily. Like you're right. It's very hard to acquire successfully outside your target market if you don't really understand that target market. And it's even harder to edit. You may be, oh there's a lot of people who love wrestling, let's do a wrestling book.

Glenn Yeffeth: Yeah.

Scott Hoffman: But if you don't love wrestling, it's very hard for you to edit that.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: And you don't know who the best wrestler is.

Glenn Yeffeth: That's right.

Scott Hoffman: Because you're not spending, doing your 12 hours a day studying mankind versus Triple X versus whatever. Like, I'm not a wrestling guy, although I kind of [inaudible 00:18:53]. It's extraordinary. And the world is changing so quickly that these new models are just, haven't caught up yet. I mean, for us as an agency, right? Maybe the only institution that's slower than the publishing business. I joke that publishing is like the best run business in the 19th century.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: It really has not changed all that much since Gutenberg invented the printing press. Maybe the only other institution that's as slow as publishing is government. It's fascinating because you talk about having a virtual office. As an agency, for your listeners who may not know the way the logistics of the business work is that generally what happens is that when the publishers pay their authors who are agented, they will pay their agency, and then the agency will take their commission out and forward the money to the author.

Scott Hoffman: And so, as a result, as any agency will issue a gigantic number of 1099s to their authors. That's just the way they do their tax report. And so, we got audited in our third year of business. And we had this tiny little 800 square foot office in Manhattan, and the guy from the New York Department of Labor came and he said, "Where are all the people?" And we looked at him, we said, "what are you talking about?" He said, "You issued 250 1099s last year. Where are all these people sitting? Where are they working?" We said, "We have no idea. They're in the closets at home, they're on the beach in Bali.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: They're authors. Their systems had, like he thought we were running the triangle shirtwaist factory.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right. But this is New York. Don't they have other literary agencies?

Scott Hoffman: You would think. But this guy was from Albany.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: And he was in this little silo, and somebody said, "Go audit this company. Figure out why these people aren't employees. Figure out why they're not paying employment taxes on these people." And the reason we're not doing that is because they're authors. They control their own lives. They write their own books. They do their own thing with their agents. And even though these crazy IRS rules say that the money has to come to us and we have to give them the 1099s and stuff, they own their own businesses. They are their own businesses, just like you said, everybody's a self-publisher, right?

Glenn Yeffeth: There are complications with being virtual. Wherever we have somebody going to a new state, we've got all these things. We've have to deal with income tax in those states.

Scott Hoffman: In those states, exactly.

Glenn Yeffeth: Unfortunately to the sales in the state.

Scott Hoffman: Right.

Glenn Yeffeth: So, we create a tax nexus. So yeah, it doesn't make, technology's gotten ahead of the regulation.

Scott Hoffman: There needs to be a new paradigm, right, that there needs to be a new way of governing that takes into account this virtual phenomenon, and that takes into account the fact that not everybody comes to the plant and works from nine to five.

Glenn Yeffeth: And so, it's not there.

Scott Hoffman: Right. And different employees want different things. Different people need different things in their lives. People have different stages. We've got some people, we and other companies would love to have people who worked ten hours a week. Right? Because in those ten hours they could be more productive, they can bring a diversity of thought and their own experience to the business in a way that I could never have, being who I am and doing what I do. So, we've got people who are raising kids, whose primary job is taking care of the kids.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: That everything's set up at home. But that drives them bananas, they want some adult contact. They want to work in the commercial world, but they can only do it for ten or 20 hours a week. No problem. And some of our best agents for three or four years of their careers were part-time agents. Some of out other best agents are, have had long and productive careers in other places where they were working 80 hours a week. But now maybe they're at a stage in their life where they don't want to work these 80 hours a week.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: They want to work 20 hours a week and travel with their family. That's great. But the structures don't exist right now in so many businesses and in the regulatory environment to easily accommodate those things.

Glenn Yeffeth: I'm going to shift us over. But let's talk a little bit about the way authors get paid. Because it always struck me as maybe I didn't grow up in this business, I moved in as an entrepreneur when I was 40. The way we do royalties and advances always strikes me as just kind of bizarre.

Scott Hoffman: Sure. It is.

Glenn Yeffeth: So, and obviously there's this royalty system that pays between seven and a half percent and 15% on the cover price of a book, but everyone gets an advance. And that advance up front you earn out against that advance. So, when you earn royalties, that advance is eaten away until once that advance is eaten away to zero, then you start getting paid additional money into that advance.

Scott Hoffman: And you know that the whole concept of advance against royalties is relatively recent phenomenon. But was only the beginning of the 20th century the publishers started paying advances. If you were publishing a book in 1880 or 1890 or even the early part of the 20th century, there was no advance. Your publisher was going to front the money to print the books and get them to the retailers, but there was no advance. It was really only in the days of like Max Perkins and Scribner.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: Or Fitzgerald and Hemingway that you started to get these small relative advances. And it was nothing like the advances that the publishers are paying now.

Glenn Yeffeth: The bizarre thing to me is so the author stats where the publishers get excited, maybe even overexcited, pay a big advance that never comes remotely close to earning [inaudible 00:23:41].

Scott Hoffman: Right.

Glenn Yeffeth: Benefit at the expense of the authors that are actually very successful and earn out and get a lower percentage of all the revenue their books bring in.

Scott Hoffman: Yeah.

Glenn Yeffeth: How do you deal with that? Like, well how do you think that through?

Scott Hoffman: Yeah. One of the lines that I use with my authors all the time is that nobody gets rich selling books to publishers. Right? You only get rich selling books to people.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: And you might convince a publisher really go crazy for your book, but unless you're already in a place where you've got a gigantic following if you're a huge celebrity or something, let's say the cap for your advance is going to be a million bucks. And that, I would never in a million years sneeze at a million bucks.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: But compared to what the bestselling books of all time earn, it's a [inaudible 00:24:19] amount. What makes a sustainable career for an author is finding individuals who are going to walk into a bookstore or go online and buy that person's book, recommend it to their friends, and like J.J. Smith, buy two million copies of this thing for someone.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: Right? And so, you might get a big advance from the publisher on the first book, but unless you're selling it to individuals, unless you know, unless you're actually adding value to these people's lives, you're going to have a very short career as an author. And what's fascinating is, I don't know how much of the mechanics of the book business you want to get intl. There's probably going to be a lot of [inaudible 00:24:49] reading this thing, or listening to this podcast. All those books that are in those physical bookstores, right, whether it's Barnes and Noble, whether chain [inaudible 00:24:54] bookstores, bookstores are basically consignment shops, right?

Glenn Yeffeth: That's right.

Scott Hoffman: So, if those books don't sell, they're going to send them right back to the publisher, and they're going to get their money back. And so, another reason why the self-publishing and the digital revolution has been such a huge deal for publishing, it used to be that unless your book sold really well in the first two or three months, it was gone. It had no useful economic life after that.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: Because it was a real estate game. You couldn't get the shelf space, they were going to move you right out the door for the next book that was going to come in that was going to sell better than yours. The retailers themselves aren't taking the risk. The people who are taking the risk are the publishers because they're the ones who are paying to print all these copies in the physical world at least under the old model.

Scott Hoffman: Now in the digital world, you can have this long tail. You can have these books that appeal to a very small segment of people in a way that you never could.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right. Because more than half of all sales are happening online now.

Scott Hoffman: Right. Exactly. And there's no cost to having an additional book in your online bookstore, right?

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: The way that there is if you're paying $50 a square foot for that Union Square retail space in New York. And that's a really big thing. It's really transformed the way publishing works because it means the publishers can take, can publish more esoteric books. They can publish books that appeal to a smaller set of, I don't want to kid things, because book publishing at the traditional level is still a mass market business, right? Because the retail environment is set up the way it is, your books have to appeal to a generic customer, right? If you're the world's biggest expert on horse hoof repair, chances are that a general trade book is not the way to share your knowledge.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: Your [inaudible 00:26:25] you're going to do online courses or whatever. So, any book that gets published, any book that finds its way onto Amazon or finds its way Barnes and Noble or your local independent has to appeal to a lot of people. It can't just appeal to a very small segment online. If you're self-published, you can do books that appeal to hardcore people on one side of the political spectrum or the other side of the political spectrum.

Glenn Yeffeth: And sometimes those niches are bigger than you think.

Scott Hoffman: No question.

Glenn Yeffeth: I remember looking at it was a book on how to compost with human manure. Which I'm like, "Who wants this?" Look, over 10,000 copies sold.

Scott Hoffman: Yeah.

Glenn Yeffeth: So, that set up a size to be of interest. Now, are you going to get that into a lot of bookstores? Probably not.

Scott Hoffman: No. Right.

Glenn Yeffeth: But it sold a lot of quantity.

Scott Hoffman: If that's what you want, as a consumer, you're not going to walk into Barnes and Noble and say, "Hey, guy at the information desk," [inaudible 00:27:12]

Glenn Yeffeth: Yeah, where's the [inaudible 00:27:12]. They're going to look at you like you have five heads.

Scott Hoffman: But the first thing you're going to do is going to type it into Google and if that book shows up, bam, you're set.

Glenn Yeffeth: So, as you know, one of the things that we've been experimenting with, and I'd say it's a third of our books now, is we do a profit share. So, lower advance or no advance, but much higher upside where basically it's a much more linear relationship between how much money we're making and how much money the author gets.

Scott Hoffman: Yeah.

Glenn Yeffeth: We're not the only ones doing that, right? How big a trend is that in the industry?

Scott Hoffman: It's a really good question. It's always existed, right? And some of the biggest authors of some household name novelists for instance, people you see perpetually at the top of the bestseller list, before I was in the business I would say to myself, "My gosh," or when I was in my early days in the business I'd say, "What? Why would they do this for a 15% royalty on a hard copy?" They're making 350 a book, and their publisher's making seven dollars, but meanwhile, this guy is the brand name.

Glenn Yeffeth: That's right.

Scott Hoffman: And Doubleday is not the brand name, John Grisham is the brand name. Or whatever. And as it turns out, traditionally, and people don't really talk about it a lot, but some of the biggest names in publishing have been doing these kinds of deals. James Paterson, for instance, is reputed to have a profit sharing deal with Little Brown because he sells millions and millions of books, and he does so much marketing on his own behalf, and people know him. If you ask people, if we were to talk to 100 people and say, "How many of you know the name James Paterson?" I'll bet you 80% of them would say, "Oh absolutely." If you were to talk to 80 people and say, "How many of you have heard of Little Brown," people would say, "Little Brown what?"

Glenn Yeffeth: That's right.

Scott Hoffman: "Is it a squirrel. A red mouse?" Maybe ten percent of people. The bulk of book publishing has kind of worked on this venture capital model, right, where publishers take bets with their own capital on a basket of investments on 100 books, let's say. Of those 100 books, they're going to lose money on 70% of them. Seven out of ten of these books are not going to be big hits. One of them's going to break even. One of them's going to be a small success. And then one of them, if they do their job well is going to be a big success.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: And so, what happens is you have this cross-collateralization where your most successful authors on your list subsidize your least successful authors on your list.

Glenn Yeffeth: Exactly.

Scott Hoffman: And it used to be a good thing, but a couple of things are happening. The authors who have been on the top of the list are realizing, "Wait a minute, this is not such a good deal for me." And their agents are realizing this is not necessarily a great deal for this author. And so, there's this big donut hole that's appearing in the market, right? And where you used to have a lot of journalists, a lot of academics who would make decent money on the books. So, it wouldn't be life-changing money, but they would get 75,000, $100,000, $150,000 advances, and sell maybe 10,000 copies of their book. So, the publishers just about break even on some of those kinds of books.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: And what you have happening right now is that you have a lot of more publishers paying a lot more money, paying 500, 600, 800, one point five million for the authors who have the followings, that were going to sell those 150, 200, 500 million copies. And you also have a lot of people where the publishers are saying, "Okay, we're going to pay you a $5,000 advance, we're going to pay you no advance at all, because what we bring to the table because you're so risk and we can't bear this risk anymore.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right. And we're going to just throw that spaghetti against the wall and-

Scott Hoffman: And see what sticks. And that's fine. And the problem with that is that the authors are saying, "Well, if I don't have the guaranteed money, what's the publisher adding versus me just going online and doing this myself? And in some cases it's worthwhile if you have an amazing editor, if you have a publisher who's really going to be transformative. But if it's a publisher who's just going to slap their color font on the spine of the thing, there might not even be a physical copy of it, then authors have a much harder decision to make about whether the publisher's adding enough value to capture what they're taking, or whether they should just do it themselves.

Glenn Yeffeth: Now when you think about let's say you've got somebody maybe in the middle, they're getting 150, 200,000 dollar advance level. And [inaudible 00:30:53] they've got offers from five or six different publishers. How differentiated are the publishers in your mind? How much is it, well this person will be, this publisher will be best for this book. And it's the money is relevant, but it's only one factor. Or is it really about they're all kind of fungible, it's who give the biggest money?

Scott Hoffman: I won't say the traditional publishing's a commodity because it's not. There are definitely distinctions among publishers. There are definitely tiers of publishers. There are publishers who tend to have more success with certain kinds of books than other publishers, no question about that. In a lot of ways, the individual editor whose the [inaudible 00:31:27] editor makes a bigger difference than the publishing house.

Glenn Yeffeth: Okay.

Scott Hoffman: Because the difference between a great editor and a mediocre editor is a lot bigger than the difference between a great publisher and a mediocre publisher.

Glenn Yeffeth: That's very interesting. And what does that great editor do, because they don't control marketing, there's a lot of things they don't control, so what is it that makes them add that much value?

Scott Hoffman: Two things: One, a great editor will make the book appreciably better. There are certain things that publishers are really good at. They're good at finding good books, and then through the editorial process with the right editors, they can make those books a lot better. I mean, the number one thing that's going to sell a book is going to be the book. When somebody reads it and they pass it along to somebody else and they say, "Oh my gosh, you have to read this."

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: You don't do that with a book that was like, "That was a meh book. But eh, it was okay." There's no pass along factor. The editor can work with the author to take what's in that author's head and make sure it gets onto the page in a way that's entertaining and informative. That's a huge value-add. And you don't really see it, so and the other huge value-add from editors is the best editors know how to identify and deploy the resources within the publishing house to the best effect, right? Because when it comes to publicists, let's say, at every publishing house there are great publicists and there are mediocre publicists.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: There are great marketing people and mediocre marketing people. And so, the best editors are like, "No, I don't want John to do the publicity on this one. This one, let's have Sally do the publicity on this one." And when Sally does the publicity, you get those big media hits, because John, he's got some other stuff going on.

Glenn Yeffeth: And so part of it is an editor with the clout to make things happen in that publishing house.

Scott Hoffman: Right. Or even knowledge of how to work the system. Because publishing, like everything else, the resources are scarce within any company, right? And if you can get more of the resources within a company and better resources, your book's going to have a better chance to succeed.

Glenn Yeffeth: And I love what you said about editing, and I don't hear it that often from agents, and there's almost a false learning out there that it's all platform. Get your book out fast, that's what matters. As you know, we've got four full-time editors and all they do is edit. And I have had authors out of big houses who go, "I've never been [inaudible 00:33:31] in my life," and they kind of like it, but it's work. And I've always felt that's value added. That's important, so long as it's truly a collaborative process with the author, which is the way we like to work.

Scott Hoffman: Right.

Glenn Yeffeth: But I have a lot of agents who go, "Do you really have to spend this much time editing?" And they're sort of poo-pooing it. So, it's nice to hear at least there is a multitude of views on this.

Scott Hoffman: Absolutely. If you look at iconic authors, people who have published, who have been massive bestsellers, and you look at the books in the first, let's say third of their career when they didn't necessarily have the clout of being a household name, when they were the ones who were working for great editors, those books in the first third of their career are objectively better than the books in the last third of their career.

Glenn Yeffeth: Before they got too powerful, but they didn't have to be edited anymore.

Scott Hoffman: Right. So two things happened, right? One is that, "I'm author effing author. My words are gold."

Glenn Yeffeth: That's right.

Scott Hoffman: Right? Which obviously doesn't happen when you're trying to sell a first book. But so that's the first thing that happens. And that's one of the reasons why those later books tend to feel a lot more like they're phoned in because people who are these extraordinary professionals who are editing those things early on. And the other thing that's huge is when you become an author of that stature, all of a sudden you become a meaningful entry on the publisher's P and L, and the timing of your book matters a lot. And if you turn in a manuscript that's maybe not such a great manuscript, ten years ago when you weren't a meaningful entry on the P and L, they could take an extra six months to edit that book. Now, if the retailers are expecting those million copies to ship in September, you better [inaudible 00:34:58] well ship in September.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right. What do we do? Well, brand name versus million copies shipped in September versus the next fiscal year. It's a very disciplined author that's going to insist on an editing process.

Scott Hoffman: The best possible [inaudible 00:35:10]. And the fact is is that no matter how good a writer you are, no matter how good an author you are, nobody can edit themselves.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: You can't do it, in the same way that you can't do psychotherapy on yourself, you can't edit yourself.

Glenn Yeffeth: Editing, I love that you're saying this is an added value for the publisher, but to me the biggest thing has got to be marketing. And it's a big conundrum because publishers aren't famous for being great at marketing. Authors now bring as much or more to the table marketing-wise as publishers do. But in the end, if we're moving toward a world where increasingly sales are online, increasingly it's not about distribution, don't publishers have to get very good at marketing? Does it have to be something that they really add value?

Scott Hoffman: And I've alluded to this a bunch of times, but we've gotten halfway down the road. So, the things that publishers are very good at, finding great books. They're good at finding great authors. Good at the editorial process, making those books better books. Good at all the logistics. Good at printing. Good at designing. Good at warehousing. Good at everything about getting those books to the places that people buy them, whether it's physical bookstores or whether it's online. And what they traditionally have not been very good at is convincing an individual to come into a bookstore and buy a specific book.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: And so, there are two ways to overcome that. One is to develop a competency in that as a publisher. And some have done that, and some have done it in an okay way. Or two, if you have access to money, you can buy it. And we've really seen that happen a lot in the past ten years where authors who already have these large fanatical followings are becoming, they're becoming very highly sought after. And that's where you have these huge auctions. That's where you have these big bidding wars among publishers. Because somebody who's got a proven track record, who's already got a huge following, publishers know that they're not the best in marketing.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: And so, if they can bring on the author as their partner to not only create the work, but to market it, that person becomes a lot more valuable. And so, the nonfiction world in particular has really gone up. And so, it doesn't matter what part of the business you're looking at. You can look at, let's say, in my old business politics, right? The political books that were published in the 50s, 60s, 70s, maybe even 80s, a lot of them were idea-driven. They were just good ideas, they were provocative ideas, they were interesting, they were ground-breaking. Now the political books that are being published-

Glenn Yeffeth: They're celebrities.

Scott Hoffman: They're celebrity books. Exactly. They're books by people that are celebrities. Does that harm discourse? I think so. Is it bad for the book business? I think so. On the other hand, there are so many other forms for ideas themselves, whether it's blogs, whether it's podcasts, whether it's whatever, that people might just prefer to get their ideas in a different format than they prefer to get their ideological reinforcement.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right. But isn't that sort of making the best of a situation that isn't necessarily ideal? I mean, where is the next group of thinkers going to come from? I mean, the people that are great at building platforms aren't necessarily the people that are biggest, best ideas.

Scott Hoffman: Right.

Glenn Yeffeth: So, there needs to be a way for maybe those up-and-coming political science assistant professors with a great idea to do a book, doesn't bring a big marketing thing. But if the publisher brought the marketing to them, they could have a reasonable success.

Scott Hoffman: Maybe. And I think that what we're doing right now is you haven't written a book, right?

Glenn Yeffeth: No.

Scott Hoffman: Nor have I. But people who have interesting ideas have so many ways to share those idea with people right now. That a book, it used to be that you would write the book and that would be what broke you out and what got you famous. The book I now kind of a trailing indicator that once somebody has already made it and somebody has an established following, that's the right time for a book, in a way that maybe 50 years ago, the book was the way that you would introduce yourself to people.

Glenn Yeffeth: Oh, that's very interesting.

Scott Hoffman: So, if you look at the, I'm going to go out on a limb and say the two bestselling books to date of bestselling nonfiction books of 2018 have been Fire and Fury, the Michael Wolff and Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life. And both of those guys had very substantial followings outside of the traditional book business. I mean, Wolff had his magazine platform. He had all this traditional publicity, all this stuff, and he was obviously writing about politics.

Glenn Yeffeth: It was the right book at the right time.

Scott Hoffman: Exactly. On the other hand, Jordan Peterson became this unwitting YouTube star because the political stand that he took in Canada of all places-

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: And demonized for so many reasons. But, and that's what got him the mind share, what got the awareness, "Maybe this guy's book might be interesting. Maybe I might hate it. Maybe I might want to argue against it. But let me take a look at it." And when they did, boy, the pass along factor of that book is huge.

Glenn Yeffeth: And the Jordan Peterson book, it's interesting because it doesn't 100% fit the model. It wasn't like he had an enormous platform and then did this book. His platform blew up as his book was out. It was just an amazing coincidence. Right.

Scott Hoffman: The timing was extraordinary, and that book has still not been on the New York Times bestseller list. We can talk about the list all the time.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: But, and the Times quoted justification for not putting him on the bestseller list as well. The book wasn't actually published in America. It was only published in Canada. They had the edition that you can buy in the United States is the Canadian edition.

Glenn Yeffeth: Yeah, the New York Times list is very political. There is no question about it.

Scott Hoffman: It's not a list of bestselling books. It's a list of books that the Times wants you to think you should read.

Glenn Yeffeth: That's right. So now, well talking about Brendan Bruchard, before you were telling your story about some of the challenges that [inaudible 00:40:07] I'd love if you want to talk about them now.

Scott Hoffman: For those of you out there who don't know Brandon Bruchard, he's a self-help and personal development guy. He's probably best known for one of his first books called the Millionaire Messenger. The subtitle is Make a Difference and a Fortune Sharing Your Advice With People. He's had tons of high end consulting clients. He does events all over the world. He's sold millions and millions of books.

Glenn Yeffeth: Brilliant speaker.

Scott Hoffman: A really extraordinary speaker. Really, really smart guy. And his first book, Millionaire Messenger, in fact, was basically self-published because well for a couple of reasons. He had this idea that he wanted to share, this content with his audience. And he was filming a PBS special at the time, and he wanted to have a book to go along with the PBS special. And he made the decision in January and the special was going to air in early April. And the traditional publishing world just never really works that quickly. So, he wrote the book in six or seven weeks, got it out there, and it starts to do very, very well. And then he said, "You know what? I think that if this book had more distribution, if we could get it in front of more eyeballs, then it would sell better."

Scott Hoffman: And sure enough, we did a deal for him, and he got it out there. And so we did a deal that involved Millionaire Messenger and that would also involve two other books, one of which was called The Charge: The Ten Human Drives That Keep Us Alive. And with Free Press, which used to be an imprint at Simon and Schuster.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: And he had a spectacular editor at Free Press and had a wonderful publisher, and turned in this first book. Became a New York Times bestseller, sold well into the six figures in numbers of copies. And then in between the time that he delivered that first book and it was published and the time that he delivered the second book in that two book deal, Free Press got liquidated. As corporations do, they had a reduction in force. They laid off a bunch of people. They consolidated. And he got sent to another part of the house that didn't understand who he was, and didn't understand why he was important to his fans. And so, when he delivered the manuscript for his second book, a book that came to be called The Motivation Manifesto, his editors and publisher looked at this thing and said, "I don't get it." He said, "What do you mean you don't get it?" "We've never seen any book like this before. We can't publish a book that's not like any other book we've published."

Scott Hoffman: And Brandon said, "Those are the kinds of books you should be publishing."

Glenn Yeffeth: Right. And this is a guy who’s had multiple bestsellers in the past.

Scott Hoffman: Right.

Glenn Yeffeth: So, he knows what he's talking about.

Scott Hoffman: Right. This is a guy who when he sends out an email, he's right now got the number one podcast in the world. He's got a blog that's read and loved by millions of people. He's a genuine influencer who's doing groundbreaking research and really amazing stuff. And the publisher, because this book was different from anything else that they had ever seen, and Brandon's intention when he wrote this book was to do a legitimate manifesto about motivation. And so, he went to historical traditions of high rhetoric. He looked at the Communist manifesto and he looked at all these other ideological statements.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: And so, when we got the editorial notes, it was very clear at the end of the first chapter, at the last sentence of the first chapter is, "to this we pledge our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor." And the editorial notes came back and they said, "This doesn't make any sense. What does this mean?" And Brandon said, "Why don't you ask Thomas Jefferson? It's the last line of the Declaration of Independence."

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: Because this book is your own personal Declaration of Independence. And so later on he talked about, he alludes to when it comes to motivation, what you're trying to channel are the better angels of men's nature. And the editorial notes came back and said, "That doesn't make any sense." And Brandon said, "Well, take it up with Abraham Lincoln because it's taken verbatim from the Gettysburg Address."

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: And so, the publisher-

Glenn Yeffeth: It's like an illiterate editor.

Scott Hoffman: But it became clear that the partnership was the wrong partnership. And if they didn't understand this book, they weren't going to publish it the right way. He didn't want them to publish it. They didn't want to publish it. And so, they said, look, and I'm not giving up any competences here because Brandon talks about this stuff from stage, but the advance for this book was literally a million dollars. And they said, "Well, we can do one of two things: Either you can write another book that's more similar to your first one. Or you can give us our million dollars back." And Brandon said, "Okay, I'll give you your million dollars back."

Scott Hoffman: And he did, and he went on to publish it with another publisher, and it hit the New York Times list, it sold over 500,000 copies and has probably become one of his best-loved books. Again, it's diversity in people, it's diversity in market. And if you understand whose life you're going to change with your book, it makes you, it puts you in a position to be a much more successful author, right?

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: Those are the three things. When I'm taking on a project as an agent, there are three things I look for. Right? I look for market, I look for author, and I look for promise. Is the market big enough to support a book on this topic? Right? Who's the author and what is their relationship with that market? So, Brandon Bruchard has this people who are looking for motivation, who are looking for coaching on entrepreneurship. And then what's the promise? What's the transformational promise of the book? If the reader reads this book and implements the advice, how is their life going to change?

Scott Hoffman: And if you have those three things that come together, the market, the author, the promise, that's what makes a big nonfiction book for me. And if you can articulate those things, let's go more into publishing sausage-making.
Glenn Yeffeth: Please.

Scott Hoffman: Right? When Glenn buys a nonfiction book, he doesn't buy it seeing the whole book. He buys it on what's called the book proposal, right? Which is basically a business plan for the book. And a good book proposal is basically just a statement of market, author, and promise over and over again.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: In a bunch of different ways.

Glenn Yeffeth: And some proof that they can deliver on that promise.

Scott Hoffman: Correct.

Glenn Yeffeth: Just sample chapters.

Scott Hoffman: Correct. Exactly. You have chapter outline to make sure you're not buying a pig in a poke, to make sure that there's actual substance there, so you can see what the promise is and you can see the steps that people will take to transform. It's that transformation, right? And even if it's a, there has to be some kind of promise to the reader. And the promise might be you will learn more about the subject that you're already fascinated by. So, if you're already fascinated by the Real Housewives of whichever county and you buy that book, you'll learn more about Countess whomever.

Scott Hoffman: If it's a diet book, the promise is we will help you solve this problem. You've not been able to take off those last ten pounds, this book will give you a plan to do it. If you do what we tell you to, you'll lose those last ten pounds. That's my promise to you. And books that have a muddy promise just don't do well in the market.

Glenn Yeffeth: No, that makes a lot of sense. Now, how do you find the authors that have those qualities? And it's rare.

Scott Hoffman: It really is. It's different for me, because I've been doing this for so long and because people know who I am, those authors often find me.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: And so, it gets a lot easier when you've been doing it for a while, because the authors for whom you've demonstrated success know other people who are very successful and who might not have done a book, or might not have had good experiences with a book in the past. And so, they say, "No. Wow, your experience is very different from mine. You got to talk to my team." And I'm part of their team.

Scott Hoffman: If I were a young agent just starting out and were looking for these people, I would say go to the places where people are doing extraordinary and fascinating things. And those are not places where authors come to congregate. Those are people who are really making a difference [inaudible 00:46:32]. If I were going to go to a conference, it wouldn't be a writer's conference. It would be a physics conference. It would be an acting conference. It would be a politics conference. It would be something else. Because the people who are making waves there are going to be the Vanguard of whatever those new ideas are. And people who are coming to see them, they're already coming to see them. So, they've got that installed fan base already.

Glenn Yeffeth: That's right.

Scott Hoffman: And so, ultimately it comes down to reaching people. It comes down to changing people's lives, right? And so, figure out who the people are who are changing people's lives. Figure out whether that information can be packaged and useful in book format. And then combine those people who are creating that information with publishers who can take it to the next level. And that's kind of the recipe for making a successful book.

Glenn Yeffeth: Now when you think of your business, and just put your entrepreneur hat on, in competition with all the other agencies out there, what do you see as the competitive dynamics?

Scott Hoffman: Man, there's so many ways to answer that question, right? It's fascinating. We talked about book proposals, right? And in a lot of ways, one of the sections in a book proposal is where you talk about other books that are in the same market space as yours. And traditionally, that section of the book has been called competing works, right?

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: What other books are going to compete with this book? And I completely reject that notion, right? I don't think that books ever compete with one another. Would I rather sell a diet book to somebody who has never bought a diet book? Or would I rather sell a diet book to somebody who bought a diet book six months ago? If you bought the South Beach Diet, you're going to be much more likely to buy the Ten Day Green Smoothie Cleanse than if you're somebody who's never bought a diet book. I completely reject the notion that books compete against one another.

Scott Hoffman: If you bought Ray Dalio's Principles, you're probably the same person who bought Horowitz's The Hard Thing About Hard Things. You're the same person who bought Jack Welch's book or whatever.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: And so, books have a network effect, right? You want to be on the same shelf as other books that are like yours because people are like, "Ooh, I want that one and that one and that one and that one."

Glenn Yeffeth: That's right.

Scott Hoffman: As opposed to trying to convince somebody to buy a book who's never bought a book.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: Right? So, when it comes to being an agent, I really don't think that agents compete against one another, except for things like maybe celebrity projects. When somebody has a large fanatical following, you could help them with the book. You can make the introduction to publishers. But that's not a whole lot of work you have to do as an agent for some of these things. In some ways, you can't be too smart as an agent. If you come up with a book that's going to be the bestselling book of 2015, right? We're in 2018 right now.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: Because it's an idea that's so revolutionary, nobody's going to understand it in 2018. You're not going to be able to sell that book. So, what it really comes down to is figuring out which authors have important things to say, and have that market, and can make that promise to readers. And if you can figure out those people, and you can tell them how to articulate it, as an agent that's sort of what you're looking for. That's the holy grail.

Glenn Yeffeth: And when you hire a new agent, what are you looking for in terms of their characteristics, their personality?

Scott Hoffman: I could teach people how to sell books. I could teach people how to talk to publishers. I can teach people how to source authors. I'm looking for intangibles, right? I'm looking for work ethic. I'm looking for sort of this, I'm looking for tenacity. I'm looking for life skills more than anything else. I don't care where you went to college, I don't care if you went to college. I want to know A, do you know what's out there already? Have you read a lot of books? So, you can tell the difference between what gets published and what doesn't get published.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: I couldn't teach this business to somebody who'd never read a book before. I don't think I could. But if I were to hire a young agent, but particularly in the nonfiction side, fiction's a little bit different. But for nonfiction, it all comes down to again, you don't get rich by selling books to publishers, you get rich selling books to people. You have to unpack that. You say, "Well why do people buy books?" And then if you understand why people by books, and there are really only a limited number of reasons why people buy books. There are seven reasons, I, we won't go into the podcast. If you identify what that reason is, and the book makes that promise, then you have a book that could be successful. And if you're publishing a book that doesn't fit into one of those seven reasons, it's not going to be successful.

Scott Hoffman: And I learned that lesson the hard way. I learned that lesson over ten years of failure. Right? So, there are a bunch of projects that I took out that didn't sell, or that if a publisher did decide to take a [inaudible 00:50:19] on them, just didn't sell copies to people.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: I met this woman in a conference, absolutely brilliant. One of the foremost experts in the world. And her book was about the ten things in your house that are most likely to kill you.

Glenn Yeffeth: Okay.

Scott Hoffman: And she wanted to do a book about this. And I said, "You know what? You are absolutely brilliant. Is this knowledge valuable? If you had this knowledge, would your life be better?" In a million years, right? Because most people don't want to die. The problem is is that they're not going to pay $25 for a hardcover book that's going to teach them that. Right? People will buy a book to solve a problem they know they have, but they won't buy a book for somebody to tell them what their problems are. So, if you're pitching a book where you could have penned the tagline, film at 11. "The Ten things in your house that are likely to kill you. Film at 11." It's an amazing blog post. It's an extraordinary episode.

Glenn Yeffeth: It feels like an article.

Scott Hoffman: Correct, it's a magazine article. That's where you get people to know that they have that problem. And then, so the book for her would have been, so you've got a child. How do you make sure that your child doesn't die in your house? Because people now know, new parents, know that they might not even thinking about how to childproof your house. They know they have that problem, they just don't know how to solve it. The book will teach them how to solve the problem. But if you're trying to do a book that tells people they have a problem, it's not a book. It's a podcast. It's an article. It's a free [inaudible 00:51:33].

Glenn Yeffeth: Unless you turn it into a comedy book, The Ten Things That Are in Your House that Will Kill You. That could be a funny book.

Scott Hoffman: Well, [inaudible 00:51:39] if the object is to make people laugh [inaudible 00:51:41] the people who buy books, then you can make it work. But the promise in that book is not we're going to save your life. It's we're going to make you laugh.

Glenn Yeffeth: That's right. Where do you see the industry evolving, I talk to a lot of agents who are a little gloomy about the way things have evolved. But sounds like you're thinking things are moving in a great direction. Very upbeat. Where do you see that heading from here?

Scott Hoffman: I think, and the publishing industry has been remarkably stable. I mean it's, as an industry that's been around for gosh, sort of 600 years, there have not been that many changes [inaudible 00:52:13] since the days that Gutenberg invented the printing press.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right. In the scheme of things.

Scott Hoffman: So, what's changing about it, and ultimately, I'm a capitalist, and the way that you succeed in any business is by adding value. Is by creating value. And so, to the extent that agents and a lot of agents, they were like Catholic priests in the Middle Ages, right? They were the gatekeepers. They said, "No, no. You can't talk to God directly. I have to do that for you." People who are gatekeepers, they're gone. They have been disinter mediated out. They're going to go the way of travel agents, right? That jobs doesn't add any value anymore. In fact, it frustrates some people.

Scott Hoffman: So, publishers that saw themselves as being the arbiter of what was good and what wasn't good. What people should read, what people shouldn't read. They're gone. So, the publishers that are going to succeed in the future are going to be the ones who legitimately make it easier for people to get the ideas that they want, or who make those ideas better. Those are the two things that are really importance.

Scott Hoffman: Agents too, the same way. As an agent, you're one of the top 20 agents in Manhattan in the 1950s, you had it made, because everybody came to you and you took your cut and you had to carry your manuscript over to the publisher, they edited it, you got to the office at ten, you went to lunch at one, you had your three martinis, and that's it. You went home by four. But doesn't work that way anymore because a lot of authors don't need agents. Because look, if you were to come to me right now as somebody who had a first science fiction novel, and say, "Well, I'd love to hire you as my agent," I would say, "I can't justify my existence to you, because what I'm going to bring to the table isn't worth it."

Scott Hoffman: If you self-publish this thing, what's the best thing that happens? I get you a deal with a science fiction house. We're going to get a $5,000 advance. I get 15%, I'm going to make $750. Okay, you're much better off on your own, you're keeping 100% of the money rather than taking your royalty. As an agent, I serve kind of a weird niche in the ecosystem. I look at myself as a PGA Tour swing coach. Like Tiger Woods coach. Right? I take these people who are already at the top of your game, and I make them 10% better. And when somebody like Brandon Bruchard, when he gets 10% better, that means that he sells 500,000 more books.

Glenn Yeffeth: I'm sorry.

Scott Hoffman: And so, that I can justify my existence that way.

Glenn Yeffeth: And 10% in this book business where we're dealing with a black swan where the books that do well do very well.

Scott Hoffman: Unbelievably well.

Glenn Yeffeth: Being 10% better means doubling your sales.

Scott Hoffman: Exactly right. That's exactly right. And so if I teach Tiger Woods how to take three strokes off his game, that means that he wins the Masters and the U.S. Open. Right? If I have some weekend duffer and I can teach that person how to make their game 10% better, now they're shooting 90 instead of 100. But is that valuable to them? Yeah, absolutely. But how valuable is it to them? It's not $100,000 valuable, it's not million dollars valuable.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: Is it $500 valuable to that person? Yeah, absolutely. And that's why I teach an online course in publishing, in nonfiction publishing so I share my knowledge with people that way. But with the people that I work with one on one, they're generally at the top of their game, and what I do is make them a little bit better.

Glenn Yeffeth: Now in your profile you say, and I don't know if you do this anymore, that you take on first time novelists. Is that something you've stopped doing?

Scott Hoffman: It's been a long time. Yeah, it's been a long time. The business has changed so much. And look, when I got into this business, I thought the kinds of books that we're going to represent were going to be big international thrillers, the Robert Ludlums, the John LeCarres.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: And the fact is is that market is so tough to break into. Every house has their one or two novelists, and until they die, basically, it's really hard to elbow out space in that niche. There's some unbelievable self-published stuff in that space right now. And some of the space in fiction that used to be the denison of big publishing houses, so for instance, like I would say techno thrillers, the Tom Clancy space.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: Nobody publishes techno thrillers anymore. And maybe St. Martins does some, maybe Tour does some, Berkeley might have done a little bit. But people are doing some amazing stuff in that Tom Clancy space right now, and they're all self-published.

Glenn Yeffeth: And it's interesting, so that market has sort of moved.

Scott Hoffman: Very much so.

Glenn Yeffeth: And so let's say you encounter a would-be author, doesn't have much of a platform yet, brilliant guy or brilliant gal. Has a lot of potential. And they say, "Well, I know you're not going to represent me because I don't have a platform. But you could see I'm brilliant. I've got great ideas. So, three years from now, I want you to be my agent. What do I need to know between now and then to get to the point where you'd be interested in me?"

Scott Hoffman: Yeah. I want you to have an audience and I want you to have demonstrated success with that audience. So, I want you to build your numbers. I want you to be the go-to person for that segment. I want to know who that segment is and I want to know what your relationship with that segment is. That's right. So, okay great. Start your podcast. And oh, by the way, I have 50,000 podcast downloads a month. Okay, not bad. Not bad. Or I have an email list where I have 100,000 people on my email list who love the stuff that I send because I have a 60% open rate or a 70% open rate. Or I teach an online course and I've sold this online course for $500 to 10,000 people.

Glenn Yeffeth: So, do you want to see them monetizing that audience? Or is that not necessary? It's got to be a plus.

Scott Hoffman: It's really difficult to live if you don't make money.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: If this is your primary professional activity, it's really hard to not make money. Unless you're a Buddhist monk or something, chances are that what you're doing on a day-to-day basis, you have a mortgage to pay, you have kids to support, you have to make a living. And if you have an audience, if you're really providing that much stuff that's of value to people, what will eventually, it's virtually impossible to not make money on it. Because people will say, "Can I pay you for this?" And you'll say, "I didn't ask you to pay me for it." They'll say, "No. This is so valuable to me."

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: And maybe I don't want this exact thing, but if you gave me this other thing, it would be extraordinary and it would be worth-

Glenn Yeffeth: If you look at somebody like Sam Harris, who has monetized his podcast just through donations.

Scott Hoffman: Yeah.

Glenn Yeffeth: And he's built quite a platform on it.

Scott Hoffman: Patreon is amazing. It's a spectacular tool. Crowdsourcing is unbelievable [inaudible 00:57:59] have been able to do on Indiegogo and on Kickstarter. The world is really, really exciting right now. If you do things that people like, even if it's showing stupid videos on YouTube, or taking butt selfies, [inaudible 00:58:12].

Glenn Yeffeth: I don't know how you can monetize that.

Scott Hoffman: Butt selfies are big business right now. Like if you're Jenn Selter or whatever her name is, the queen of butt selfies, you have people who want your ten million Instagram followers, because boy, they would love to get their yoga pants in front of ten million of your followers, because those people are likely to wear yoga pants. Or they would love to get their protein shake, or their Thigh Master, or whatever. And so if people, if you have the attention of people and you're providing them with something that they value, that is inherently valuable in this economy.

Glenn Yeffeth: Now, what is the kind of author that you would take a risk on who doesn't have an established platform? Is there any kind of person like that?

Scott Hoffman: There's two kinds of authors. One is an author who I believe has an idea that is going to be legitimately world-changing. And even if that person doesn't have their own following, I will basically do a pro bono gig, let's say.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: And take this book on, because I think that the book is just, is so valuable and then if people were to read this book, their lives would be fundamentally different. There would be a transformation, the world would be different and a better place. And this is not exactly that case, because this is an author who's got a great following, is a very successful journalist, but I represent a guy named Tim Carnegie who writes for the Washington Examiner. And he just delivered the manuscript for his book that I represent and that's about democracy in America. It's about how the breakdown of institutions in the United States over the past 50 years from the church to the Kiwanis clubs to the PTA to all those things-

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: Explain why we're fractured as a society, and explain some things [inaudible 00:59:45] the Trump phenomenon, right? If you look at the difference between areas that voted for Trump and areas that didn't vote for Trump, even in the Republican primaries, let's say, right?

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: Where things were working and where there were good institutions, and Tim covers this amazingly well in his book, if you have institutions of civil society, you are going to vote for Kasich or Romney or Cruz or somebody. If you were in a place where there are no jobs, and where there was no community, or no institution to rely on, that's what made you a Trump voter.

Glenn Yeffeth: I'd love to read that book. That sounds fascinating.

Scott Hoffman: It's amazing.

Glenn Yeffeth: Are you a fan of Jonathan Height?

Scott Hoffman: Yeah. Oh sure, yeah.

Glenn Yeffeth: He talks a lot about this.

Scott Hoffman: Yes. It's that great tochavillian tradition of doing a deep dive into American civil society-

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: Figuring out, right, whether it's bowling alone, whether it's [inaudible 01:00:30] kind of coming apart. These heights through a democracy. Right? All these books have really interesting things to say. And Carney in particular, he's that old school journalist who gets down there. When he was covering the election campaign, he checked into a hotel and he studied where do people go to talk about things. And the checkout clerk, the clerk at the front desk said, "You can go to this place, this restaurant, or you can go to Hooters. Whatever you do, don't go to DK's." So, what did he do? He went to DK's.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: Because that's where the interesting people were, and that's where the people were who was going tell him the truth. And so much of journalism right now is people sitting on their thrones in New York and D.C. and are pining on what they think the world should be, rather than getting out there and reporting on what the world really is. And that's what Sam does, and that's what makes him such an amazing author.

Glenn Yeffeth: To what extent do you feel that your background coming out of the political world, your point of view which is maybe not the traditional New York agent point of view helps you in this business?

Scott Hoffman: And I'll tell you, probably the biggest advantage I have over other agents is that I don't live in New York City. I live in Texas.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: I have an apartment in New York. I spend maybe a week a month there, because that's where a lot of the business is. But the fact that I hang out with people who have a diverse viewpoint means that I can see things before the media establishment knows that they're a thing. Right? Like so for instance, Roseanne Barr, the new Roseanne show, right? I'm like. "Oh, there's going to be a new Roseanne show, who cares?" Well, 25 million people watched the first episode.

Glenn Yeffeth: That's right.

Scott Hoffman: Why is that? Because the world is a lot different than people who live in New York think it is. It's a lot different than people who live in Los Angeles or San Francisco think it is. Their world is exactly what they think their world is. But that world is only 35 or 40% of America. That other 60%, 65% has a lot to say and boy, they buy a lot of books.

Glenn Yeffeth: So again, if you accept the proposition which is hard to deny these days that the world that the American population is [inaudible 01:02:32] then New York has a decreasing ability to understand what the rest of the country, I watched the Roseanne Show, which I really enjoyed. There's a lot of people, I read articles how they were offended that there's somebody on there that voted for Trump. So, even the idea that somebody voted for Trump, even though that's a third of the country, is more than a third of the country, is offensive. How can you then sell books to those people, if you can't even accept that they exist?

Scott Hoffman: If you don't [inaudible 01:02:54]. There's confirmation boas, right? And people tend to accept the facts that paint the world as they believe it is, and they reject the facts that paint a different world. And so, there's this amazing book, not my author, but a really good book by a guy named Al Pittampalli called Persuadable that Harper Collins published that's all about how one of the biggest advantages going forward in business is the ability to change your mind.

Glenn Yeffeth: Right.

Scott Hoffman: It's to say when presented with evidence, to say, "You know what? I am going to draw a logical conclusion from this evidence that the world is different from what I thought is was, and I'm going to change my behavior accordingly."

Glenn Yeffeth: I'm not just going to look for things that-

Scott Hoffman: That reinforce what I want.

Glenn Yeffeth: Yes.

Scott Hoffman: But to be fair, there's a lot of money to be made by conforming to people's worldview. Right? Like if you think Trump is a buffoon, do a book that says Trump is a buffoon, you'll sell 100,000 copies. Easy. No problem. Same way, if you think that Obama was a buffoon, do a book that says Obama was a buffoon, and there's be 100,000 people who want to buy it because they like that. But the real value add, the real interesting things that happen are from people who are willing to look at the world and say, "You know what? Wow, I was wrong about that. And I need to change." Because it's so rare. It's so rare.

Glenn Yeffeth: I [inaudible 01:03:59] the kind of of books I like would be a nuanced look at, let's say a nuanced look at Trump. I don't know how big a market there is for that book.

Scott Hoffman: I know. Because everyone's split in terms of which [inaudible 01:04:09] are. And the self-publish market is fantastic because you can get 10,000 people to buy it, you can make some money on it, and you can add to the debate. On the other hand, in the bookstore, they need another 100 copies of The Fire and Fury.

Glenn Yeffeth: No. That's all right. All right, well Scott, thank you so much. You've been very generous with your time. I really enjoyed this.

Scott Hoffman: Happy [inaudible 01:04:24]. Likewise. All right, have a great day.

Glenn Yeffeth: Thank you for listening to the Building Books Podcast. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes, or if you happen to listen to it, or share it on social media. If you're an author who wants to submit a proposal or pitch to Ben Bella Books, please go to benbellabooks.com, click on the for prospective authors button, and it will lead you through a little form that makes it real easy to submit to us. Thank you.