Terry Whalin on Publishing Myths: Why Being Published Is Not the Same as Being Read

<h1>Terry Whalin on Publishing Myths: Why Being Published Is Not the Same as Being Read</h1>Edited for clarity and concision.Ali AlhajjiWelcome to Reading the World. I’m Ali Alhajji.Today’s conversation begins with a distinction that sounds simple and turns out to be enormous: a book being published, and a book being read.We often treat these as the same event. They are not. A book can exist—printed, listed, available for purchase—and still go essentially unread.And the space between those two facts is not empty. It is filled with decisions: editors, acquisition boards, marketing assumptions, distribution channels, platforms, reviews, and the long shadow of the bestseller list.So today I want to think about publishing not as a neutral pipeline that carries good books to the readers who deserve them, but as a cultural system that decides which books become visible, valued, and socially present—and for whom.To do that, I want to speak with someone who has made those decisions from inside the publishing world, and who has also experienced publishing from the writer’s side.My guest today is Terry Whalin. He has worked, by his account, on both sides of the editorial desk: as a magazine editor, literary agent, author, and acquisitions editor at several houses, currently at Morgan James Publishing. He is also the author of 10 Publishing Myths, a book that asks writers to think more realistically about what publication actually involves—not only writing and printing a book, but distribution, promotion, audience, and the difficult work of reaching readers.That double vantage point—someone who has both made books and helped decide which books get made—is why I wanted to talk with him about the gap between being published and being read.Terry, welcome to Reading the World.Terry WhalinAli, thank you for having me. I’m honored to be with you today.Ali AlhajjiYou have written that publication is only the beginning—that the day a book exists in the world is not necessarily the day it gets read. When you say that to a room full of writers, what expectation are you actually correcting?Terry WhalinWhat I’m trying to get at is that we can make a book. That part is relatively simple. There are thousands of new books entering the market every day, especially when we include self-published books. There is a lot of material pouring into the marketplace.But getting a book read—getting someone actually to process what is in that book—requires action from the author. The author has to be doing something.That is something I learned years ago. Publishers were making beautiful books of mine. I had written many books for traditional publishers. They were producing them and placing them in bookstores. But when you work with traditional publishers, they send royalty statements once a year, or sometimes quarterly, to tell you how the books are actually selling.My statements were in the negative category. My books were not selling. So I realized I must have been doing something wrong.At that point in my life, I was a literary agent with a small agency in Scottsdale, Arizona. Mark Victor Hansen, co-author of Chicken Soup for the Soul, invited me to an event in Los Angeles called Mega Book Marketing University. I went, took pictures, and sat with about 400 people listening to the speakers. I was trying to understand what I was doing wrong with my own books.One of the speakers was Jack Canfield, the other co-author of Chicken Soup for the Soul. Jack wrote The Success Principles, and the first success principle is that you take 100 percent responsibility for your own success.I realized that I had been expecting my publisher, or someone other than me, to take responsibility for my success. I decided to change. I realized how little I was personally doing to tell other people about my books. I had a website, TerryWhalin.com, but I was doing very little else. Once I changed that, it turned around my sales and the way people were reading and processing my books.Ali AlhajjiThat is a useful story. I want to stay with the gap itself for a moment—not only what the writer misunderstands, but what the publishing system does not announce. What happens in that space between a book becoming available and a book actually finding readers?Terry WhalinPublishers can make books. They can get them into bookstores. But what really moves them out of bookstores and into people’s hands is the author doing something proactive to tell people about the book.That might be a live event. It might be a blog post, a radio interview, or a podcast like this. There are hundreds of things authors can do. But the typical author does not do that. They assume someone else is going to do it. They leave it to someone else, when really it is their own action that often makes the difference.Another story from Mega Book Marketing University is about the authors of Chicken Soup for the Soul. People forget that they were rejected more than 160 times before the book was finally published. They found a small publisher in Florida willing to publish the first book. They told the publisher they were going to sell a million copies in the first year. The publisher laughed at them, because they had never sold a million copies of anything.It took them a year and a half to sell the first million. But they practiced what they called the rule of five. Every day they did five things to tell people about their book. Most authors would never do that kind of consistent work. But that persistent and consistent work helped Chicken Soup for the Soul take off. It became one of the most prolific series in the English language.Ali AlhajjiWhat you are naming is a gap the system does not usually announce. I want to understand how you came to see it—not simply through the sequence of your career, but through the different positions you occupied inside publishing.You have worked as a magazine editor, literary agent, acquisitions editor, and author. What does each of those positions allow you to see about a book’s chances that the others do not?Terry WhalinEach position has taught me a lot about the reach of the marketplace and how to reach readers.For example, many writers neglect the magazine market. They want a physical book in their hands, and I understand that. But the magazine market is powerful because you can reach far more people with a magazine article than you probably ever will with a book.If your book sells 5,000 copies during its lifetime, that is a good number. But in the magazine world, it is possible to reach 100,000, 200,000, or even half a million people with an article. Many authors forget that they can do this.Most magazines take personal experience stories. All of us have personal experiences that can become stories. Writers can write them up and send them to magazines. That is a way to reach readers. And at the end of the article, the byline might say, “Terry Whalin, author of 10 Publishing Myths.” So magazine writing can also promote your book.As an acquisitions editor, I have sat inside meetings where we look at different manuscripts and decide which books to publish and which books to reject. It has been interesting to see which ones move forward to contract. Much of that decision has to do with the author: Who is the author? What kind of reach does the author have?That is why the idea of author platform is so important in the industry. We have learned that someone may need to hear about your book a dozen times, maybe more, before they decide to buy it. Publishers are looking for people who have that kind of reach, whether through newsletters, podcasts, radio, or some other connection to readers. The author’s position and reach are very important when a publishing house decides whom to work with.Ali AlhajjiI am less interested in the sequence of roles than in the different kinds of visibility each role gives you. What could you see as an agent, for example, that you could not see as a writer?Terry WhalinAs an agent, you are a go-between. The agent stands between the publishing community and the author. You are looking for good authors and trying to help them shape their ideas and pitch them in a way that makes a publisher say, “This is a good idea. We should publish this book.”Publishers and agents are both looking for the right people. The standard for traditional publishers keeps going up because they want higher-profile authors. Many authors do not understand that. As an agent, you reject many authors because they are not going to reach the kind of readers publishers want to reach.So the agent stands in the middle, trying to find that right fit between author and publisher.Ali AlhajjiMuch of your formation was in Christian and inspirational publishing, where the audience is often more clearly defined than in some other markets. How did working with a specific community of readers shape the way you understand the word “audience”?Terry WhalinYou are right. Much of my work has been in the Christian and religious area of the marketplace. I have always been fascinated with people. As a child, I read many biographies, and that translated into a lot of the work I have done. I have written biographies of people like Billy Graham, Luis Palau, and Chuck Colson.Understanding community plays a very important role in how you position and pitch a book to that community. But I would not say the lesson is limited to Christian publishing. The same principle applies if it is a sports book or another kind of nonfiction book. What I learned about audience applies to many areas of book publishing.Ali AlhajjiWhen you were on the writer’s side, rejection probably felt one way. When you became an editor or agent, what did rejection begin to mean from inside the system?Terry WhalinThat is a great question. We all get rejected a lot as writers. But editors and agents get rejected as well, and people hardly ever think about that.Publishers are looking for the right fit: the right fit for bookstores, the right fit for their publishing house, the right fit for their readers. Agents are also looking for the right person and the right fit.I think agents may get rejected even more than publishers and writers in some ways, because they have to send material to many different people before they finally find someone willing to offer a book contract. It is hard. It is not easy. Like they say in real estate, you are only looking for one buyer—but finding that one can be very challenging.Ali AlhajjiLet’s go directly into that decision-making process. I want to understand what is actually being judged when a book is considered—not only what the book is, but what the publishing room needs it to be.When a manuscript or proposal lands on your desk, what do you actually evaluate beyond whether the writing is good? I am thinking of category, platform, timing, risk, audience, distribution. Walk me through what is really being weighed.Terry WhalinThere are many different factors. First, there is the writing. Because I have looked at so many submissions through the years, it is fairly easy for me to read a couple of pages and see whether someone can really write and tell a good story. You can generally tell that in the first few pages.But the other material is also important. A book proposal needs a good pitch, a good target audience, and a clear understanding of how the author is going to reach that audience.Will the author use BookTok? YouTube? A newsletter? Library events? There are many ways to reach readers, but the question is: what will be most effective for that author and that topic?For example, if it is a children’s book, the author may need to plan to go to schools and show the book to children. Each book has a different audience and requires different action from the author.Creating a book proposal is hard. I admit that freely. I have written two book proposals that received six-figure advances from traditional publishers, though I also have long stories about what happened with those books and why they did not necessarily succeed in the marketplace.As an editor, I was often frustrated because I could see potential in a pitch, but I could not get my colleagues to agree to offer a contract. Often some part of the proposal was missing. That frustration is why I wrote Book Proposals That Sell. It has helped many people get agents and publishers, and the new edition reflects how publishing has changed.Ali AlhajjiIf platform and audience matter that much, are you really judging the author rather than the book itself?Terry WhalinYou are exactly right. Our founder at Morgan James often tells us that it is 80 percent the author and 20 percent the book. At the end of the day, if the author does not take action and reach readers, we are not going to sell books. We can often fix the book part, but we cannot always fix the author. So we have to find good authors as part of the search.Ali AlhajjiThat is very interesting. In practice, where does the quality of the writing enter the sequence? Is it the first filter, or does it become meaningful only after other questions are answered?Terry WhalinThe quality of the writing is very important. We are looking for writers who can tell stories and have strong content in their books. But it is a combination: the quality of the book and the author’s willingness to get out there and tell people about it.Ali AlhajjiYou have described situations where an editor may champion a book internally, but a board or committee still says no. When that happens, what is the system protecting itself against?Terry WhalinThe system is protecting itself against poor sales in the bookstore. The publisher looks at the manuscript and asks: Can we sell this book through our channels? Can we distribute it in bookstores?I remember years ago, for example, I received a devotional book for seniors. I thought it was a good market. People are getting older, and they need this kind of material. But when I pitched the book to the publication board, they took a turn I did not expect. Instead of focusing on the book and the author, they started talking about seniors: Do seniors buy books? Do we have the bookstore reach to sell this into bookstores?Ultimately, they decided they did not have that reach, and we rejected the book.That gives you a hint of how decisions are made inside a publishing company. But what the author receives is usually only a generic letter saying, “This was not the right fit for us.” The writer does not get the specific reasoning, which is frustrating because they do not know how to improve or adjust.Ali AlhajjiOf course publishing is a business. But if consensus tends to protect against risk, then the books that reach readers have survived a bias toward the predictable. What kinds of books struggle to survive that process even when the writing is strong?Terry WhalinYou are right. The publishing world is risk averse. Publishers are protecting themselves from putting out something that readers may not respond to.But there are ways to break through. Sometimes people break through through self-publishing. For example, The Shackwas originally self-published. It sold many copies. People bought boxes of them and gave them away. Eventually, the book was picked up by a major publisher and reached an even larger audience through broader distribution.Sometimes that happens. A self-published book becomes successful and is then picked up by a traditional publisher. But those cases are rare. They do not happen very often.Ali AlhajjiGoing back to platform: somewhere in recent decades, much of the responsibility for finding readers shifted from the publisher onto the author. We now call that platform. From inside acquisitions, when did you see that burden migrate, and what does a publisher now expect an author to arrive already carrying?Terry WhalinI would say it shifted at least fifteen to twenty years ago. Publishers used to do much more for authors. They used to send authors on book tours. They used to book radio and other media. Some publishers still do a little of that, but usually only for their top-tier authors.The rest of us have to find our own way. The author’s platform has become a major part of what publishers look at. They want to see if the author has connections to readers. Do they have a newsletter? Do they have visibility online? All of those factors enter into the decision process.Ali AlhajjiEverything you have described can be read in two ways. One reading is practical: this is how the industry works. The other is structural: this is whose work the industry is built to make visible. I want to move to that second reading.The platform requirement asks writers to arrive with networks, time, capital, and digital fluency. Doesn’t that quietly favor people who already have those things? I want to ask directly: does platform democratize access, or does it entrench advantage?Terry WhalinI think you are right. Publishers do look for people who already have visibility in the market. They gravitate toward people who are on television, radio, or have some kind of visibility.But all of us have to start somewhere. That is why I encourage people to begin in the magazine world. You can reach more people and build your reputation as a writer. There are many ways to do it. Some people do it through TikTok or YouTube. They build their platform, and then a publisher comes along and offers a book deal because they already have visibility. It is almost a chicken-or-egg situation.Ali AlhajjiCan you name a specific manuscript you passed on purely because the author lacked platform?Terry WhalinI know I have done it over and over, but I do not have a specific example I can name.Ali AlhajjiThat is understandable. Your work emphasizes author responsibility: persistence, promotion, marketing, platform. That makes sense. But how do we avoid turning structural problems—distribution, visibility, saturation, access—into personal failure?Terry WhalinOne way authors experience it as failure is by quitting. I always encourage authors to persist and find the right place for them.I started blogging in 2004 and decided to blog once a week. I have been doing that consistently since then. I now have a large archive of entries. I have a group of readers who receive the blog by email every Monday. Over time, consistent and persistent work creates visibility.That is something any writer can do. Start small, but start—and then continue. Be persistent and consistent.Ali AlhajjiOne of the myths you address is the fantasy of bestseller status. If bestseller lists do not simply measure literary merit, what do they actually measure?Terry WhalinThey measure sales. Lists like USA Today and The Wall Street Journal are based on sales.The New York Times list, which is often considered the gold standard, is also an editorial list. I know authors who sold enough books during a seven-day period that they probably should have appeared on the list, but the editorial side of the process meant they were not included.Bestseller status is important because once you achieve it, you can continue to carry that label as a bestselling author.Ali AlhajjiWhy do writers and readers stay attached to the belief that bestseller lists measure something deeper than sales, timing, distribution, and coordinated visibility?Terry WhalinI think it is built into the industry as a kind of metric. People watch these lists. I still look at bestseller lists when they come across my screen.Right or wrong, we track them. Some authors have been on them for years. But they are based on sales, and those books continue to sell over time.Ali AlhajjiThat explains how the list works, but I want to ask why the myth persists. What does the publishing world gain from keeping readers and writers attached to the idea that visibility equals value?Terry WhalinI think it comes back to the business side. Publishing is a business. The fact that those books continue to sell and make money feeds into the lists. The author has to figure out how to break through, get attention, and get the book out there in the first place.Ali AlhajjiLet me bring this down to the people listening: readers, students, writers, and anyone who encounters books only after all these decisions have already taken place.Self-publishing is often framed as liberation from gatekeepers. But from what you have seen, does it actually solve the access problem, or does it relocate it—turning a gatekeeping problem into a discoverability problem in an even larger flood?Terry WhalinYou are right. Self-publishing often becomes a discoverability problem. The average self-published book may sell only a hundred or two hundred copies during its lifetime, which is a poor return considering all the energy an author puts into the book.The challenge for writers is to understand the marketplace and to work practically on their visibility. That is part of why I wrote 10 Publishing Myths. I wanted authors to understand that there are actions they can take day in and day out in order to succeed.One example I give is a self-published author I interviewed who sold thousands of copies of his book to public libraries. People forget that libraries have money and buy books. This author found a list of public librarians, figured out which librarian to call, and called them state by state. A librarian might say, “We have ten branches. I’ll take ten copies.” Then he would pack the books and send them with an invoice.Those are the kinds of actions many writers never think about, but they can be practical ways to reach readers, even with a self-published book.Ali AlhajjiFor readers and students listening—people who mostly encounter books as finished objects on a shelf or screen—what should they understand about everything that happened before the book reached them?Terry WhalinThey should understand that a lot of sorting and many decisions go into the process before a book reaches them. It takes a lot of work to make the page look good, to make the cover attractive, to write the copy on the back cover, and to gather endorsements that tell people why they should buy the book.There is a lot of work involved. But the people who do the work are more likely to find success. That connects again to Jack Canfield’s first success principle: writers need to take responsibility for their own success rather than depend on someone else to do it. If they take that attitude, they can find their place in the publishing world.Ali AlhajjiPutting it another way: if a student walks into a bookstore and sees a table display of books, what should they understand about that table that the table itself does not tell them?Terry WhalinThey should look at that table for the book that is right for them. That will be different for every person. One book may tug on someone’s mind and heart and make them want to read it.That is why we have such variety in books. Some people love horror, for example. I personally do not especially like the genre, but many people do. It is good that we have that variety in the book world.Ali AlhajjiAfter decades inside this machinery—both making books and helping decide which books get made—I want to return to the largest question.We started with the gap between a book being published and a book being read. Having walked through the machinery of acquisition, platform, distribution, risk, and visibility, what do you now believe determines whether that gap ever closes, and for whom?Terry WhalinI think the gap closes if the writer understands the gap and then takes personal action to reach the audience.For example, some fiction and nonfiction authors create reading guides in the back of their books. Reading guides can help book clubs and reading groups engage with the book. So I would say writers need to learn the different skills related to the book business and build those tools into the book so they can reach the broadest possible audience.Ali AlhajjiThat puts the weight back on the writer. But we have just described a system that was never designed to close that gap equally. So I want to end with that asymmetry rather than only with what the writer should do differently.One final question, and it is the question this whole show keeps returning to: what does your work help us read more carefully about the world—not just about books, but about how anything becomes visible, valued, and treated as worth our attention?Terry WhalinI guess I am the eternal optimist. I believe we live in one of the greatest times in human history.About a year ago, I heard Markus Dohle, who was then the chief executive officer of Penguin Random House, say that we live in one of the greatest times in human history since Gutenberg invented the printing press. I believe that is true.It is amazing that books are available all over the world, and people can get them all over the world. When ebooks appeared, many people thought they were going to take over print books. But worldwide, print books remain dominant.Books have tremendous potential to reach people all over the world. I agree with that optimistic view. We live in a time of great opportunity. We need to be aware of those opportunities and seize them when they come our way.Ali AlhajjiMy thanks to Terry Whalin for walking through this machinery with me.What this conversation reminds us is that reading the world often means reading the systems that decide what becomes visible in it. A book can be published and still remain unread, and the distance between those two states is not closed by merit alone. It is shaped by editing, acquisition, platform, distribution, timing, and the long habit of mistaking visibility for value.To see that is to read publishing not as a neutral pipeline, but as a system that manufactures cultural presence—and to ask, each time, for whom.Thank you for listening to Reading the World. I’m Ali Alhajji. Until next time, keep reading carefully.