← The Digital Executive
The Digital Executive
Yehuda Niv on Rewriting Publishing with AI: From Manuscript to Market in Weeks | Ep 1239
00:21:16
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- [00:00]
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- [00:31]
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Brian (Podcast Host)
Welcome to Coruscant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast. Do you work in emerging tech? Working on something innovative? Maybe an entrepreneur? Apply to be a guest at www.corazon.com brand welcome to the Digital Executive. Today's guest is Yehuda Niv. Yehuda Niv is the CEO and co founder of spines, the world's first tech driven book publishing platform. Many years ago Yehuda Niv authored a book in and his search for a publisher, he encountered a century old industry ripe for disruption. He responded by founding NIV Publishing, a publishing house that aims to empower authors and has since grown to become the largest publishing house in Israel, publishing 15% of of the new books in the country within a decade. Eleven years after he established Nymph Publishing, Yehuda recognized that the true innovation the publishing world needed was rooted in technology. This led to the creation of spines. Well, good afternoon Yehuda, welcome to the show.
- [02:11]
Yehuda Niv (Guest, CEO and Co-founder of Spines)
Thank you. Great to be here.
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Brian (Podcast Host)
Absolutely my friend. I appreciate it, really do because I know it's hard to traverse time zones you're in near Tel Aviv, Israel. Today I'm in Kansas City and sometimes traversing time zones internationally is really a challenge, but I'm glad you were able to make calendar sync up today. So Yehuda, if you could I'm going to jump right into your first question. You started your journey as an author struggling to find a publisher which ultimately led you to build NIV Publishing and later spines. What were the defining moments that pushed you to become a founder and disrupt the publishing industry?
- [02:49]
Yehuda Niv (Guest, CEO and Co-founder of Spines)
So when I published my first book, I was halfway throughout my master's degree at electronics engineering and I realized that the publishing process is completely broken. And this was 13 years ago. So. And I, I figured out that if I will use the technologies available back in the day, I could save ton of time in the process and make the publishing process much more appealing for the authors. And, and I did that. And this is what allowed NIV Publishing to grow and become the largest publishing house in Israel, responsible for more titles a year, which the next competition in Israel can publish about 300 titles a year. So four times larger than the next local player. And then I realized that I started to do all of those angel investing in tech startups and I realized that everyone is working on AI. It was two years prior to ChatGPT and I realized, okay, AI will revolutionize everything. So whatever I did with NIV Publishing, I better do it better with spines. And this is why I started this new company. And the whole idea is how can we leverage the AI abilities and make publishing even easier, even faster, even must, even in a better quality for, for authors. And this time we targeted the American market because it's a huge lot of players and lot of opportunities. So this is why we decided this time to target the American industry. And actually what we are doing with Spice is revolutionizing the whole way that people are thinking about publishing a book. So we are using the most advanced technology possible to take the publishing process from A to Z in a much more affordable way. And spices are today we are kind of AI native operating system for book publishing and we help authors taking the whole process from A to Z, from a manuscript to a published distributed title. And it's been great. We have more than 6,000 authors has already subscribed to Spine so things are going great.
- [04:52]
Brian (Podcast Host)
That's awesome. Really love the story. I've had guests on here all the time and there's always some sort of problem that has perplexed them and perplexed many people. And you found a gap in the market here and you went ahead and built new publishing. But with the advent of AI and the proliferation of it, before it got mainstream, you took it a step further and built spines, leveraging the technology and of course tackling the market here in the us. So really appreciate that. Just love how you're helping the little guys do this whole full service process, A to Z. And now you've got over 6,000 authors, which is amazing. So thank you.
- [05:33]
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- [06:02]
Brian (Podcast Host)
Go Amex Graphite and Yehuda with spines. You're building a tech driven publishing platform that automates everything from editing to distribution. As you mentioned, Spine enables authors to go from manuscript to published book in just a few weeks. How does technology fundamentally change the speed, costs and accessibility of publishing?
- [06:22]
Yehuda Niv (Guest, CEO and Co-founder of Spines)
So every step of the process of publishing a book, we looked at it and thought to ourself, okay, if talent wasn't the problem, like you can get the best designer on the planet to design your cover, for example, okay? Yet the designer probably have no time to read the book and understand what the book is all about and design cover based on that. Because if he's earning his living from design covers, he has zero time to read books. So, so the process that that used to be in cover design, for example, is the COVID designer getting briefed of the book and doing what is think best the author look at the design, he didn't like it and there is the whole back and forth that can take months until there is a version that is approved by the author and by the publisher. And so for example, we took that step and now the AI scans the books, understand what it's all about, can make a category, research, understand on which categories the book is better to be categorized on. And based on that design amazing covers and that stays minutes instead of months. Okay, so that's only one example. We do that with the editing, we did that with the proofreading, with the formatting, with the AI narrated audiobook. So most of the books being published are published without an audiobook version. Because that's a hassle to create. You will have to get a studio. You will have to, if you want to use your own voice, you have to go to a studio for about 40 hours to create 10 hours of an audiobook. And that's so much expensive and so much authors just don't do that because that's a very complicated process and all very expensive to do that with external studio. So what we did is we used our technology to save all of that process. We only need three minutes of the author's own voice and we can Create the whole audiobook with our technology. And so, so, so, so every process, every step of the process of getting the book published, we optimized it to save time, save costs, make it in the most time and capital efficient way and also in the most simple way. So let's say you are an author, decided to do self publishing because you don't want to work with a publisher yet. You will have to figure out publishing by yourself. A lot of know how you will have to learn by yourself. And so the old approach of spines is you have to know nothing about publishing, the platform, take care of everything for you. Everything is done quickly, fast, easy and we keep in our minds, on our minds that our customers are actually the authors. And this is why we are here to serve them and our platform need to optimize for what they believe is the best for their book. And this is how we build this product, this vision and this is why we are growing so fast. So, so, so this is how we took every step of the publishing process and optimized it and refocused.
- [09:27]
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- [09:53]
Yehuda Niv (Guest, CEO and Co-founder of Spines)
And re engineered it to become what it is today.
- [09:57]
Brian (Podcast Host)
That's awesome. And you absolutely did re re engineer. I like how you use the technology, your creative creativeness, your innovation to streamline this process every step. And you share a couple examples. One, I just want to highlight that I think it's important you lower that barrier, that entry barrier for authors to get in and publish a book. And the big example you explained was that cover design, the back and forth with maybe with an artist this or that, but now with your platform, this process takes minutes versus weeks and I think that's totally awesome. And again, thank you for finding this gap and providing a solution to the world. And Yehuda. Many authors struggle not just with publishing but with marketing and distribution. How does spines help writers ensure their work actually reaches and resonates with readers?
- [10:49]
Yehuda Niv (Guest, CEO and Co-founder of Spines)
Yeah. So distributing a book, that's a whole a different headache that authors are having because most of them, let's say if you are a self published author, probably we will list your book on Amazon. Amazon on in the US is responsible for I think about 70% of all the retails of books being sold to readers are going on on Amazon. So probably must most of the authors will do they release their book on Amazon only. But there are hundreds of channels, even thousands of channels that you can list your book on. And for an author, you want to look yourself at Google and find your book everywhere, not only on Amazon, but each one has a different system, different royalty things going on, different settings you will have to create with your book, different metadata, different categories. So for you to upload your book manually to all of those different channels, it will take a while, it will take a lot of exploration and probably the book won't be optimized to each one. So what we do with spines, spines is after the book is published in the post publication phase of the platform, what you are getting is a distribution system and royalty management system. So what spines does we list the book across 100 channels globally, Amazon included of course and we manage the royalties for the authors. So instead of them going and do all the W9s with each one and figuring out all the tax and having to pass the minimum barrier of each one, spine stakers for all of that for the authors, we actually collect the royalties for the authors and they can collect them on a monthly basis. So if you will work with a publisher and you go to choose a hybrid publisher, of course he will take care of that for you as an author. However you will getting your royalty reports once every six months, even once a year. So let's say you've been creating this amazing promotion for your book. You have no clue if that has been working or not because you are getting your royalty reports every six months and with spines, everything is on the dashboard in real time you can see what's going on with your book.
- [13:06]
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- [13:36]
Yehuda Niv (Guest, CEO and Co-founder of Spines)
that in place actually helps author to not only make sure their book is appearing, is and is optimized and listed across all of those different channels, but they're actually getting a visibility in how the books is doing and what is the impact of the promotions, doing to the book selling. So having all of that in in one system that you can actually produce the book, distribute it, manage the royalties and also we have a campaign management tool going on so you can promote your book from one place. And now we just released our community layer as well. So you can actually manage your readers community within the same platform. So have everything from A to Z. This is why we are calling this a book publishing operating system. Because you can actually do whatever you need within one place without you need to explore all the different tools, all the different things and learn how to become a published author. Everything is simple, quick, affordable and ready for the author.
- [14:38]
Brian (Podcast Host)
Thank you, appreciate that. And I didn't know you shared a statistic. 70% of all books are sold on Amazon, which I know that's how Amazon started, but that's awesome. But what I really want to highlight here is this book distribution process, right? It's a big part of the process and there's various markets, there's royalty management agreements, the genres, marketing, revenue management, distribution. And you take this whole process, which is huge, and help the author get their book out to the world with your centralized one centralized platform in that dashboard that they're able to look at the status of the progress of it. So I appreciate that. And Yehuda, the last question of the day, looking ahead to the future. How do you see the future publishing evolving over the next decade? And what role will platforms like spines play in shaping how stories are created, shared and monetized?
- [15:31]
Yehuda Niv (Guest, CEO and Co-founder of Spines)
So that's a great question because I think that true democratization will happen finally in the publishing industry. Because if you will look back 20 years ago, how the publishing industry were operating is it was controlled by gatekeepers, the traditional publishers who actually decided who is worthy to become a published author and who isn't. Nowadays the industry has transitioned that 99% of the books that are being published are published in a non traditional way. That means that the authors who got tired of the gatekeeping going on, they decided we don't need them. We're gonna pay ourselves for the publishing process and we will become a published author without the gatekeepers, without the traditional publishing says that we are worthy to do that, we will do it by all stuff. However, that introduced a new gatekeeping, which is who can actually pay for that? Because that's a very expensive process. It will cost an average American to about 10,000 to $50,000 to get his book published. And finally with AI, this barrier is being lowered as well. So if, if back in the day the gatekeeping were the traditional publishers. Then it became who can actually afford it. And finally, in the coming years, what we will see is the whole industry is shifting to real democratization. And I can give you a glimpse an example of a different industry. For example, Netflix choose very wisely, the content is uploaded to the platform. However, YouTube allows everyone to upload to YouTube whatever video they would like to. Either it's a million dollar in production video or something that was videotaped by a smartphone camera. Everything going on on the same platform and lets the readers decide what is sorry. And lets the viewer decide what is better. So what we will see going on on publishing is instead of the gatekeeping that selecting what the readers should read, we will see a true democratization that that content flow freely to all the channels. And the readers will finally will be the one was choosing what is, what is worthy and what isn't. And through democratization of content eventually will be enabled with AI tools like spines being more and more and more available. And I believe eventually the concept of what publisher is will completely change. And what will be available is only publishing platforms like spines and not publishing houses or publishing companies, because they will be replaced by publishing platforms like Spine. So this is my vision and this is what I believe will eventually going on in the publishing industry.
- [18:17]
Brian (Podcast Host)
That's amazing. Thank you for doing that. Again, another great innovator and entrepreneur making the world a better place. But just to highlight some things going forward in the future, book publishing. You're looking at true democratization in our future with, like I said, entrepreneurs like you disrupting the industry, disrupting gatekeepers, lowering that financial barrier to get in the space as an author. And I just think it's awesome and I love how again people get involved and fill that gap and really lower the barrier so everybody can be a player. I really appreciate that. And Yehuda, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
- [19:01]
Yehuda Niv (Guest, CEO and Co-founder of Spines)
Thank you so much, Brian, it was great.
- [19:03]
Brian (Podcast Host)
Bye for now.