Jimmy Soni, CEO and editor in chief of Infinite Books, is back on Infinite Loops. We discuss what’s broken in traditional publishing and how we’re fixing it. We also dig into Jimmy’s forthcoming book on Kobe Bryant, why the world needs more “problem authors,” and why our goal is to make our authors millionaires.
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. We’ve shared some highlights below, together with links & a full transcript. As always, if you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.
— Jim
Links
Highlights
Be a Problem Author
Jimmy Soni: So books are notoriously a prestige business […] It’s based in New York, a prestigious town. It has big prizes called the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. That has a lot of prestige. People go to parties. They have a kind of air about them, if they are an author, that is in excess of the actual thing itself.
In prestige businesses, it becomes very hard. I think you’d know more about this than I would. It becomes very hard to say, “the emperor has no clothes” or “you’re doing this wrong,” “or could we try doing it better?” Let’s be nice. “Could we try doing this better or differently?” It becomes very hard. It’s especially hard if you’re the author because you are and have been historically the lowest on the totem pole of where the, we are mighty publisher. “Here is your contract. Take what we give you. Go off and do your work. Don’t ask us any questions.” That’s the model. That’s how you and I were treated, right. You are a lowly author. Go off and do your work.
But today, authors come with million person Instagram accounts that are bigger than their publishers. Authors come with email lists that are 250,000 people strong, a million people strong. They have more reach than their publisher. So for the first time, that power dynamic has shifted and publishers don’t know what to do with it. But actually, what’s funny is authors don’t know that they have this power. That’s why I’m telling authors, if they’re listening, be a problem author. Push the limits on this. There are options for you that there have never been before.
We Want to Make Our Authors Millionaires
Jimmy Soni: People don’t want to talk about the commerce side of this business, but creativity is ultimately a struggle of time versus resources. Right? Anybody can be creative if given enough time, but most people run out of resources. Resources can be health, resources can be your age. Resources can be money. Money matters in the world of publishing.
So one North Star for me is, have we made an author a millionaire? Because if we have, by the way, Infinite Books has done well also. But the point is that I want to be the place where we say our goal explicitly is to make millionaires out of our authors.
Why? Because then they keep getting to be authors. That’s the whole point. The whole point. It’s like they could buy nice things, but most authors I know are actually kind of goofily nerdy. They actually care a lot more about just having time to do their nerdy thing than about buying a Maserati. If they want to buy one, fine, go ahead. But we want to make our authors millionaires.
Think of the Story You Can’t Shake
Jimmy Soni: Think of the story you can’t shake. There are just some stories that you can’t shake that just, you keep coming back to, and they bother the hell out of you. And if you think hard enough about that story you can’t shake, there’s a reason why, whether that comes out in the form of a documentary, a podcast, an email you send to a friend, a book you write, a piece you write online on Substack, do something about the story you can’t shake.
Because I do find that the things that became my books were stories that I just could not, I was so annoyed. I was so annoyed that there wasn’t something out there that I was like, I’ve got to do something about this.
🤖 Machine-Generated Transcript
Jim O’Shaughnessy
My friend and partner, Jimmy Soni, the CEO and editor in chief of Infinite Books, is back on Infinite Loops. We had a great conversation about what we’re trying to do that’s a bit different than other publishing companies. But we also got a sneak look at his new book, which I’m very excited about. Enjoy.
Jimmy Soni, before we became partners in Infinite Books, I discovered you through your own books. Now, I started with Claude Shannon because it turns out when I found that book I was kind of like, what? Somebody else loves Claude Shannon like I do. And of course it’s a great book, but I want to start today with Founders. I went on to read Founders, which I think is an amazing book, but I want to do it a little different. I want to talk through what would we do differently with Founders at Infinite Books?
Jimmy Soni
People are going to be listening. Some people may be new to the podcast, right? So it’s probably worth me just saying. In 2022, I published a book called The Founders. It was all about the origin story of PayPal. And the basic idea of the book was that you have this small group of people, some are household names, right? You’ve got Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, et cetera. And they all work together at one place at one time. And that one time is not a ten... It’s a four year period, 1998 to 2002.
All of these people, the founders of YouTube, the founders of Yelp, the founders of LinkedIn, Tesla, SpaceX, the creators of Founders Fund, the first money into all these things. This group has a combined net worth that is larger than the GDP of New Zealand. And they all, and only about 200 of them work together in this one place, at one address at one time. And I basically chanced into the story because I just asked the question, well, hold on, what was in the water? What was going on there? How do I get some of that mainlined into me?
And it turned out that for a number of reasons, nobody had really gone and done that deep look at that period of their lives. It makes perfect logical sense. If you are interested in Elon, you’re interested in rockets and cars. If you’re interested in Peter, you may be interested in the Thiel Fellowship and his investments and these other things he’s doing. But if you go back, in so many ways, the most interesting period of their lives was this 1998-2002 period when they were building PayPal and they create what becomes known as the PayPal mafia. And just nobody had gone back and asked them. I mean, that’s the truth. The truth of this. It was just not that I had any kind of special access or anything, or that I had covered tech for 25 years. I just was curious.
I just said, wait. This seems to be an important, narrow slice of time in which a bunch of talent is in one place. Kind of like the American founding, right, or the Renaissance or the Enlightenment, or Xerox PARC or Apple during its early years, that kind of thing.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Bell Labs.
Jimmy Soni
Bell Labs. You sort of think to yourself, okay, that doesn’t happen by accident. There might be part of it that’s accidental, but there’s a part of it that’s actually cultural. Something’s in the water. What are they doing differently? So I wanted to go and answer that. And I basically spent five years on this crazy wild goose chase tracking all these people down, the people you know and the people you don’t, and just aggressively ask them questions about what they did, what they learned, what they saw.
And the end result of that was this book, The Founders, which was published by Simon and Schuster in 2022. And you’re asking me the question, what would we have done differently at Infinite Books, which is your and my venture? I mean, we would have done everything differently. There’s not a part of it that we wouldn’t have approached differently. In fact, a lot of what we’re doing at Infinite Books comes out of both the good and the bad of that last Simon and Schuster experience, where, as an author, a lot of times you feel like you’re on your own.
And there were so many things that I did that we’ll get into to make that book better that I now am like, well, we’ll just build that into our process. There’s no point in not trying to do better, to try to build a better mousetrap. And then it’s funny also, because some of the lessons from the book itself are kind of infused into Infinite Books, right? There’s all these kind of entrepreneurial lessons that come out of The Founders. And we’re in a similar place with the book business, right? We are, David, taking on Goliath in some ways. I don’t actually think it’s that competitive a business. It’s one of the nice things about books is that they’re not zero sum. But we are a David working to sort of change this system.
And again, I have good things to say about the people at Simon and Schuster. So this is said with a lot of respect. They gave me a chance to do the book, but the cover art was an issue. When I got back the first renderings of the cover art, they had created some concepts that were just clearly not going to work. And then they had created some concepts where they had taken Getty images of the people I just named, the famous ones, and basically just put them on the cover.
The problem with that, well, there’s a few problems with that. One, it kind of looks boring, right? Two, they’re all men, right? And in this day and age, and in a company that had significant female people at the heart of the story, I shouldn’t have to be the one to say, hey, this might be a problem. And I wrote about and interviewed many women who are at the heart of this story, and you’re putting only men on the cover. And I remember throwing a flag on the play and saying, this is crazy.
And the response I got back, which was dispiriting, was, well, the women aren’t a part of the Getty Archive. Or we don’t have publicly available photos of them. So there’s nothing we can do because we can’t pay for rights to those photos because there are none. And I said to myself, well, that’s just not acceptable. That’s not a good enough answer, right? There are clearly photos of these people. They’re human people. They have photos somewhere.
And so I had seen a different book cover where someone had done something where they illustrated the faces, they took them and they made them into cartoons effectively. And I said, well, could we do that? Because I’ve got images of these women and images of other people, by the way, who are not famous, who are men, who are part of the story. Could we just get an illustrator to do the work?
And the response I got back was that they had already spent the budget buying the images from Getty for the other people, Elon and Peter, et cetera. And so it was not going to work unless the budget was gone. And so what I said was, well, I’ll pay for them. You can take it out of my advance. I will pay out of my advance, which was modest, for a new cover to make this better. And that’s exactly what happened. I was billed for the illustrations for these. I’m not even sure I’ve shared the story with you. I was billed for these illustrations that were done, and we did a few different rounds of them. They took it out of my advance and we designed a new cover.
And then I did something else that we’ve been doing at Infinite Books, which is I A/B tested my cover art against all the other cover art that I had been sent, and mine won by a country mile. And so I knew. My instinct told me that I was doing the right thing by pushing back. But then the tests, the audience tests themselves, revealed, one, people wanted faces, and two, they want a mix of faces. They want a world that looks like what the company was, which was a bunch of different kinds of people, and it worked and it was accurate.
And I think that’s one of the areas where simple process… what I’ve learned doing Infinite Books now for a while is simple process improvements can make a huge difference in how a book finishes up. But if you’re in a big system where process improvements are frowned upon, it’s very hard to do them. Nothing I just described is rocket science, right? I’m not an illustrator, I’m not a graphic designer. I just asked the uncomfortable question. And that’s a big part of, I think, what we’re trying to do at Infinite Books is just ask a question at every stage about how something can be done a little bit better.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And it’s so funny, you and I, one of the reasons we clicked so quickly was even though I was publishing my books 20 years ago, we had identical experiences. The story about What Works on Wall Street, same thing.
Jimmy Soni
Wow.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
They did a cover that was dog shit. It was horrible. You know, my wife is a pretty famous street photographer and obviously a great visual eye. She looked at it when we got it and she’s like, oh, this is completely unacceptable. But it was too late. And so when the book took off with the bad cover, so they immediately wanted a second edition, a third edition, and they did the same thing. They used the same cover because they wanted to rush the second one out because it was selling really well.
Then when we got to the third edition, which was a pretty significant rewrite, Missy was just like, there’s no way I’m allowing that cover. She designed the third edition’s cover of What Works on Wall Street.
Jimmy Soni
I had no idea. Yeah. Wow.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And literally they were so opposed. No, no. You know, this just isn’t done this way. And then, of course, it like all of the emails, you finally got a nice cover.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah. But let’s talk about A/B testing on this point, by the way, and it relates to the A/B testing. People might ask themselves, well, why does it matter so much? Why does this level of rigor matter? Why does the audience’s opinion or a prospective reader’s opinion about the cover matter? Isn’t the publisher the one making these kinds of judgments?
And what I would argue is that was a plausible theory in an era where most book buying happened in bookstores because you already had buyer’s intent. Right. So we can borrow language from the world of commerce and marketing.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Sure.
Jimmy Soni
You have buyer’s intent. You have somebody that’s standing in front of the book, holding the book, looking at it. Even then, by the way, they’re going to make snap judgments based on the cover whether we like it or not. People judge books based on their cover, but that window is a lot bigger. You’ve probably got, I don’t know, 15 seconds to a minute, maybe two minutes. Somebody flips through the book, but they’re already in a store, they’ve got their credit card with them, they’re thinking about buying a book. They went into a bookstore in the first place. Very high buyer’s intent.
If we are clicking through on an email link in the middle of a workday and somebody goes to Amazon, I’ve probably got three to 15 seconds, right. Maybe that. And it’s where their eye is going to go. They’re going to go to the cover, maybe a couple of the reviews, maybe they scroll down, maybe they look at the customer reviews. That window is very unforgivingly short. And so given that if you can gain even a little bit of advantage with a cover that’s more eye catching, it’s a huge advantage statistically because most book buying happens online.
And I think that’s the difference. The difference is we’re thinking a lot about our audience is people who are bored and clicking at work on their phones at home, they click through, they look at a cover, they make a snap decision. We don’t have the luxury of two minutes in the bookstore anymore.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right.
Jimmy Soni
We’re still going to offer books in bookstores. We’ll get that done. But the plain fact is that most of our audience is buying it online. So we have to be very thoughtful about the cover.
The other thing I was going to say is you can also get rapid feedback. This is to the point of A/B testing. In the past, Tim Ferriss tells this great story about Four Hour Work Week, which I’m sure many people have heard. He A/B tested his cover in an actual bookstore. And what he did was he printed out book covers for his book and put them on hardcover books that were not his book. And he sat and watched what people responded to on the bookshelf. And that way he knew what was going to work. And then he went with the cover that worked.
Now that’s a physical in person A/B test. In an hour, you and I have gotten responses from 50, 100, 200 people, maybe 50, closer to 50, to say this cover is better than this cover. And it regularly challenges our team’s intuitions about what is and isn’t going to work. And that’s the point. The point is the window is smaller and the data is easier to get than ever before. So why wouldn’t you get it? Why wouldn’t you want it? Even if you disagreed with everything an audience said, wouldn’t you want to know what the audience thinks?
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And that’s a central tenet of everything we do at O’Shaughnessy Ventures. Right. You always have to challenge your assumptions. We had a book recently where all of us preferred one particular kind of cover. The A/B testing was absolutely clear. And you have to swallow your pride and understand that you are not the God of cover design. You’ve got to let the audience understand or give you feedback as to what they’re going to respond to. It might not be what you are going to respond to, but when it overwhelms, it’s just better data.
And I would also make the point. You said our audience. Anyone trying to sell books is selling to an audience. What is it, 80% of books bought online?
Jimmy Soni
Yeah, more than 80. And in some categories it’s more than 90. So it’s not even close.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
No.
Jimmy Soni
And I think that’s one kind of critical thing, is you don’t have to go with what the audience says. Exactly. We’re collecting information to see what the audience says. But there have also been times when we’re testing something and it comes back and it’s not quite clear. In which case, all right, great, the umpire gets to make the call at the plate. And if we have a call at the plate, we’re the umpires, we get to make the call.
But when, for example, with a book we have coming out in May called Dispatches from Grief, we had an artistic cover, call it the artistic cover. And a version of several versions of a cover that was more design oriented, much more heavy on, let’s try to have a metaphor or an image or a painting. And then we had a cover that is the mother that lost the daughter and the daughter herself, Danielle and Miranda. It was a selfie that Danielle took, and we used that as a, oh, let’s see if the selfie cover notches a few votes. It didn’t just notch a few votes. It won lights out every time, by the way, much to the frustration of our team.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Jimmy Soni
So when we ran that test, what was so interesting is everybody on the team did not think the selfie cover would win, did not want it to win, and it won. So when it won the first round, we went back and we said, okay, let’s expand the sample size and expand it from 50 people to 200 people. Maybe if we get a bigger sample, it’ll change. No, it actually veered the other direction. We had a higher percentage in the 200 person sample. Then we were like, well, maybe we screwed up and it should be black and white for the design covers or this kind of color.
We ran seven different cover design tests over the course of, I would say, six months, and every single test came back with the selfie cover winning. And we went against what our team wanted because we knew that’s what the audience needed.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And obviously, if an author felt very strongly about a particular cover, it’s their book. But we would be remiss if we did not give them that data, if we did not say, we love that too. We love this artistic look, but the public vastly prefers this one. And it just, as I’m listening to you, it’s like this is one of the easiest things for a legacy publisher to copy.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Why aren’t they copying?
Jimmy Soni
Yeah. And by the way, they should. Anything that we say they should freely copy. And more importantly, and I hope there are authors listening, authors who have traditional publishing contracts should understand that they have the ability to do exactly what we are doing in so many ways to push a publisher a little bit further than they might be comfortable. Right. It used to be that if you did this in the industry, I’m sure you got tagged with this label. You were called a problem author.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Oh, yeah, right.
Jimmy Soni
I’ve been definitely called that from my first book. And that’s the best. The world needs more problem authors, right? It actually, because that’s the only way that an industry like this is going to shift and is going to change. And there, by the way, are editors who want to embrace these things. What’s funny is every time I sent one of these A/B tests along, the editor I was working with was really impressed, was really happy. Their anxiety came in sending that A/B test to the graphic design department because that was the place where science wasn’t welcome among the group of artists.
But we should just be frank about it. We’re in the business of selling books. If there’s a way to sell books, significantly more books, you’d want to embrace that. The other thing is, the reason that this test works is because it’s really cumbersome to go run tests inside a bookstore to have five different versions of a cover. It’s just confusing. And a person buying a book isn’t going to expect that online. They can see a bunch of covers, respond exactly. Click, click, give some commentary. That is a natural Amazon style behavior. They’re looking at something on a screen. Right.
And so that is, it’s also, we’re meeting the buyer where they’re at, and then we’re running our design process where the buyer is at, as opposed to doing it in a black box and then sending it out into the world. Assuming we knew exactly what the audience wanted, we don’t have to assume anymore. Why wouldn’t you run this test? These aren’t expensive tests to run.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And that’s also another central part of our business model, which is, it seems to me that many of the legacy publishers are still orienting themselves to the world of atoms, the world of things, bookstores, et cetera. We are in a digital world now.
The other thing I would mention is you and I are both natural entrepreneurs and a lot of book authors aren’t. Right. A lot of them would love to see everything we’re doing but feel uncomfortable doing it themselves, et cetera. And so I think when you get entrepreneurial authors, you kind of see, well, this is what the world could look like. And now we’re extending that and we’re saying Mr. Author who’s not entrepreneurial or Ms. Author who’s not entrepreneurial, don’t worry, we’ll get you covered there. Which kind of leads into, and let me take a moment and say, I’ve said this to you many times. And so I owe my career to my books, literally. McGraw Hill took a chance on me. Broadway took a chance on me. I’m incredibly grateful.
But, and the other thing, we both love books. We would let them use our techniques if it meant they could sell more books.
Jimmy Soni
Right. Exactly.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
But this sort of institutional reticence to adopt anything that, just best business practices. It blows my mind a bit.
Jimmy Soni
No, yeah. I’ve thought about it a lot because I have wonderful relationships with the people who worked on my books, particularly the editors. And there are some things that book publishers, traditional book publishers do that is still world class. I think it’s, honestly, if we were to get down to it, a lot of it is probably just pressure in terms of the number of books that you have to publish and the amount of time you have to really invest in a particular project, because we’re keeping our list small, especially at the outset of our operation, so that we have time to invest in every single book.
That takes energy, it takes resources. It takes countless texts and calls and emails with authors. Countless texts and calls and emails with parts of the publishing ecosystem. And it’s just really hard to do that if you are publishing thousands of books a year. Right. So I generally try to give people a lot of grace when it comes to mistakes they’ve made or things that aren’t working in a system. I tend not to assume it’s malice. I tend to assume it’s something else. In this case, I think it’s time famine.
So I think it is actually just that the sheer volume of stuff that a graphic designer has to do in that current system is such that they don’t have time to run seven A/B tests on a given cover. Right, right. Which makes sense, except that part of that is a chicken and egg problem because it’s because you’re publishing so many books and not getting as much as you could from each one from a profit perspective, that you’re then in a situation where you can’t run seven A/B tests or it becomes a little bit of, again, a chicken and egg problem. You can’t fix one without the other. I think that’s a big part of it.
I think the other thing is you always have to be on guard about prestige businesses, about any business where there’s too much prestige baked in as the end goal. So books are notoriously a prestige business.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Totally.
Jimmy Soni
It’s based in New York, a prestigious town. It has big prizes called the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. That has a lot of prestige. People go to parties. They have a kind of air about them. If they are an author that is in excess with the actual thing itself.
In prestige businesses, it becomes very hard. I think you’d know more about this than I would. It becomes very hard to say, the emperor has no clothes or you’re doing this wrong, or could we try doing it better? Let’s be nice. Could we try doing this better or differently? It becomes very hard. It’s especially hard if you’re the author because you are and have been historically the lowest on the totem pole of where the, we are mighty publisher. Here is your contract. Take what we give you. Go off and do your work. Don’t ask us any questions. That’s the model. That’s how you and I were treated, right. You are a lowly author. Go off and do your work.
But today, authors come with million person Instagram accounts that are bigger than their publishers. Authors come with email lists that are 250,000 people strong, a million people strong. They have more reach than their publisher. So for the first time, that power dynamic has shifted and publishers don’t know what to do with it. But actually, what’s funny is authors don’t know that they have this power. That’s why I’m telling authors, if they’re listening, be a problem author. Push the limits on this. There are options for you that there have never been before.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And we kind of took Charlie Munger’s advice. Invert, always invert. And so we do exactly that. The author can have vastly higher royalties. But that is primarily because of technology. All of the things that we are doing at Infinite Books is if it can be automated, it gets automated. Marketing especially. There are so many, it’s the lowest hanging fruit. And it just, I marvel at the fact that other people aren’t doing this. It’s not like it’s some secret.
Jimmy Soni
No, I think part of it is, you know, if you also think about the way that some of the biggest books emerge, it’s because somebody has gotten a very big contract and that’s where the marketing dollars flow.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yep.
Jimmy Soni
And so you have a marketer who is understandably under duress in their business and they’re like, well, look, I’ve got 25 books coming out next week. Three of them got million dollar advances. I really got to put all the chips on the million dollar advances and I’m going to focus there. But what that does is for the 22 that didn’t get the high advance, it’s kind of slim pickings. You’re going to have to do everything yourself.
By the way, this is the other thing. You made a comment about entrepreneurial authors. An author in 2025 is by definition an entrepreneurial author. You can be a bad entrepreneurial author, right? You can be a great one. But you have to be somewhere on that spectrum because you’re not going to get the kind of support from a traditional publisher that you think. This is one of the funny things when authors sit around and joke. The joke is just how little you actually get from a marketing perspective from your publisher. You’re not actually supported. It’s a little bit of just, here’s what we’ve got and the best we can do.
Meanwhile, you have rockstar marketer authors who are coming in, looking at the system, scratching their heads and going, wait, really? That’s it. That’s all this is, right? And I have had to actually work with and coach other authors to do things themselves that they thought the publisher was going to handle or to hire resources that they thought the publisher was going to hire. And it’s in very rare cases that you get the royal treatment. And I would say, even when you get the royal treatment, trust but verify.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And I experienced both. Right. So my first book was published in ‘94. I think Invest Like the Best got a $5,000 advance from McGraw Hill for it. And I’m like, when I had the meeting with my editor about marketing, she was like, well, maybe you can talk to the marketers about that. And the big thing was, yeah, no, you got a $5,000 advance. We published thousands of books. And I’m like, okay. So I did it myself. I hired a PR agent. I did all of that. And it was kind of brutal, right?
But then I also had the experience with How to Retire Rich, which I got a huge advance for, the biggest advance for a personal finance book given up until that time in the late ‘90s, where, if you were writing about investing or personal finance and you were doing it well, it was a bidding war and it was crazy. And then I saw the massive attention, at the sales conference, where all of their people who go to the bookstores and talk about the fall or spring list. Yeah, it was me and a couple other speakers. And then they, I had a satellite radio tour here in Manhattan and, but it lasted two weeks and then it was over.
And, you know, I think I’ve already told the story in the past about I got an opportunity to be on Oprah Winfrey. My agent called the publisher and was like, print some books. He’s going to be on Oprah. And their response was, yeah, no, we’ve moved on. We made back our advance. We’re happy. We’ve made money on this book. And I was literally dumbstruck because I watched as the book was on Oprah for all of five minutes, by the way.
Jimmy Soni
Right. But five minutes on Oprah, that’s every author’s dream at that time.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right. So for all of five minutes. And so I was a big junkie of Amazon back then, which was relatively new. After I left and I went back, you didn’t have mobile, so you had to go back to your hotel with the hooked in wire. And I went to Amazon, number one sold out. And I just thought to myself, how many copies didn’t get sold? The idea that the author is the lowest part of the totem pole just makes no sense in today’s world.
Jimmy Soni
I think that’s a big, that’s the other big difference in 2025 versus earlier eras is there has to be a fundamental respect for an author’s intuition about their audience and for an author’s understanding of who their reader is. Because with the digital world being what it is, the author probably has that. Right. So it used to be you’d write a book kind of in a silo. Right. You didn’t have the ability to get all this very fast feedback from friends. You couldn’t tweet things, you couldn’t put things on Substack. You couldn’t post about stuff and then see what was coming back.
Authors have all of that now, but it’s out of keeping with the level of respect that they get from publishers for that knowledge. Right. For that kind of information. And so a great example, it’s like there are certain books where one Substack is more powerful than a review from the New York Times.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right.
Jimmy Soni
And there’s not the same level of shifting internally to think, well, should we focus on this? Should we focus on YouTube? Should we focus on TikTok? Where should we focus? Some of that is starting to change, but I think that the big difference is authors come armed with more knowledge than they know or appreciate, and honestly, sometimes more knowledge about their audience than the publisher has. But the publisher’s whole business is, that’s cute. Stay where you were at. Right.
But in our business, and one example is with this particular grief book, every one of those A/B tests that we ran, we sent straight to the author.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yep.
Jimmy Soni
Right away, there were two emails. One was to our team, and one was to the author because we thought it was important to let them in on the process by which we designed covers and because they actually have something valuable to add. Right. And that isn’t, and it isn’t the case that they get a veto, we get a veto. That doesn’t need to be the process now. Right.
They simply should have access to the same data that we should. If we showed up with the selfie cover and just presented it to the author as the finished product, the author could justifiably have said, well, hold on, what about all the other design covers you were talking about? Instead, we guided them through the many months of diligence and work and testing and surveys and arguments about the cover until we came to a good place. And that’s also how you avoid this stuff about, well, an author and a publisher hate each other. They’re at loggerheads.
I never want to be in a situation where we are at loggerheads with an author. Right. The differences in this field can almost always be worked out over time. And I think that’s, that little bit of, oh, there goes the publisher again, or oh, there goes the problem author again. That stuff can be designed out of a publishing system. And I think we’ve done a pretty good job with our early projects of designing it out of our publishing system.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And that goes back to the earlier comment you made about prestige industries. They tend to be very opaque and they’re opaque for a reason. You’ve got to have mystery and it builds these stories and narratives that no longer hold. Right. And there are all sorts of things. If you are an author today, it just boggles my mind that you wouldn’t want to be open to all of the possibilities. Right. And I have friends who are self published authors and fine, if that’s what you want to do and are built to do, that’s great. I don’t think a lot of people are built to do that.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah, it’s an important point, kind of avenue to go down. Right. Because you do have the option today that you didn’t have years ago where if you wanted to upload a PDF to Amazon tonight and publish it tomorrow, you could get it out on Kindle. Self publishing is a pretty robust ecosystem and somebody listening could plausibly say, well, okay, Jim and Jimmy, you guys take only 30% of the royalty compared to the 90% that Simon and Schuster might take. But what am I getting for my 30?
We’re going to edit the book better, we’re going to market it better, we’re just going to make a better product because we have editors on our team that are actively improving books. The whole point is that the book is better. But the other is that there’s an entire process of actually laying out proof pages, copy editing, fact checking, doing the design work, doing the A/B testing, all of that. That is really cumbersome and expensive for a self published author. Some can do it, but it’s hard enough to write the book, let alone publish the book.
Which is why we think there’s still room for a new publisher because many people want to be guided through this experience. And then the other thing is we benefit from every book we have done has informed every subsequent book. Right. We started our A/B testing with Two Thoughts because we tested the subtitles, we tested the titles and the subtitles just to see what people got into. Right. And that informed subsequent tests for other books. Every one of these is assembling a body of knowledge, especially with AI, that we can depend on to kind of run our process more efficiently and more effectively.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And you know, we’re also willing, as you know, I’m writing, I’m taking my first stab at writing a fictional book. I think it’s pretty cool. And one of the things, because it’s me, I’m like, yeah, let’s experiment the hell out of this entire book. Maybe there’s a new way to write a book. So I’m embracing everything. I’m embracing AI, I’m embracing writers rooms, which you participated in one. And let’s talk about that for a minute. Because you originally, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but were a little like, oh, what the fuck, I got to go do a writer’s room. I don’t know about that.
Jimmy Soni
I like hanging out with you. So I don’t know if it was quite that reaction.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
But for all of us, it was incredibly productive.
Jimmy Soni
Oh my God, I’d never done, look, so writers rooms are a Hollywood convention, right? It’s how they write shows. And I had never done or participated in anything like that before. I’d kind of done it around speeches and stuff where there were groups of people involved in editing a speech. But generally with writing, when you have more cooks in the kitchen, the meal doesn’t get any better. Right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And often it gets worse.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah. This was different because you’re in media res. You’re in the middle of your project and you had this idea, well, what if I did the writer’s room now? Right. As opposed to handing everybody a 500 page manuscript and saying, read this and then come back to me with feedback. Which is very traditionally, that’s how traditional publishing often approaches.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right.
Jimmy Soni
Even if authors are doing that request for feedback themselves. This is cool. You were in the middle of the project and you said, no, let’s get everybody together now and I’m going to walk you through the plot and everybody poke holes, suggest ideas, suggest examples, say things so that we can make things better. And then even cooler was we used NotebookLM to take certain chapters from the book and have NotebookLM play a conversation about that chapter for the assembled group of seven or eight people so that we could hear what NotebookLM had to say and then react and respond to that.
I was blown away, actually, by how amazing it was. And I think one is that we did it in the middle of the project, not at the end. So you’re not as attached.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right? Right.
Jimmy Soni
You’re not as attached to your stuff because you’re not like, these are not sacred cows. The other is that we used AI to make it okay that there was no need to have done 20 hours of homework before the writer’s room. Right. Have everybody read 500 pages. Because we could just use AI to hear some of the high points on the plot, to listen to a discussion that sounded plausibly real, and then engage in a discussion ourselves. That’s just scratching the surface. I have more to say, but I want to pause there to let you respond because you’re on the receiving end. You’re the author.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And I thought it was going to be very valuable. It exceeded my expectations in every way because there were things, you know, when you’re writing and especially fiction, when you’re world building and creating a world and everything, you’re so deep in it, you don’t know your own blind spots. You don’t know, wait a minute, maybe I’ve got a conflict with the villain and the hero. And those things got highlighted immediately. And so, but the great thing there was I looked at them just as pivot points, and we just got so many great ideas out of that.
I’m not going to give the story away. But one of the suggestions you had for the prologue, which everyone agreed was pretty good for a thriller, and then you were like, well, wait a minute, why are these people, the only ones there. Wouldn’t other people be there in this kind of household? And I’m like, of course they would be. And then so I rewrote it that way, and it’s just so much better.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah. And I think it’s one of these things that it’s not usual for a publisher to want to assemble a writer’s room of their own people to dissect a book, because historically, you have one editor that champions your book and fights for it, and they and the author are working like a team. When it’s at its best, they’re working as a team to push the book forward. But it’s not like that editor grabs every other editor and says, hey, let’s go away for a half day and dive into this book.
And I thought, that worked so well. We’re going to do that with all of our books. Because there is something about sitting with it for a half day or even a day and saying, okay, let’s go through everything and everybody raise every objection, raise every idea, all of that. You know, people have done plenty of research on why that kind of group work actually makes things better. I think it’s almost never done with books and should be done more often. And for us, it’s just now we’ve seen it pay off. It’s just a natural part of our process. We have one scheduled in January for our book on David Rhoiney. Right. And I think that’s, that’s exactly. We’ve learned our lesson and seen the power of it and are adapting it into our process.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And you can get blind spots and just be completely unaware of them. And what the writers room does is raise all of those up really quickly. And, you know, I’m admittingly, I’m extremely experimental and I will try everything. And I have some friends who work in Hollywood and long time ago were telling me about the process of writing a TV show, and I was kind of like, wait a minute. It’s not this guy who says, written by. And they’re like, yeah, no. And now he or she is the final say.
Jimmy Soni
Of course, just as the author is the final say.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
The author is the final say. But it’s such a rewarding experience. And, you know, movies and TV have done pretty well, by the way.
Jimmy Soni
The other part of it that’s important and this is something to say, and it’s funny because we’re so digitally first that you can almost wonder, well, how can being in person matter there? It really did. I think for one vitally important reason, which is basically everybody was off their phones and laptops.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yep.
Jimmy Soni
And were actually focused on the questions you were asking us. Here’s what historically happens. You have a PDF of a book, you send it out to 20 of your friends. Your friends are very busy. They’ve got kids to drop off at school, they’ve got doctor’s appointments to get to. They’ve got their own books they’re working on. They’ve got dinners, they’ve got meals, they’ve got holidays. They’ve got the stuff of life. They have their stuff of life. Your book is about as low down on that list as it gets.
And no matter how many favors you’ve banked, asking a friend to read a 500 page book and give you feedback is like a root canal. It’s socially very costly. Right. You have to make those asks very carefully. And it’s why even asking for blurbs is a very delicate exercise. Because people just don’t have time. It gets back to time famine. Or people just feel like, or they feel like they don’t have time.
In this case, you didn’t have us do 500 pages of homework. Right. And we were all together in person so that when we were talking about a specific scene, everybody could actually focus on that as opposed to focusing on that scene in a Google Doc from four different countries and 10 different time zones. Right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yep.
Jimmy Soni
That made a big difference. I didn’t realize how big of a difference that would make. Maybe that was just me being an idiot. I haven’t worked, you know, I’ve worked remotely for so long, I’ve gotten used to it. But there was something about the team being together and being able to largely actually be off our laptops and phones and say, okay, chapter four is like this. What do we think? That was a big difference maker. And by the way, it had some cost, obviously, just in getting people there. But for authors who are trying to do this on their own, if you live in a city and you’ve got your group, one way to approach this is just to build your own room.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And on top of all that, it’s fun.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah. Oh, it was a blast. It was a great time.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I totally agree on the in person. Right. I definitely see kind of a barbell approach here. Online, most of us are screens. But I think that is going to heighten the value of in person, especially for the reasons you just stated. Right. We have so many distractions in our lives and the ability to set those aside, focus all together on it. First off, it’s just fun, but it’s enormously valuable for the author and I think for the people participating too, because, you know what you even said, I think these are going to work for nonfiction books too.
Jimmy Soni
Oh, yeah. Oh, I mean, look, I’m guilty of this as much as anybody. When you’re doing a book, you have so much that you’re doing at any given time. In nonfiction, it’s hard to find the time to get feedback, right? Feedback. Apart from getting feedback from your editor, it’s kind of the lowest down thing on your list. You’re sort of like, you’re writing, you’re trying to make words work on a page, hard enough, you’re doing research, hard enough, you’re doing interviews, often hard enough. All this stuff is super taxing.
And generally, by the way, for most authors in 2025, you’re doing it not as a full time job, you’re doing it on the side while you’re doing other stuff. So you have such precious little time. The idea of getting feedback from 10 different people for a book is very, very hard to pull off. And so I’ll be honest about how I did it with my prior books. I paid people, so what I would do, I paid editors, right? Or I paid readers, so I would have somebody I knew. I said, hey, listen, I have this book. Can I just pay you to go through it, make some edits, marks, comments, et cetera. And I would just pay, right? Because I knew I needed that feedback and I knew I wasn’t going to get it from the publisher.
The difference in this particular case is if we are all together, you can dive into a project and bring all of us out, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction. I actually really look forward to doing it with David’s book, the David Rhoiney book, because it’s a nonfiction book. We’re going to sit there and we’re going to beat the hell out of it. We’re going to say, here’s what works, here’s what doesn’t, and that will make a better book.
Ultimately, what’s interesting is we are just trying a bunch of tools and techniques to make the product better, right? It’s not like we discovered some secret algorithm. We’re just literally, well, what if we collected a bunch of smart people, stuck them in a room, you were in the middle of your project, and we beat the hell out of the plot and tried to make the plot better. There’s no, again, this is just a very classic Hollywood convention that we’re applying to a fiction book.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And spoiler alert, we have discovered some pretty good secret algorithms.
Jimmy Soni
We have. We also have secret algorithms. Also true. We have secret algorithms. Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Because that’s a big part of the marketing component. Right. I’m a huge believer in iteration. You know, if you don’t, people are so afraid of making a mistake or, you know, society has said that’s bad. On the contrary, mistakes are portals to discovery and better ideas and better processes to do it. So, one of them is the email campaign that we are building. I’m a huge believer, as are you. Somebody sends me something, I don’t know the person. Right. And if it looks like it’s a mass email and hey, Jim, please read this book and blurb it for me, I’m probably not going to do that. Right.
But we try to customize any of those campaigns to the person that we’re sending the email to. Right. We want to be aware of how they look at the world, so we make sure that we know what’s in their Substack, we know what kind of books they’ve written in the past, if it’s an author. And then you just keep taking times at bat. This whole two week thing just baffles me.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah. And this grows out of both of our experiences of marketing. Right. In my particular case, I did this book called A Mind at Play, and it was about Claude Shannon.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Great book.
Jimmy Soni
And Shannon, here’s what I knew. We can just let the cat out of the bag on how we build certain things. Not how and what we’re building, but how we approach it. Claude Shannon was an electrical engineer and a mathematician, and he was a giant in those fields and also became a kind of saintly figure in the field of computer science because he created the field of information theory. And so you’ve got three fields there. Electrical engineering, computer science, and mathematics.
What do I know about those fields? Well, I’m not any one of those people, but I know that they work at universities, they teach at universities, and most university email addresses are publicly available. So before my launch, I found a bunch of tools to help me scrape university email addresses from every university in the United States, Canada and Mexico. And I built a database of about 14,000 email addresses of every computer science, electrical engineering and math faculty member that I could find that was workable.
And then what I did was I sent, I used this program, I don’t remember the name of it, I think it was called GMass to send individual emails to all of those names, but do so in a way that didn’t violate Gmail’s mass email service that didn’t trip that wire. And what it included was a really short note from me saying dear doctor such and such. I didn’t know if this would be of interest, but I just finished a book on somebody that’s a giant in your field. His name is Dr. Claude Shannon. I’m sure you’re familiar with him.
I wanted to let you know about it and I’m attaching the preface in chapter one as a PDF in case it’s of interest. Here’s the link to the book. If there’s anything you want to do with me, to collaborate, et cetera, I would love to. I’ve become very passionate about this, as I’m sure you are. Thanks so much, Jimmy. Something to that effect. Yeah. I sent out 14,000 of those emails. Not a single one got a negative response. In fact, I had one that was really funny. One was really funny. Somebody wrote me back and the first line terrified me. This guy writes back, Jimmy, I thought this was spam, comma, and I’m like, I’m mortified. And then he goes, comma. But then I read the rest of your note. Dr. Shannon is a hero of mine. Thanks for letting me know. I really appreciate it. And he signed off.
So even somebody who thought that the note was at first spam could respond in that way. We have a genius on our team whose name is Jean-Marc, who took what I just described, this very elaborate strategy of very hyper targeting and is building a tool to do that for every other book we are publishing and to do it at scale. So the idea is, could it be spammy? Eye of the beholder? I don’t think it is. I don’t think it is. If you’re reaching out to somebody in a field with an idea you have in a way that is largely non committal. We’ll parse out what is and isn’t spam later.
But I think the idea more specifically is we don’t believe in spray and pray marketing, right? We are hyper targeting people we think will be interested in a given thing based on other patterns of behavior, based on other things they’re interested in, based on where they work, based on what they do. And people may want to quibble about that. We think that’s just good marketing.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And I would even go further, it is thoughtful and customized marketing. We are not going to send an email for my book, which is a fictional thriller, to a nonfiction person who, you know, has nothing to do with the thriller category, has, there’s no connection, right? If there was some kind of connection, sure. But if there’s no connection, the spray and pray, it just goes to everybody. And that pisses all of us off. Right. And so we want to lean into the.
Jimmy Soni
We do.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
We want people to go, oh, my God, I love this. And this new book is coming. Wow, that is so cool.
Jimmy Soni
That’s right. You should be, and I hope you are delighted if you hear from us about a book because we’ve chosen to get to you with a particular book because we know you’re going to love it. Right. So if you have got 1% annoyance and 99% delight, we’ve won.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Jimmy Soni
Right. Because both of us, you and I, are on the receiving end of countless requests for things, for our time, et cetera. And it’s very, as you said at the beginning, it’s very easy to see when somebody has actually thought about why they’re reaching out to you and when somebody is just a Nigerian prince telling you you should hand over your Social Security number. Right. I get enough of the Nigerian prince stuff. It’s very rare to get a good, thoughtful, tailored, customized ask for your time or your attention or your energy.
Our goal is to bring that to scale for books, which we think is eminently doable. And if we discover it’s not, then it’s not. But our early tests suggest we’re knocking it out of the park because the people we’re reaching out to are writing back and saying, thank you. This is, I thank you. This is the best. Thank you for letting me know. Right. Which is exactly the response that I got from faculty members who would not have otherwise known or heard about my book.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
You’ve got to pick your audience. And what technology allows us to do is to scale that. And so rather than being annoying, rather than being a Nigerian prince, you are actually talking to people about things they love. And so it’s part of the thesis for not only Infinite Books, but all of our verticals at O’Shaughnessy Ventures is we are moving into an era of mass customization. And rather than, you know, spam people or do it the old way, that’s dying. Right.
And if you look at some of the traditional email marketing metrics, we are so far above them that it’s kind of like when Jean Marc was telling me about the click through rate and the open rate. I’m kind of like, are you telling me the exact truth here? Because it’s, you know, orders of magnitude higher, but it’s only because it’s getting sent to the right people.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah. And I think the other thing is, it is, if you think about the mass customization for email, it’s very hard to pull off in an elegant way. But why it works is that we’re not reaching people who are utterly disinterested in whatever we’re offering.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right.
Jimmy Soni
Which is a lot of what I discovered. And I’m sure you found, publishers, but also PR agencies have big lists, Excel files they’ve assembled for many years. They send the same notes to the same people, and there’s no thought put into, hold on. Well, is this person even going to want to get this email? Right? Is this person even going to want to hear about this particular project?
I remember there were all these lists of the business books, and they would send my book out to everybody on the business book list. And you’re thinking to yourself, what about if that person’s just had a baby or if they’re busy or if they happen to know me? There was none of that. And so we’re trying to apply a little bit of just, I guess you could call it humanity. Basic humanity. Right. But cast a wider net.
The other thing I think is different, and I always tell authors this. If you go do a podcast of a thousand people, there are some authors who would say, a thousand people. There are some iTunes podcasts with a thousand reviews. Right. Why would I ever do a podcast that only had a thousand listeners or 100 listeners? One way I’ve heard this described is, imagine the energy it would take to get a hundred people into a room at a physical bookstore event. It’s unheard of, even for famous authors. They have a hard time getting those kinds of names or getting that volume of people into a given place.
We don’t, and I don’t ever want to treat anybody’s audience as anything other than sacrosanct. Yeah. If you invite an author of ours onto a podcast, or if we reach out to a podcast for an author and they say, yes, we want to treat that entire time like it’s encased in gold dust. Because that podcaster is taking time to read the book, to interview the author. But I think there’s too much focus put on, well, I only want to get on the tippy top podcast, and I don’t want to do anybody that has a thousand listeners.
And my argument to every one of our authors is going to be, you can find 45 minutes to an hour to do any podcast, and you never know who’s listening. And it is important. Right. And it doesn’t mean that you just go hog wild, but it does mean every one of these hits counts. One of the things I’m sure you saw in traditional publishing is the only hits that mattered were from mainstream tier one media publications. We are thinking much more, I mean, on weekly calls, we ask ourselves, what’s the perfect YouTube channel for this show? If we had a dream YouTube hit, where would it be? If we had a dream Substack post, where would it be? And we begin from there.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And the other thing that we are building, we’re not there yet, but we have some prototypes, are dashboards for the author. Again, I love your remark about humanity, because what we’re doing is how would we want to be treated? Right. We’re both authors, but we’re also big readers, both of us. How would we like to be treated? What would we like to be served up versus what annoys us? And it just baffles me that people don’t think that way.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah, right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
In the dashboard, for example, for authors, you know, why is it revolutionary that an author should be able to see where his or her book is selling? Why is it revolutionary for them to have that in as close to real time as we can make it? That’s table stakes to me. Right. Maybe it’s because of my background in quantitative processes and all of that. But the other thing is, follow through. When the dashboard gets to where it needs to get, we’ll be able to see, wow, Jimmy’s book just spiked in Omaha. Wonder what’s going on there. And then who in Omaha might be interested? Can we talk about your new book?
Jimmy Soni
Yeah, absolutely.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
So I am more excited maybe for this book than Jimmy is. It’s called The Tao of Kobe.
Jimmy Soni
Yep.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I am not a huge sports guy.
Jimmy Soni
Neither am I, to be honest.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And I cannot wait for this book to be published.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
But let’s segue to that and then I’ll come back to what we’ll do on the marketing side. Tell us a little bit about The Tao of Kobe.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah. The very short version is, and I’ll just get personal for a second. The pandemic was a very hard time for me. It was hard for everybody.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right.
Jimmy Soni
But here’s my species of hard. I had a young daughter who was, before the pandemic started, she was in pre-K. And she was going to go into kindergarten, and the writing was on the wall with schools in New York. They were sending out messages saying, everything’s going to be fine. And you’re looking around the world, and in five seconds on Twitter, you’re like, nothing is going to be fine. Nothing.
So in the spring of 2020 and early summer of 2020, when the pandemic was just getting going, New York was hit. I would say it was hit first and worst, right? I just, I knew schools were going to be a mess, so I built a pod school for my daughter for kindergarten. So for all of kindergarten, we took my tiny Brooklyn place, kind of got all this Scandinavian rollaway furniture. Found a group of friends, five friends. And we interviewed teachers that summer, hired a teacher, and built our own school.
I wasn’t the only one to do this. There were a lot of articles about it. But I had an experience of building a school from scratch, and I had to. I knew iPad education for my daughter at that time as a kindergartner was never going to work. You got 26 kids on an iPad screen. The teacher’s driving themselves crazy. Right?
But I knew if we had enough gumption, a little bit of elbow grease, we could probably assemble a pretty good school. It ended up exceeding our wildest expectations. Podcast episode for a different day. You and I can dive into education, because I think we think pretty similarly there.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Jimmy Soni
So we built this pod school. I’m doing the pod school. I’m writing Founders. I’m sort of freelancing and consulting. I’m editing another book project that I had from years ago. I mean, I’m doing too much all the while. The world is shutting down. Nothing works. You don’t know where you’re going to get groceries. You’re spraying down bananas and stuff.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
It was crazy.
Jimmy Soni
So you’re in the midst of all this duress, and everybody finds their own outlets. They find what’s going to work for them. And it was weird. I stumbled on a Kobe Bryant video, and I started this habit of I would just start my day with Kobe. I would watch a quick YouTube video, and it was he was talking about kind of getting through the difficulty of, I think, his Achilles injury and rehabbing, and then also just the mindset that he had. And I’m not, by the way, I’m not the only one. Millions of people have watched these clips.
But I just started, every day. I started my day with Kobe, which sounds so weird. I’m not an athlete. It’s not my thing. Loved basketball as a kid. Not a sports person. But there were all these things that he was saying that applied perfectly to the process, particularly of getting through The Founders. So I started going just a little bit deeper, and I discover that Kobe, unlike what many people know about him, unlike what the world knows about him, he’s actually a much more varied career than people think.
He won an Oscar. He won an Emmy. He wrote. He journaled for 10 years. He studied writing. He knew about Joseph Campbell. He was friends with creative people. This, what, this is what blew my mind. He was friendly and actually close friends with many of his creative heroes. He could get in the door because of his name, but he actually befriended them as an exercise in understanding what creativity was.
Then you go further. After he leaves basketball, he builds an investment company, but he also builds a creative studio called Granity Studios. He wants Granity Studios to be the next Disney. He publishes books under the Granity Studios imprint. He was working on a Broadway musical under the Granity Studios imprint before he died. He was working on movies. He did podcasts. He did actually television shorts. He did a thing with ESPN where he would break down game tape, right? He’s running 10 different creative experiments at once. But he was a truly creative person. That’s what he cared about.
And he cared about writing because when he was in high school, he had a writing teacher, this woman, Jane. She really inspired him to learn how to become a better writer. And he loved writing on the back of planes when they were flying from game to game. People said Kobe always had his nose in a book. He was always reading, constantly absorbing information.
So I’m learning this, and I’m like, I know that type of person. That’s a nerd. People think he’s a jock. This is a nerd. This is not just a nerd. He’s one of the world’s biggest, most epic nerds. And it blew my mind. I was like, nobody knows this. And so I just start finding, then I found the podcasts and appearances that nobody’s listening to. So he goes to places like the Aspen Institute or the Milken Institute or the USC Law School. He speaks in China at the TED Conference. He speaks here and there.
And I’m finding all these places where professional athletes don’t go and speak. They just don’t. It’s not done. But he is different. He’s cut differently. And I start essentially listening to these, assembling notes. Kind of keeping quotes of his that I’m like, no, this is clever, this is interesting. And the outgrowth of that multi year process that started five years ago is now a book called The Tao of Kobe.
And my idea is very much modeled on a book by a mutual friend of ours, Eric Jorgensen, who wrote a wonderful book called The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. And his theory, there was the same theory I had with The Tao of Kobe. This assembled wisdom exists in 150 different places. Somebody needs to just curate and assemble it and make it digestible. And my thesis on Kobe is he is much bigger than the game of basketball. And that’s why he speaks to so many people around the world. That’s why people have Kobe tattoos. It’s why these videos have millions of views.
People watching them are not looking to put a ball through a hoop better. Many of them are just looking to get through a difficult time in their lives. And he taught the world how to do that, how to be creative, how to think about business, how to think about art in a very interesting and counterintuitive way. And because he was so good at putting a ball through a hoop, the world missed it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And I remember when you first, we were sitting outside, it was summer at my house, and you told me about this and I’m like, what? I had no idea. And so I started, I went and watched some of those videos. I’m like, oh, my God, I am looking at, as you say, a polymath super nerd. But what’s so cool about it is his particular take is very interesting because it’s not entirely similar to your average super nerd. Right. He had this other incredible talent, obviously, as a basketball player.
So I remember when I was watching it and I had the thought, he is embodied in sports. But that gives him a kind of a different lens to look at all of these creative projects through. And it’s just that all of this is sitting out there.
Jimmy Soni
I know.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Unorganized. Blows my mind.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah. And I think it is, it was to me. It blew my mind too. There were interviews I found with him that had 100 views, 200 views on YouTube. These are long interviews where he’s really talking about his life and creativity and process. There were some that nobody ever uploaded to YouTube. So I found all these interviews that were just never uploaded. They were living on some random website somewhere, or they were only living in their podcast form, but not their YouTube form. And that universe, obviously the YouTube universe is much bigger than the podcast universe.
A great example is he does this interview and now it’ll end up on YouTube because I’m saying it. He does this interview with Cal Fussman, who’s famous for his interviews. Cal interviews Kobe about creativity. That interview never made it to YouTube, which is why it doesn’t have 2 million views. Right. But there are nuggets in there about creativity and about inspiration and about just hard work, tenacity, being a dad. All these things that Kobe brings to the surface that never really got the audience they deserve.
The other piece about this that’s interesting is that he speaks in metaphors, right? So he has a different, there’s no athlete I’ve seen that does a post game interview the way Kobe does, because he can do it in three languages and he speaks in metaphors, which is extraordinary to watch. So I watched all of these post game interviews, and I got all of these nuggets from different things he was saying. And there were just moments. I’ll give you one moment.
Somebody asked him a question about leadership. And, you know, this is a trope of a question that’s a classic. You’re going to ask an athlete about leadership.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Where do you see yourself in five years?
Jimmy Soni
Michael Jordan, what do you think about leadership? Well, you know, Kobe says, “I had to change my leadership style during one season.” And the question was about how he changed his leadership style. And he says, I’m paraphrasing, but this was basically the answer. He says, “I learned a lesson while I was walking on the banks of the River Seine in Paris.” He said, “I looked at some, I was with my wife and I looked at some flowers on the banks of the River Seine. And I realized that the sun hit the flowers in a certain way. But then when there was some cloud cover, the sun disappeared and the flowers could take the nutrients they’d gotten from the sun and metabolize them. And then the sun would come back and then the sun would disappear.”
And he said, “In that moment, I saw a metaphor for leadership.” He said, “That season I had been too much like a bright sun, always on my team, never listening to them, never paying attention to what they wanted. I was just always in their face. I was so aggressive, and I was badly disliked because I didn’t actually understand what they needed.” He said, “When I saw those flowers, I said, oh, my sun has to disappear for a while at different moments, and then it has to come back.”
Who the hell speaks like that? What professional athlete do you know that’s talking about the banks of the River Seine and some flowers. I mean, honestly, have you ever seen an athlete? And I regularly had this experience of he would reference Joseph Campbell in interviews with ESPN people, and they’re staring at him like, okay, good on you. You know, that was the experience I was having, and it threw me. I just, I didn’t expect it. You expect certain things. And when it broke my expectations, I said, well, the world has to know about this.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And that’s why I got so excited, because you were telling me some of these stories, and I’m like, wait, what? And then when I went and watched some of those and listened, I was like, oh, my God, this is a gold mine. And what I think is cool is, you know, obviously, tragically, he didn’t get to do all of these things. So I think the book, too, is kind of a testament to what a genius this guy actually was.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah. And it is, it is tragic. His life was cut short. I always joke that this is the book he would have done. He would have explained some of his principles. He did it in a limited way with basketball through a book called Mamba Mentality that was a coffee table book. But he never really put together a guide for the second half of his life.
The other reason this is a bit of a, it’s a bittersweet story, it’s a tragic story, is I really genuinely do think he would have been, he would have built the next Disney. Granity Studios was on a tear. They’d had successful books. They’d had an Oscar, they’d had an Emmy. They were doing all kinds of interesting work with interesting creative people and his ambition. And he had studied Walt Disney, studied the life of Disney. It was really to get the world to shake the image of him as a basketball player and to embrace the image of him as a writer and creative.
And I love that. I love people who fully are willing to shed one identity and go into another. And it actually, it’s very interesting because one of the things that he said is his challenge was that he could always get a meeting because of his basketball accolades. But the tough thing for him was finding people who weren’t just willing to sign him on to do a project because he was Kobe Bryant, the basketball player. He wanted to work with people who saw him as Kobe Bryant, the creative.
He said the great challenge in his life was that because any room he walked into, he was this guy who they knew in this one world, he had to often reject partnerships, reject even investment opportunities that might have been lucrative because they didn’t see him as a serious person.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, well, your book will rectify that.
Jimmy Soni
Let’s hope.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And I think what else is really interesting, I have not, so I was telling my wife, who is not a sports fan, about the book, and she’s like, wait, what? And immediately she’s like, oh, I can’t wait to read that book. And so it’s, you know, it’s one of the problems I have with labeling, and we see it with authors.
Jimmy Soni
We totally do. I was just getting to this.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
You know, he got put in the label of, you know, basketball superstar, and that’s how, that’s the lens people chose to look at him through incorrectly, in my opinion. But the same thing happens with authors, right? We’ve been talking to authors who are bestsellers. They have a real and long track record, but their publishers put them in a lane, and they’re like, nope. They have incredibly interesting projects. But nope, that isn’t the label for you. You can’t do that. Talk a bit about that.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah, it’s been one of the most surprising things. You would think success gives you a certain amount of permission, and I think, I’m sure in every industry, you’d think so, but it turns out not to be true. It’s surprising in book publishing, but we’ve been speaking to a number of authors where all they want to do is break out of the genre they’ve been in or to try something a little bit different.
One author in particular we’ve been in discussion with for a while. He was a particular kind of author in nonfiction. Sold many copies of his... Hit the list, did all the traditional things, and he wrote a memoir. And his publisher said, well, you’re not really a memoir guy, right? And his agent kind of had a similar reaction. And you’re thinking to yourself, why wouldn’t you just take a flyer on this? This guy made you millions of dollars. Just take a flyer, right? Maybe he is a memoir guy and you just don’t know. Right.
And it doesn’t mean, by the way, that every author instinct is right. The difference in this case is you’ve achieved a lot of success as an author. You would think the publisher would give you a little bit of the benefit of the doubt, right? And maybe there’s limited resources and maybe there’s limited time, and you have to, whatever the reasons they said no to him, it crushed a part of his creative life. He stuck it in a drawer. He hasn’t revisited it because you and I know, it’s also hard to be an author. It’s psychologically really difficult.
Something like that can actually lead you, no matter how much success you have, to stick it in and to believe what your agent said and what your publisher said. You’re not a memoir guy. Right. And I think that’s one of the things that just like Hollywood, you know, the cultural commentary about Hollywood is it’s gotten more risk averse. I think weirdly, the publishing industry has gotten more risk averse, but the risk is not really big risks. These are not massively capital intensive projects. There is not a ton of capex in publishing the way there used to be. Right. The opex is still there and it goes up and down and what you need.
But given that the capex on a book is pretty low, you would think that publishers would encourage their authors to come to them with projects that are totally out of left field. Right. On the theory that maybe this person has something to say, that maybe this person can actually write a novel if they’ve been a nonfiction person or vice versa, or they are a memoir guy, even if they’ve done these other kinds of books. One of the things we’re explicitly doing is allowing and listening to authors who are coming to us with projects that are out of their swim lanes. Because we think if you’re successful in one area, we should at least take you seriously in this other area.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And then let’s bring it back to the marketing discussion that we were having. So let’s say we publish The Tao of Kobe and it’s doing really well, but we notice it’s skyrocketing in a very unusual place. Not in the areas where we would think. And all of a sudden it’s 5Xing sales. Let’s stick with Omaha.
Jimmy Soni
Right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
In Omaha, we also are building out the ability to go directly find podcasters, find Substack authors, find anyone who would be interested in that, and then approach them. Hey, you know, Jimmy’s book is 5Xing in Omaha. It’s something in the water. We don’t know. But that’s just going to be continuous. There’s going to be no end date on that.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah. And I think this is one of the things that publishing, because again, time famine, time pressure, the amount of books they have to publish, the amount of volume they’re putting through the system, you know, books can continue to sell in perpetuity.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Jimmy Soni
Right. You and I are still getting royalty checks from our books. Right. And so the idea of a marketing window that is two to three weeks long after a book publication just doesn’t make any sense. Right. The classic example, by the way, is The Founders. The day before Founders debuted, Russia invaded Ukraine. What do you think? What do you think they did for my potential news? I was actually, I was being, a book party was hosted for me in D.C. by my friends. And my friend who hosted the book party is a bigwig in the writing and political world. And he came over to me and said, Jimmy, are you okay? We’ve got a couple people here who are experts in European politics. I think on everybody’s mind is the fact that Russia just invaded Ukraine. Would you mind if they say a few words before we get to your book event? I was like, yeah, absolutely.
It throws everything off. If I had only paid attention to the idea that the two week or three week window for marketing and publishing is the only thing that matters, I never would have continued marketing my books later. And publishers, unfortunately, are in a position where they have to move to the next book. Our view is if we do a book on grief, it’s relevant six months from now. It’s relevant a year from now. And to the extent that we can automate the marketing, we can continue to market over time and build an asset that becomes an annuity for us and an annuity for the author.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And it’s just bad investment methodology, in my opinion. You know, that’s the world I come from. And I remember just thinking and just scratching my head and thinking, this is just so stupid. And it’s one of those kind of cultural legacy things, I think, you know, you get back to prestige. You get back to, you know, publishing has always been run right where we’re sitting. And, you know, and it was basically if they weren’t, if the chattering classes weren’t talking about it at a cocktail party right after debut. Right.
Jimmy Soni
And then it ceases to matter.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
It ceases to matter at all. Which again, we now have the technology, the ability to put so many great people into the book market. And it’s, I think, unprecedented in history. You know, the history of books.
Jimmy Soni
Right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
They started out as novelty items that jewelers sold. I never knew that.
Jimmy Soni
I didn’t know that, actually.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
So what they would do is once the printing press was up and going, nobody like, what the hell is this? And so what they would do is they would make these beautiful books and encrust them with jewels and they were given as gifts. And then, of course, you know, good old Martin Luther and the need for Bibles in German interceded. But I don’t think that we have ever had this kind of opportunity. Historically there are, and that comes back to a question of taste. Right. You know, the one thing that cannot be automated is taste and, you know, authenticity.
Jimmy Soni
Right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
But now our ability to find those people, it’s kind of like we did with the fellowships at O’Shaughnessy Ventures. Right. And it’s like there are so many incredibly talented creative people in the world who due to whatever their geography or their background or they weren’t here in the United States or they weren’t in a major European city. We can find them now. And there’s so much human creativity that is being, in my opinion, wasted. And that doesn’t have to happen anymore.
Jimmy Soni
It doesn’t. And it’s one of the things that our team is doing basically constantly is it used to be that editors had more time to reach out to a promising voice and say, you should really think about writing a book. We’re doing more of that. There’s one particular person I’m thinking of who we found a really good set of Substack commentary and posts from him. And I reached out to him. I just said, listen, I’m a fan. Have you ever thought about doing a book? You’ve got a really strong authorial voice, you’ve got something to say, you’ve built an audience. You clearly know what’s resonating. Have you ever thought about doing a book?
And the entire team jumped on a Zoom with him and we basically helped him brainstorm a book. If he does it with us, would be amazing. We would love to do it. But if he does it at all, good for the world.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right.
Jimmy Soni
About once to three times a day, I’m reaching out to somebody like that where I’ve just noticed something they’re doing. And I think there’s a book in what they’re doing. And that is the way that you encourage people to create these Gutenberg era projects that still have lasting cultural value is you go find them and you say you can do this. And then more importantly, you build the kind of infrastructure that we’re willing to actually help them do it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And that’s the part that I think is somewhat unique to us. Right. In that we are very willing to roll up our sleeves and help develop a project. Yeah.
Jimmy Soni
And the developmental editing, by the way, is where a lot of the magic is. A good example, it’s actually, this isn’t developmental editing, but it is similar in spirit. We’re also reviving books. So we’re taking projects that were published, but that we thought kind of something, somebody missed a trick somewhere. We’re trying to take those and revive them. We bought a book recently, the rights to a book recently, where we’re retitling it, redoing the cover and editing the book itself.
And part of the magic of doing something like that is our team came together and it was our team and AI and we brainstormed and looked at all possible titles, and we’ve come up with a short list of titles. Right. So we’re basically, I describe it as we’re gut renovating a book. Right. New title, new cover, new everything. Let’s go for it. And that is a different exercise than what a traditional publisher might do. Right. Because once a book is out the door for a traditional publisher, it’s done. There’s no changes to be made. There might be a 10th anniversary edition or a 25th anniversary edition, if you’re particularly good at selling.
But what we’re doing is saying, well, wait, there’s a good book here surrounded by a bunch of crap and other stuff. We can get the good book out of this and put it back into the market. And that itself is an exercise in just respecting that we can learn about the audience. We’re testing those titles with the audience. We’re testing those titles with our team. That is a little bit different than developmental editing or even developing new projects, but we’re bringing that same focus and emphasis to it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And that book, I had read it when it first came out. It was marketed horribly. They talk about burying the lead. Literally, there was pure fire in that book. But you wouldn’t know it if you looked at any of the marketing for the book. And after we acquired it, I went back and reread it, and I’m like, holy shit, this is a real gem that just was handled incorrectly.
Jimmy Soni
Right. And you’ve got to ask yourself how many projects there are out there that are like that, where, but for one or two things happening, you never would’ve heard of that author. And we know those stories. Right. Slow Horses is the now the canonical example where the author struggled for years, didn’t really see himself succeeding in literary life, but just kept writing. One NPR piece and that book took off, and now he’s a legend and he’s got all the accolades that any author could hope for. Right?
Boys in the Boat, another classic example. Book debuts, doesn’t sell at all, but rowers pick it up and love it. And that niche expands. And out of that niche grows this book that then hits a Times list eight, nine months later. There are story after story like this. We are, I think, different in publishing in that we’re actively looking for things that the market missed when they first debuted, but only because the debut window was two weeks of focus and then nobody bothered to pay attention after.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And one of the reasons I bought into this so easily was because there’s a direct parallel from investing, right. In investing, most people do very poorly because they’re hyperbolic discounters of time. Right? So it’s because they let their emotions take over. And let’s say, you know, you’re 40 years old, you’re going to be working for at least another 25 years and the market hits the skids and your time frame ceases to be, this is for when I’m going to be 65 or 70 and it’s, oh my God, I’m losing all my money right now. And you make horrible decisions, right. Because your perspective collapses. Right.
And one of the things that we always said was, no, our time horizons are infinite. Right. And if your time horizons are infinite, the market goes from being a horribly risky thing to being the least risky thing you could do. I would give the example of when people panic, where do they put their money? Usually in treasuries, if you’re in the United States, usually in U.S. treasuries, which are the closest thing you can find to riskless investments. Well, that’s true over short periods of time.
However, if you start back where we have data in 1927 and you take it all the way to today, what looks like the least risky investment actually is the most risky, because a dollar invested back in 1928 or ‘27 grows to about $90, whereas the same dollar invested in an S&P proxy grows to the hundreds and hundreds of dollars. But you see that happening everywhere, right. It’s not just investing, right. It’s marketing of books. It’s the time horizon. It’s really an arbitrage that we’re doing because so many people have these short term time horizons which are completely not optimal.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah, right. I think the other thing is that for publishers, it puts so much pressure on continuing to fill the pipeline with new projects because you’re never really taking full advantage of the projects you already published. And so from our perspective, if we did fewer books that sold way better, the math works for us. Right. That means we have to be very careful about the bets we place and really over invest on continuing to market for a long period of time.
But the idea is very simply that the other way to do it is to try to publish a lot of books and hope. Hope that something works out. And that’s where a big part of this disconnect that we’ve been talking about, this entire conversation comes in. Because they’re placing so many bets that your book, my book, kind of, maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t, but we’ve got to move on. Our hope is that with many months and even years of marketing in different ways, some light touch, some bigger, we can actually make these entities profitable over a long period of time.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And the backup there, of course, is that we are building to be able to scale because, you know, maybe I’m insane and crazy, but authors who suddenly are getting between 50 and 70% depending on their needs of the royalty, and going with a publisher who understands that if nobody knows about your book, nobody’s going to buy your book. I suspect that we will face that problem at some point in the future, but we will always bring what we bring right now, which is taste, discrimination. And is this something that we really can get behind and believe in?
Jimmy Soni
Yeah. And even now we’re saying no more than we say yes, because we do have a lot of people pitches and we want to do a good job with the projects we have. But it’s, there is going to come a time when, you know, we’re able to say we’re going to give more yeses. Yeah. And when our volume becomes bigger. But even then, the things we just talked about, attention to detail, really investing in each book, that’s going to matter to us. I’d rather have a portfolio of 200 books that are really on fire, that shape a cultural conversation, than 2000 books with a handful of winners. Yeah, right. I think we will do both.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And what has surprised you the most? Changing hats, becoming, well, we’re both kind of coach players, but from the point of view of becoming the publisher, what’s surprised you in a positive or negative way that you were like, huh, I never, I didn’t expect that.
Jimmy Soni
I would have thought there’d be a lot more skepticism from agents about our business model and about what we’re doing. So agents for those who are listening, who aren’t super familiar with the book business, if you’re an author, let’s say from 10 years ago, you would write a proposal, you would find an agent, and that agent would get you a book deal. I had thought that because we’re a newer, smaller publisher, even though we’re trying to do everything right, I would have thought agents would have been the first to say, you’re not quite what we’re looking for. Right.
It turns out it’s the exact opposite, because we are actually having conversations with authors, because we’re willing to even entertain pitches, because we’re trying to do some things differently, because our royalty split is 70% in the direction of the author, 30% in the direction of the publisher. It’s the agents who have actually been most excited to have conversations with us. I never in a million years would have anticipated that. I thought we were going to get the cold shoulder from agents and we were going to have to go direct to authors and basically run a guerrilla effort, a grassroots effort to win the business.
No, it’s been the opposite. Agents are coming to us with projects and saying, listen, people are turning this down for stupid reasons. You’ve got to take a look at this. And we have signed, I think, three, maybe four agented projects in addition to the ones that we’ve done without agents. That’s been the most surprising thing to me.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, that surprised me a lot as well. And the level of the enthusiasm from agents really surprised me. And, you know, it’s, but then when you kind of think about it, think of all of the projects that they’ve seen, that they’re like, this is amazing. And then for whatever reason, they can’t make that sale. And that was another thing we leaned into. Right. That’s how we approach some of our agents. And, you know, it was, the magnitude was very surprising to me.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah. I think the other thing that happens if you’re an author, if you’re in that position, you take a project, you manage to land an agent. Wow, what a big deal. Your agent’s excited. Your agent takes the project out to other people. They’re like, we don’t know. They’ve sent it to, what, the 20 contacts on their list? That’s it. The project dies. How many projects are basically either finished or near finished or good proposals that just didn’t get an audience?
But because of whatever reason, my hope is we find a bunch of diamonds in the rough and we manage to get them, polish them, publish them, make them into something. It would seem to me, and in fact, I know for sure that there are a bunch of authors who are sitting on projects that have a lot of promise, but the industry just turned them down for not very good reasons.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And the final thing I want to talk about is there are other things that baffle both of us. Let’s talk audiobooks. I’m not a huge audiobook guy. My wife is. She’s a maniacal walker. And so she listens to maybe a book in two days. But when you told me about some of the stats, I was like, what?
Jimmy Soni
Yeah. So you talked about this distinction between bits and atoms in this business that the business of publishing is focused on atoms. Physical books. Two thirds of contemporary readers are reading in bits. They’re reading on ebooks and on audio. In some categories, week over week sales in audio are north of 50%. My books, north of 50% of my total units of sale in a given week are on audio.
So you have an industry that’s focused on what, 30 to 20 to 30% of the actual book, of the total units of a given book sold, while more than 50% are being basically ignored. Right. Audiobooks for a long time have basically been regarded as the second class citizens of books.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Totally.
Jimmy Soni
And that has to change. And that’s something we’re trying to change in our own ways, big and small. Encouraging authors to read their own books. Right. That’s a big part of it. An author’s going to get their pronunciation right, they’re going to get the syllables right. They’re going to get the stresses, the emotion, the tenor, all that stuff. Right.
We’re also trying to experiment with AI. Yeah, AI involved in production and audio can dramatically reduce the cost of audiobooks. The cost of audiobooks can still run into the thousands, sometimes over $10,000 to produce an audiobook. It shouldn’t be that way anymore. The equipment is widely available. Studios are easily accessible. You don’t even really need a studio these days to make high quality audio. We just need a revolution in audiobooks because they are the part of the business that basically time forgot. Audible and now Spotify and others are playing in that field. There needs to be more rethinking there. We’re at the early stages of doing that.
The other thing that’s important is the audiobook doesn’t have to be a carbon copy of the actual book. We’re going to be experimenting with some ways in which the audiobook can be a little bit different.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And again, back to my project. It’s going to be really different. So kind of before I ask you to be emperor of the world, you’ve been with me before. So you’ve had lots of shots at being emperor of the world.
Jimmy Soni
Right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
But, what would, if you’re sitting in 2030, what would you love to be saying about what happened with Infinite Books? And why? What are your North Stars?
Jimmy Soni
We made many of our authors millionaires. Yeah, that’s important. People don’t want to talk about the commerce side of this business, but creativity is ultimately a struggle of time versus resources. Right. Anybody can be creative if given enough time, but most people run out of resources. Resources can be health, resources can be your age. Resources can be money. Money matters in the world of publishing.
So one North Star for me is, have we made an author a millionaire? Because if we have, by the way, Infinite Books has done well also. But the point is that I want to be the place where we say our goal explicitly is to make millionaires out of our authors.
Why? Because then they keep getting to be authors. That’s the whole point. The whole point. It’s like they could buy nice things, but most authors I know are actually kind of goofily nerdy. They actually care a lot more about just having time to do their nerdy thing than about buying a Maserati. If they want to buy one, fine, go ahead. But we want to make our authors millionaires.
The second is we want to keep the quality level of our books exceptionally high. Right. They can measure that in all kinds of different ways. But we don’t want to be the place where you send, we don’t want to be the thing that we’re criticizing, where if there’s a book in the system and it’s not a famous name, we don’t care about it. It doesn’t get any editing support. It doesn’t get any marketing support. Right. That I don’t want to do that. So it’s sort of like we kept the quality very, very high.
And then the last thing is, I would say we managed to find audiences in international markets in a way nobody had before. You and I both know the international part of this business is broken. We haven’t really begun to push the limit on our experiments there. But my view is the reading public is much bigger than America.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Jimmy Soni
The market for reaching those people, the mechanisms for reaching those people are underdeveloped. So there’s an undercooked process, foreign rights, foreign translations, foreign publishing. I would hope that in the next five years, given where AI is, that we could crack that code. And I think we can.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And we’re doing a special thing with my book, which I’m going to keep secret, but that’ll be a big swing. But you’re absolutely right. I think all of those are laudable. And I think the idea that we have to talk about commerce, because your point is a very valid one. If we can make our authors millionaires, they get to keep writing. That’s it.
Jimmy Soni
It’s the whole thing. And it’s also doing a book shouldn’t be a privilege reserved for a small clutch of people who can do it because they can afford it, because they have some other means of keeping the lights on. We’re not running a charity, it’s a business. But the idea is we’re providing incentive alignment in a way that I think is powerful. Because a 70-30 author royalty split with no advance also means the author’s got to hustle to sell. We have to hustle to sell as a publisher, but so is the author. But if they hustle to sell, if they work their hearts out, they should get rich doing it. There’s, that’s just logical for us. It’s just intuitive.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Totally agree. And I’m incredibly excited about what we’re doing right now with it. I didn’t think that I was going to love it nearly as much as I do.
Jimmy Soni
That’s surprising.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Well, I mean, you know, it was when you and I started talking about it, and it was that recognition. Wait a minute. Same problems, same problems that I was facing 20 years ago are still plaguing authors today. That’s something that is arbitrary. You can arbitrage it and you can fix it. And that’s what we’re trying to do.
Well, as you know, having been on Infinite Loops in the past, your final question is always, we’re going to wave a wand, make you emperor of the universe. Can’t kill anyone. You can’t put anyone in a reeducation camp. But what you can do is incept people. Like that famous movie. You can say, we’re going to give you a magical microphone and you can say two things into it, and everybody alive on the planet is going to wake up whenever their tomorrow is, and they’re going to say, wow, I just had two of the greatest ideas. Unlike all the other times when I never did anything about it. I’m going to start working on both of these today. What are you going to incept?
Jimmy Soni
People in whatever line of work, be a problem author, actually be the person that pushes your industry to rethink how it’s done things. It’s only problem authors that get the industry to change. You and I are problem authors. Now, building a publisher, which is kind of fun. And that, to me, is actually really important because authors have more power than they do, but people in any line of work generally have more power than they think they have. So be a bit of a problem author is probably one.
And the second, think of the story you can’t shake. Right. There are just some stories that you can’t shake that just, you keep coming back to, and they bother the hell out of you. And if you think hard enough about that story you can’t shake, there’s a reason why, whether that comes out in the form of a documentary, a podcast, an email you send to a friend, a book you write, a piece you write online on Substack, do something about the story you can’t shake.
Because I do find that the things that became my books were stories that I just could not, I was so annoyed. I was so annoyed that there wasn’t something out there that I was like, I’ve got to do something about this. So those are the two.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I love the second one because that’s why I’m writing the fiction book.
Jimmy Soni
There you go.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I got a letter in real life from an interesting person, and I immediately spun up a story about it, which was, I used to love doing fictional treatments. Never did anything with it, but I couldn’t shake it. And that was 30 years ago. And so what’s really interesting is the story I spun up back then. Completely different.
Jimmy Soni
That’s right, of course.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
But it was because, you know, I just couldn’t shake thinking about it. I just kept thinking about it. And so I think that’s great advice. Jimmy, as always, great to have you on, and great to see you. This was great.
