Publishing a vegan book independently

Taking the leap to publish your words can be terrifying, and oftentimes challenging. Yet with a little trust and positivity, the stars will align for you. Join Sandra and me as we discuss her experience and learnings publishing her book independently.

Dan Kenner: Hey, Sandra, how are you?

Sandra Nomoto: Hi, I’m doing well. Thanks so much, Dan.

DK: I’m so excited to have you today, for a number of reasons. You are actually, I think, the first vegan that I’ve been able to have on the podcast, which is really exciting. I don’t know that it’s—that I’ve necessarily found people that are vegan. Maybe I have had vegans. I’ve never mentioned it, but your book around business marketing and book marketing and book publishing, I think is really interesting. It’s fascinating. I’m excited to learn more about it and pick your brain on some of the learnings and the services that you offer for businesses and/or authors in the market. Before we dive into all of the fun stuff, I’d love to ask you, how long have you been in the publishing business? The writing and publishing business?

SN: Yeah, not very long, three years, I’d say. So ‌the first book I self-published in 2019 through Amazon. And then, yeah, this book just came out very recently. I released the ebook in September, and then the paperback and audio just came out November 1. So yeah, three years in, I guess.

DK: I mean, that’s awesome, everyone. It’s great to hear all of the different experiences that people have in such short amounts of time. I feel like as an indie author, you’re forced to learn things a lot more quickly, just by nature of having to manage everything, right? There’s just so much to manage. But what made you decide to self-publish the book is called Vegan Marketing Success Stories, correct? That’s right. So what made you decide to indie publish that book, as opposed to seek traditional routes?

SN: Yeah, well, I did think about the traditional route, and there are a couple of vegan-focused publishers out there, but just my intuition told me, you know, if you want complete creative control over your book, self-publishing is the way to go, and that’s how I did my first book. So I had some experience there. So yeah, I’m glad I did it this way. Yes, it can be more time-consuming. You have to, you know, you’re the boss of the project. You gotta cover all your bases and all of the expenses as well that go with it. But I’m really happy about how the book turned out, because the focus of it is vegan business.

I also wanted to make it a vegan book through and through. So not only did I make sure that the book was printed on vegan ink, so initially I was going to go with IngramSpark, but yeah, just one day I was like, oh, I should just ask them and make sure that they use vegan ink. And they straight up said no. So I guess I gotta find another platform, because that’s a deal breaker for me.

So, yeah, so I ended up going with Lulu, yeah, which did a great job. The quality is very high. And then everybody involved in the book, so my editor, my cover designer, you know, my marketing strategist, everybody involved is vegan as well. So super excited. Yeah, as much as I could, as much as possible to make it a truly vegan book.

DK: I think that’s amazing. It sounds—it adds an additional level of complexity to the publishing process, that’s for sure. But how did you manage finding and sourcing all of the ‌people that helped you with this process? Did you—were there specific platforms that you know, maybe other indie authors who are or are not looking for vegan resources to help them? How did you manage finding all of these people?

SN: Well, some folks I already had in my back pocket. So since the start of 2020, that’s when I launched my new-ish business as The Content Doctor. So my ideal clients are vegan businesses. So just as a result of being a part of vegan networking groups, yeah, I sort of had my editor in mind. So she she’s Canadian. She’s vegan out in Ontario, so just east of me, so yeah, I heard her in mind.

I knew I wanted to hire a vegan cover designer. And there’s plenty of vegan graphic designers out there. Actually, I did my own formatting, yeah. And then from there, was just asking around, I think the toughest one was a vegan narrator, and I wanted it to be a woman of color, just because that’s who I am, and I wanted the voice to be as close, you know, to not what I sound, but just yeah, that was important to me. So yeah. So I found a vegan woman of color out in the US, and yeah, and then as so this is sort of a side note, but as a result of creating this audiobook, you know, both of us realized that there’s another level of you know, when you submit your audio files to Audible, they have to be within this certain decibel range, and you know that the sound just has to be a certain quality.

And so she’s like, you know, I can’t do the sound engineering. You’re gonna have to find somebody. And luckily, I had just appeared on a podcast with a vegan host, and noticed that his LinkedIn title said audio engineer. And I’m like, “Hey, can you help me with this? I need to get my files up on Audible.” And he did it for me, and that was amazing. So, yeah, I really kept to that, that, you know, vegan criteria, as much as they can.

DK: I think it’s amazing. Sounds like the stars aligned with some of these, these people that you’re able to work with it, which is amazing. I mean, a book like this that’s so focused on helping vegan businesses get out there and ‌build their business and extend it, therefore, to authors, right? Because authors kind of have their own business in a way, particularly indie authors. Did you experience any roadblocks or challenges in your publishing process, any learnings that you maybe didn’t anticipate when you first dove into indie publishing?

SN: Well, yeah, as I was saying, the audiobook is definitely a different type of project that—it’s very different from creating a paperback and an ebook, I have to say. And also, you don’t have control over when the audiobook goes live. So when I was marketing my book, I was telling everybody, oh, paperback and audio and live November 1, and then yeah.

So I submitted my files about two weeks before that date and they just tell you, like, if everything looks good, it’ll be up in about 10 days, and if there’s something wrong, we’ll tell you. And so 10 days roll around, and I’m like, “Hello!” I sent a kind email over to Audible. I’m like, “I’d like to this to be up by November 1.” And then the date rolled around, and then I was fully prepared to tell my audience “I’m sorry. I don’t know when this audiobook is going to go up,” but it actually went up late morning.

And so as you said, the vegan stars were really aligned in my favor. So that’s just a side note about the audiobook. But yeah, I would say I didn’t really have any huge challenges with this. The nature of the book was very collaborative. So the book formed itself because I was very lucky to get 47 contributors that were willing to tell their marketing stories.

And then I have examples of an additional about three, three to four dozen vegan businesses, because I wanted to get at least—I wanted to have at least one example of a company for every marketing tactic that I talked about. And so I just found more examples online, got their permission to use them, and then they made it into the book if they said yes. So yeah. So my hope with the book was to have 50 case studies or 50 stories, and I figured if I reach out to 200 businesses I’ll get that 50.

So that initial 200 businesses actually ended up growing to 280 so that’s, that’s the number I had to reach out to get you know this 47 number back. So there was a lot more time and emailing to reach out to get that number, but, yeah, but once I had that, that once I had all of those stories in and the examples as well, I felt like I had a substantial enough book to move forward. So that was when I felt my manuscript was complete. So yeah, so I wouldn’t call them necessarily challenges or roadblocks. They were just things that I didn’t expect that I had to do.

And the other thing is, I was hoping to get a very wide range of businesses involved, so solopreneurs all the way up to large corporations, working with million-dollar budgets. Those large corporations never got back to me, or yeah, they had intentions of submitting the story, but, you know, the marketing directors are very, very busy, and they just couldn’t make my deadline. And so this book is very much a collection of small to medium size business stories. And so that’s, yeah, if you’re running a business of that size, this is exactly the type of stories that you’re going to get.

DK: I mean, I think it’s really great that you we were able to source stories and information from people at the various levels, you know, various sizes, various steps of their business process on the beginning, some that are more established, because that does provide a really good window into, you know, what the process might look like at various steps. You know, for someone who may be at the various steps when they’re finding your book or trying to get into marketing themselves and marketing what they have to offer, if there was any like highlighting or‌ common theme among these stories, is there anything that stands out as kind of like a commonality as a part of the journeys from These stories that you were getting from these people.

SN: So the two longest chapters are public relations and digital marketing. So I sort of divided my book up into the types of tactics, so that just tells me, yeah, PR and digital marketing, those are the groups of tactics that most of the companies in the book are using. The other thing I learned is that nobody’s strategy is the same. Everybody’s using a different combination of tactics and yeah, and it’s true in real life. Yeah, you’ve just got to come up with your own marketing strategy that works for you, even if you were to copy exactly what your competitor was doing, use the exact same budget, it’s probably going to turn out a little bit different, because your brand is different, your audience is going to be different.

So the overarching kind of feel that I got when I put this together is that nobody, yeah, no, marketing strategy is the same. It’s like a cocktail that you have to figure out what works for you. Keep doing the tactics that work and that ‌give you sales, and then ditch, or at least delay, the ones that don’t work. So, yeah, so that’s what I learned.

DK: I think that’s a really important thing to think about when it comes to business and marketing, because sometimes it’s hard to let go, right? Some of those things that you feel like should be successful, right? Like, and I’m going to use social media as an example, right? Because a lot of people that is either their main focus or maybe their only focus, when it comes to their marketing plan, maybe there’s a specific platform that they lean into very heavily. They put a lot of work into it, and they really want it to work, but it’s just not, for whatever reason. Sometimes it can be hard.

I’m actually finding that X platform is working better than these other ones. So maybe I should try to lean a little bit heavier into that kind of go where the effectiveness is. And having that reevaluation of your marketing plan is really key. Reevaluating on a fairly regular basis and making sure, hey, is this still working? It’s still doing well that it would, and sometimes the answer is no. So when you were building your business, obviously you have more than just the books that you’ve released them, you have other consultation and services and‌ various other things that you offer to clients.

So for you, how did creating the Vegan Marketing Success Stories book, maybe change the way and change your perspective on your business and how you are marketing your services?

SN: That’s such a great question. I don’t think I’ve sat and reflected on that. I mean, having written the book, I’m sure I’ve subconsciously absorbed everyone’s information in some way, but yeah, because I’m still in launch mode right now, I haven’t really sat down to think about whether anything in terms of my marketing is going to change. Because I had this book to launch in the last few months, I did increase the frequency of not only my social media posting, but my blogging and my email newsletter, my email newsletter. I was sending out quarterly, if you can believe that, and then I stepped it up to weekly, and I hired a marketing strategist to help me with this, because I have roughly 80 companies in the book. I wanted to give all of them love, and I needed some help with that.

So yeah, she basically built this 90 day strategy for me, which included posting about at least one company or about one company every day on social media. And I’ve continued past that 90 days because I wanted to do an extra month. There’s a lot of companies to mention, and then she told me, here’s what to blog about every week, and then that’s the same day that the newsletter is going to go out. It’s going to talk about the blog that you’ve just released.

So I’m a very organized person. I know that my content strategy will change slightly in the new year. Yeah, I’ll probably scale back the frequency of posts related to the book now that it’s, you know, it’s going to be out for a bit. Yeah, I’m waiting to see what happens with Twitter right now. Twitter has always been my favorite platform and‌ people are calling it the Titanic right now. So I’m hoping, you know, it sticks around. If it does sink, I might move to TikTok, because I know that platform is growing, and the organic reach there is, yeah, you know, is what Facebook and Instagram used to be. So that’s sort of the stuff I’m thinking about. But it’s, yeah, it’s sort of a wait and see with Twitter.

DK: Yeah, there’s, that’s a whole, a whole conversation we don’t need to get into. But I’ve heard a lot of other authors who have leaned very heavily into authors and business owners that have been in Twitter for a while. I admittedly have not been in Twitter. I joined it probably four months ago, and I didn’t get it. I didn’t try that hard. I’ll be honest, I saw it, and I was like, “Oh, this is confusing. I’m not sure.” This makes sense for what I’m working on now. So I have a profile and I never log in. But yeah, it’s a tricky thing to look at, right? With the recent changes and all the unrest, so to speak, that’s going on.

There’s a lot of authors [have a] tenuous look on the situation. And maybe I do need to, quote, unquote, jump ship, but you never know. I mean, anything could happen, anything could change at any time. But I think what you’ve highlighted is really important, not putting all of your eggs in one basket, right?

You’ve got your email list, you’ve got your blogs, you’re appearing on podcasts, which is another way to get out there. So if Twitter does happen to go down, then you’re not left without nothing, right? You have these other options, and you’ve been building your content. You’ve been building your brand in many other places, which is so important when it comes to being an author, being a small business owner, just trying, as with what time you have, to create a presence everywhere, where it makes sense.

I think it’s great that you mentioned you have a lot of businesses in your book; you have a lot of content to share, which is so amazing. I think some authors struggle. They’ve, they’ve written books, and I think they forget you have, you know, 80, 90,000 150,000 words, depending on what type of genre you’re writing, of content that you can use. Don’t forget that, you know, maybe fiction, right? Maybe it’s fantasy, or maybe it is nonfiction. Don’t forget that that is content that you can be using for, say, these weekly emails, or, you know, however often you do it. I’m impressed that you went from quarterly to weekly. Was that a really challenging jump for you?

SN: I mean in terms of time investment, yes. But yeah, I knew that it was absolutely necessary to in order to market the book, because, yeah, I mean, on any given day, somebody might not open that email, but if they’re going to get, you know, a similar one the next week, then maybe they’ll open it that week. So yeah, so I think it was a good idea for the book launch, but yeah, I’ll probably as of December, yeah, like I said, scaled back to monthly, right?

DK: It probably makes sense with the timing of launches. Is this something that you do full time? Do you invest most of your time in these objectives? Or do you have, you know, other jobs or responsibilities that kind of detract from this business?

SN: So my main business is content writing and editing for vegan businesses. I do marketing consulting as well. So that’s, yeah, vegan businesses is my one type of client, and then self-publishing authors is my‌ other batch. Books. So coaching, editing, formatting, indexing. I’d love to ghostwrite a book. I haven’t done that yet.

And then, obviously, if you need help with your content, like we’ve talked about. “I don’t know what to post on social media to market my book.” That’s something I can help you with. I won’t post for you, so I’m not a social media manager, but I can certainly help you write, whether it’s blogs, articles, or social media content for you. Now that I’ve done it myself for over 90 days, I feel confident I can do it for another author well.

DK: And that’s, I think that’s the biggest part that a lot of people struggle with, is actually that content strategy for whatever reason, whether it be time or maybe, I don’t say, lack of creativity, but maybe not the right mindset for that type of creativity. Some people just have a knack for it.

And I mean, I can already look at your website and see that you have a propensity for good creativity and design and some of those things that maybe some other authors don’t. Personally, that’s not my strong suit, and I recognize that the content strategy is something that is so important but very challenging. How would you approach that content? And I know this is challenging because there’s probably so much to discuss and so much that you could share, but obviously Spark Notes kind of bullet point list. How could someone approach a content strategy plan for themselves and their business?

SN: Yeah, great question. I think you have to look at your own capacity first of all. So if you’re like me and you are your own business, and you don’t want to outsource your social media or your content or other types of content to somebody else, so you’re all doing it yourself. Just be aware of what your time investment is and your capacity, because there are a lot of social media platforms, like we’ve said. And you know, how much do you want to be on there? Because you can be on there, 24/7, if you want to.

But yeah. So take a look at, yeah, where your presence is on social media. Are you going to post a few times a week? Are you going to post every day? And then same thing with your newsletter and your blog. Can you do weekly blogs? If not, then maybe it’s going to be more monthly. And then same thing with your newsletter, I think the more touch points that you can have with your potential audience, the better. But we’re all human and so and yeah, we don’t want to be spending more time than we need to online. I think we need to balance that with, you know, as they say, work, life, balance, mental health, that’s really important, yeah? Or if you’ve got the budget, you’re more than willing to outsource these things to somebody else. There’s plenty of professionals that, yeah, would be willing to help you do that.

DK: Yeah. And I think that’s sometimes the resources are there for people who are trying to ramp up their business, and if they’re not, then, yeah, looking at your time, I think that’s really a really important thing to look at. So for myself, I don’t have a crazy amount of time to dedicate to content, to marketing strategy, but you know, you do, you can still—planning with what time you have, I think is something that oftentimes people forget. Maybe they overplan because they think they have more time, or they hope to have more time, and in the end, they’re frustrated with that. For you, do you have a favorite success story, whether with someone you’ve worked with directly, or possibly a favorite story from your book that you know comes to mind, like, Oh, I just loved that story. I loved that example of success.

SN: Yes, and I should say that I don’t have a favorite story. It’s like‌ picking your favorite child, right? They’re all in their own way. But yeah, one that I feel really honored to have received and, and I’m just so impressed by this person is Meredith Marin. Her company is Vegan Hospitality. So she is somewhere in the US. I’m not quite sure where at this point, but in 2016 she and her husband relocated to the Caribbean island of Aruba. Her husband’s originally from there, and she found it just wasn’t a very vegan-friendly place. There weren’t very many options, you know, to get certain foods in supermarkets. No vegan menus. And so over the course of a number of years, she almost single-handedly, made this island vegan-friendly.

So she appeared in local media to talk about the importance of veganism and what it is, because I’m sure it was very new to people on the island. She got the opportunity to partner with some restaurants, and that was really just her reaching out to the chef and being like, “Hey, can you give me some options here? Because I’m living on this island, I love to frequent your restaurant.” And so yeah, she got the chance to help them create vegan dishes and menus, and because of that, she got more press. So she either wrote for or was featured in articles in travel magazines. So these are magazines that were in every hotel room on the backs of airline seats. Just really amazing media coverage for not only herself, but veganism.

Yeah, just everywhere she was invited to speak at about veganism, she showed up, and then she partnered with the Aruba Tourism Authority in 2018 to sponsor an influencer trip. So, yeah. So they brought over six influencers from the US vegan influencers. Showed them a good time. And some of that content that they put out, this is four years ago now, is still some of the top-ranking content when you search vegan and Aruba. So, yeah. So that’s the campaign she started with. You know, #VeganAruba. And Happy Cow, which is an app that helps people locate vegan restaurants and other other sorts of you know, places to visit, they named Aruba the most vegan friendly island in the Caribbean all because of what Meredith has been doing here over the course of a number of years.

So I know she doesn’t live there anymore, but she started an actual business. So her business is Vegan Hospitality, and she coaches people on doing exactly what she did in Aruba, you know, if they live in areas where, yeah, where it’s still not a thriving vegan community. And so, yeah, I’m super stoked to have had her story in the book, and she’s just really amazing, a great example of just yeah, just the power of one person, you know, she, she didn’t even have a huge team around her, helping her. It’s just yeah, one media outlet at a time, one speaking gig at a time.

DK: Well, and that also shows how passion can really do a lot of amazing things, right? With your passion about something, you know, any ‌author who’s passionate about any subject, right there, there’s authors that write about all sorts of things and various genres. And with that passion, there’s so much that you can accomplish and what an amazing story. I haven’t been to Aruba myself, personally, so that’s not something that I would have even realized, right? That is not vegan-friendly, or at least it wasn’t at the time.

But you hear these amazing stories, and it’s often easy to look at those and say, “Oh, that’s not me. Like, I’m not, I’m not capable of doing that, right? I’m just one person.” But like you said, yeah, you are one person, but one person can do amazing things, right? With that passion, and I also like that you said one step at a time, sometimes it’s hard to remember that we want to do everything right now. We want to do it all. Be everywhere, but you shouldn’t, because you may get burned out for one, but two. It’s not possible, right? You can only be in one place at one given time, and your mind can only focus on so many things at one given time. So it’s that step-by-step approach that can make a huge difference for anybody wanting to build a business or publish a book or, you know, whatever you’re trying to accomplish, whatever your dreams may be, which I think is so fun. So for you, how have you enjoyed the process of your marketing for this book? I mean, the self-publishing part, everything kind of fell together. For the most part, you published it, and now you’re kind of in the trailing period of getting that book out there. What have you loved about the marketing process and the strategies that you’ve employed to try to find readers for your book?

SN: Well, yeah, so I did what no author should do, and I thought it was being smart by releasing the ebook first, because I feel because I figured, oh, all the digital, you know, natives will just grab it first. And some people you know, did tell me, I’m gonna wait for the paperback. I’m gonna wait for the audiobook. So that was really interesting. And then the first week I released the ebook, it made the top 100 Kindle books for the business skills communications category, which is really cool.

And that just tells me, like, people still want to buy their ebooks on Amazon. So just, just a bit of yeah, just kind of the market telling you where it’s buying. And then just the number of people around the world, not just in my area. I’ve, you know, I’ve done a few local events now, signing events, but folks from around the world telling me that they’ve bought the book and where. And I think that’s the coolest part of it.

And also my favorite thing is just signing books, just giving that, yeah, signing books and physically giving it to people like that, just that warms my heart. But also, yeah, and then appearing on podcasts. So some are vegan podcasts, some are author-related podcasts, like this one, and then others more general or business related. And that’s, yeah, just been really interesting to have these different types of conversations all, yeah, all around the book or the business that I’m doing. So yeah, those are just some of the things that I’ve observed well.

DK: And I think it’s amazing that you’ve kind of hit at the root of being an author or, you know, being a business owner, it’s making those connections. Right? If you’ve ever experienced someone trying to sell you something, and I’m not going to speak negatively about anybody or any business, but if you’ve ever been in a transaction where, say, a salesperson is trying to sell something to you and it just feels like a cold interaction, you’re not connected. Just, it’s so hard to relate.

But being that author, being that business owner, who can connect with other amazing people and ‌learn from other people and share your experiences making those connections, we’re humans, right? We thrive on connection, even if we’re introverted. I think I heard mentioned on one of your podcast episodes that you’re introverted. I am also relatively introverted, which is ironic, right? Because here we are in a podcast, talking to each other, but it’s that‌ connection that really helps you realize what other people’s needs are, and they help you understand what your needs are.

And overall, you can learn so much and share these amazing products and these amazing situations. So I am not vegan. Some of you listeners may know that, but I think it’s amazing to connect with people who are and to learn from their different experiences, and overall, like we can learn so much from each other, particularly as authors trying to share our stories and share the stories of others. So I think it’s great I have not done any book signings yet, so that’s something I need to get on. How did you find the right places for those book signings? Was this you reaching out actively to local bookstores or locations about book signings? Or have people reached out to you about them?

SN: Yeah, good question. So even before I had written this book, I thought about, where locally would I even want to have a book signing? And we have a grocery store. There’s two locations here called Vegan Supply. And I’m like, Where else would I have it besides Vegan Supply? So I feel like I manifested it from the very beginning. But it did happen, because I was fortunate to get the owner of Vegan Supply contributing his story. And he also owns a number of, or a chain, I should say, of vegan restaurants. And so he shared a bit about how he markets both businesses. And yeah, and while we were on the call, he was like, “Hey, do you want to do a signing at our store?” And I manifested that.

So yeah, so that was my official book launch. I just hung out there and signed books for folks who came by. And then another business in the book, which you may be familiar with, PlantX, they have a number of XMarket, again, vegan grocery stores, both online and physical. So yeah, they have about six locations across North America, I believe. So the CEO reached out and said, “Hey, do you want to do a signing and a reading in Squamish?” So Squamish is about an hour, just over an hour’s drive, north of Vancouver, so of course, I said yes, and they organized a bit of a sampling event as well. Invited some of our local vegan vendors to offer samples to folks. It actually snowed that day, so not very many people were out wandering the streets. A lot of people came by to try out samples, but just not the greatest setting for the reading that I was supposed to give.

So what I decided when I got home was I’ll just do a reading. I’ll record myself reading, and I put a fire background behind me with Zoom, because we were out in the cold for like two hours. We did have heat lamps, but you know, that only gives you so much warmth. So I put a nice fireplace background, and did the reading that I was supposed to do and threw it up on YouTube.

So anyway, anyone can actually go on YouTube and my YouTube channel and find that reading that Squamish was supposed to get. And then just this past weekend, my aunt is part of a church, and the Seventh Day Adventist Church, I believe they are very vegetarian. That’s part of their beliefs. And they held a community event where they were offering—they did a vegan cooking demo, and they were offering vegan food. And so she invited me to come in and sell my books and sign my books there.

So every opportunity—and there’s a couple of both online and offline events that are happening in December that have invited me to speak about my book and sell my book there as well. So yeah, every opportunity that has been extended to me, I say yes to because that’s really what you have to do when you’re an author marketing a book.

DK: Absolutely, I think that’s so cool, and it’s great to hear some of those specific examples, because there’s a lot of people, once again, that hear this and think, “That’s not me. I won’t be able to find events,” or “I don’t even know where to start.” But you highlighted some very important vegan-related local relationships that you were able to make with people so that you can have these books. Nice. I think it’s amazing.

Just look out, seek out what you can and be bold, right? Don’t be afraid to have these conversations. I think maybe that’s the first step for some of us, but what a great success story to hear from you, and what an interesting topic to talk about, particularly for some of us who aren’t as familiar with veganism, but we are running short on time. So I always love to ask before we end, where can people find more information about you and your books and your services?

SN: Yeah, everywhere, with my name, SandraNomoto.com, so both my services and the links to where you can pick up the book are all there.

DK: Awesome. Well, that’s great, and I’ll have to look into publishing with Lulu. I’ve heard a lot of amazing things, so I’ll have to look into that. Thanks for that tip, but thanks so much for your time. I appreciate it.

SN: Thanks, Dan. Pleasure to be here.