Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Madeleine Elizabeth. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Madeleine, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. So, naming is such a challenge. How did you come up with the name of your brand?
Extra Extra had a very natural evolution. When I first decided to publish my own book I knew I didn’t want to name my LLC after myself, and I knew I wanted to help other authors and writers down the line which meant a brand separate from me. At the time, the term “extra” was all over everyone’s feed. I resisted for a while, since so much of our language comes and goes over night; very few additions stand the test of time. Then as I was thinking about all the extra time I had put into finding just the right cover artist, the extra effort I had put in to ensure my manuscript was completely free of typos, I realized this reverence for literature as an art form and not just another product to get in front of a consumer is where my ethos really lay. In a moment of self-doubt I started thinking about artists everywhere, we’re all just trying to get paid for our work, inkslingers or otherwise. This reminded me of Newsies, the musical. Specifically the one from Disney, with a very young Christian Bale as the lead and all the newsboys are just scraping by…”Extra, extra, read all about it!” As a writer who appreciates wordplay that works on multiple levels, there was no denying it. It had to be Extra Extra Publishing House.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I started as a psychology major in college, and changed my focus at least three times before life intervened and I got busy with having a family and raising children. When everyone finally started sleeping through the night and there were no more babies on the horizon, I decided to go back and finish my degree but the words of my academic advisor haunted me, she had said to me once “You know, you can’t keep taking writing classes, you’ve used up all your electives.” So I looked at my credits and realized I was barely a year away from having a full blown creative writing degree. The choice was obvious. In the course of taking some of those final puzzle piecing classes, I was in a mandatory publishing course and finding the whole thing quite easy. It turns out that a lot of the market research and agent studies I had to do for class assignments were all things I had done for fun and to appease my own curiosity. From there, I realized the only thing I didn’t have was a completed manuscript. I took about eight months off to finish the book I was already working on, returned to school once more, flew through the last two classes and two years later I had written a second book with plans to publish it, and knew I wanted to start my own company.
How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?
Admittedly, the capital for publishing my first book had to come out of family funds, but within two years I had already earned back the entire amount I had spent out of the family penny jar.
From the very beginning though, I knew the only fair thing to do in regards to books and book design was to use my own books as the experiment. I would never put someone else’s book baby at risk with regard to design, covers, formatting, edits etc. If anyone is going to have a ‘bad’ product, it should be mine. I’m the one taking the business risk, so if anyone is going to be embarrassed, it will be me. Therefore, once I had earned back my initial self investment, income made new was squirreled away in a business account until I had the same amount my book had cost me. The nice thing about book publishing these days is that as demand for Print-On-Demand Printing (different from offset printing) increases, the quality of that product also increases. I don’t need 10k for a run of three or five thousand hardcover books with embossed covers and custom end pages. It helps keep the cost down and generally I find most readers want a good book over a fancy print job.
Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?
Not a book, video, or essay, but from the very first boss I ever worked for, and the only one who would literally or figuratively scrub the toilets with everyone else on the team; he used to say to us “If you do the little things right, the big things will fall into place.” I have tried to hold true to that, which is why I made sure to experiment with my books and not someone else’s.
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