1560 - Publishing Challenges, with Darin Ostrom

Publishing is really just putting information out there. Print publishing is putting in a book, but there's digital publishing. So you have been working hard on these history projects of the hobby. What is your current situation with respect to publishing? Because you're thinking about packaging it into a book. And I used to be a publisher, but now I'm a former publisher. But I do understand the process. I'd like to be helpful and I'd like to see it get out there. The problem was I started a second YouTube channel about four years ago, telling in depth stories about specific aspects of cards, card development, et cetera. As I was working on it, every video felt like a chapter. I could recognize there was a book there. But what I was not getting was viewership. Because at the end of the day, whether it's a YouTube channel or a podcast, for some people, they want to get their voice out there and they want to be heard and respected. But for others of us, we want to provide the information, we want to educate, which obviously is what you're doing with your podcast. And if you're not getting viewership, then you've got all of this useful information that's not accessing an audience. I've been thinking in the digital space, the problem we have is we're all nestled into little tiny corners, because even for me and YouTube, there's a pretty impressive YouTube sports card community, but everybody's nestled into their own little groups and so you don't really find what's outside. And being able to get new audience members in is very difficult. That doesn't include podcasts and Facebook and Instagram and all these other spaces. So in the digital space, we don't really have much cross awareness. As the world of books is fading away, I feel like it's still the best gathering space that we have for communicating and for learning. Now, that's all a great concept, but then you've got to actually turn it into a reality. And I don't recognize that the book industry is ready to embrace something like this. For me, it's a book about the evolution of sports cards in the 1990s. Nobody's ever done a book like this, which means it is that book we've been waiting for. Whether we realized it or not, it's a very specific opportunity. But there's no market for a publisher to say, I'm willing to invest in it. I realized that in order for the book to really be able to reach out and connect with audiences. And that's not just sports card collectors, that's also People who collected for a few years in the 90s. This book isn't as much a nostalgia book as it is an educational book. And I haven't been able to get agents or publishing companies interested in the book. And so it would be more effective for me to push it forward, although I can't do the whole thing myself, mainly from funds. Sometimes I think I authored these books and yes, I did. But I also had a lot of friends and supporters, not just customers, but people that understood what I was trying to do, came along, gave assistance, and probably in some sense helped promote it. So I wasn't just a guy showing up with, hey, here's something. I'd paid my dues, you've paid your dues. But my sense is, Darren, you're unwilling to be untruthful and boisterous and exaggerating and controversial and offensive because that's what draws the eyeballs and the ears for content. Sometimes you're telling the story and it's a wonderful story. But right now I'm figuring out you're at least going to sell one book to me. Thank you. But it's hard to find the niche. The reason it hadn't been done, it's not appealing to a mainstream publisher. Mainstream publishers in almost every field now are really looking for authors that already have probably thousands of followers, customers and maybe tens of thousands book publishers anyway. I've helped other people over the years and what they wind up doing, Darren, is some amount of self publishing, which is in fact how I got started this idea of doing a price guide back 40, 47 years ago. Nobody thought that was a good deal, but I believed in it. And I had a business partner, Denny Eckes, who totally believed in it. And the other thing that you don't have exactly is this ready made wholesale distribution that Denny had. He was already a wholesaler within the industry, sending to card shops and trading out with other big dealers, big wholesalers, distributors. That's what I'm not seeing for you right now. On the other hand, when you sell them wholesale, you're selling them at half price and when you're selling retail, you're selling for full price. I don't know that this is a book that the card shops are going to say, give me 10 copies and I'm going to try to resell them there. I think you're true to your name. You're being the sports card professor. And I did the same thing. When you go too deep, that sometimes can limit the audience. Even in my podcast, I'm not Trying to be controversial. I'm sure if I were, I would have more listeners or viewers, whatever. But that's not what my motivation is. So I don't think your motivation is to make a lot of money. Just like my motivation was, it was to do something that really ought to be done and to do it right. But it's hard to figure out how that's going to be a break even financial position for you. If we think of it that way though, you were thinking about digital publishing, where you're developing the manuscript and then Amazon and others are selling it for you and you're packaging it. When I studied doing some things like this before I did the podcast about doing some books, I realized that doing books took longer than doing podcasts. And the good thing about podcasts, they were free and people could try it and then they could say, that was good, I'll listen tomorrow or in a couple of days. And the Amazon publishing model at that time seemed to be better for smaller titles. Most women read long books, men read short books, if at all. If you were to serialize it or to break it down, and like I said, the Amazon publishing model, you could charge less, but then what else do you have from this author? And so Instead of a 500 page book, it'd be better to do 1050 page books or 500 page books. And the money works out again, as long as you're not warehousing and printing, which Amazon can do that for you. Because the print thing is challenging. There's a lot of publishers going out of business. They're not ignoring what you're saying. They're saying what you want to do is not going to be financially worth it for us as the publisher. And I think that's true of my former company. I think they've moved away from print. We did a lot of that, but that's been 25 years ago. Yeah, marketing is really the key because the audience is out there and you got to connect with them from the start. I believe that you could do it through a pre order system, through card shops. If you send out a stand up cardboard display to all the card shops that say at a certain time we're going to open the window for pre orders, then they would have a good understanding of how many books they could probably sell. And then from that you print the books and then the profits off of that is what generates the next printing of books. In which case you're not risking money on books that might not be sold. They're already sold. It's the marketing of the front end. And that's wave one, which is to card shops, which I believe if card shops have enough time to probe their customer base, there could be a decent number of books per card shop, which probably around 2,000 card shops at this point. And then you reach out outside to spaces that are sports related but not sports card related to people who remember card collecting. Nostalgia wise going. I remember doing that. I'm curious about that. That to me is the real larger audience that you'd be connecting with. So you could scale it up based upon mostly a cash forward model. Again with the exception of the initial outlay for editor. Got to speak with a lawyer at some point, the initial marketing, et cetera. So it'd be a low financial impact beginning that would then be self generating movement forward. What you're talking about is a tried and true model from the past. It's well thought out what you want to do. But the differences are not as many people do print books as much now. Also when I was doing it at the peak there were 20,000 card shops, not 2,000 card shops. And I'm not hearing from you yet is the hook. I was doing price guides where they said I need this and I'm going to read it. It's going to be a reference but I'm going to make money. So what kind of a hook do you have that they need to get this because it'll be profitable for them. Not just a textbook, but something where they're going to be able to hobby better. And I agree it's in there, but it might be too subtle for the mass market. I talk about subtraction by addition and addition by subtraction and learning about the future by looking at the past. Basically you're stuck between the current day realities and you want to talk about the 90s. And you've got the rudiments of a publishing model from then. But I don't think it works anymore. Let's pivot here and say is there a corporate sponsor out there that would say this book needs to be done? Collectors, which wants to make collecting safe, easy and fun and Nat Turner, they bought up Beckett, my old company and sgc, but they have their own magazines. This could be serialized in the magazine and you'd get something out of that and the content could be released in that way. The other one is Fanatics. Why would fanatics want to sponsor your book now if it was a book that you did with an eye toward. Every card shop should have this book because it's going to help them understand that period of time that was very pivotal and volatile in the history of collecting with the junk wax and these golden age of inserts and parallels and all that. And maybe fanatics would say, this is not a textbook, but every one of the card shops ought to have this on their shelf so they can understand when people come in or they're trying to make sense. See what I'm getting there? It's not a perfect fit, but if they, if they told the card shops, you need to get this book, it's really valuable. It's going to fill in the gaps of the understanding you don't have. That Darren has accumulated all in one place to understand the roots of the hobby. Collectors definitely is in my mind because one, I see a good opportunity for a partnership with Beckett Media because they already have the outreach to card shops and I mentioned about the display that could be sent to every card shop. They could just stick that in with the Beckett annuals that they send out. Every card shop, I believe is still getting Beckett annuals. So you've got that opportunity already packaged together. Because nostalgia is something we in Gen X haven't really gotten into, which is weird with baby boomers. Nostalgia was huge in the 80s and we've even been seeing a lot of nostalgia with millennials. But Gen X, that's an untapped market. As I see it. If you can get the marketing out there and just get people going. I hadn't thought about that. In which case, that partnership, if I can carry enough of the external weight, then it's potentially low stress for Beckett and it's an opportunity for fanatics to try to get better excitement over a segment of the sports card space that doesn't really get a lot of love. I think the P Word partnership is a non starter for some of these. I, I don't think they want to do it that way. And let me just say, the way I would encourage you to look at this is that you're coming up with suggestions of how these other card shops or Becket or collectors or somebody could accommodate you in making this happen. And I think you need to flip it and say, how can you accommodate them on the objectives they have in terms of having, for example, a strong relationship with the card shops, but you're wanting to give them something additional to distribute these marketing materials, their marketing material. And this goes for PSA as well. They have SMR and Beckett as Beckett Vintage and other publications already going into those stores. My suggestion at least, for starters, you've got to get enough batiz in those magazines that are already going in there and getting in the hands of whether it's 10 chapters and you put in chapter one as a long form article within one of those, they do the editing and they get it in there and it's illustrated and it's nice looking, people would like it. Then after that you can go to whoever did that say, look, I'd like to publish the whole book and can you give me a free ad in the back of the magazine? I just think asking them to have a placard or a window poster or something like that, that's extra work for them. If they can fit you into their vehicle, which is the magazine, in fact, you could get paid to do those articles. You could do 10 articles. I think people would rather have 10 chapters in a magazine. They're already getting that. They say, hey, this is great. I can't wait till next month to find out more than getting a larger book that's a separate purchase. I think it'd be a completely different receptivity if you said, look, I'd like to submit some articles for SMR or Beckett Vintage, then that's gonna be your answer. You're gonna have people out there familiar with your work. Really questionable, Darren. Where the book is the way to go. Publishing is getting information out there and form it takes has evolved over the years to where now it's more digital and you're competing against free because free is podcasts and podcasts are very easily transcribed. Now you're also competing against AI who can make up stuff faster than you can research it. They could do a reasonable 90% accurate facsimile of what you've and I and others have painstakingly verified. But they can generate however many hundred pages you want and it'll all sound very affirming. So you're competing also against Claude and ChatGPT. That could give you a history of sports cards in the 90s and it might not even be 90% correct. It might be 50% correct. Again, I'm betting on you. But that's what you're competing against of people wanting to get the quick and dirty answer. That's mostly right. And so I want what you're doing to happen. I just think the most cost effective way to do it is probably not initially thinking about a book. But you'd already mentioned in your explanation about getting it out there and that still I hold is the biggest problem we have in the digital space is that there's no way to connect broadly to audience Members, you gotta go pocket by pocket to be able to do that. Because on YouTube, the amount of work I would have to do to get all the people in the sports card space and YouTube to even know about my channel and then get them interested to look at it would be an enormous undertaking. And then that doesn't include all the other spaces. I like what you're talking about with the articles. I think that's a great idea. It was a lot easier when it was you and tough stuff. And there were just a couple of articles that we all gathered around and now it's a lot more separated out. It's the great conundrum. Because on the flip side, not just how well will books sell, but again, how do I let people know about the book as well? That's easier to manage for a book. Because even with a digital book, an ebook. Yeah, but we're still not on the same page of one aspect of this. And that is the other topic you and I are eventually going to talk about is the history of virality and in the hobby. And I a great beneficiary of that. I'm still not hearing the hook from you. When somebody gets this book regardless of how much they paid for it. So you've got a book, you put it in the hands of somebody. Why are they going to tell their best friend, their collecting buddy, that you got to get this book too? This is chock full of information. It has helped me so much. What is going to be the viral narrative? Because you know, with the Beckett price guides, what happened? They said, hey, you got to know what the up and down arrows and what's going on. And yeah, the articles are good and there's some good artwork in there, but you're going to see a price guide, you're going to be in the know of what's going up and what's going down and what things are. And so what do you have that's like that? Because I don't think I sold magazines one at a time. They were bundled. Once we got into a card shop, it really had a viral spread. And again, this is a compliment to you. I think you're unwilling to lie and cheat and steal and exaggerate and click bait because what you're doing is solid, but it's not controversial for people in it for the money. What's the payoff for them? We're probably pretty similar in terms of being in there for the knowledge. I loved researching and being able to share findings. But here's the thing. That stuff that People wouldn't have been willing to pay for. Darren was embedded in the price guides in the books and sometimes in the magazines, but they didn't feel like they were paying for that. That just came along with it. They wouldn't have paid for it. They were paying for greed in some cases of I need to have this so I can make more money. Greed is one of the great motivators in the hobby. And I'm not sure you're tapping into that in a way that people are going to say, hey, you got to get this, because if you don't, you're a loser. You're going to be not in the know of what was going on 35 years ago. And people say, why do I care? I care. And like we said, it's two of the most amazing periods. In the 90s, you had the junk wax at the beginning, and the absolute golden age of parallels and inserts began in 97. And you had companies going out of business and companies sprouting up. It's a fascinating story just freestyling here, maybe to turn it into a reality show, but definitely would be that instead of Love island, it's Card Company island. And you've got 13 card companies at the beginning, in 92 doing football and they get voted off the island, which they kind of did by the end of hobby. Said, these guys aren't as good. They've messed up. We're spending our dollars over here. Maybe that's a more fascinating story and you have some tidbits about that. Well, it's interesting hearing you talk because you've always been more on the financial side of collecting. The trading, buying and selling. That's really been the thing that has driven you. Whereas I've 100% on the collecting side. I don't ever consider the resale value of a card. So I look at the 90s as an historian and as a kid coming back going, oh, so that's what was going on. Right now as you're talking, I'm trying to shift my mindset to interpreting the passionate collector who is excited to finally understand what was going on in the card shops that I wasn't realizing because it was all happening in real time. And this lays out that whole experience I had. To me, that's just natural. The book. I talk about it as an educational book and a nostalgia book because it does both of those things at the same time. But I come at it as a collector who has been collecting all these cards, who is trying to understand the ins and outs. So I'M working on trying to adjust over to a different perspective. Effective. That's more aligned with what you're talking about. No, you need to be who you are. I don't think I'm completely in the financial camp, in my heart anyway. But Jeremy Lee has done work on exactly this issue. His hobby spectrum, where you take his diagnostic test and you come out where you're more financially motivated or more collecting motivated. So the lower numbers are the people that would be totally in your corner and the people with the high numbers that are the tycoons and the flippers and things like that, they're going to not even give you a second thought. Okay. But in the lower numbers, they're going to say, wow, I'd love to have something like this. I don't know if you ever got a copy of Mike Kramer's book, Pacific Hitting Cards. And his book was not a tell all, but it had enough details about what was going on and I don't think anybody made any money and I don't think he really even sold that many books. But he got his story out there and it was fascinating for me because on Jeremy Lee's spectrum, Darren, I'm a hybrid because I love the hobby and I love cards, but I understand it's a hobby and an industry. I had to make payroll when I was the boss. I could have these great ideas, but we had to have positive cash flow and we had to evolve our publishing methods. But I don't think I really fully understood how much viral marketing we had that we didn't pay for. When I got started, I didn't know how commercially viable it would be. I lost money for two years, didn't pay myself, but I had saved up money to be able to give it a go. And then it started to turn the corner, but I wasn't doing it for the money, but I didn't want to go broke doing it either. So you need to redefine how to get this material out there. If you have a sponsor or have some way to serialize it to get it out there and you build up a following. There's crowdsourcing for this stuff. Brett McGrath, he's got a Patreon group and he got all these irons in the fire, but he's dealing with topics and he's interviewing people. He's full time in the hobby now, so that's an example, but he's not writing any books. If Mike Payne was still at Beckett, who was my close friend and the editorial director, he'd jump all over this. But his claim to fame is not the articles that he did. He did the 300 Great Cards book, and that became a PSA registry. And so people have to buy the book. If you had a registry, a list of these are the hundred best cards from the 90s. And then PSA turns that into a registry. You need to get what Darren says of the hundred iconic cards. Now, that's an idea that makes people, hey, I got to get that.