Episode 25
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Welcome back to the Women in Writing podcast. This week I have Larissa on my podcast, and she started her own publishing company. You can learn a lot from her, everything publishing related. So definitely listen in because there's a lot of nuggets of wisdom in there for you if you want to publish your own book, or if you want to start your own publishing company.
Welcome back to the Women in Writing podcast. I have the beautiful Larissa here with me today, and I'm excited that she took the time for our interview here. Hi, Larissa. How are you today? I'm good. Thank you so much for having me. It's such a pleasure to come on these podcasts and meet new people and talk to new audiences.
Yeah. It's always so exciting. Like I can see like how the network just expands and there's so many [00:01:00] women in writing obviously. And it's so great, like how we support one another kind of like growing and everyone has so much to offer and it's so different and yeah, just great. It's our net worth, right?
It's our network is our net worth. So yeah, absolutely. A hundred percent. That's a really good saying. So you founded Next Page Publishing. Is that correct? Yeah, so I'll just give you a little background as to me and what the company is and what we stand for and why we exist in the first place.
So I started the publishing house in 2020 after suffering a mental health crisis and leaving my corporate position knowing that was Not gonna cut it for me anymore. And through the journey of that deep self discovery and the hard work of finding yourself, I actually fell into creative writing.
And it was, I think, the same for so many people. I loved it as a kid, and then I lost it as an adult. And after I had a miscarriage, and I really lost myself as who [00:02:00] I was as a person. All of a sudden, I was this mother, this wife, employee, daughter, and I was, who was Larissa? Who was I?
Yeah. And so I ended up taking a couple months off work and I found this creative writing. And it was a beautiful process. I found so much of myself. I like to say that my first sci fi book, my daughter saved my life in a very dark time, but my sci fi book brought me back, like it really gave me the hope that there was something out there for me as Larissa to look forward to and to contribute to this world.
And so I wrote the book in eight weeks. It was astonishingly fast. And then I was ready to publish about probably two, three months later after all the editing and multiple rounds of editing. It was just stunning, like astronomical 10 out of 10 don't recommend, but it worked for me. And I, In the process, of course, I went through multiple rounds of editors because I didn't know what I was doing.
And the editors I was finding were doing really terrible jobs in all honesty. I kept having to go back to them and saying, Hey, like I'm finding mistakes and I'm nowhere near a [00:03:00] perfectionist. I'm nowhere. I'm a terrible grammar and I'm picking up on these things. And so after multiple rounds of very disappointing editors, I finally found one that I enjoyed.
So that set me back quite a bit. And then I ended up partnering with what I now know as a vanity press. And the moral of this story is almost at every single turn as a new author, people were taking advantage of me. They were taking advantage of my hopes and my dreams and they weren't being straight with me.
They weren't teaching me what I needed to know to actually be a successful author. They banked on me being overly optimistic and they sold me on that. Wow. And that's so many people's stories, right? So many people have that story of, we thought it was gonna be amazing, this is our first book, this is the, this is our dream.
Whether we knew it or not, now we're here. And this is what we're looking forward to the most. It's like birthing a child, and then all of a sudden your medical team is giving you shitty advice, and telling you that you're gonna [00:04:00] be a millionaire. And, It just doesn't work that way. I, we know that now.
Now I know that. But it all works out as the universe does because I was able to step back from that and go never again. Never again will I hear the horror story of an author and not be able to help. Never again will I ask an author to hand over the power the way that I did. Traditional publishing asks of an author, even Vanity Press asks of an author, the one that I partnered with.
Almost two years later, I was still fighting to get my manuscript back from them. Wow. And to get back my distribution rights. And again, Never again. So Next Page Publishing was born. We do serve female entrepreneurs who are looking to write books to grow their businesses. And our whole motto is putting the power back in authors hands.
Because of the women we serve, the six and seven figure CEOs that are here to change the world, they need full autonomy in their book and in their product. And that's what we've created inside our house. Wow, that's [00:05:00] so amazing. That's so inspiring. And it's just like you said, like heartbreaking and sad.
Like you like created within a couple of weeks, like you created this amazing, project. And then all of a sudden, it like you were set back. So quickly. It's just so crazy. Yeah. It was heartbreaking, right? Like you're on this role. You're so proud of what you've done. And then every turn it feels like people are against you.
Oh, that's so crazy. So how what was the route that you were taking then? Was it like a traditional publisher or was it like self publishing or what was it that you were doing? So I did try traditional publishing, the querying route. And then I very quickly realized It, the grass is not greener on that side, that would mean.
Giving up my rights to the content and to the series even potentially depending on how the, because it was a three part series. And I just didn't want to be at the mercy of someone else's timeline. I didn't want to be at the [00:06:00] mercy of someone else telling me how my book needed to end or what my main characters needed to be like or act like.
I've had my editor, my second sci fi is coming out and she's I actually don't like your main character. And I was like, what? Perfect. You're not supposed to like her. She's not a likable person. Oh, wow. Okay. And, but I was so afraid that if I gave that to a traditional publisher, they would have every single right to ask me to change it.
Yeah. And then she wouldn't be what I needed her to be anymore because she was just as much for me as She was for the world, a thing. And so I very quickly, I think I queried for probably three or four months, got a handful of very nice rejection letters realized my skin's not this thick.
I need to reconsider my approach here. And then I went self publishing and that's when I found this Vanity Press and thought, wow, this is going to be amazing. And then boom, it was not. Oh my God. But it's it's just great that you had This experience again, like you said just to create what you created now, right?[00:07:00]
Yeah. Next page publishing wouldn't exist without this. And we wouldn't have been able to help the 60 authors in, you know, year that we have been able to help do all sorts of different things. And I think that was the biggest thing for me with. The vanity press and what makes my hybrid publishing house so different is that nothing is cookie cutter in what we do.
I don't put you into a system and then spit you out a book at the end that looks like everybody else's book, that's formatted like everybody else's book. I actually read every single book we publish. I can pretty much guarantee no one in my vanity press house did that. And I can, and so it goes through our teams.
We partner with people through the writing portion. So when I was sitting lonely in my office wondering what the heck I was doing, we partner them with a literary
coach. So the journey for the author inside our publishing house is so much more supportive [00:08:00] and what you want from a book. I, one of my favorite quotes, I'm going to put myself here is books are not meant. They're not, you don't write a book for no one to read it, you write it for the people, so why would you write it alone, a thing, right?
Like, why wouldn't you go out and get another person's input while you're writing it? Because your book is meant for the world, so don't write it in isolation, that doesn't make any sense. Yeah, that makes so much sense because a lot of people like have that, like author, like sitting in a cabin in the woods, just writing, like for themselves, but it's actually not that right.
And for some people it can work. One of my favorite authors, Pierce Brown. That's what he does quite regularly. He goes and he sits in his cabin. I follow him on Instagram and I love him like, Oh my God, please release the next book. But for most people, especially new authors, he's been published eight or nine times.
Like he knows what goes into writing a book. He knows how to work through his blocks. New authors don't, they do not have that experience to, to fall back on when they get stuck and then they get stuck and they [00:09:00] give up and that's sad. So how was it for you? You said you wrote the book in eight weeks, right?
Like, why was it just it was all flowing out of you or were you like planning it or were you just sitting down and you just wrote like part of your healing journey or how was that? Yeah. So my, my sci fi the defender book, one of the Gatlin series is it's very heavily rooted in my journey that I was going through at the time I was heavily depressed Going through multiple rounds of therapy on different medications.
And I really needed, I literally needed to get out of this world. I literally needed to step away from this galaxy and go somewhere else. And so I stepped into Alexia, is her name. And I started her character very much like mine. Very sad, very depressed, very unhappy with her life. And then, She had to get better.
It wouldn't have been a good book if she hadn't gone through some personal growth and some challenges and some struggles and come out the other side. And I knew [00:10:00] that the only way to write her effectively, to know what she was truly going through, was to go through it myself. To bring her out on the other side.
And no, I had absolutely no idea. I didn't even know I was writing a book until I was about 10, 000 words. And I didn't know where it was going. I only thing I had was her name and Alexia is it loosely translates in Greek to the defender of man. And so this whole persona around her was created in this storyline.
And. I, to this day, I don't think I could plan a fiction book. I just wrote another short story for another collaboration project we're doing. And I'm just as surprised as everyone else is what happens in the book. Sometimes I sit back and go wow, I did not see that coming. And my husband's you're the author.
Wow, that's so crazy. That's amazing. Yeah. Fiction is different or nonfiction, excuse me. Nonfiction is very different. And that's where I excel in coaching. I actually don't coach in fiction. We don't publish fiction unless it's a passion project that I'm like incredibly closely linked to, [00:11:00] but nonfiction is different.
Nonfiction follows a system because the goal isn't just to entertain or to make people laugh or cry or, whatever comes with fiction. Yeah. Yeah. The goal is usually to teach, to inspire, to transform. And so you have to be so much more strategically thinking in the outline. Winging a nonfiction book is not the same as, not knowing where your fiction book is going.
Like that, it would have been my next question. Like, why did you choose nonfiction then over fiction? Because it's like what you can coach, like you said, or is it for you? Elevate that person like, or is it like, who is like the typical client that you work with? Do they have brands or do they have a company or do they have a good idea?
What is it that they do? So typically we serve the six or seven figure CEO, female CEO, who is the thought leader who wants to be on international stages, who wants to earn mainstream media, wants to be on TV. And she's here to change the [00:12:00] world. And. What what attracts a lot of those women, those powerhouse of people to us is the fact that we don't, we aren't cookie cutter.
So every woman has her own goals and her own whys and we should never be shoved into a system. That is going to determine what those are for us and going to make us conform to something. And so what we do is we put that power in their hands and we say, what do you want to do with this book? And then we'll build the plan and we'll get you there.
And we'll give you all the resources. You will not have shitty editors. You will not be left to hang and dry because your designer ghosted you halfway through the project. We're going to be there every step of the way. And we're going to get you to whatever your goals are. And a lot of time that the first week is what are your goals?
Let's really talk about that. And so the reason I picked nonfiction, one, I love nonfiction. I'm a huge buff of self improvement, learn, adapt, read opinions that are different than yours, just to see [00:13:00] a different side of the world. And sometimes it solidifies my views and sometimes it changes my views.
And there's just something so special in nonfiction. And when I was given this opportunity to. open the publishing house, I saw this huge opportunity for growth. Honestly, it was a little bit selfish of me to choose this route because I was like, I'm going to get to read people's non fiction books for a living.
People are literally going to pay me for my opinion on their books. Heck yes, please. So that's, And there's money, honestly, there's money in nonfiction books for the entrepreneurs, for the CEOs, for the coaches. When I looked at the value that I wanted to bring to this world, I wanted to the publishing world.
I wanted to bring more than just the book. Cause that was the problem I had. They brought me the book and they didn't teach me anything else. I didn't know how to use the book. And when I saw the. Return on investment opportunity. It was with entrepreneurs, it was with the CEO. So they were able to invest [00:14:00] in me knowing that it was an investment and knowing guaranteeing they were going to get their ROI five time ROI, a thing, coming back to them in the next year, if they did it right.
And so then it became the challenge of, okay, what's right. And then we built the system, right? And we built the system so that every author can go through it and get their goals. Wow. That's so amazing. Like how how did you create that shift from like being in that like at the point of being depressed and figuring out your life to being like that powerhouse supporting seven figure females to elevate their business with their books, because also like I 100 percent believe like this, like that if you need to make money writing a book don't do it, obviously like you see these ads online, Oh get your book written like with AI uploaded within a week.
And then you make Oh, those ads are gross. Yeah. It's terrible. Like I was actually watching one of the webinars, like for an [00:15:00] hour that they provide and I'm like. That doesn't really work, I don't know. And again, that's playing on people's hopes and dreams and not having a realistic side of it.
And that's what women like about my program. And when they come in, I'm straight up, you will not make money in royalties. That is not how our program works. Our program works by selling books off of your events and getting you on TEDx and getting you on TV. That's how our programs work. Yeah. Yeah. So how did I get out of, how did I stop being so sad?
That's a good question. I think as women and you're a mother with those first few years are hard beyond anything you can ever imagine. And I only have one after my, the loss of my unborn, I decided that we didn't, we weren't going to do anymore. And the first thing I had to do was forgive myself.
For the guilt that I was carrying for not being able to carry that pregnancy successfully, and that was incredibly hard and with [00:16:00] that forgiveness came that sense of worth. That I was worth more than my uterus, and I meant more, I was enough as I was, and I had things to offer this world, and my creative writing was a big part of that, and then it transferred into some of my children's books and my non fictions, and suddenly I had a voice.
It wasn't the voice of my daughter's mother, it wasn't the voice of an employee, or the voice of a wife. It was my voice, for the first time in decades. Wow, I have chills you saying that. That's amazing. Yeah, and so that's what it, that's what it took. And so I actually just, again, I'm going to quote myself because I think I'm the best source of my knowledge because what goes on up in my head is like, So friggin weird sometimes, but being depressed is giving up hope, right?
It's losing that light at the end of the tunnel and not being able to see beyond today and the darkness that's consuming [00:17:00] you. And, For me, once I found that voice, I found that hope. I found that potential of what can happen if I just talk, if I and my talking was written, right? And what, what could happen?
Who could I reach out to? Who could I connect with? What lives could I change? And I started out wanting to be a coach. And then I realized. I'm actually not a very good speaker I am okay, but I'm so much better written. That's why I have journals all over the house, right? Because I don't have the best memory.
And I find if I write it down, I can think about it and I can make it more well rounded and that's the beauty of books is they are fully well rounded thoughts that you just cannot get in speech. That's amazing. That's so amazing and inspiring. And I also, I agree with you with every thing that you say.
And I think it's just. You growing the Phoenix, into that role of supporting other women. It's just [00:18:00] fascinating. And I totally love that. So how was it for you when you started out, was it difficult to do like the marketing or find your first clients or did it like all come really natural to you?
Because, I think there's like a lot going on then, right? Starting a business is not for the faint of heart. I will say that I'm actually working on a book right now called CE Nope. And it's about everybody rah rahs you when you want not everybody, but a lot of people in the entrepreneur space be like, yeah, do it.
Take the leap, take the plunge. It's going to be awesome. And then you get in it and you're about two, three months in and you're like, what is happening? What is this tornado that I have willingly stepped into the middle of? And now I'm trying to pluck these things out of the air and pretend they know what they mean.
And it was it was about, so I did it in stages. First, I started out really small and I started playing out with my niche of who I wanted to help. And I actually ran a couple of bestselling bootcamps where I took. 20 authors, [00:19:00] and I helped them reach bestseller status. And so that helped me learn the marketing side of what goes into becoming a bestseller.
I got to learn that the systems that I'd be playing with, I got the tech set up, how do I take payments? How do I find people? But I also started to learn what it was that authors were driven by. And it wasn't so much The bestseller status that was very enticing to people. Although I have my opinions on that, it was very enticing, but they really just needed someone to tell them what to do and it didn't seem to matter that I was new as long as I had shown that I had given some thought into this process, it was based off of my research and it was going to work and then it did work.
It worked 20 times over and every single one of those authors hit bestseller status. And then in true entrepreneur fashion, the system changed, the game changed, and Amazon changed how we do bestseller now. You can only pick three categories, and it's harder, and so that [00:20:00] campaign's actually gone. We don't do that campaign anymore.
But then that morphed into, okay, authors are struggling, they need to be told what to do, so Where is the actual pain point? And quite often, it's at the very beginning. They haven't decided who this book wants to be, like, who should be reading this book. They don't know their target audience. And so I stepped back at that spot, and I really analyzed what was happening in the market that was stopping authors from selling copies of their books or ever even publishing their books.
And it was because they didn't know who they were talking to. So I went back all the way to the beginning and I said, you know what, if I'm really going to help authors, if I'm really going to make a difference, it's not coming in the marketing stage and throwing them a Hail Mary, because I don't, first of all, I can't.
Help with what's in their book. I can't advise them on how to do good storytelling, how to craft an emotionally engaging message. Yes. And you can market the heck out of a book, but if it's a terrible book, it will never sell. 100%. So question here, do they? write their own [00:21:00] books? Or do you have freelancers or writers or ghostwriters that work with them then?
Or how is that? Yeah, we have multiple stages depending on what the author's needs are. And again, this is the beauty of us. We don't cookie cutter it, like everybody's different. So some authors come to us and they've been doing blogs for years and they are super confident. We then we assign them one of our I would call her like a literary guide.
She is incredibly good at providing you feedback and asking questions to spark your thought process. And then there's the next level, which is me and I am the VIP experience. And I'm much more hands in the document, so the people that are a little bit nervous about their writing styles, they're not confident in their voice yet, they go with me.
Because I'm gonna get in that document, and I'm gonna move stuff around, and I'm gonna make suggestions as you're writing. And I can say from experience, the writers that I coach, by the time they're done their book, they are awesome writers. They will never meet, need that level of in depth. [00:22:00] coaching again, they'll need more of the original because they learn so much.
And that's what this industry needs is teaching, not doing it needs teaching. And so there's that. And then of course, if people are like, I don't have the time, I don't have the skill, but I have the money, then we can write the book for them. We have ghostwriters on staff as well. Okay. That's really cool.
Very exciting. So is it for you, like you really read every single book, right? I do. Yeah. I have eyestrain, but it's worth it. It's so worth it to step into the author's heads. It's stunning. How long does it take you usually to read a book? When I first started, I could get through about 30, 000 word book and I'd say three or four days I would do the dev.
So I mostly do the dev editing in the company. That's majorly my role. So I do my VIP coaching clients. And then I do all the dev editing for every book that comes through. And I know a lot of [00:23:00] people look at me like you're the CEO, you shouldn't be doing that. Like you need to farm that out. And it's then how can I stand by my authors?
How can I say you're part of the Next Page Publishing family if I've never read your work? That doesn't make any sense to me. That doesn't seem ethical to me. Yes. I do see myself growing and scaling up. I never see myself stepping away from reading the books. I don't ever see that happening.
So did you have a lot of coaching as well yourself, like with different like business coaches, et cetera, to grow or how was that for you? Yeah. Every coach needs a coach. Even if I'm not technically a coach, I'm a I guess I'm a literary coach and a dev editor and a publisher and all of these beautiful little roles, but yeah, I got my own coach.
So I started my company with a business coach that went terribly wrong. It taught me exactly what I didn't want to do and how I didn't want to sell, how I didn't want to run my systems, which I mean, in itself is a win, not the way I expected it. But, and then I, in January, I partnered [00:24:00] with a coach one on one and that is so much better for me.
And I should have known that from the beginning, all our programs are one on one because I dislike group coaching very much. I always found. My needs never got met. You get a select minute, number of minutes, and they're going to give you a cookie cutter answer to that applies to the masses and not you.
So now I have a one on one coach. She's phenomenal. I've seen huge growth. You and I were talking offline about shifting responsibility, stopping. Like I have an admin now. We have team members, we have coaches, editors, designers, and I have to step back from that. I'm the CEO of do all. And now I'm the CEO of be all kind of a thing. Amazing. Yeah, that's really cool. I love that. I was in different coaching programs myself. I was in I did some group coaching, some one on one and I just, for me, it was piecing like finding the Mrs missing piecing pieces to my puzzle, sorry, like putting it all together [00:25:00] so it works for me.
And it's almost like shopping for, the next coach that brings you to the next level. Yeah, I like to joke that I paid 18, 000 to be told what I don't like. And it's true, like I'm probably more than that. If I honestly look at the investment, I've invested in two group coaching programs and both of them have been washes for me.
But I learned what I don't like and how I operate my business. Yeah. It's good in a way. But a hundred percent. And I agree. If you sell coaching, like then you invest in coaching yourself and then, yeah, just all it elevates. So how many clients do you work with usually like on a regular basis?
Is there like always a cap? Do you look into kind of like how much, How many people can you take on or like, how is that for you? Yeah. So we do have a cap in our business. And it's to the point where we did hire a new coach in January and she's serving her clients now and she's taking on her discovery calls and finding the matches that are right for [00:26:00] her.
And that's, what's really important to us. It's not so much have a whole staff of. Coaches it's finding the right coach for you and your niche, right? And someone that's going to really be able to challenge you. What we try actually not to do is partner a coach. That's really knowledgeable in your niche.
We want someone that's not, that is more in line with your ideal reader so that they can ask the right questions to get those answers out of you. So for me personally, I only take six clients a year. And again, that's that VIP experience of, I tend to. Air more on the side of literary and business coach.
I've Bin through the ringer and a lot of cases, these women that are looking to scale up to six and seven figures, they need beyond the book advice. And so when we create the selling system and when we create the book, we're thinking big picture, right? We're never thinking just book. We're thinking, how does this convert into clients?
How does this make me money? How do I get that ROI? So that's my experience. And that's only six people a year. And I'm booked out now until September, I believe. Wow. And [00:27:00] then. Amy, she can take on up to 10 a year. We have range. And then of course we have our publishing only services, which is, they don't require the literary coach.
They just need the project manager. And that we had, that's a whole other division of our business. So if someone has a manuscript done, they can still come into us and come through our doors and we'll give them the same support as if they were our author from word one. It's just a little bit of a shorter journey for them.
Nice. Very cool. Thank you so much for all the insights. That's amazing. Is there like a last question? Yeah. I couldn't hear my dog barking in the background. He was just losing his mind. No, I couldn't really. Sometimes the things like when, my dogs are barking too, but you cannot really it's really good in filtering it out.
Like nowadays, actually. Yeah. Anyway, I will cut this out. How, like last question, What would be like the number one tip for [00:28:00] everyone listening to that kind of like being still at that stage of kind of like maybe being depressed, wanted to go into writing and having a hard time because I totally.
Relate to you, like how heartbreaking it can be. I think we chatted about that. I also suffered from three miscarriages before we had our little daughter and it's just really changing you and sometimes I felt like you couldn't really talk to a lot of people because sometimes it's like that, no, no topic that no one wants to talk about unless you're like meeting the right people.
I would say is it for you that, you would suggest as like a first step to get out of there and then like finding that more clearer, more hopeful vision for themselves. Forgive yourself. I held so much guilt and shame for not being able to do what women should air quotes, biologically be created for.
And And I held that weight for [00:29:00] way longer than I should have. And once I realized that, one, I was not alone. Yes, it's okay to talk about it. We should be talking about it. Because there are women suffering in silence. So once I found people and years of therapy, I will put that out there too. I did not do this alone.
I did not pull myself out of this alone. Yes. In any way, shape, or form. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah. So get help and forgive yourself. And then once you forgive yourself, you start to see yourself as a whole person where you're not as bad as you thought you were, you are still worth something. And then your worth starts to build and, but it starts with forgiveness for yourself for you didn't do anything wrong.
Amazing. Thank you so much for that. Oh, that was such a good chat. Thank you so much. I will definitely pop all of your information below for everyone that wants to reach out and I'm so excited to keep in touch with you. Definitely. [00:30:00] Yeah. That sounds good. Thank you so much for this opportunity. Thank you so much.
Larissa. Okay. Have a good day or night, probably for you. Exactly. Yeah. Bye. Yes. Evening for us. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Bye.
Thank you so much for being on the podcast, Larissa. That was an inspiring episode. So if you want to have questions, and if you want to get published as well, or if you want to work with Larissa, definitely reach out. Please share this podcast if you enjoyed it and ask me any questions that you have or pop my link below.
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