We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Julie Smith. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Julie below.

Hi Julie , thanks for joining us today. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?

I started my business in 2010, just as independent publishing was moving out of the pariah stage into respectability, among authors, if not others in traditional publishing. In the previous few years, there’d been a lot of scam artists who promised authors all the benefits they fantasized they’d get from the Big Five publishers, but they didn’t deliver. One other problem–you had to pay these publishers rather than getting paid. So disappointment was pretty much a sure thing. Authors had no place to go and didn’t know where to turn to get a fair deal.

It seemed to me–and to other authors I knew– that traditional publishing was missing out on a lot of opportunities by hanging onto their old traditions
and beliefs. They were reacting to the digital revolution with insouciance and often outright hostility instead of embracing it and expanding with it.

Starting out as a publisher of ebooks only, I literally wanted to turn their model on its head. I wanted to try everything that might be possible with ebooks–books with embedded videos, series books in episodes, like television series, shorter books, unconventional books, books about so-called “forbidden” subjects. Most of all, the outdated belief that a genre author only competes against herself if she has several different series, and/or publishes more than one book a year.

I knew all that was possible because of the greater flexibility and exponentially lower production costs of ebooks. The most important trait for success, it seemed to me, was to keep up, keep changing with the times and technology, try everything, break through the stodginess and stuck-in-the-mud quality I was used to as a traditionally published author. In other words, to be nimble, as business folks say.

I wanted a name that would convey my own excitement about all that endless possibility– I wanted it to say something like “nimble books”, but that URL was taken. The final choice, I think now, was even better than that very descriptive one– we call ourselves booksBnimble.

Julie , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I was the author of almost two dozen mysteries, an Edgar Award winner, and a battle-scarred veteran of traditional publishing when I went rogue and started my own digital publishing business.

The idea at first was to publish every kind of book and try everything new under the sun. But since we (there were soon several of us) had a steep learning curve, almost all of that changed as we figured out what really worked.

It soon became clear that we should stick to genre books–mysteries mostly, with a sprinkling of other other things we liked. And we should dump most of the fun things I wanted to try–most notably ebooks enhanced with video. Nothing particularly unfamiliar to readers caught on except for “boxed sets”– anthologies of entire books instead of short stories.

So much for my videographer ambitions.

Thus, after starting out with sparkly notions of innovation, we went back to the tried and true. But we saw opportunities along the way. Knowing the Levi Strauss lesson– that it’s better to make pants for the miners than to pan for gold– we recognized the need for services to writers, and added those to our business model.

It’s been a twisty journey, but helping authors has been such a joy! The thing I’m most happy about is being able to give backlist writers hope again–and also some nice revenue. For those outside the field, by backlist writers I mean those who’ve written numbers of books that have lain dormant since they stopped publishing the traditional way.

What many didn’t know is their work could have a second life, and so could their careers. Even modest revenue streams can make a huge difference to people in the arts. These are two of my proudest accomplishments: One writer, single and over sixty, was finally able to save enough for a luxury she’d always wanted: hardwood floors for her condo. And a married pair of writers were able to cross off long-desired items on their bucket list– with international travel that changed their lives.

Sometimes people don’t understand why I have as much passion for this work as I did for writing. That’s why–actually knowing that I’ve changed authors’ lives for the better, sometimes in small ways, and not only financially.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

A few years in, when an author who was already self-published submitted his work for publication, we quickly realized that would have no advantage for either him or us.

But what we thought might work was to take him on as a marketing client. That way he’d keep a much higher percentage of his revenue and we wouldn’t have the expense of production. So he agreed to be our guinea pig, and we all did well. Now marketing is the bulk of our business.

Most series that come our way are in desperate need of optimization before they’re really ready for market, so we offer that as a service as well. That includes new covers, Amazon description, key word searches, etc. We added formatting when user-friendly software became available.

For years we resisted adding editing, but we’ve now done that because so many authors are disappointed with the editors they’ve found online. (Probably not the editors’ fault. Another thing we learned the hard way–every book needs several readings.) And we’re about to add critiques and editorial consultation.

So in a way we’ve come full circle–we started out wanting to do everything new and ended up responding to the demand for the old-school services authors will always need.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

Funny you should ask. To a writer, the idea of becoming an entrepreneur sounds about as easy as building the Pyramids. I’d never have thought of it, never, ever in a million years imagined I could be one and operate without my heart in my mouth and a prescription for Valium.

But I had great friends who’d done it, right before my eyes. Colleagues from my newspaper days built Banana Republic from a flea market find (old army shirts) and a thumbmail ad in the New Yorker. That was beyond inspiring!

And then that other world got even closer to home–I married someone who quit a dream job at IBM to found his own highly successful company. As luck would have it, he wrote a great book about how to do it–
THE SAVVY ENTREPRENEUR by Lee Pryor, available on Amazon as an ebook (naturally) and also on audio.

I’m not sure how I could have done it without that. He makes it sound so easy.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.booksbnimble.net

Image Credits
Ellis Anderson— on one pic only— the one of me in my office (the nook that looks like a bedouin stent.)