I started a publishing company with no clue what I was doing

Mel Torrefranca: 00:00

When I was 17 years old, I had the brilliant idea of starting my own publishing house with really no idea what I was getting myself into. And I thought it’d be fun to tell you how I ended up making that decision because it was a series of steps that led to that point. And I do get this question a lot, particularly from teen writers asking me how the heck I started Lost Island Press. So here’s the story. I made a YouTube video several years ago talking about a book called The Sky Weeps With Us, which was a book I published when I was 13 and it was bad.

Mel Torrefranca: 00:37

And the whole YouTube video was about how I unpublished it. When it came to my debut novel, Leaving Wishville, I was terrified about putting out a bad book again. And I didn’t trust myself to self publish. I’m not sure if I have ever shared this on YouTube or not, but I was pursuing traditional publishing. I wasn’t doing this for a year, but it was over the course of several months.

Mel Torrefranca: 01:02

I vividly remember the first time I got a full request. I was on a trip in the Philippines with family to visit family. I wasn’t really logged onto social media or checking anything. I was just having a good time, but I got the itch to check my email. I felt like there might be something there.

Mel Torrefranca: 01:20

And I logged in and there it was. One of the agents had gotten back to me and he wanted to see the full manuscript. And I was on cloud nine. I mean, I was so excited. So I eagerly sent back the full manuscript that same day. And not long after I got the hardest rejection to take.

Mel Torrefranca: 01:43

I felt like I was just almost there. Like I got a full request, but he didn’t vibe with the rest of it. I knew at the end of the day that it was a persistence game. I would just keep querying. If an agent was kind enough to give me notes, I’d take those into account, improve the story over time and eventually something would stick. Right?

Mel Torrefranca: 02:02

I really wanted to work on the next book. I wanted to get this one out there. Also, being a teenager, I knew I was going to have much better pieces in the future once I had even more experience. And so I thought, what the heck?

Mel Torrefranca: 02:16

I’m just going to self publish it. My main concern has always been that it’s just not going to be professional. So I’m going to put all of this time that I’m putting into querying into learning how to self publish a book right. Eventually it came time to publish the book. So I’m not sure how common this knowledge is, but when you self publish a book, you get to assign your own imprint name.

Mel Torrefranca: 02:41

Especially in my case, since I was purchasing ISBN numbers, I won’t go into all of the technical stuff, but I needed to come up with a press name. I wasn’t planning for Lost Island Press to become a company. I just thought, okay, this is going to be the publisher name that all of my self published books are going to be under. My stepdad, he was always great growing up with brainstorming sessions and stuff. He sat down with me one night and we went back and forth.

Mel Torrefranca: 03:08

We came up with tons of different press names, and I wish I had the list today so I could share some alternatives, but I don’t remember them. And the one that really stuck was Lost Island Press. Some people over the years have asked me, where did that name come from? And honestly, it just came from my debut novel Leaving Wishville, which is kind of a lost island. If you read the story, you’ll know what that means.

Mel Torrefranca: 03:30

It’s kind of a nice name. I really love it because it brings me back to that original story that started all of this. I ended up doing a design. I don’t think it was a design contest. Was it on 99 designs?

Mel Torrefranca: 03:45

No, I think I just searched for designers in their catalog and found someone whose style I liked, which was Ivan Cakamura. He made the cover for Leaving Wishville. As soon as he sent it, I don’t recall making many revisions at all because it was like instantly the best book cover I had ever seen. I mean, fell in love with that cover. I was so obsessed with it.

Mel Torrefranca: 04:06

And it was the first cover for a self published book of mine that was good. Trust me. I mean, if you’ve seen The Sky Weeps With Us, you’ll know what I mean. It’s like an umbrella with some rain. It’s just not a good cover.

Mel Torrefranca: 04:19

I designed it myself when I was, like, 12. I moved on. I got the cover design. I hired a professional, as I had seen in a lot of advice videos on YouTube, to typeset my book. She did all of the formatting for the pages that would go inside and she formatted the ebook.

Mel Torrefranca: 04:38

Simultaneously, I was doing a little promotion on YouTube, making some casual vlogs about writing and where I was at with Leaving Wishville. And I really wanted to make sure I got the marketing right too. So I ended up hiring this marketer who had worked with a famous teen author before whose name I won’t share, but this is a teen writer who has had really great success and ended up getting picked up by a big traditional press. The marketing plan cost $500 and I was able to afford this as a teenager, mainly from YouTube. I think I got one of my first big YouTube checks, like for my royalty payouts and also a combination of voice acting because I did little freelance gigs here and there online.

Mel Torrefranca: 05:27

And so she did give me some great advice to really lean into the teen author angle because that is what worked for her past teen client. So I really leaned into that angle on YouTube with the videos I was making. And I did my best to incorporate a lot of the advice that she gave me, but it was a huge marketing plan. I mean, was like 15 pages long. There was a lot of stuff that she wanted me to do where I didn’t really have concrete steps.

Mel Torrefranca: 05:55

And as soon as I started looking into it online, it’s like, okay, that’s a lot of money. I don’t have that money. Or it was just super time consuming. And I mean, at the end of the day, you can’t do everything unless you are outsourcing some stuff. It’s just not possible.

Mel Torrefranca: 06:09

And so I did what I could with just my own time and a little bit of money. But that is honestly where most of my money went was into that marketing plan. I’m not sure I spent more than $500 on other marketing related things. So that was the bulk of it. I’m not sure that it was worth the money.

Mel Torrefranca: 06:29

Not that the marketing plan was bad. It was a good marketing plan. I just think that with the limited amount of resources that I had at that age, I should have not paid for any marketing plan and should have just done my own research and put that money into other things. After I published Leaving Wishville, I started to play around with the idea of turning this imprint name, Lost Island Press, into a real company. I remember one of the key things was that I was reflecting on all of the work I had put into doing this publication right.

Mel Torrefranca: 07:02

Every single step of this process to turn my work into a product was a huge learning curve. And so I realized like, oh, wow, I’ve actually developed quite a bit of knowledge about this and there’s people who have no clue where to begin. I could create Lost Island Press as a real publishing house and help other people publish their books. Figuring out the financial aspects of that was confusing for me. I wasn’t making too much money from my book sales.

Mel Torrefranca: 07:33

I had a bit of income from YouTube, a bit from my voice acting, but overall, you know, I wasn’t making a living off of my books or anything crazy like that. So at first my solution was to offer a publishing service where people would pay not all of the costs of getting the book out there, but they would chip in. And then I would handle all of the nitty gritty work and all of the management. And I would publish it under the imprint Lost Island Press. And to me, this seemed like a pretty fair deal, but I quickly started researching different types of publishing models and realized, oh, this is essentially a vanity press and this has a very bad reputation.

Mel Torrefranca: 08:12

So I think I had put out a post on Instagram with the publishing fees for Lost Island Press that never went anywhere. So I never actually charged anyone to publish through Lost Island Press. It was just like a very brief moment. And then I quickly switched models. So I realized like, okay, I am not able to publish a lot of books because I don’t have tons of money, but I have enough to publish one book.

Mel Torrefranca: 08:42

That’s probably better anyway, because that means I can put all of my effort into that book. And so that’s what led to our very first writing contest. And there was a fellow teen writer named Katie Flanagan, and she had reached out to me because she had seen some of my posts about my efforts to turn Lost Island Press into a real thing. And she wanted to help out. So Katie and I both went through all of the submissions that we received during that year.

Mel Torrefranca: 09:11

I think it was late 2020 after I published Leading Wishville is when we ran that contest. It was a lot of work cut between the two of us and Katie was a lifesaver for helping me out. But eventually we narrowed down our options to a book called My Brother’s Spare, and that was by Shira Behore and she signed with us. And I published her book that following year, along with my second novel around the same time. There were a lot of learning curves with these first three books that I published through Lost Island Press.

Mel Torrefranca: 09:41

One of them was not asking for source files. This is kind of a touchy topic with designers. My personal opinion is obviously in my favor. I always want the source files. If they finish the work, finish the job, and send me the source file, if I ever need to make little tweaks in the future, I can do that without pestering them.

Mel Torrefranca: 10:00

And I totally understand why some designers don’t want to share source files as a way to make sure that if there are revisions that they are in charge of those revisions. Like I can understand. Unfortunately, I just don’t work with those designers. It’s because that design company that formatted Capsule and My Brother’s Spare, they just vanished off the face of the earth. I mean, were gone.

Mel Torrefranca: 10:24

I can’t find any trace of them. I have tried to email one of them and it bounced. There is no way to contact anyone who might possibly have those source files, meaning that any typos that were found, anything that needed to be corrected wasn’t possible. The book would have to be reformatted from scratch. So the same thing goes with cover design.

Mel Torrefranca: 10:47

I mean, I always want to have the source file. And that’s one of the things that I ask before I work with a designer is, are you willing to share the source file for me? Is there an extra fee involved? Like let’s make that work somehow to make sure that I am in control of those files for the worst case scenario. So that was one big mistake was not getting those source files.

Mel Torrefranca: 11:07

Another mistake was paying for barcodes when I didn’t have to, because there are automated generators for doing that. So for anyone self publishing, just so you know, you don’t have to pay for barcodes. All right. And then the other one was not giving enough time for publication. Shira’s book launch was rushed.

Mel Torrefranca: 11:27

Shira, I think she got her book in the mail, like the day it was published. It was like a rushed expedited shipment so that she could just have a book in her hands. I felt quite bad about that, but she was so sweet. After publishing those three books, I decided to run another writing contest, I think in late 2021. While that contest was running, I decided to meet with a marketing guy.

Mel Torrefranca: 11:53

He is a marketer who is hired by big time self published authors and some traditional publishing houses. And he coordinates a team that does all of these sub things. So there are people who specialize in just Google ads and people who specialize… I mean, it’s a whole operation and he makes a lot of money doing this and he gets self published authors and traditionally published authors a lot of book sales, but obviously that is so much work and it’s so expensive. You know, I couldn’t hire him obviously, but I was able to pay him for a call. And this was the main advice that he told me.

Mel Torrefranca: 12:30

He said, Lost Island Press, it needs a specialty. Big publishers, they will publish a ton of different genres for a ton of different age groups. And he said small publishers, they can only thrive if they focus on a small group of things and do that really, really well. Thanks to him, I ended up really focusing on speculative fiction.

Mel Torrefranca: 12:51

So that was a huge breakthrough moment for me. And I was so grateful for that advice. And I think he’s so right. Like so right. The next thing he said is you need to do everything.

Mel Torrefranca: 13:00

You have to do influencer marketing. You have to do ads. You have to do social media. You have to do it all. That was super overwhelming to hear.

Mel Torrefranca: 13:09

But he gave me good advice, which was to do one thing at a time and to really master it. I said, you know, I’ve been kind of dipping my toes into learning about ads. He said, no, Mel, no more dipping your toes. Pick one thing on the long list of how to market a book and become an expert at it. And then once you become an expert, outsource it and learn the next thing.

Mel Torrefranca: 13:32

And that was such good advice for me. He ended up not charging me for that call that we had. He said, you remind me of my nephew and we have amazing strategy talks like this all the time. And I wish you the best. You know, I think back to that conversation and it was very nice of him, very helpful for the growth of Lost Island Press.

Mel Torrefranca: 13:50

And for the first time ever, was put into the opposite end of that because a teen writer reached out to me and was asking me for advice on how to build a publishing house. I actually met her on a call and she asked me during that call, if you could give your younger self one piece of advice, what would it be? I remember reflecting on that conversation that I had with the marketing guy and how he told me to pick one aspect of marketing, master it, then outsource it, pick another thing, master it, outsource it and how you slowly build up these skills because how else are you going to hire someone to complete a task for you if you don’t really know what that task is. That leaves you vulnerable for scams. I realized that his advice with marketing also applies to a lot of aspects of the publishing process.

Mel Torrefranca: 14:41

I had to go back and learn how to typeset books, how to format ebooks, because I didn’t learn that in the beginning. I hired people immediately from the start. I’m sure there’s tons of people who have been successful in their businesses in outsourcing the things that they don’t know. But I think there is a value in taking a different approach and actually learning each thing yourself, going through all of the steps before you start the process of hiring experts. So I said, if there was one piece of advice I’d give my younger self, it’s to get involved more in these different aspects of publishing, learn how to format Leaving Wishville instead of having to, you know, learn how to format years later and then go back and reformat leaving Wishville.

Mel Torrefranca: 15:30

So that was the advice that I gave. And I think that’s the advice I would give to anyone who wants to start a publishing house is to take the process slowly, try to get your hands on everything. Having that context of having done it before is going to help you so much. So anyways, that’s the story. I’m sure one of the follow-up questions is probably, do you regret the choice to not continue pursuing traditional publishing for Leaving Wishville and instead taking this path?

Mel Torrefranca: 15:57

My response to that is absolutely not. This was a 100% the right choice for me. And a lot of this stuff was an accident and just kind of exploring a new idea and giving it a shot and it not working and doing the next thing. There were a lot of learning curves. I made a lot of mistakes.

Mel Torrefranca: 16:13

I lost money here and there. And obviously I have so much left to learn, but you know, that’s what the rest of my life is for. And I hope to document as much as I can on this podcast. So thanks for listening to the story of Lost Island Press. And thank you as well to Bookvault, our founding sponsor of Off the Press.

Mel Torrefranca: 16:34

All books sold on lostislandpress.com are printed and shipped by the Bookvault team. If you like this video, I encourage you to join my private newsletter where I share even more behind the scenes updates about what I’m working on at Lost Island Press. The link is in the description or show notes. And once you join, you’ll get a free book as a thank you. Lost Island Press. Get lost.