How to Publish a Book That Grows Your Business with Ally Machate

Kathi: Hi everyone, thanks for joining me this week. This week I have an amazing guest who helps you publish a book that will grow your business. Her name is Ally Machate, and she is a publishing strategist, an author services expert and the founder of The Writer's Ally. She is a former Simon & Schuster editor with 25-plus years of experience in the industry. So if you're looking to grow your book, write your book, or understand what to do with your book, she is the girl. She helps authors write, publish and sell high-quality books that fuel business growth, attract ideal clients and boost authority. Ally's known for her honest, strategic approach, and she helps authors cut through the noise, avoid the mistakes that you shouldn't be making, and turn your books into real engines of visibility and results. You're going to love this interview. So let's jump on and let's meet Ally.

Kathi: And we're back. As promised, we are going to talk to Ally now. Ally has been around, been there, done that in the publishing industry. Welcome to the show.

Ally: Thank you so much for having me, Kathi.

Kathi: Hey, I didn't realize that you had worked for Simon & Schuster. So talk to me about your background. How'd this all begin?

Ally: Getting that job at Simon & Schuster was really the culmination of a lifelong manifestation story. I've always loved to read. I've always been into writing. My mother loves to brag and tell people that I started reading at the age of three because I was so frustrated that my parents wouldn't just sit around and read to me all day. I loved reading. I loved story time. And so I just figured I have to figure it out myself. And I would make these books out of construction paper and crayons and give them to people and tell them I was a book publisher. And a few years later, we started school, and you get to that age where everyone always asks you, what do you want to be when you grow up? And I would tell them that I wanted to be a writer, a lawyer, and an editor at Simon & Schuster.

Kathi: Wow.

Ally: Yep. I don't know where it came from. Probably my parents just explained to me what a book publisher was, and there must have been a book in the house from Simon & Schuster, and I just latched on to that one. But whatever the reason was, it stuck with me my whole life. I did all the academic stuff, like editor of the school paper and the yearbook committee and all that. I interned in college for a small regional publisher, and then lo and behold, I was very fortunate to get my dream job and be an editor at Simon & Schuster when I graduated.

Kathi: That's amazing. When you think back on that career, what book sticks out in your mind that you had worked with?

Ally: That I worked with at Simon & Schuster?

Kathi: Yeah.

Ally: Oh, well, one of my proudest projects was a book called Ruminations on College Life by a gentleman by the name of Aaron Karo. It was his first book. At the time, Aaron and I were about the same age. He'd been out of school for a few years, and he had amassed a mailing list, which at the time… we didn't have all of these tools that we have today, right? We're talking about the early 2000s. And Aaron had built a mailing list throughout his college years with a very simple newsletter that he had created called Ruminations on College Life. And he had 15,000 subscribers to this list.

Kathi: That's a lot, way back then.

Ally: A lot. A lot. And it had just grown through word of mouth, because he was so funny and people really enjoyed it and would forward it around, and more people would sign up. And so we bought the rights to Aaron's first book, and we worked with him to cull the best content from these humorous emails. It was very Seinfeld-style observations, right? Ruminations on college life. And the book went on to do very, very well. It went through numerous printings. We did a follow-up; I think it was called Ruminations on Twentysomething Life, something like that. And ever since, Aaron's career has just exploded. He's been on comedy specials, he's been on, I think, Netflix and VH1, and he's written a bunch of other books. I feel very proud to have been a part of his beginning.

Kathi: Yeah, I see him as, okay, Ruminations of a Man at 40, Ruminations of a Man Retiring. I mean, he could go on and on and on, and people would probably love it. That's a great story. That's fantastic. So do you have any other stories about clients now that… okay, so you've left Simon & Schuster. Oh, yeah, we have to talk about that. Let's talk about the exit strategy, what happened, and how you fledged on your own.

Ally: Yeah, absolutely. I loved being there. Like I said, I had gotten my dream job. It was a huge accomplishment. I had wonderful mentors. I was really very, very lucky, because at the time many departments were known for not being very nurturing of their young people. It was a very strict hierarchy. It was a Devil Wears Prada kind of situation. Assistants would tell stories about being sent out to get laundry and things like that. That did not happen where I worked. They were wonderful. Everybody was wonderful, from the leadership on down. So I got to learn a lot, and I got to start acquiring books a lot earlier than I think most people my age in the industry would have.

Ally: So everything really was very good until we started to see a lot of changes in the world. We had the dot-com bust first. Then a couple of years later we had 9/11, which really impacted New York and all of the businesses in New York pretty significantly. And so, like many other businesses, we had some shrinkage. We went through a few years with multiple rounds of layoffs, and we were owned by a large corporation, which is of course one of the hallmarks of Big Five publishing: they're all owned by very large companies. We were owned by Viacom at the time, and we had reduced our workforce to about a third of what it was when I started, and yet we were still producing the same number of books.

Kathi: Yeah.

Ally: So things got very difficult. It was really an untenable situation, and I felt very stuck, because they had gotten rid of all of the positions in the middle. So we had the junior folks and the super senior folks. There really wasn't anywhere to go. I was buying books and meeting agents and editing books, but there was no room for me to progress in my career. I was almost finished with a master's degree. I had been going part-time for a number of years, and I decided this is a good opportunity. I'll quit, I'll go full-time, I'll finish up the degree, I'll do some freelancing on the side. Maybe in about a year or so New York will get back on its feet, we'll have all this tragedy behind us, things will start moving, and the economy will start opening up again. And I just loved working directly with authors so much, I never went back.

Kathi: Fantastic. Who was your first client?

Ally: Oh my gosh, I honestly can't remember, but I can tell you some of my very early projects. I was hired by my bosses at Simon & Schuster to edit a few of the books I had acquired, so that was a really great start. They let me continue those projects, which I was very grateful for. I remember writing copy for a jewelry designer who needed copy for her display cards. That was kind of unusual. In the beginning, you take everything, right, when you're freelance?

Kathi: Right. Of course.

Ally: And I wrote SparkNotes guides. I don't know if anybody remembers SparkNotes. They were Barnes & Noble's answer to CliffsNotes.

Kathi: Oh, yeah.

Ally: I wrote a bunch of those. Those were some of my earliest projects.

Kathi: That's pretty cool. That's awesome. So where are you at right now? What's your passion project with your company?

Ally: Well, my own passion project is probably my own book, to be honest. I'm writing my own book for the first time after years of helping other people produce their own books. As a ghostwriter, I wrote a number of books that of course were not published in my name and were not really mine. So I'm now working on my own book, and I'm very excited about it.

Kathi: That's great. So are you going to give us a little hint?

Ally: Yes, of course. It's called The Author Advantage Playbook, and it is specifically designed for these folks that I've been meeting now for years and years: experts like yourself who have a nonfiction book that's related to their business. Many times people are told, well, you need a book. You need a book for your business. And so they write the book, but nobody tells them what to do with it afterwards. And they just think, well, if I publish the book… Field of Dreams, right? I'll just publish it and my business will magically grow. And the truth is that if you treat it that way, your book becomes a decoration in your Zoom background, but nothing else. And so I want to help people see that the value of their books is not limited to their cover price, and there are really useful and time-tested strategies where they can leverage that book to achieve various goals in their business.

The value of your book is not limited to its cover price.

Share this quote on X

Kathi: That is a great calling, and it's something that you know how to do. I can't wait for your book to come out.

Ally: Thank you.

Kathi: All right. I'm going to help you launch that puppy. Not that you're going to need it, because you know how to do all this stuff. But you're right. I remember when I wrote my first book, way back in 2009. It was a three-and-a-half-year endeavor. I just couldn't get the title right. The working title, you'll love this, Ally, was Stuck in the Muck of Your Stuff.

Ally: Wow.

Kathi: And I was stuck in the muck of my title. When I finally spoke with someone, she divined the word mastery. And when it became How to Master Your Muck, I published it in like three months after that, and every chapter was a mastery chapter, right? So it's amazing how words will really affect that. But what I was getting at is, I remember three and a half years into it, I finally published. I self-published, because I'd been a publisher before for various other things. And then I'm like, oh God, okay, I'm exhausted now. I have to market.

Ally: Right.

Kathi: So it's not just writing the book, it's marketing the book. And it takes a lot of diligence and effort to market. So I think hiring you would have been a big shortcut for me way back in the day.

Ally: Definitely. Shortcut is the right word. I like to say that publishing a book isn't rocket science, right? With enough time and enough access to resources and people with experience, you can figure it out. But you're an expert in whatever it is that you do. You don't need to become an expert in book writing and publishing. We're the experts. Let us help.

Kathi: Exactly. Shortcut it and get rid of all the grief and the agony and not doing it right anyhow, because you only really have one launch until you do a revision or whatever. So yeah, I agree with that. Back to my theme that keeps going through all of my podcasts: masters hire masters. Masterful people will hire others to do what they cannot do or what they should not be doing anyhow.

Ally: That's right. That's right. I mean, writing a book, as you said, in and of itself, that's not something someone else can do for you unless you hire a ghostwriter, which is a very expensive proposition. Other than that, writing the book is really on you, and that takes so much time and so much energy. Hire people to help you with the rest.

You're an expert in whatever it is that you do. You don't need to become an expert in book writing and publishing.

Share this quote on X

Kathi: Absolutely. I am behind that 5,000 percent. I will do that for my next book, which is in the back of my head right now.

Ally: Nice.

Kathi: So how do you celebrate your successes? All this year I've been talking about it, and it goes back to my first book, actually, because I published and I didn't stop to appreciate or to celebrate. I'm just like, okay, now I've got to get on the marketing grinding wheel, right? So how do you celebrate your successes yourself?

Ally: Yes, it's a great question, and I'm very guilty of the same thing. I have for many, many years been really bad about celebrating. It's like, okay, done. What's the next thing that has to be done? My husband helps me a lot with that. I tell him when I've accomplished something, when I've wrapped something up, when I've finished something, and he's the one who says, "Great, we're going out to celebrate. We're going out to dinner. We're going to grab a little bottle of champagne on the way home. We're going to do something special." Or he'll bring me home a special treat from a bakery or something like that, just to find a way to mark it and to celebrate a little. Because I'll be honest, if he didn't, I probably wouldn't.

Kathi: That's exactly why I ask this on my podcast. It's a very self-centered question. It reminds me that I need to stop and celebrate and say, yeah, that worked out great. Pause.

Ally: Yeah. It's so important. It's so important. And I think especially for entrepreneurs, we're all high achievers by nature, and we're so bent over, do the work and get it done. It's hard. It's a hard muscle to build.

Kathi: It is. And it's a very important one for sure, because we need to celebrate ourselves. So you're very organized, I'm sure, because you teach people about writing. What's your favorite organizing hack or tactic that you use to keep your life in line?

Ally: Asana is my project management tool. I had an assistant introduce me to it over a decade ago, and it was absolutely life-changing. I treat it like a second brain. I forward emails into it. Any ideas I have go in there. Of course, we actually manage projects in there, as you're supposed to. The year that I learned not to keep everything in my head and to put it into Asana absolutely changed my life.

The year that I learned not to keep everything in my head and to put it into Asana absolutely changed my life.

Share this quote on X

Kathi: Yeah. Because we hold a lot of stuff in our heads, and I always tell my clients it's like you're taking up precious RAM space for a task list.

Ally: That's right.

Kathi: You don't have to remember all that stuff. I use Trello. I truly believe that having a good project management system that jibes with you works great. My husband loves WorkFlowy, and I can't do WorkFlowy. WorkFlowy freaks me out because I love the board. So, to each their own. But for those of you listening, if you have a lot of projects in the brew and you're super busy like Ally and I are, you really need to have somewhere to contain that data in a fashion that makes visual sense to you. I think visual has to be the kicker. I think that's why WorkFlowy doesn't work for me. I love Trello. I love little cards. Asana's a whole thing. It's just whatever works for you. So thank you for that tip. That's a good one. And check out any project management system if you're listening and you don't have one.

Ally: Oh, yeah. This is one of the things I'm really on a soapbox about. When I talk to people, they'll tell me, oh, we're using spreadsheets, it's fine. Oh, I do it through email, it's fine. It's like, girl, you don't even know how not fine it is until you start using a system. And then you will understand what you've been doing to yourself all this time.

Kathi: Yeah. The spreadsheets. It's like people that keep their accounting in spreadsheets. It's the same thing. It's like, what are you thinking? Really, you're doing all that? It's really hard. So yeah, for sure. Okay. So I know that since you were three, you wanted to be a writer and you wanted to publish, and you did do that. If you had to look back and give your girl right out of high school some advice, what advice would you give her?

Ally: I think that I would have put more emphasis on content creation early in the trajectory of online businesses, right? You remember when info products were a thing, and especially with the self-publishing world, a lot of people were putting out, in my opinion, really bad information: books, blogs, white papers, et cetera. And I held back because of imposter syndrome. I really felt like, oh, I don't have enough experience yet. I don't know enough yet. And in retrospect, most of those people didn't know any more than I did, and in many cases didn't know as much as I did at all. They were bros and digital marketers and SEO people that were jumping on the self-publishing bandwagon and didn't actually have any book experience at all. So I would go back and try to encourage her not to hold back just because she's afraid that she doesn't stack up to other people, because I think I had really valuable information to offer that would have helped a lot of people.

Kathi: Yeah, that's great advice. And to know that we're all an expert in something, and we all know more about one thing than most other people do.

Ally: True.

Kathi: Which makes us an expert. So yeah, the self-confidence factor, for sure. Imagine if you had been prolifically putting out content since that age, especially with your career. I can't wait to read it. I hope you have some things in the book you're putting out about your career and what you've learned in your journey along the way, because I think it's very interesting, the backing of a huge international publishing company. That's great. So I know that you have a free, valuable resource, and I'm excited to hear what you're going to give. What is it that our people can download or use or tap into from Ally?

Ally: Well, if they go to the URL offers.thewritersally.com/organizedandenergized, it will take them to my recorded webinar called Don't Write the Wrong Book. It's about 30 minutes, and it is all about what it means to write the right book and how to avoid writing the wrong book, and it takes them through a simple five-step process that they can run against any book ideas they're considering right now. Or if they're already writing, they can think through it based on what they already have and really make sure that what they're writing is in alignment with what they want that book to do for them out in the world.

Kathi: Valuable. I'm definitely going to watch that. We have all the things formulating in the back of my mind. I'm such a content creator. I just love that, right? But thinking about what's the desired outcome, that doesn't come naturally for me. It comes naturally just to put it out there. So I'm definitely going to watch that. Everybody, make sure to grab the link and listen to what Ally has to say. Okay. Is there anything that I should have asked you, or that you wanted to talk about during this conversation?

Ally: Well, I think it probably just relates to that free gift, to set the stage for that. One of the things that I hear very often when I do these podcasts or when I do speaking engagements is people always say that everyone tells them they need a book as part of their business. If you have a business, you have to have a book. And I think that actually leads a lot of people into writing a book that isn't really in alignment. You have creativity and then you have strategy, and those two things really have to go together if you want to get results. Like we said, you can publish a book that looks really good, that reads really well, that is by all objective measures a good book, that still doesn't sell well or doesn't get you the results that you might have wanted for your business. So it isn't enough to just write a good book. It has to be a strategically designed and aligned book.

It isn't enough to just write a good book. It has to be a strategically designed and aligned book.

Ally: And not everybody needs a book. It may not be the right tool to get the job done. It may not be the right time in your business. Like we talked about, it's a huge investment of time and energy and resources to do it correctly. There may be other things that that time and money is more beneficial to use for in your business right now than producing a book. So I think books are wonderful. I think lots of people benefit from them, but I don't agree that everyone has to have one.

Kathi: Yeah, I'm with you on that. This leads me to probably my final question, which just came up in my brain. What's your viewpoint on the co-author series deals, where you write a chapter so that you can be an author? What's your take on those books?

Ally: I don't want to poop all over somebody else's business model. There are people who do these regularly, and I think that the books themselves can be good. It can be beneficial if you are participating in a group that is really collaborative, where part of the benefit of being in the book is in fact forming relationships with the other authors, where there's lots of opportunity to work with partners in various different ways. And/or if the company producing the book has a really strong plan for distributing and marketing the book and really pushing to get it out there. Unfortunately, a lot of places sell this as a quick fix. Oh, well, just pay us a thousand bucks and write this one chapter. You don't have to write a whole book. Then you can call yourself an author. I don't think that anyone with any real experience is fooled by that. Writing one chapter in a book does not make you an author. And it certainly doesn't have the gravitas that a complete book with your name on it has when it comes to leads and other prospective partners. They're not going to look at that book where you wrote one chapter and consider you an expert at the same level as if you wrote a full book.

Writing one chapter in a book does not make you an author.

Kathi: Yeah. I've always wanted to ask a publisher that question, so thank you for answering that.

Ally: Yeah.

Kathi: Well, it's been a pleasure. I am so happy to have you on the show. Everybody out there who's got an idea in your head and thinks you might want to write a book, make sure to listen to the training. I'm going to for sure, and ruminate on what I want to do next, and you can as well. So thank you, Ally. I really appreciate your time.

Ally: Yeah, it's my pleasure, Kathi. Thanks again.

Kathi: Yes, and keep us in touch when your book comes out.

Ally: I sure will.

Kathi: Okay, take care. Thank you guys for listening, and until next time, we will see you then.