Non-Obvious Thinker: Transform Networking with ONE Question

Note: This is a rough transcript. Errors may be present.

Alice Draper (00:01.848)
Hello and welcome to another episode of My Rejection Story. Today I’m really excited to be joined by Rohit Bhagava. Rohit is on a mission to inspire more non-obvious thinking in the world. His latest book, Non-Obvious Thinking, which he co-wrote with Ben Dupond, released mere days ago at the time of recording. We’re recording on October 3. And yeah, not only is Rohit a three-time Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author,

but he’s also the co-founder of Idea Press, which is a hybrid publishing company that multiple clients of mine have worked with to get their books into the world. Rohit, welcome to the show.

Rohit Bhargava (00:40.845)
thank you. I’m excited to talk to you.

Alice Draper (00:42.795)
Yeah, me too. So to start the conversation off, what is your earliest memory of rejection?

Rohit Bhargava (00:51.045)
My earliest memory of rejection? Yeah, probably like most people like being in school and maybe not making the team or not being picked first. I think that’s probably one of the earliest times when any of us experienced that. Maybe not. I don’t know. That’s kind of what came to mind for me.

Alice Draper (01:11.273)
I just, you just triggered that memory of me sitting on the sidelines hearing people pick teams and I was so non-sporty, of just like a given that I was never gonna get picked. But I would always…

Rohit Bhargava (01:22.627)
See, mine was a little bit different because I grew up in a time when little Indian kids were not supposed to be athletic. So I would not get picked because I looked Indian, even though I was athletic. So for me, it was double frustrating, right? Because I’m like, I’m better than most of these people you’re picking first. Now, eventually, people figure it out. They’re like, OK, he can actually play. But in the beginning, they look at you and they’re like, yeah, he’s probably not athletic.

Alice Draper (01:52.118)
Yeah, yeah, with me it was actually based on the fact that I couldn’t play. So for you, there’s the stereotype and racism at play. So how did you change that narrative? And did that narrative kind of stick around with you, like as you grew up? Or do you feel like you were able to shake it? I mean, not narrative, but you know, that feeling of rejection.

Rohit Bhargava (02:01.817)
Yeah.

Rohit Bhargava (02:12.675)
Yeah, yeah. I mean…

As with some things when we’re younger, they’re both really complicated and really simple at the same time. And so there’s a lot of things at play there, but the solution is pretty simple. I mean, once you get picked and you play, people see that you know how to throw and you know how to catch and you can run. That problem pretty much solves itself. And that’s the beautiful thing about being a kid too. Like they may quickly judge you, but they quickly change their minds also. They’re not stuck.

in that way that we get stuck when we’re adults. So in that situation, it actually fixed itself pretty quickly.

Alice Draper (02:52.036)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting idea of getting stuck in that notion, because I think that’s one of the hardest things that a lot of people sort of talk about when there’s systemic issues at play in the career world or the publishing world or whatever worlds we’re running through as adults and feeling like you’re fighting a losing battle because people have these preconceived notions about your capabilities based on your country,

your race, your gender, whatever it is. So do you think that having that kid, that childlike mindset, so if I need to just show them, is beneficial as an adult or is it a little bit more complicated?

Rohit Bhargava (03:35.077)
I mean, I think it can help adults. I think that when someone shows up and they do something that is impressive, you do sort of change your opinion a little bit. It is much tougher though, because I think that as we get older, what we think becomes wrapped up in our sense of who we are. And so changing our mind feels like we’re changing ourselves. And if there’s one narrative I think we should try and overcome, it’s that. I everything that you think…

isn’t necessarily making you who you are and therefore changing your mind doesn’t make you a different person. It doesn’t make you bad. It actually makes you pretty intelligent, pretty evolved. And I don’t think people hear that often enough. And as a result, I think that we don’t change our minds often enough.

Alice Draper (04:21.189)
Yeah, yeah. I remember this, this may be a little bit off topic, but I remember reading fiction book Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus. And there was this like very conservative, closed minded father figure in the book. And one of the defining things about his personality is that he would never be wrong. And if that meant not being successful, not getting a job, losing connections, like whatever would happen, like he would, he would be adamant that he was right.

and so he would lose a lot because of that. And I just remember I was very young, I mean I was like quite a few years ago and I read that and I was like this, this, like I don’t want to be this person in the world.

Rohit Bhargava (04:52.146)
Yeah.

Rohit Bhargava (05:02.115)
What a great thing for you. mean, at that time, right? What a great thing to actually learn that.

Alice Draper (05:08.048)
Yeah, but I think that it’s, it’s the self awareness is key. Cause I think that our instinct is that it’s humiliating being wrong is humiliating and knowing that we had a view that we were very sure of. now we kind of have to admit ourselves as wrong is.

It’s not a good feeling and I don’t think that it will ever feel good. don’t think any of us are evolved enough to not feel bad about the fact that we were wrong about something. But I think it’s kind of knowing that we can access that.

Rohit Bhargava (05:37.497)
Yeah, I mean, I think that I think all of us could benefit from doing a little bit. This is a very odd thing to say. I probably will be sorry that I said it, but I think all of us could benefit a little bit by thinking a little more like a politician might in the sense of, you know, they don’t ever say they’re wrong. They say, well, I had.

I made the best decision with the available information I had at the time, you know, and like now I have new information. I met somebody different. I had a different life experience and I went to, you know, the place I traveled and therefore, you know, my perspective has shifted. And in a politician sense, it’s waffling, you know, it’s sort of not admitting anything, but in our own sense, I think it gives us a little permission to say, look, we weren’t wrong. We were just, you know, we thought what we thought based on what we knew. And as you grow and get older, if you’re a

a lifelong learner, you’re going to get new information. And as you get new information and new relationships and new people, of course it’s going to change your perspective. It doesn’t have to be big deal.

Alice Draper (06:40.051)
Yeah, yeah. my gosh. This is like what my partner says all the time. He’ll be like, this was the information I had at the time. It’s so diplomatic, but I think there’s value in it. No, he’s not.

Rohit Bhargava (06:46.957)
Yeah. Is he politician?

Alice Draper (06:54.388)
But who knows, know, career shifts can happen. So Rohit, tell me a little bit about your story. I know that you spent some time working in Argalvy. I know you spent some time working in the service industry. You’re now a co-founder of IdeaPress and you also are a thought leader in the world of non-obvious thinking and you’ve been talking and writing about this for a very long time. So yeah, I’m curious to hear from you. Kind of who are you and how did you get into the position you’re in right now?

Rohit Bhargava (06:57.135)
Yeah, right.

Rohit Bhargava (07:24.547)
Yeah, that’s a tough one. I don’t even know where to where to take you on that one. I I guess I guess I got my start by being I don’t know if it was rejection really, but I got my start by wanting to do something that I realized would have set me up for a lifetime of rejection. And so I chose not to do it. It was playwriting and screenwriting.

Alice Draper (07:49.757)
What was that? Thing. Wow, okay.

Rohit Bhargava (07:53.925)
So in high school, I really loved it. That’s kind of, thought that’s what I wanted to do. I went and worked for theaters. I always liked writing. So obviously, I mean, that’s become a part of my career, but the playwriting and the screenwriting, as I started getting advice and learning from people in the industry, I realized that there were only really two paths you could go. Path number one was that you had to be a writer slash producer slash director to keep the artistic vision.

of what you created to be exactly what you wanted. The other was to basically write on spec, which meant you would write a screenplay or you would write a play and then you would sell it to a studio or a theater or someone like that. And then someone else would take it, adapt it, maybe hire a different writer to fix it, change the vision of it to what they wanted so that it would be whatever they wanted to use. And they would basically use it as like raw material.

And I immediately thought to myself, you know, that’s so unfulfilling as a creative person to like put your heart and soul into something and create it the way that you think it should be created and then sell it to someone who quote unquote fixes it and makes it different. And now sometimes it’s no longer recognizable to you. And I thought, well, you know, a, that industry has a super high rejection rate. things almost never get produced and

If I’m setting it up so that the best win I could possibly imagine is getting paid for something I wrote so that someone else can fix it, I don’t think that’ll be a fulfilling career for me. And so I ended up not doing that.

Alice Draper (09:30.198)
Yeah.

Yeah, I love the story. One of the guests we had on the podcast, Haley Jacobson, she talked about, I think she went to acting school and she’s now a writer and she’s as like a New York Times bestselling fiction, but she spoke about how she thought that it was rejection that made her decide not to pursue acting. And when she really pursued writing and realized that she’s going to get rejected a lot if she wanted to get a book deal, she realized that actually she just didn’t love acting.

enough to deal with the rejections and would it be would it be this true to say that perhaps that what you’re explaining about losing creative control of your project is what put you off rather than all the rejections you would face or do you think it was a mixture of both?

Rohit Bhargava (10:03.234)
Yeah.

Rohit Bhargava (10:18.531)
Yeah, maybe. I mean, I think that it was also maybe a lack of ambition slash confidence that I could do all the other things that would be required to make a project successful, i.e. raise the money direct, you know, bring that vision to life. I mean, I really just wanted to write.

Alice Draper (10:41.057)
How, sorry, go ahead.

Rohit Bhargava (10:43.491)
No, I was going to say that the prospect of doing all those other things just felt pretty intimidating.

Alice Draper (10:49.292)
How old were you at this point when you decided not to pursue screenwriting?

Rohit Bhargava (10:54.553)
Seventeen.

Alice Draper (10:55.978)
Okay, so you were young. Because I think that the interesting, at least my observation of myself and also many people I’ve spoken to, is that it’s harder to put ourselves in the wake of rejection, I think, when we don’t have a clear sense of identity. And we’re kind not old enough to have, I guess, built that muscle a bit or gone through some hard things in life that made us realize, like, okay, I’m going to survive.

Rohit Bhargava (10:57.317)
Yeah.

Alice Draper (11:25.974)
back at myself when I was younger, I didn’t do a lot of things that I wanted to do because I thought rejection would break me and then I kind of had to live a little bit and realize it’s not going to break me. So I don’t know kind of what your thoughts are and when you look at kind of how you approached rejection when you were younger versus how you would approach it now.

Rohit Bhargava (11:46.073)
I do think there’s a big relationship between your level of comfort with rejection and your amount of confidence. And if you generally agree that as we get older, we get more confident because we have more experiences, we have more successes perhaps to look at and point to to say, yeah, you know, I’m good. Like I know what I’m talking about. People are looking to me for advice now, right? I’m the mentor. Then I do think that dealing with rejection gets easier.

because your confidence goes up. Now I realize for some people as they get older their confidence doesn’t go up and so for those people I think rejection remains tough.

Alice Draper (12:27.326)
That’s really interesting. Well, if we go back to your story, and I love how you put it, by the way, I don’t think I’ve heard anyone put it kind of in that way. And it is like not everyone becomes resilient to rejection as they get older. And I think that there is a strong relationship between confidence.

With your story, was there a point where you kind of noticed your relationship with rejection change? Where you felt like you could put yourself out in the wake of rejection more easily? Or do you think it was a gradual process and there was no kind of point at which you noticed things shift?

Rohit Bhargava (13:01.945)
I do think there was a point. In fact, I think there was a very, well, there was one very specific point I remember because I was living in Australia and I had just moved there. And this was when I was 22. So I’d basically just, no, 23. So I’d just graduated from college and I’d been waiting tables to earn enough money to go. And I applied for a visa and I got one and then I went. So I had no job, no place to live.

And I moved into this hostel near the central area, central station in Sydney. And the hostel was a beautiful place, but it had a three week limit, which meant that I had a place to stay for three weeks and then I would get kicked out. Now I probably could have gone hostel hopping or whatever and they were like 20 bucks a day. So I knew I could afford that. Right. But I gave myself three weeks and I was like, I need to go and find a job in three weeks so that I actually have some money to be able to get a place to live.

And I had a ton of rejection because I didn’t really have any experience and I was not in the Australian market and I would do these things to try and save money. Like at that time, this is way back, but like the way mobile phones worked is you would only pay for the calls you made, but if someone called you, you wouldn’t pay.

So I would generally like call all these people and recruiters at lunchtime when I knew they were out. So they’d have to call me back so that I wouldn’t actually have to pay for the phone calls when I got a call. So was like trying everything I could do to just save a little bit of money and try and get that job. And I remember I had nothing to do during the days. So it was one day where I just went on the train and I rode it to the end. I was like, yeah, let me just get on the train and see where it goes. And I went to this end station. It was like one of these stations from the movies where there was just like a bench there.

and like nothing else and it was like outside. And then I was just waiting for the train back. And I got a call while I was waiting for the train back for an interview. And that was like one of the few calls that I got. So one of the few moments when I wasn’t rejected by with silence, right? So it wasn’t like people were telling me, no, you’re not good enough. They were just not calling, right? So that’s a form of rejection. There’s just nobody’s calling you. So I got one call and I got that one interview and I didn’t actually get that job, but the recruiter who put me in there,

Alice Draper (15:04.752)
Yeah.

Rohit Bhargava (15:17.817)
was like, I think I can get you something else. And then that recruiter ended up getting me a different role, which was a three week gig, which then turned into a job. But I remember that moment, new country, don’t really know anybody on like this train station. Obviously no one goes to sitting there and then getting one phone call and being like, somebody actually gave me a shot. Like it didn’t turn into the job, but it made me feel like maybe this string of rejection by silence won’t last forever.

Alice Draper (15:47.056)
Yeah, yeah. Did you get a job within three weeks?

Rohit Bhargava (15:51.177)
I did get a job within three weeks. Now that first three week gig I got, but it was only a three week gig. but it was enough money to like be able to at least get a, you know, pay rent on somewhere for a month. And then I was like, I’ll probably get something else.

Alice Draper (15:53.552)
Wow, very impressive, very impressive. Yeah.

Alice Draper (16:05.476)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I think that the very notion of going to Australia, going to a country where you knew no one and you didn’t have like a giant safety net and you didn’t have a giant network and everything is putting yourself in the wake of a lot of potential rejection. I think it’s type of activity that many, many people would be like, not no way, like absolutely no way. And you’re going to grow, like you’re going to grow from something like that. There’s no doubt about it.

back to like my first time solo traveling and I like kind of went out one day and realized my gosh I know absolutely no one like I was working remotely so I wasn’t worried about money but it was like this like moment of like I can’t message anyone to meet up for coffee with me because I don’t know anyone in the city and and then I met people because I was like you know what I don’t want to this time alone let me like figure out ways to meet people and I’m an introvert I don’t just strike up conversations with strangers so was like

Rohit Bhargava (16:57.647)
Yeah.

Alice Draper (17:08.328)
at me go online and like join meetup groups and stuff. coming out of that, I think I had a lot more confidence in terms of like my social abilities because I was like, well, if I could survive being in a country where I knew no one for a month, I can survive.

Rohit Bhargava (17:25.649)
Excuse me. Yeah.

Alice Draper (17:26.428)
Other things, bless you. So I think just to like kind of summarize, I think that this idea that can we went to Australia with no job, no plan, no money, like you’re gonna come out of that a lot more confident. Or I guess if it went really badly and you were like, I’m never gonna leave my room again. I feel like it kind of could go one of two ways. Yeah, yeah.

Rohit Bhargava (17:42.757)
Yeah. Yeah, it could have gone badly, for sure.

Alice Draper (17:51.052)
And post that, kind of how did that shift your relationship with putting yourself out there and sort of seeking big goals or yeah, kind of.

Rohit Bhargava (17:59.517)
Yeah. I mean, I think after that, well, first of all, moving to a foreign country where you don’t know anyone, getting a job and then building a life. And I ended up staying for five years and getting my citizenship too. So, you know, that gives you a lot of confidence, right? Because now you feel like, well, I did that, so I could probably do other things too. And I think that in our lives, that’s one of the antidotes maybe to feeling like we have this string of rejections.

Alice Draper (18:11.974)
Wow.

Alice Draper (18:15.366)
Yeah.

Rohit Bhargava (18:28.761)
having some sort of victory and then pointing ourselves towards that to say, well, you know, might’ve gotten rejected this time, but I did that. And sometimes it’s out of our control, right? I mean, I moved to Australia, somebody had to hire me. It’s not entirely in my control. I can do my best, but you know, it either happens or it doesn’t happen based on me doing my best. But there’s other things people do in life. I think they give them a boost of confidence that are within their control. Like if you have the money, like you could go skydiving.

Right? And everything after that, you’d like, well, I got rejected, but I jumped out of a plane. Right? Like I did that. So I do think there are ways we can give ourselves that sort of confidence that helps to deal with rejection.

Alice Draper (19:04.668)
Yeah.

Alice Draper (19:14.202)
Yeah, yeah. This is very interesting. I’ve never thought of this in this way and you’re the first person that’s mentioned it, but basically like creating difficult events for ourselves. Would it be like, you know, making yourself go cold plunging in like a really cold pool or like do things consistently do things that feel very scary and hard just to kind of build that muscle memory. Yeah.

Rohit Bhargava (19:15.578)
Hmm

Rohit Bhargava (19:30.307)
Yeah. Yeah.

Rohit Bhargava (19:37.647)
doesn’t even need to be consistent. mean, if you do it once, right? Like, you’ll have that for the rest of your life, really, right?

Alice Draper (19:45.592)
It’s really building that muscle memory that you can survive these things. if you’re obviously not going to consistently be jumping out of planes, unless you have a lot of money and you really enjoy the trend in Russia. So you got your citizenship in Australia and what was the next thing that you focused on in your life?

Rohit Bhargava (19:53.381)
Some people do. But yeah. Yeah.

Rohit Bhargava (20:09.221)
So after I’d been there for a while and I was, I mean, that was my twenties living kind of a single life. And at a certain point, I just felt like Australia was just too far from everybody. Far from friends, far from family, far from just everything. So I ended up moving back to the US and I moved back to the DC area.

And it was shortly after that, that I met my now wife and then we settled down and then we had kids. And so, you my life totally changed in every way, right? But because of where I was living and like my situation. So that was a big shift and that was kind of right at the end of my twenties.

Alice Draper (20:41.712)
Yeah.

Alice Draper (20:51.258)
Yeah, yeah. And you also made a shift from Uggleby to starting IdeaPress. When in this timeline did that happen?

Rohit Bhargava (20:59.365)
Yeah, that was actually later. I got my job at Ogilvy when I moved to DC and then I stayed there for eight years. So this was kind of eight years after I’d moved back to the US. Then I left and around that time, which was now about 10 years ago, 2014 is when I started Non-Obvious Company and Idea Press.

Alice Draper (21:08.398)
Okay.

Alice Draper (21:23.78)
I’m very curious to hear a little bit about Idea Press just because I know a lot of the listeners are authors themselves and a lot of them don’t know what hybrid publishing is yet. At least in my conversations, that’s what I’ve learned. So what is Idea Press and who does it serve?

Rohit Bhargava (21:32.901)
Hmm?

Rohit Bhargava (21:40.229)
Yeah, Idea Press was my answer to my own frustration with getting traditional book deals. So I had done my first book with McGraw-Hill and it was not a bad relationship. But there were a bunch of things that I just felt like I didn’t have control over because I didn’t. know, kind of like when you, what people don’t realize, especially if you’re not in the world of publishing is when you get an advance from a publisher, basically it’s like an acquisition and advances alone.

Like you’re paying back that advance with your royalties. That’s why it’s called an advance. They’re giving you the money in advance, but you’re paying it back. It’s not like you’re getting paid, right? That’s one of the things that people forget or don’t know. The other is that once you earn out, which means you paid them back that full advance, now you’re just making generally a 15 % royalty on sales, which means the other 85 % is going to other people.

And that’s one of the reasons why authors who are wildly successful, the more successful they are, the more they feel like they’re not in a great relationship with their publisher, because they’ve done all this work to sell all these books. And incrementally, once they’ve earned out of their advance, every book they sell, they’re making more money for someone else than they are for themselves. And that’s not a recipe for someone who’s going to be happy, right? Financially. And so when I started IdeaPress, that was one of the things I wanted to fix.

I wanted to flip the royalty structure, which I did, so now it’s 70%. Our authors get 70%, not 15. The other thing I wanted was to have more control over every element of the book so that we didn’t have to cut corners, we didn’t have to live with a design that the publisher was forcing us to take. We basically had control of everything. And we could do the things that we wanted to do that would make the book more successful.

That was the reason for me going off and doing all this work to get distributors so we could get the book into retail stores globally. We could get it into airports. We could do foreign rights translations. We could do beautiful printing with printers generally here in the U S or in Canada. All of those things were because I wanted to have the whole process end to end. the reason, one of the other reasons why I was like starting it back at that time was I was reading about all of these musicians like Beyonce.

Rohit Bhargava (23:58.123)
who were like, you know, we don’t need the label. Like we’re going directly to our fans. We can control the whole thing. Like, why are we giving all this money to someone else for nothing? And and that was part of the motivation, too, because I was like, hey, if music is going this direction, why not publishing, too? And that was the you know, that became the mission.

Alice Draper (24:18.416)
Were other people doing, like when you started IdeaPress, was that a place in the market? Like were there other hybrid publishers? Okay, yeah.

Rohit Bhargava (24:23.653)
Yeah, we didn’t invent it. There were other publishers that were doing that. But there are a things that set us apart. One was that I was an author, a working author the whole time, which meant that I was an author first and a publisher second. So everything we did was author centric because I understood what authors wanted. And the other was that I’m a marketing guy. And generally what people complain about with their publishers, they don’t do any marketing. And I knew how to do marketing and I’d done marketing and I…

you know, hit number one on the Wall Street Journalist and, you know, done a bunch of stuff to make that happen. And so I understood what it took to make a book successful.

Alice Draper (25:01.838)
This is actually why my clients chose you to work with you. What I heard in reference was like he knows marketing and that is I think one of the

like, sorest points, even with traditional publishers who, you know, they’re taking tons of your money, but they actually want you to be the one with the platform who’s marketing the book. And that’s why they often choose people with big platforms for book deals, which I think can put the author in a losing situation if they’re doing all the work and getting very little of the money. So, yeah, that’s very, really interesting.

Are there any benefits to opting for traditional? Because I know you did traditional for your first book. I’m curious, like what would make someone decide that versus hybrid?

Rohit Bhargava (25:47.407)
Sure.

Rohit Bhargava (25:53.125)
Yeah, there’s a couple of things and I tell my friends this too. So if you, in our space, so I only really know business and nonfiction books. So, you know, don’t take any of my advice really, if you’re writing a novel or a kid’s book, because those worlds are quite different. but in my sector, if a traditional publisher comes to you and gives you an advance of, $250,000 or more, that’s probably going to be better than what we can do. And the reason for that is because if you get an advance that is

you know, about there or higher, that means that they’re going to devote significant resources to you. And the problem with traditional publishing for most authors is if you’re not the $250,000 or more author, you get no attention, which is why it’s frustrating, because they’re spending all their attention on those authors, because they have to recoup. I mean, think about it financially, right? They just gave that author a quarter of a million dollars. Now they have to recoup it with sales.

Which means the pressure’s on for them to spend all of their time and all of their marketing budget, whatever marketing budget they have, to promote that book and to get more media so that they recoup their investment. So they’re betting on you and they’re betting big if they give you that sort of advance. So that’s one situation where going with a traditional deal would be better. What I do not think that most people have the impression of is, a traditional publisher will give me more credibility.

And the problem with that way of thinking is that most traditional publishers has shed penguin any of those they have 18 imprints Which means the brand on the side of your book the brand on the spine of your book is not necessarily going to be penguin Which everyone’s heard of it’ll be something else That’s one of their imprints and if it’s one of their imprints like if you’re under Grand Central or basic books or you know, Verso or whatever Most people I don’t think have heard of those brands

And so this idea that, I’ll have a recognizable brand on the side of my book doesn’t turn out to be true. And by the way, most people don’t buy books based on that anyway. They buy books based on either what they’ve heard about the book, or if it’s in a physical bookstore, they will pick up the book. And if it feels cheap and printed, you know, in China or somewhere else and just not done with good design, they’ll assume it’s a small publisher or self-published.

Alice Draper (27:53.182)
Yeah, yeah.

Rohit Bhargava (28:11.491)
And if it’s a beautifully designed book that’s beautifully printed, they will assume it’s a big traditional publisher. And that has no connection to what it actually is. Like when you look at our books, they’re beautifully printed, they’re beautifully designed. And when people pick it up, they’re like, IdeaPress must be a big publisher. I could show you easily a bunch of books on my shelf that are from Penguin that are not that.

Alice Draper (28:31.779)
Like yeah, really beautiful. Yeah, and I also have some traditionally new-purposed ones that are not very beautiful.

Rohit Bhargava (28:38.723)
Right. And people just assume, okay, that was probably self-published, even if it was Penguin behind it. Because when they look at it, they’re like, this couldn’t be a big publisher because it doesn’t match what they think.

Alice Draper (28:44.491)
Mm.

Alice Draper (28:50.729)
Yeah, yeah.

I mean, this, you know, there’s a saying, don’t judge a book by its cover, but I think that’s literally the first impression and we all do it. Like we’re, and this, think there’s so many subconscious parts of our brain that are going off that even leads us picking up the book to read the blurb is like, does it look interesting? Does it look credible? Does it, does it draw me? And if it doesn’t, like we haven’t mentally processed why we didn’t pick up a book to read the blurb. So just, then decide to buy it because yeah, we never even reached that point.

Rohit Bhargava (29:10.33)
Yeah.

Alice Draper (29:22.283)
So that’s really interesting. Would you say that that $250,000 advance is also beneficial in the sense of like having that time to dedicate to writing the book? Because that’s what I’ve heard a few people say is that that’s the only reason they would consider traditional is to get the money to just spend time working on the book. Whereas the other routes, they kind of have to do that amongst everything else because they need to make money.

Rohit Bhargava (29:50.413)
Yes and no. I mean, I think it sort of depends on your situation. Like if you’re working for someone else and getting a $250,000 advance allows you to quit so that you can focus on the book, then sure. But a lot of the people who are writing business books, I mean, they’re business owners, right? And you don’t just stop your business for six months because you got $250,000. I mean, a lot of the people we’re working with, they’re making, their companies are making way more than that, right? So…

Alice Draper (30:16.288)
Yeah.

Rohit Bhargava (30:16.709)
That’s that even that wouldn’t be enough money for them to just stop and devote themselves to the book. So I don’t even think that’s the motivation for a lot of people. I think that a little bit of it is just the credibility feeling of like, I got a big, you know, book deal. And the other is just the perception that this is why this actually works really well in business, the perception that, if I have $250,000 now in my pocket, that is

going to be better than making $500,000 two years from now. Right? And the author who will understand the pitch of, look, you’ll get some money now, but you’ll make way more two years from now. And even though you have to put money in upfront, betting on yourself under the model of idea press, you’re to get it back. And, and you’re going to get it back much more quickly. The authors who go with this hybrid model, they’re the ones who understand that message, you know, who buy that and they’re like, yep.

Alice Draper (31:06.999)
Yeah.

Alice Draper (31:14.732)
Yeah.

Rohit Bhargava (31:15.8)
I totally get that.

Alice Draper (31:17.815)
Yeah. What makes you discern whether a book you want to work with an author’s book or not? Do you have like a vetting process?

Rohit Bhargava (31:27.535)
Yeah, of course. I mean, I look at, I mean, I’d say I probably look at three things. One is the originality of the idea. So is this something that I haven’t really heard before or a take on the topic that I haven’t heard before? The second is the person behind it, the author. Are they a credible expert in this topic? And are they someone that I would want my team to be working with for the next year?

forever really because once you publish a book you’re paying royalties to the author forever. I mean this is not a relationship that just spikes and goes away like we’re going to be in a relationship for a long long time. And the third is is it timely. So I look at like the time element like is it should this book have been written four years ago. Is it good for right now. So generally those are the three things I’m looking for.

Alice Draper (32:04.984)
Yeah.

Alice Draper (32:18.1)
Do you look at, and I’m also curious, because you said you know people who have gotten those big advances, do you look at like the size of people’s like followings, mailing lists, audiences? Is that a very integral process in deciding whether an author can sell a book, I guess?

Rohit Bhargava (32:36.953)
sometimes, it kind of depends because a lot of first time authors, mean, they may not necessarily have that. And I think that one of the problems with publishing that everyone knows is the lack of diversity, the lack of minority voices that get publishing deals. And part of the reason is because we’re using these artificial metrics instead of looking at the caliber of someone’s work and the caliber of their ideas. So I would say we are very much looking for.

interesting people who have different perspectives and we can help them come up with the marketing plan to actually sell the book and you don’t need a lot of followers. That’s I think a myth. It is valuable to have a great email list. I will say that. mean, you know, having I would much rather have a highly engaged email list of 20,000 people than a million followers on TikTok or any social media platform like

you know, those two things together, the email list wins hands down every single time.

Alice Draper (33:39.001)
Interesting interesting. if someone and this is just out of curiosity if someone does not have much of a platform What would they what would kind of the marketing look like for them to drive? Momentum towards the book if they don’t have a huge email list or people in their direct network who are going to be like pushing book sales up

Rohit Bhargava (33:59.277)
Well, so this is where I think my perspective differs from most publishers, which is I would look at what their goal of writing the book is. So for example, we have had some clients where their major goal is to lend a new $3 million consulting client. And the reason they’re writing the book is to get that big consulting client. So for that individual,

You know, having a huge platform is not as important as having the book in front of the right people. And if they get invited to the CEO forum and wherever that, you know, those individuals who are making those decisions are, and it drives their business. You know, we have some authors who’ve launched their book and they only sold a couple thousand copies, but they’ve generated well over, you a couple million dollars of business that they can point to the book really helping them close. And so the book becomes a huge business win for them.

So it depends on the, and then other authors are like, look, I need to sell this many books, right. In order to actually break even, or I need to get this many speaking gigs. Right. So every author’s got different goals. And, and I mean, I’m a business person at the end of the day, I’ve run my own businesses successfully and I’ve done all of these things. I’ve done consulting, I’ve done speaking, I’ve done, you know, all of those, those different venues to make, to make money. So that’s one of the first candid conversations we would have with an author to say.

Alice Draper (34:51.441)
Yeah.

Rohit Bhargava (35:19.999)
What are these things that are going to be beneficial for you? What’s important? And then we figure out what the right marketing is based on that.

Alice Draper (35:28.932)
I love that you highlighted this because I think this is a very important consideration and not just for books, it’s for any point of media. know, some people start podcasts because they just want to connect with their ideal clients. Some people like me could start podcasts because they want as many people as possible to hear the message they’re sharing. But I actually interviewed a literary agent on the show and she specializes in nonfiction. And when I was asking her what makes you choose a nonfiction book, she spoke about things like

timeliness and like really topical like if you wrote a biography on Kamala Harris and then Kamala Harris is like, know, the Democrat nominee, you would probably get picked up because it’s very timely and tied to current affairs. And so she went into a lot of very niche topics and she wasn’t talking about a lot of the books that I think you and I would be familiar with, which would be more in the business and personal development space.

And she, when I asked her about that, she actually said it’s probably better to self-publish or work with a hybrid publisher because there is business incentive there. But from the publisher’s perspective, when you’re shopping for a publisher as an agent, it’s going to be very hard for them to know that there’s going to be.

enough sales to make it profitable for the publisher. So I’m curious, like, is that a concern for you? Like, you know, running Idea Press, do you worry that if there’s not enough sales, you guys will not be driving enough revenue into the business?

Rohit Bhargava (36:58.501)
No, because we’re not taking small books. I we’re taking books that have sales. So, you it’s not a situation where we take a book and they sell 12 copies. I mean, we make money, right? Because like, even when an author gets 70%, like we still get 30%, which in any business is a pretty decent margin. So, you know, we still make money. I think the challenge is for a lot of people just understanding

where that book fits into the ecosystem and when it needs to come out to, I mean, I’m not surprised that the person you spoke with talked about timeliness, but that’s the great irony also in traditional publishing that they say, we want really timely books and then they take 18 months to publish them.

Alice Draper (37:44.67)
Yeah.

Rohit Bhargava (37:45.443)
Which is idiotic, right? mean, if it’s timely, then get it out timely in a timely way. Don’t take a book, sign the deal, and then wait 18 months because you’re sitting on your ass, which is the reason why it takes 18 months. It’s not because it took 18 months to write, which is different. OK, if it took you 18 months to write it, I get that. But there’s all this fat, like you’ll send. I mean, it’s so frustrating. I’ve heard from so many authors, they’ll finish their draft, they’ll send it, and then they’ll wait like.

Alice Draper (37:51.403)
Yeah.

Rohit Bhargava (38:14.097)
eight weeks for the editor to be available to like even look at it. And then the editor will go through a four week cycle to do it and then they’ll send it back and then they’ll come do the revision. Then they got to wait another four weeks. Like that’s why it takes 18 months. It doesn’t take that long to print a book. It doesn’t mean so. And look, I understand allocation of resources and they’re doing a ton of books. I mean, this is one of the reasons why we only do like 12 books a year, because we’re not a book factory.

Alice Draper (38:26.421)
Yeah.

Rohit Bhargava (38:41.167)
Like I have no desire to be that. I could easily have done that. I could have done that a couple years ago and we probably would have four times the revenue. But I think we would set ourselves up to fail and publish substandard books if we did that. And I’m just not interested.

Alice Draper (38:41.686)
Yeah.

Alice Draper (38:57.588)
So, I mean, actually, I’m just learning about this 12 books a year now. That’s really interesting. So you really dedicate a lot to the authors you work with if you’re only taking on 12 books a year. What exactly does the relationship look like when you have an author like kind of from them signing on to post book launch now just continuing the sales? What would that relationship look like?

Rohit Bhargava (39:22.281)
So we figure out who they need in terms of resources. We pull in all the different resources and for a lot of it we use freelance because the freelance talent that’s on the market is like amazing. And also my philosophy has always been that I want to get the right team on the right book. So I don’t want to have one editor on staff and then regardless of that editor’s expertise have that person work on every book. I would much rather look at the book and say what type of editor does it need and find that editor. Same thing with cover design.

Which is why if you look at the website for Idea Press Publishing, ideapresspublishing.com, the covers don’t all look the same because they’re not done by the same designer. And I think that’s important too. And what they definitely don’t have, which is like the worst thing that publishers do is they slap their own logo on the front cover of the book. What is that? Right? I mean, that’s a pretty clear metaphor for who’s most important.

If they’re taking your book and putting their brand on the front cover, that’s like, we matter more than you do. That’s basically what they’re telling you. They’re literally doing it on the cover. And I just think that’s like a perfect example of how you get treated.

Alice Draper (40:18.486)
Yeah, yeah.

Alice Draper (40:38.294)
No they don’t. I’m just looking like a…

Rohit Bhargava (40:40.761)
Some traditional publishers do do it, and you’ll be able to easily see who. The good ones don’t. Yeah.

Alice Draper (40:46.314)
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, so there’s the cover workers working with the freelancers. What else is there?

Rohit Bhargava (40:54.989)
there’s working with me. so I become sort of a mentor slash coach, for them, in terms of anything that they, that they need. So should I do this? Should I do that? I’ve, I’ve done a lot of different marketing campaigns and I’ve spent a lot of money trying things that sometimes fail. And so the good thing there is that I can tell an author, you know, that’s probably not worth your money. And we’re doing like, you know, I’m launching a book now, so we’re doing some really fun, creative stuff.

around that so we’re gonna be doing a whole elevator advertising campaign where we do those ads in the elevator and we’re gonna test that and see if that works and if that’s a good tactic then now we have all the connections we could do some really cool stuff with that so we’re always trying new things from a marketing perspective remember I come from the marketing and advertising background like I used to do media buying and things like that so so I know how that’s how all of that works

And sometimes we’ll be able to do really cool things like remnant advertising where we do a full page ad in Wired magazine for you know one 20th of what it usually costs So there’s a lot of cool experimental things that we’ll do on the marketing side And then I’ll just report back to authors and be like yep. I tried that didn’t work. You probably shouldn’t do it

Alice Draper (42:09.903)
Yeah.

And I think that finding marketers who are willing to experiment is probably one of the hardest things with outsourcing marketing.

like I’ve read studies and stuff that show you know founders are very open to experimenting. Like often the kind of most innovative ideas have come directly from the founders themselves because it’s their business and they are willing to kind of take those risks. But that went as soon as you kind of outsource it and you start working with someone else, they can play it really safe, which is obviously very limiting. And so it’s probably a very standout thing that you’re willing to do as experiment for your clients, for your

Rohit Bhargava (42:35.897)
Yeah.

Alice Draper (42:51.198)
office.

Rohit Bhargava (42:52.227)
Well, I mean, it’s a little different when you own the company and it’s your money. You don’t have to ask anyone. And sometimes the barrier to experimentation is like too many people involved and everybody has to sign off and say yes. And so that’s one of the reasons why it really works for us that I don’t really have to ask anybody. I mean, if I think it might work, I’m going to try it. Obviously I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t think it would work. I’m not always right.

Alice Draper (43:17.051)
Yeah.

Rohit Bhargava (43:18.167)
And so again, you know, going back to what we were talking about before, admitting that, yeah, you know, I tried that, didn’t really work. So like, we’re not going to do that again.

Alice Draper (43:26.724)
Yeah, yeah, Stephen Bartlett writes in Diary of a CEO, he talks about working with a father and son in a company and the father owned like a multi-million, I’m not sure if you read the book, but the father kind of owned this like huge empire and the son, I think, started like a subsidiary brand underneath the main brand. And that when Stephen Bartlett and his company were hired as the marketers, they had all these experimental ideas and the father would put so much red

between them and their idea and the execution that by the time they’d executed like you know that tailwind was over like it wasn’t gonna work whereas the Sun would just be like yes go go go go and that within like 18 months or something the Sun’s brand was like way way bigger than the father’s brand and became kind of like the Shelf Name brand of

Rohit Bhargava (44:02.565)
you

Yeah.

Alice Draper (44:20.929)
bigger than the parent company which it was initially built under. So yeah, I think it’s useful to be able to take those risks.

Rohit Bhargava (44:29.221)
Yeah, is something to be said for being willing to take some risks and take some chances.

Alice Draper (44:38.274)
Mm-mm. And it puts us in the wake of rejection.

Which is why it can be scary, but I think very, very necessary. And I think it also ties to your book. So your book released two days ago as a recording, this will come out a little bit later. And I know that it’s a good book because I’ve been seeing like a lot of buzz around it months before it even hit the shelves. But for listeners who don’t know about the book, non obvious thinking, can you give a little brief synopsis on what the book is about?

Rohit Bhargava (44:42.755)
Yeah, totally.

Rohit Bhargava (45:12.281)
Yeah, the book is really inspired by more than 10 years of work that I’ve done to try and help people see what others miss. That’s actually the subtitle. And what I mean by that is helping people to be more open-minded, to shift the way that they approach their day so that they can be more creative. They can see solutions where maybe they wouldn’t have seen them otherwise. And they can just do more fulfilling work. I think that we all want to wake up and do something

that has purpose and that is different and that is not just waking up and doing the routine thing over and over again. And what this book is really about is how do you inject the sort of thinking into your day that the people who are coming up with these wildly creative things or coming up with these world-changing companies, like what do they do to be able to welcome those types of ideas into their day?

and what are the habits that you might be able to adopt to do that. So the book is very short, it’s very practical, it’s got like 48 specific tips for how to do this, and in any one of them you could literally just start doing tomorrow. You don’t need a lot of training or education or money to be able to do them. They’re all very approachable.

Alice Draper (46:27.676)
Yeah, yeah. One of the tips that you had, which I loved, it was, I’m trying to remember what it was called, was a way of asking questions. You had a special title for this, storytelling questions, yes. And I actually got an email yesterday from someone in your team asking for questions for this interview. And I was like, God, like I’m not really like a read off the script kind of person. It’s like I can…

Rohit Bhargava (46:38.514)
Storytelling questions? Yeah. Yeah.

Rohit Bhargava (46:52.946)
really? That must be the over eager PR team because I definitely didn’t ask for them.

Alice Draper (47:01.433)
And I was like, no. So then I wrote an explanation being like, you know, I do prepare questions, but I usually don’t answer them. So roughly, this is kind of the structure of the conversation that I’m planning.

Rohit Bhargava (47:13.227)
that’s good to know. I’ll have to let them know that they don’t need to ask that because they probably have other clients who are like, tell me what the questions are going to be so I can prepare. And I am very much as you could probably tell, not like that. I’m kind of an open book. Like, I mean, that’s some of the things that I shared. I mentioned to you before, like some of the stories I shared here, like I haven’t really told anyone else that on any other podcasts. So this is not my media trained pitch of the book that that you’re hearing. This is just me telling stories and

And you’re asking storytelling questions, so you’re leading that really nicely into that.

Alice Draper (47:47.413)
Well, thank you. Thank you for being such a great guest. Like you have, yeah, the answers are just, I’m very interested. So I hope people listening are interested as well. But I love the idea of storytelling questions and I love it because I don’t like listening to something where it feels very formulaic and kind of like there’s a script being followed. And as a kind of interview, and I think this has also kind of happened through the PR work that I’ve been doing with clients, is that right?

really to like find the heart of their story, we have to kind of go down some rabbit holes that we didn’t really plan where it just needs to like pick up what is a thread and dig further with that. So following that, you know, like set of questions can just keep it.

Rohit Bhargava (48:24.527)
Yeah.

Rohit Bhargava (48:34.106)
Yeah, I do think it’s, I mean, I do think it’s important that people know that it’s not the same as winging it, right? And the idea of storytelling questions, like what makes that idea so powerful is that what it requires is really active listening. Because what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to listen to what someone says, and then you’re asking the next question based on that to elicit a story. That’s what the storytelling question method is.

And I think that that’s why it’s also so powerful because it’s not coming in with a script to say, okay, we got these 10 questions, let’s go through them. And then someone says something interesting, but then you’re like, up, let’s go to question six instead of exploring that a little bit more. And I think that exploring it more leads to more interesting conversations. And that’s what this method is meant to do.

Alice Draper (49:19.839)
Yeah, and on that topic, I mean, I think that it works well if you have prepared. Like, I always like to have a set of safety questions. I just don’t ask all of them. And I do a lot of research on the guests before speaking to them because that, you know, allows pick up threads and there’s some information that I can kind of point to. So like, like you said, when you’re listening, I wouldn’t say it’s swinging it, say it’s something quite different. But I think from, if I read your book correctly, kind of the storytelling method, the first

Rohit Bhargava (49:28.004)
Yeah.

Alice Draper (49:49.853)
of that is really moving towards stepping into someone else’s shoes and why is that important to kind of harness this non-obvious thinking ability.

Rohit Bhargava (50:01.669)
Well, I think that what it does is it gets you outside of maybe what your own biases would be. And, and we all have them. So I know that bias is kind of a loaded word now and we’re like, wait, I’m unbiased, but I mean, we all have what we think. And I think that as we go through these conversations, like the more we can get outside of it and say, what was that experience like for you? And to empathize with it say, yeah, that sounds like it would have been really difficult.

Like, because I think the natural, there’s two ways to empathize, right? One way is to wait for someone to tell a story and then say, okay, the time when I had something that was like that is this. And then now you’re just telling them a story about you that hopefully connects to what they said. The other is to actually empathize, to say, yeah, that does sound like a really tough situation. What did you do next? Like, did that stick with you? Right? I mean,

That’s the sort of thing that you do when you bring these out, these rejection stories out. You’re not comparing someone’s rejection story to your own, right? You’re trying to bring out from them, what did that teach them and what lesson might someone take from that, like a listener that could take from that that they could use. And I think that’s the ideal way to do interviews. I would like to have more podcasts and more podcast hosts interview people that way.

Alice Draper (51:23.743)
Yeah, yeah. And I think it’s, you know, it’s like an active listening, it’s a different skill set and it can feel more vulnerable perhaps than speaking off the script. What I’m thinking of, as you were giving that example, is something that my partner said to me sometimes, as he says, sometimes you share your own story and it feels like you’re dismissing that person’s story when you share it. And…

I’m like, my gosh, but when people do that to me, I feel so like heard and understood. So this, this may be very off like left field to kind of your expertise, but I’m curious in the topic in the realm of active listening, if you have any tips on like what it means to kind of demonstrate empathy in a conversation and do it in a way that doesn’t feel like you’re now like comparing stories or trying to like one up that person.

Rohit Bhargava (52:21.195)
I would say that what I would spend the most time trying to do, like when I’m interviewing somebody, what I spend the most time trying to do is imagine what question I would ask if I were in their shoes, not imagine what I would do if I was in their shoes. And I think the difference between those two things is one is solution driven, which is a typical sort of criticism of men and how men listen, right? They’ll listen and then try and solve the problem.

And I think that I, what I really try and do is not jump into that mentality so much, that masculine mentality, and instead try and reflect more and ask the next question so that that person can lead that conversation. Cause at the end of the day, if you’re interviewing someone, you’re trying to put the spotlight on them in such a way that, brings their story out. if I wanted to have a solo

let’s tell Rohit’s story podcast show, I would host that show or I would do what I’m doing now, which is I would go on someone else’s show and then that way I get to tell my story and it’s about me, right? Cause I’m the guest. So, you it’s about the situation that you’re in. Like if you’re the host, it’s not about you. It’s about bringing out that person’s story in a way that’s interesting for what you know, your audience wants to hear.

Alice Draper (53:42.347)
I love the idea of, yeah, trying to step into their shoes and figure out what next question would help them solve the problem. I’m like, try it. mean, my brain is kind of has all these things being like, how could I approach this? My next question. Something else you mentioned in your book is you mentioned weak ties, building weak ties. And the idea of us is that we often kind of when we’re networking and building

Rohit Bhargava (53:59.013)
Yeah.

Alice Draper (54:12.391)
It’s very easy to connect with people who have a lot of mutual connections with us or share a lot of similar interests or are in the same domain or field as us. And what went through my brain when I was reading that is that weak ties, which I think are…

profound and I’ve changed my life so I’m sure there it would change anyone’s lives. It’s a lot more vulnerable, like connecting. Going to networking event in a room full of strangers to me feels like the most terrifying thing in the world. So yeah, I don’t know. Is that something that came naturally to you? Or is that still her?

Rohit Bhargava (54:51.193)
Not at all. Not at all. So one of the things I started doing, and actually I’ll try and help everyone who’s listening to get a little more comfortable with it, because most people are like you and like me, which is a room full of strangers is not a happy place to be. It’s an intimidating place to be. And it feels like work. And even though it’s networking, mean, there is the word work is in the word networking. So it’s not like, you know,

joy because that’s not what people generally feel. But one of the things that has transformed the way that I network and now I actually host these meetups as part of the talks that I give in different, different events where we host a seven minute meetup and non-obvious seven minute meetup. And the whole idea is that we teach people how to be better at networking very quickly by teaching them one question that they can ask that will immediately transform the way that they network with people. And the one question is.

What’s something non-obvious about you? Because when you ask someone that question, now they can’t just tell you where they live or how many kids they have or what their job title is. They have to come up with something else, something interesting. And when you ask someone to come up with something interesting about themself, but you don’t put it that way, you say non-obvious.

Right? Because if something interesting about you, I’m like, I don’t know if you would find it interesting. I think it’s interesting, but you know, right? Whereas non-obvious is like, okay, we kind of all know what obvious things are. and so when it’s something non-obvious, it’s like, I should tell them something that I don’t really say otherwise. And when you do that, you immediately get to the second or third conversation, very quickly, because usually we don’t share those sorts of things with people when we just meet them. And I’m not talking about going deep, intimate, you know, personal details in an awkward way.

Alice Draper (56:16.096)
Yeah.

Alice Draper (56:21.493)
Yeah.

Rohit Bhargava (56:42.597)
I’m talking about like, you know, I play in a band. I love, you know, gospel music, like whatever, whatever it is. And then the responsibility of the person who asked the question is to do what we were talking about before, which is ask the storytelling question after. you love gospel music. Did you grow up with that? Like where you’re, you know, do you have somebody in your family who is saying that? Like what led to that love of gospel music? And now you’re off and running. That’s it. That’s your conversation. Like it’s done.

Alice Draper (57:10.4)
Yeah.

Rohit Bhargava (57:11.725)
Like it’s happening now. And at the end of that, like it was amazing when we gave this tool to people in seven minutes, people would be like, my God, we got to start partnering together. Two people started a podcast together. like after that, I mean, just based on those conversations and connections. so yeah.

Alice Draper (57:29.854)
I

I’ve written this down and I’m going to be using it at my next networking event. It’s brilliant. Cause I think that, yeah, there is this, there is this very awkward, like small talk that happens where you feel like you’re just citing your resume because now it’s like, as you said, networking events and people are there to talk about professional things and it’s, it’s boring. And I think that we kind of habituate and a lot of it goes over our head. So this was kind of a way I think of cutting through that noise and getting to something of more substance in the conversation.

Rohit Bhargava (57:34.243)
Yeah.

Alice Draper (58:00.429)
quickly. So that was amazing. Okay, so I know we’re kind of at time now. So my final question. So in your book, you talk about, you advise readers to look for option C, possibly choose option C. And I think that this all starts with being able to identify option C. And in many ways, I think that hybrid publishing is option C in the book publishing world. And

an option that many people still don’t know is there and one that you can leverage. So for listeners who are interested in working with idea press or just exploring kind of if that’s a possibility, where can they find you and are you taking on authors or what other work can they do with you?

Rohit Bhargava (58:48.269)
Yeah. So I would say, I mean, we’re pretty stacked up, as you would imagine, with just, you know, not that many projects that we take on. But we’re always looking for fascinating, interesting ideas. So, you you talk about one of the themes probably from your show is that don’t let the fear of rejection keep you from doing something. Right. And I think that that definitely applies for publishing. And one of the things that I decided early on as a publisher was that

We, as you would imagine, only doing the number of books we do, we reject a lot of people, but we never reject someone without putting kindness into it. And so we have gotten pretty consistent with rejecting with kindness. So what you can expect back from me, even if it’s not a great fit for us, is not, some sort of mean commentary or dissection of why.

It just wasn’t a good fit. Sometimes it’s just a timing thing, right? And the timing isn’t great for us or based on the goals that a certain author has, like I just, I’m not going to take somebody’s money just because we can do it. Like I’m only going to do it if they’re actually, if we can deliver and do a great job with it. And so sometimes it’s actually on us. like, you know, I know you’re willing to do it with us, but we’re just, you won’t.

Two years from now you won’t look back at this and say, wow, that was a really positive thing. And I don’t want that. And I don’t want that for you. I don’t want that for us. So all the details on how to submit just logistically are on our website. So if you have a project or anything like that, you can just go to ideapresspublishing.com. You’ll see the details of who to submit to. And then you can just share a bit about your project. So that’s the way to actually do it.

Alice Draper (01:00:39.088)
and I’ll share that link in the show notes. I’ve had two clients, think so far who have worked with idea press and had a really positive experience. But I also want to highlight your rejections, I think are such a good way of approaching business because I think that when it comes to, obviously you don’t need to retain clients because they are retained basically once they’ve signed on with you, they’re there for life. But in other fields like my field, one of the best things for retention and also referrals is the fact that the client

needs to be a perfect fit. And so I look at it as a business decision to reject clients. It’s like, I will hurt my business if I take on a client where I don’t believe that they’re going to benefit from what I can offer. So I just think it was a very sage piece of wisdom. But.

Rohit, thank you so much for your time. This conversation was such a pleasure. And anyone still here, you can find all the links to Idea Press and Rohit in the show notes. And I’m also giving away a copy of non-obvious thinking to a listener who subscribes to the podcast. Just email me screenshots to media at haslingwriters.com. Thank you so much. Thank you. I know we’re a few minutes over.

Rohit Bhargava (01:01:46.745)
Thank you. Thanks for having me.