Interview with Patrick Walsh, founder of PublishingPush
PublishingPush, founded by Patrick Walsh, is a self-publishing company that aims to truly serves authors. They assure that authors keep 100% of NET royalties and ownership, and focus on correcting the problems in the publishing market.
Patrick took a break out of his busy schedule to talk to us about starting his company, the publishing industry and the future of PublishingPush.
Why did you start PublishingPush? What were your aims starting out?
I observed traditional publishing companies taking less and less risk. This meant more and more authors were struggling to get deals - especially new authors. I saw a rise in the popularity of self-publishing but heard horror stories from many authors about the process of self-publishing. I heard tales of companies taking thousands of pounds from authors and not delivering. I heard stories of authors not getting any royalties or not hearing from their publishers for months on end. This is what prompted me to start PublishingPush.com. Our mission is to make self-publishing easy for as many authors as possible. We offer professional self-publishing that is indistinguishable from the service they would receive from a traditional publisher. On top of that, we don’t take any royalties and make sure that the author keeps full ownership of their copyright, distribution and retail accounts.
What have been the highs and the lows of starting your business? Do you have advice for other people thinking of starting a business?
It always takes longer than you think. I have been working on PublishingPush for around 10 years at this point. What keeps you going is a genuine problem you want to solve. I was so determined to help authors self-publish and not get ripped off. Every time I would hear those stories it made me adamant, we were building a company and a service that could really help people. Marketing and reviews are the lifeblood of your business. You need to collect testimonials. Online reviews do the selling for you in today’s world. Once people have found you online this is the first thing they look at. Delivering a great service that people love will give you an enormous advantage and make growing the business much easier. A mistake I made was I focused too heavily on building our brand. When you’re a small business starting out focus on making sure more people know you. People buy from people and this is especially true when you’re a small business. Until you’re the size of Coca-Cola you are more important than the brand.
Where do you see PublishingPush going in the future?
I see PublishingPush progressing to assist authors with all aspects of creating a book. At the moment we are very focused on the production and distribution, but we are starting to offer more ghost writing and writing coaching to authors. We want to help more people tell their stories and create books they are proud to publish. Currently, we are the highest rated self-publishing company in the UK but have aspirations to become the biggest self-publishing company in the UK and then beyond. We only have one main competitor who is larger than us at the time of writing this.
What does the future of publishing look like to you? Where do you see it going?
Self-publishing is going to become the default publishing method. Why spend years trying to get a literary agent to represent you and then another couple of years while they convince publishers to publish your book when you could publish with us in 12 weeks and be earning 100% of your NET royalties. I also think NFT’s will play an interesting role in publishing. I am not sure providing books as an NFT will take off quickly, but I think selling digital art of characters, offering meet and greets or access to events or other benefits will be the main way they get used in publishing. Audiobooks may also overtake eBooks at some point. They are rapidly growing in popularity and I could see this happening at some point in the future.
Check out PublishingPush.com to find out more.