We've More Than Doubled Our Publishing Business to $155K/Month [Update]
This is a follow up story for Publishing Services. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published almost 2 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
Hi! I’m Laura Mikkelsen, and I’m the founder and CEO of Publishing Services. As you can see in my first interview, I started the company as a one-person copywriting service for book descriptions in 2019, striving to create best-selling Amazon book descriptions that self-published authors could use to sell their work.
Today, Publishing Services is a one-stop shop for every service a self-publisher needs to publish their books on Amazon. In under five years, we’ve grown the company from $72K per month to now making $155K in a single month. From a one-woman business to a 62 person-strong team, we’ve drawn on skills from multiple areas.
I’ve always had huge drive and ambition, and I’ve always believed in the company, but never in my wildest dreams did I imagine we’d grow this much this quickly – especially not in those early days when I was sitting on the beach writing one order a day!
Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?
It has! It feels like life has been non-stop since we last spoke, both on a personal level and in the business. When I started Publishing Services (then called Bestselling Book Descriptions), I was working on one order a day. When I did my first interview with Starter Story, we were getting 10 orders a day. That figure has doubled, and we now process 20 orders each business day.
When I started out, there was just me to handle everything from processing the orders to marketing and delivering the product. By the time we last talked, we had grown to have a team of 41 people; we now have 62 employees. My sister, Sarah Eberstadt, is now a co-owner of the business, and transitioning into a partnership with her has been both necessary for the company and a huge reason for its continued growth.
Sarah Eberstadt and Laura Mikkelsen
I was barely making a living when I first started out, and I needed the money I brought in as a yoga teacher. But when we last talked, Publishing Services was bringing in $72,000 a month – and that was just three years down the line.
Again, we’ve managed to double that figure, and the business now makes $155,000 in a single month. I’ve always had huge drive and ambition, and I’ve always believed in the company, but never in my wildest dreams did I imagine we’d grow this much this quickly – especially not in those early days when I was sitting on the beach writing one order a day!
Publishing Services sales figures for December 2023
Of course, none of this would have been possible without considerable hard work and dedication. As demand for our products increased, we focused on hiring new staff to handle the orders. We streamlined the hiring process through a virtual onboarding course, which we recorded ourselves. Providing top-quality service is our highest priority, so our hiring process is very rigorous: We only hire writers who we believe can deliver the style and consistency our customers expect.
Publishing Services training for new candidates
Our services have changed since our last interview. We took away products that weren’t in such high demand and instead focused on the improvement of our bestselling products – the ones our customers come back to time and time again.
By focusing on maintaining and improving the quality of those products, we’ve solidified our reputation and made sure that we’re offering exactly what our customers want. We’ve started offering gift cards on our order page too, which publishers can use towards whichever service they need. We also offer monthly promo codes for various packages, and these have proved to be very successful in attracting new business.
At one time, we collaborated with other companies to deliver the full range of products our customers asked for, but over time, we’ve trained our team to provide all the services we were missing in-house, allowing us to end all our collaborations. This streamlines the business and allows us to provide a consistent service.
We’ve also continued to build our management team, and have now added a customer support specialist and a dedicated coach for new writers to our team. Each member of our management team has a specific role and responsibilities, and as the business has grown, they’ve been able to focus their skills on a particular area, ensuring that no one is spread too thinly.
When we last spoke, our social media presence was limited to Facebook, but we now have a new Instagram account. We’ve focused on gathering positive reviews through various platforms. We use Trustpilot and relevant Facebook groups, using this information to not only attract more customers but also to build morale within the team and share praise for the high-quality work of our staff.
Publishing Services on Trustpilot
The satisfaction and wellbeing of our staff are hugely important to us, and we have regular calls with all team members. As a remote company with a team spread across the globe, this is important for connecting with our writers, editors, formatters, and designers, and maintaining the close bond we like to nurture with our team.
It can be difficult to organize social events in a remote workspace, but we’ve been able to create unusual ways to connect based on what our staff enjoys, allowing the whole team to build stronger connections and share their expertise.
What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?
The demand for our services just keeps increasing, which is a wonderful problem to have, but it has meant that one of our biggest challenges has been hiring qualified people quickly enough and getting them trained to a level that they can take on the number of orders we need them to and turn them around within our delivery time.
There could have been a temptation to relax our hiring procedure to enable this, but we’ve remained committed to hiring exceptional writers and investing in the time they need to be trained thoroughly.
Another big challenge has been one that must have been faced by everyone in this industry over the past year. AI has taken off in a big way, and particularly since the use of ChatGTP became so widespread, we realized we needed to update the guidelines we give our writers to accommodate this.
ChatGTP and other AI programs like it are great tools when they’re used well, but since this is a new development in the industry, we found we needed to come up with a clear framework for navigating them. When AI first came onto the scene, many people in the writing industry were afraid of losing their jobs. We felt it was important to empower our team to use it as a tool, helping them to see that it isn’t the threat they might have feared and that they can use it as an apparatus to help them produce their best work.
Laura hosting a lesson on ChatGPT and AI
I’d advise anyone who’s struggling to grow their business to go all in and double down on the things that work…You have to give it your all, but it doesn’t make sense if you’re pouring all your energy into services that aren’t in demand. Take that energy, and focus it on the things you know work.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned over the last year is not to be afraid of firing staff when they’re not the right fit. Even when you’re in desperate need of more staff, people who keep repeating the same mistakes or disrupting the company's flow will hold you back and keep the business from meeting its goals.
Ultimately, you end up wasting more time and energy than you gain from having them on the team. We have interventions and training in place to help staff who are struggling with particular issues, and we always look to training first, but there are times when you have to draw a line and recognize that there’s nothing more you can do.
I’ve also learned that the hiring process should begin before you need the extra staff. It takes a long time to train people and bring them up to the level of skill and confidence they need to maintain the company’s quality, style, and ethos. When you wait until the need is already upon you, it leads to a hefty workload and defers solving the problem you’re trying to address.
But lessons come from life as well as business, and nothing teaches me more than my family. While the company has been growing, we’ve had huge developments in our personal lives. Both Sarah and I bought new family homes and grew our families. My husband and I bought a dog (he’s called Shaka, and the woman who never wanted a dog is now totally besotted!) We’re also expecting our second child in April – and Sarah’s second daughter was born in August, so there’s been a lot of development!
Laura’s house on Oahu, Hawaii
Laura with her husband, Rasmus, their son, Finn, and their dog, Shaka
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
It probably won’t surprise you to hear that our main plan is hiring, hiring, and more hiring! But as we grow our team, we’ll also be growing our offers by adding new packages.
We listen to feedback from customers to help us gauge what services they’d like to see added, and we always have new ideas in the pipeline. We do have existing services we plan to expand too. We currently have a very small team of high-quality ghostwriters, and demand is so high that we don’t offer this service on our website, and instead have a waiting list.
Our goal is to expand our ghostwriting service and offer an all-done-for-you package for successful business owners, encompassing everything from the outline and description to the entire manuscript written, edited, and formatted. We also plan to start a blog to expand our reach and acquire new customers.
Our 5-year vision is to be the number-one publishing service in the entire self-publishing industry. We want to be the only service self-publishers want to use – and we believe we will be.
What’s the best thing you read in the last year?
I think I told you in our first interview that I’m not much of a reader, so it seems apt that one of the best things I’ve read this year is called Never Finished! It has nothing to do with my reading habits though. It’s by David Goggins, and it motivates you to push beyond your limits to reach your full potential.
What I’ve learned from that book is that when you want to quit, that’s the time to push harder – it’s like physical training in that way. 100M Offers by Alex Hormozi has been another one that’s inspired me. The main message I took from that is to make the offer so good that people feel stupid saying no!
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
One of the biggest things my journey has taught me is that while there’s a lot one person can do to get a business off the ground, you can’t do it alone. Find a partner with complementary skills. Sarah is the perfect business partner for me: Our skill sets are very different, and when we combine them, we find we can cover everything our business needs. Without Sarah, I’d be lost with the finance and organizational side of the business. Together, we can do so much more than we could do alone, and teaming up has been key to our success at Publishing Services.
I’d advise anyone who’s struggling to grow their business to go all in and double down on the things that work. As I mentioned, we’ve removed some of our services over the last couple of years, and the reason for that is that it has allowed us to concentrate on our bestselling packages. You have to give it your all, but it doesn’t make sense if you’re pouring all your energy into services that aren’t in demand. Take that energy, and focus it on the things you know work.
Essentially, you have to get rid of everything that’s distracting, whether that’s other business ideas or parts of the business that are keeping you from growing as a company. We tend to think of distractions as things that come from the outside, but I think you have to be aware of the ones that creep into your business too.
I’d also say beware of shiny object syndrome! I think everyone’s fallen into this trap at one time or another, but just because something’s new and exciting, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s right for your business. Listen to what your customers want, and focus on providing those products or services to the highest quality. At the end of the day, unless they align with your business and its goals, shiny objects are just distractions.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
We are! We’re currently looking to fill several positions. We’re looking for a talent acquisition specialist to help us streamline our hiring process and target exactly the candidates we’re looking for. We’re also looking for editors, copy and outline writers, ghostwriters, and an InDesign formatting specialist. If you’re interested in any of these roles, you can reach out to us via email – [email protected].
Where can we go to learn more?
Last time we spoke, we only had our website and our Facebook page, but there are several ways you can find out more about us now. Here are all the ways you can find us:
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
