Dave Ramsey is the undisputed King of Personal Finance. His empire is built on best-selling books, a nationally syndicated radio show, an uber-popular podcast and ongoing speaking engagements and events that further evangelize his debt-free message. And if you’ve ever had visions of (finally) paying off all your credit cards and student loans, you’ve probably at some point heard his straight-shooter admonition that “If you live like no one else, eventually you can live like no one else.”
But in addition to being one the country’s most-respected authorities on the topic of money, Ramsey has also become an expert on the publishing industry — due largely to the four New York Times best sellers under his belt. He’s since channeled his know-how and resources into Lampo Press, his self-publishing imprint that spawned his own title, EntreLeadership, and two best sellers by former employee Jon Acuff. Here, the media mogul talks about self-publishing versus traditional publishing — and a book he co-wrote with his daughter Rachel.
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When we did Financial Peace it was 1992, and it was certainly a different publishing environment than it is now. In those days, it was the Holy Grail to get a publisher, and we weren’t worthy. So nobody would publish us; that is why I did it myself. I went to a printer and had some books printed up, and I carried them home in my car. And then I couldn’t get any bookstores to buy them, so I got some video stores to carry them on their front counter, and I would sell them at speaking events, and I got on a little radio show and eventually we got them into bookstores. Then we issued a second version of it with a couple more chapters and an updated cover. And the total of all of that was about 147,000 copies. At that point, we were able to do a deal with Viking/Penguin and, of course, they were the ones that in 1997 — five years after carrying the books home in the trunk of my car — [helped get it] on The New York Times best-seller list.
Do you regret selling Financial Peace to a publisher?
No; it was just me. I was working out of my living room on a card table, and I didn’t have the PR muscle to get on the Today show or People magazine; they did. I was a [new] author; nobody had ever heard of me. I was on three radio stations when that book came out, and we’re on 533 now. But they did things for me that I did not know how to do. Now, I was overly confident — I thought I could do everything they could do. And we’d sold 100,000-plus copies over five years, but if we sold 263,000 in six weeks like we did with Viking, I couldn’t have handled the cash flow. I couldn’t have handled the billing and the purchasing. I didn’t know how to do that at that level. We were buying 20,000 copies a pop, but if you move a couple hundred thousand copies pretty quickly, that changes the game logistically. So I’m really glad I was with them.
| “It’s important that the book is good, that you’ve got something to say and that you’ve said it well. A good friend of mine says that good marketing makes a bad product fail faster.” |
What advice do you have for a new author who’s deciding whether they should self-publish or try to find a traditional publisher?
I think you have to have a plan if you’re in the nonfiction world to sell the book, whether you’re self published or you’re working with a publisher. If you’re looking to write a book and hand it to someone, and let someone else do all the work, those days are completely gone in our world, with very, very rare exceptions. So publishers are looking for an author that has a willingness to hustle and has a platform of some kind. How are you going to leverage things you’ve done in the past? How are you going to leverage your PR appearances, your knowledge, your Twitter base, your fan base on Facebook? It may catch fire and hit critical mass after that, but to move the first several hundred thousand copies, you’ve got to plan on doing that. It’s also important that the book is good, that you’ve got something to say and that you’ve said it well. A good friend of mine says that good marketing makes a bad product fail faster.
I think if you’re a new author and you have a really, really good platform, but you don’t have a business that does sales to bookstores and PR and that knows about shipping and billing and accounting and working with distributors, then you probably want a publisher. We happen to be big enough now that we do all of those things. But until you’re that size, you need a really quality publisher to bring the PR to the table and to bring the social-media strategy to the table. And to print the book, and design the book, and deliver the book, and bill the book, and collect the billing, and handle the returns. Just the logistics of a book can be a nightmare — but that’s assuming you’re aiming at a 100,000-plus copies. If you’re doing 5,000 copies, you can do them out of your basement, and you should. Don’t sell your book if you plan on doing 5,000 to 50,000 copies. Just do it on your own.
How did Lampo Press come about? Were you interested in maintaining more of the control and profits from your books?
Well, Lampo Press was, oddly enough, the original name that I published Financial Peace in way back then. But as far as our decision to go self-publishing now, as I said earlier, it’s no disrespect to the publishers, but we do everything they do. We can handle all of the aspects of it. We do outsource some of the distribution, but we’re the publisher and we’re the owner. And we just realized we were doing 99 percent of the marketing, and we were doing 99 percent of the PR, and we were controlling the cover, and we were controlling the look, tone, feel — and we were good at it. It was frustrating to the publisher because they’re used to wanting to do all of that, and we were doing it all. And it was frustrating to us because every time they did something, we didn’t like it. I’m happy with my publishing deals on the books that we’ve done thus far, but I don’t think there’s any question what our team can do with one of our books versus what any major publisher can do, at this stage of our company. Again, we’re in a very unusual, unique situation.
| “Don’t sell your book if you plan on doing 5,000 to 50,000 copies. Just do it on your own.” |
Smart Money Smart Kids, your book with your daughter, Rachel Cruze, will be released in April. Why co-author with her?
Well, she could have written it herself. She just did an episode of Katie with me, and she’s been a regular on Fox & Friends in the last year. She’s spoken to 300,000 college students, high school students and young mothers’ groups in the last 36 months, so Rachel’s become a personality and a brand in and of herself. We easily could have done it just with her. We decided to do it together for two reasons: One, we thought it would be kinda fun to do a father-daughter thing. And it has been fun. To have the father’s voice and the daughter’s voice in the book communicates the message and the lessons in a really winsome way. From a pure business perspective, we wanted to take the strength of my personal brand and use it to set her personal brand at a higher level by the time this project is over. So it was an intentional, strategic move to have a huge coming-out-into-the-marketplace party. And I can’t think of a better way to have her first book be a New York Times best seller.
You’re well known for your “baby steps” as applied to personal finance. How does that theory apply to the publishing industry?
I think that the question lends itself to the overall [concept] of ‘Just don’t go to market until you’re ready.’ A book is something that you should live with for a little while. I often pick up a book that I lay back down — and sometimes just throw in the trash — that I can tell someone did not spend any time on. There’s no love on the pages. There’s no excellence on the pages that’s due to their passion. Too many things in our go-go world, with the ability to publish stuff instantaneously, are not well thought out. They’re not well written, the outline isn’t there, the research isn’t there. It’s kinda thrown together and you can tell. And so I just encourage people [to] cook it long enough so that it’s gonna taste good. You don’t have to overcook it, but cook it long enough that it tastes good.
Andrea Williams is a freelance writer based in Nashville. Follow her at @AndreaWillWrite
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