When it comes to publishing myths, acquisitions editor W. Terry Whalin doesn’t sugarcoat anything.
Terry has worked both sides of the editorial desk — as a magazine editor with bylines in more than 50 publications, a former literary agent, and now an acquisitions editor at Morgan James Publishing.
He’s written more than 60 books. Several of them have sold over 100,000 copies. His latest is 10 Publishing Myths, which is essentially a list of the things authors believe that aren’t true.
I asked him to name them. Here’s what came out of that conversation.
Myth #1: You’re going to make a lot of money
This is the first one in his book, and he says it’s the first one out of every author’s mouth.
“Everybody assumes they’re going to make money,” Terry told me. “I don’t care whether they’re self-publishing or whether with a Big Five publisher, they all assume they’re going to make money.”
His point isn’t that books don’t earn. It’s that the earning doesn’t come from the publisher’s machinery. Publishers can make a beautiful book. They can get it into a bookstore. But if the author isn’t doing anything to tell people about it, that book sits on a shelf and eventually goes back.
What Terry says a book actually buys you is authority. Speaking invitations. Doors that don’t open otherwise. That’s the return most authors underestimate while they’re busy calculating royalties on a spreadsheet.
The moment he stopped waiting
By 2007, Terry had written around 50 books for traditional publishers. Every royalty statement he received was in the minus column — advances that never earned out. He knew something was wrong, but he assumed the problem was somewhere out there in the industry.
Then he flew to Los Angeles for an event and heard Jack Canfield speak. Canfield’s first success principle is that you take 100% responsibility for your own success.
“None of us want to take 100% responsibility,” Terry said. “We want some publisher or some editor — please, somebody other than us — to do that work.”
He went home and started blogging. That was 2004 to now, once a week, without missing. Over 1,800 posts. A weekly newsletter. 170,000+ followers on X, nearly 20,000 connections on LinkedIn. He was named one of the top 27 content producers in his space.
Stop building on rented land
Authors constantly tell Terry their audience is on Facebook, or LinkedIn, or TikTok. His response:
“I don’t own LinkedIn and I don’t control Facebook. Matter of fact, I could get kicked off of there tomorrow. Knowingly or unknowingly, I could violate the terms and get kicked off.”
Build on what you control. Your newsletter. Your blog. Your website. Your list.
Every platform you don’t own is a landlord who can evict you without notice and without appeal.
You can watch the full conversation on YouTube below (Please don’t forget to subscribe).
What actually makes him say yes
I asked him about red flags — what makes a manuscript an automatic no.
He told me about the time, back in his agenting days, when a box arrived in the mail containing a full novel handwritten on legal pads. Possibly the writer’s only copy. He read a few pages, photocopied a couple so he’d have a record, and sent it back with a polite no. He didn’t want to be responsible for it.
He reads the first page. If it’s good, he reads the second. If that’s good, he keeps going.
“What that shows me as a writer is I don’t want to bury my good stuff over on chapter five, because that editor may never get there.”
At Morgan James they publish 150 to 180 books a year. They receive over 5,000 submissions for those spots. Your first page is doing an enormous amount of work.
Write the book proposal anyway, he says. Even if no publisher will ever see it. A proposal is a business plan. Who is your competition — and don’t tell him you don’t have any, because every book competes. How will you market it? If you can’t answer those questions in a document, you can’t answer them in the market either.
On self-publishing:
I told him about the authors I’ve interviewed who did so well independently that they turned down the Big Five. Those authors are the exception, he said — the typical self-published book sells 100 to 200 copies over its entire lifetime. His argument for traditional is distribution: Amazon is only 24% of Morgan James’s business. The rest is physical bookstores, Target, retail accounts that indie authors can list into but rarely land in.
Terry left my listeners with a useful tactic I hadn’t heard before: sell directly to libraries. There are over 9,000 in this country. He interviewed a self-published author who built a list, called librarians, pitched them, took orders of five or six copies at a time, packed them himself, and mailed them with an invoice. He sold thousands of books that way. Almost nobody thinks to try it.
And one more, for anyone with a launch coming: if 300 people pre-order your book from BarnesandNoble.com during the pre-sale window, that triggers the national distributor to stock physical copies across the chain. Three hundred people. That’s not a marketing budget. That’s a well-worked email list.
Which brings us right back to where we started.
Where to find Terry
10 Publishing Myths — publishingoffer.com ($10 including shipping, plus bonuses)
Book Proposals That Sell — free ebook at bookproposals.ws
🎧 Listen to the full episode here.
