We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Amy Quale a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Amy, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard.
Wise Ink Media was cofounded in 2012 as a blog for independent authors by myself (Amy Quale) and Dara Beevas. At the time, we worked for a small independent press that was owned by a publishing entrepreneur in his eighties with a passion for people and stories. When we started Wise Ink, there was challenging binary in the publishing world, with self-publishing carrying a stigma of being low-quality and traditional publishing being the pathway to success; the problem was, of course, that traditional publishing worked best for a select few authors. When the founder of our previous employer passed away at the end of 2012, we felt a closure of that era and we launched Wise Ink as a publisher. Our philosophy for publishing was threefold: 1. put agency back into the hands of the creators (authors); 2. bring the same process, talent, and quality control to independent publishing as there exists in traditional publishing; 3. publish books that are going to go out into the world and have a positive impact for the author, readers, and the world at large. As a publisher, we take great responsibility in what we publish and how we select, edit, package, and market our books. We know that 76% of publishing professionals identify as white, and this is the lens through which books are created and eventually become our collective recorded history. Information is power, and even as a small but fierce organization, we feel responsible for doing our part to diversify our industry and the perspectives of those who run it. To this end, in addition to seeking out and celebrating diverse authors and publishing professionals, we have funded fellowships and accredited publishing-related educational opportunities for talented BIPOC individuals to break into the publishing industry.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I always knew I wanted to work in books; in my twenties, I was hired for my first publishing job with a small independent publishing agency. I was thrown into managing acquisitions, editing, design, printing, and distribution for dozens of books at a time. While there was a lot of learning on the go and the occasional backtrack, I personally thrive in a sink-or-swim environment, I’m never afraid to ask questions, and I do well when I have the flexibility to create my own systems, so this first role was perfect for me. (This was also a working style that made me well poised for entrepreneurship later!)
While I was there, I started a freelance writing and editing business on the side, which gave me a lot of experience working with other types of presses–traditional and independent, large and small. I was also getting my master’s degree in English. One of my colleagues was my current business partner, Dara Beevas, and we became creative partners and collaborators right off the bat, eventually launching Wise Ink together.
In our work at Wise Ink, we help leaders, storytellers, influencers, activists, brands, organizations, and nonprofits to create custom books that elevate their mission and work in the world. We look at books as a vehicle to carry our clients to their next stage of influence. We don’t just help with the publishing, but we help with all things in the creative process (ghostwriting, writing coaching, copywriting, book concept development, writing retreats, and more) and the marketing process as well. We have the best of the traditional publishing world in the talent we employ and our holistic take on the traditional publishing process; we also have the best of the independent publishing world in that our clients maintain full ownership and agency over their books and how they are built and marketed. We also help our clients through the hurdles of crowdfunding (typically via Kickstarter) to fund their publishing process.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
I grew up in an entrepreneurial family. A lot of grit was passed along to me, and for that I am forever grateful! Part of that story is dark though, and I’ve had to recognize the lessons and ideas that came from others’ experiences rather than my own. When my dad was fifteen, his forty-three-year-old dad (my grandpa) passed away from lung cancer. My thirty-nine-year-old grandma had four kids–two teenagers and two kids under ten. My grandfather had a life insurance business and a business partner whom he entrusted to handle all of his life insurance money; sadly, this business partner stole and swindled away all of the money that was supposed to go to my grandmother for her children’s education. She was able to get lawyers involved and eventually took over my grandfather’s business to make a good life for herself and her kids, but that experience taught my dad a painful yet important lesson that you have to depend on yourself above others. Fast forward several years, when I was ten years old and my siblings were seven and three, my dad started his own business. Our family had to come together to make this possible. I had to give up piano lessons that year, my siblings had to give up sports, and we all understood that these small sacrifices were for the benefit of the whole. His business was successful, and so at an early age I was able to witness how sacrificing and risk taking could pay off, and my parents were my biggest cheerleaders when I left my steady job to start Wise Ink. That said, both my grandmother’s entrepreneurial journey and my father’s were ones where they relied solely on their own grit and resources. I have had to learn to think bigger about my business and to not limit where my organization can go based on what I can accomplish on my own. While the lesson of depending on myself above others certainly served my early days of entrepreneurship, scaling a business to new and expansive levels requires a different kind of risk taking that does depend on others’ support, faith, and investment, and also requires my faith and trust in them.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
The most rewarding part of this work is helping an author find the right book for where they want to go. I love sitting with my clients in the messy creative process and helping them find the path out. My brain processing tends to be pretty balanced between the right brain and left brain, and because of this I like to say that my magic in the world is helping my clients to articulate their abstract, lofty vision and to help them pin down the specifics of what that means for their perfect book concept. I’m good at finding just the right nuanced questions to break them out of roadblocks in their writing, connecting dots between stories and themes that seem to be showing up, and acting as a mirror so that my authors can see themselves and their work clearly. It’s so hard to see yourself clearly as a creative, and so it’s an honor to be able to bring clarity to my clients in coaching.
Contact Info:
- Website: wiseink.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wise_ink/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WiseInkPub
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-quale-abb8127/
- Twitter: @wiseink
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/wise-ink-creative-publishing-minneapolis#reviews
Image Credits
Desireé L. Wells