"Writing is not just a means of communication; it is a vehicle for self-discovery, empowerment, and connecting with others on a deep, human level"
Welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Today, we have the privilege of diving into the world of publishing with Boni Wagner-Stafford, the co-founder of Ingenium Books. With a passion for making the world a better place through impactful literature, Ingenium Books has emerged as a trailblazer in the industry.
In this captivating discussion, Boni takes us on her personal journey and shares the inspiration behind the birth of Ingenium Books. With an unwavering commitment to their values, she reveals how Ingenium Books forges lasting relationships with authors, nurturing their creative expression.
We explore the company’s unique approach, which sets them apart in a rapidly evolving publishing landscape. From their recent achievements to their adaptability in the face of shifting trends, Boni unveils the secret behind Ingenium Books’ continued success.
Join us as we embark on a remarkable exploration of the transformative power of books and the extraordinary vision that drives Ingenium Books forward. Get ready for an insightful conversation that will ignite your passion for literature and leave you inspired to make your mark in the publishing world.
Check out more interviews with entrepreneurs here.
WOULD YOU LIKE TO GET FEATURED?
All interviews are 100% FREE OF CHARGE
Table of Contents
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Boni Wagner-Stafford: Happy to be here, and thank you! I’m Boni, cofounder of Ingenium Books. We’re a Canadian publisher of books that have the power to make the world a better place.
Our authors are professionals—from Canada, the US, and beyond—with a strong drive to help others in some way, shape, or form. I love sharing the origin story of Ingenium Books, as it does reveal quite a bit about the company as well as me and my cofounder, my husband and business partner John Wagner-Stafford.
John and I personally each have a strong creative drive: my career as a television reporter bringing together my love of words and storytelling with a visual element, my extracurricular musical activities like playing piano and singing.
John is a former professional musician, he’s managed audio production teams in film, television, and video games, and writes and composes music in his spare time as a way to relax.
When we were starting the company, we wanted to honour that creativity and give it the space and freedom to breathe and find a way to do the same for the people we wanted to help. And as we were looking for the right name for both the company and our main publishing imprint, we found “Ingenium,” which is Latin for creative thinking, creative mind. So we thought that was perfect.
And this creativity—not just the role it plays in the fabric of our DNA but also in our approach to teasing it out in the authors we work with, whether they’re an academic grounded in research or a yoga teacher or a psychotherapist, for example—is also honoured in our purpose and core values:
Our purpose is “breathing life into ideas.”
Our core values are:
- 1. Inspire with Integrity
We’ve spent a lifetime breathing life into ideas. Sometimes they need a little honing in order to have the intended beneficial impact on the reader.
Our currency is the integrity to tell an author when their idea has merit but might need some massaging, or when we need to find a new idea. We help authors find the inspiration to keep going and to get it done. Our content strategy work shines a bright light on their goals and objectives and helps us chart a clear path to success.
- 2. Create Lasting Relationships
Working together on a book project means spending a lot of time together. We get to know our authors really well. Writing and publishing a book is a big job and together we create much more than a book. We build rewarding relationships that last long after the book is published.
- 3. Reflect. Respond. Re-energize
Creative discovery means encountering the unexpected. When that happens, and it does, we reflect on what’s happened to get us to this point. We respond by taking steps to find the answers and adjust our course. And we re-energize the team so we’re all focused on the best way forward.
- 4. Passion for Creative Expression
Creative expression is the fuel to the fire in our soul. Preparing, perfecting, positioning, and presenting our authors and their incredible book to the world is, we believe, the ultimate creative exercise.
Whether we’re publishing journalistic or narrative nonfiction, memoir, autobiography, biography, business, or self-help: they’re all stories that matter. They all help create a better world. Yours, ours, and theirs.
In the past year, what is the greatest business achievement you’d like to celebrate with your team? Please share the details of that success.
Boni Wagner-Stafford: We had our first title hit the Wall Street Journal Bestseller list! It was for The Promise of Psychedelics: Science Based Hope for Better Mental Health, by Dr. Peter Silverstone.
Now, before I dig into the details we want to and have celebrated with our team, let me clarify that not every author has a dream or a goal of becoming a bestseller. (What???) Yup, that’s right. When we work to support our authors with their book marketing, and determine what our marketing strategy is, we make sure we are all aligned on what the goals are for that author and their book.
In the case of The Promise of Psychedelics — that was a goal for Dr. Silverstone. So we developed a robust marketing strategy, began intensively working it, starting about eight months in advance. We worked on creating content — thought piece articles that we got published in Psychology Today, Authority Magazine, LinkedIn, Dr. Silverstone’s own website, etcetera.
We ensured his social media presence was appropriately branded and helped him and his team set and implement a posting and engagement schedule. We worked on an aggressive advance reader review campaign and helped Dr. Silverstone run an active and engaged private launch team.
The publish date for the book was April 14, 2022, and the results of our efforts were that The Promise of Psychedelics hit #4 on the Wall Street Journal’s bestseller list for nonfiction for the week of April 28, 2022.
So this was a significant win for us.
What advice do you wish you had received when you started your business journey and what do you intend on improving in the next quarter?
Boni Wagner-Stafford: It wasn’t so much advice we hadn’t received and wish we had… as much as possibly wishing we’d listened to the good advice (and our experience!) that we did receive! And that is around the importance of niching down.
Here’s what I mean. Having been in business before, and understanding the communication and marketing principles of focusing on who you want to reach, we knew this. Identify your market, yadda yadda, then ensure all your visibility and marketing and business approach and practices are working toward that. So far, so good.
When we started our publishing company, though, we willfully wanted to focus on what we observed was a fairly new (at the time) trend toward global presences: digital nomadism was gaining visibility, the internet and technology had removed geographic barriers which meant books published on one side of the globe could easily be purchased, downloaded, and read on the other side of the globe.
And so we positioned ourselves in that perceived “global” space. “A global team for the globally-minded author.” And we DID have a global team — we still do. And we DID attract and work with some incredible, talented, and dedicated authors from Canada, the US, Australia, Denmark, South Africa, the UK, etcetera. We WERE selling books in nearly all geographic markets. So, what was the problem?
It was that we human beings are still local at heart. Which means that we felt we weren’t allowing prospective authors to see themselves in us. Or at least not as much as we came to believe we needed to.
So, we are changing this. We’re starting to proudly share that we are a Canadian publisher. We work with lots of US and North America-based authors, too, but Canadian is who we, as founders and as a brand, are.
So… do we wish we had listened to our own experience and advice on this matter? Yes, and no. Would we possibly be in a different place vis a vis our market position if we had chosen to “niche down” earlier in our journey? Almost certainly.
But we also learned invaluable things along the way, met amazing people and had experiences with our authors and shared in journeys that have brought us more joy and value than can be measured on a balance sheet.
Now to the next part of your question, and that is what we intend on improving in the next quarter. We are focusing on continued improvement around our title P&L work, as each subsequent book we publish gives us more data and experience that we are incorporating and applying into the next title P&L.
There are consistent investment costs that are easy to predict with bringing each book to market, but what’s always a prediction — like weather forecasts, prone to being unpredictable! — is how the synergistic forces of the author’s readiness and ability to engage, the response from their network, and which of our collective marketing and visibility efforts actually produce the results we “think” we’ll get.
Here is a two-fold question: What is the book that influenced you the most and how? Please share some life lessons you learned. Now what book have you gifted the most and why?
Boni Wagner-Stafford: Of course my answer to both parts of this question involve books we’ve published at Ingenium Books!
The book that influenced me and had the most impact on me is Dying With Dad by Yvonne Caputo. It’s Yvonne’s second book, and came about after a discussion between Yvonne and me about one of the chapters in her first book, Flying With Dad.
She talks about how her open conversation with her father before his death changed her relationship with him for the better. But more importantly, how it changed (for the better) her ability to help her father have the kind of death he wanted.
She talks about going through a conversation about “the five wishes” in which a person clearly talks about things like how they wanted to be treated as they near the end, who will make both medical and other decisions when they no longer have the ability to do this for themselves, and how they want to be remembered.
Working with Yvonne on this book made a huge impact because, as part of her research while she was finishing the writing, she interviewed a number of people, including my father! Which led to my father initiating his own “five wishes” process and an incredible and open conversation between my father, my sister, me, and our respective spouses.
This would not have happened were it not for Yvonne and her book, Dying With Dad. I will be forever grateful. Learn more about Dying with Dad here: https://ingeniumbooks.com/dying-with-dad/.
The book that I gift the most often to others is Listen for Water by Marie Beswick Arthur. Listen for Water, set in Canada, is snappy, bittersweet coming-of-age novel that tells the story of roles reversed–a daughter charged with keeping her mother and their lives right-side up.
It’s no easy task for a teen who wants to be anywhere-but-here while her mom is hellbent on living as though she wasn’t somebody’s mother.
Within this story though are themes relevant to the social discourse on issues of poverty, fostering, addiction, Indigenous heritage and Canada’s residential school system, all woven together with hope for the future. It’s really one of my favourite books. Learn more about Listen for Water here: https://ingeniumbooks.com/listen-for-water/.
Both books are available wherever you buy your books.
Christopher Hitchens, an American journalist, is quoted as saying that “everyone has a book in them” Have you written a book? If so, please share with us details about it. If you haven’t, what book would you like to write and how would you like it to benefit the readers?
Boni Wagner-Stafford: Well, as a former journalist and publisher, of course! I’ve written three nonfiction and am writing a fourth — my first fiction, based on fact. First the nonfiction: I’ve written The Best Memoir: How to Write It When You Don’t Know How, which provides the foundational information every aspiring author needs to know in order to get a good start on the writing.
On one hand, you can say that in order to write and publish a book you just need to sit down and generate word count. And that’s partially true. But in order to write a GOOD book you need to understand the market you’ll be putting your book into.
You need to understand how to structure your book, which involves purposely creating the journey you INTEND for your reader. Which brings me back to that all-important foundational piece: identifying the reader who wants, needs, and will most benefit from the book you want to write.
The Best Memoir also digs into an exploration of your motivation for doing this work, which is a critical piece when you consider how much work it is to write a book. It’s not uncommon for someone to understand how to leverage their motivation at the start of the work — but you need to know how to leverage it to FINISH the work. So that’s The Best Memoir.
I’ve also written, and am just finishing up the second edition of, One Million Readers. This book is all about helping authors with their book marketing strategy. So it’s part educational, part informational, and part how-to.
I talk about how authors can assess their readiness for the often daunting task of marketing their books, and demystify things like how bestseller lists work, what they really mean, and what the publishing ecosystem looks like. I talk about content strategies, visibility strategies including endorsement, media, and reader reviews, as well as the tools, tactics, and assets you’ll need.
Then I dive into the book launch, which involves preorders, a launch team, PR and publicity, awards, and more. There really shouldn’t be any stone left unturned on the book marketing front once a reader has finished. The first edition is available now, and I’m anticipating the second edition will publish in Q3 of 2023.
My first fiction that is a work in progress, as in at the time of this interview I’m writing about 1,000 words a day and am halfway toward my target of 100,000 words, is a historical work based on the true story of my German grandfather’s journey from the Volga region of Russia, from which he escaped in the steerage compartment of a ship in 1925 after the Russian Revolution, civil war, and famine that ravaged that country.
He arrived in Canada to trade one set of hardships for another: somehow working his way up to homesteading, farming his own large plot of land, and raising a family, who, three generations later, are still farming the same land.
This book, which does not yet have a title, is going to explore issues related to generational trauma, immigration and its role in the development of Canada, and it strikes me now that it also reveals that while much has changed in Russia, there is much that remains the same. I expect this book to publish in late 2024.
And I suppose I need to mention my first book, co-written with my husband and business partner, Rock Your Business. This book began as a series of media columns for the aspiring entrepreneur and covers the issues to consider for anyone considering or just starting out with building a business.
2020, 2021, and 2022 threw a lot of curve balls into businesses on a global scale. Based on the experience gleaned in the past years, how can businesses thrive in 2023? What lessons have you learned and what advice would you share?
Boni Wagner-Stafford: There have been so many curveballs and lessons. Wow. I think I would sum these up in the following ways.
- 1. Embrace unexpected change
Like many businesses, 2020 and the global pandemic scared us — and while we expected to be hit hard, it actually turned out to be good for us. More people found themselves with time on their hands to write the book they’d always been dreaming of, and we saw a definite surge in submissions that year and we published some really, really good titles.
But we were significantly impacted by the logistics logjam, the increase in paper prices, the timelines on print runs quadrupling from what we’d come to expect and rely on as normal. So we did what everyone else did: we adjusted.
And then, we have even more economic uncertainty, and the impact of AI in all our lives, which we are seeing impact our business in both positive and uncertain ways.
On the positive side, it’s helping us streamline some of our repetitive tasks, like the generation of promotional materials for our podcast, The Ingenium Books Podcast, and that’s cut down our time investment per episode by a factor of about four times.
The uncertainty comes in via the fact that we just don’t know yet how that content-generation capacity is going to impact the human-generated intellectual property and how significant the issues around originality detection turn out to be.
But it’s kind of like the advent of the internet, or the Y2K scare, when we were worried the computer clocks were not going to know how to turn themselves from 1999 to 2000 and some were predicting every computer around the world was going to shut down, or when social media arrived and some thought it was going to be the end of human connection rather than a facilitator.
We’ve all weathered those things, and we will weather this, too. So the lesson that we’ve taken from all of this is to expect the unexpected, do our best while going with the flow, and don’t allow ourselves to freak out. Steady as she goes.
- 2. Be nimble.
This could part part of #1 but here I’m talking more about our own more personal business lessons around business financing. We are a bootstrapped publishing company, self-funding our operations and often, oh so very often, wishing we had a deeper pit of operating or investment capital to catapult us to the next level.
In hindsight, had we opted to pursue business loans or other financing mechanisms, what we experienced over the last three years would have posed I think much higher risk to us.
We can now see that having zero debt is an incredibly valuable space that has and continues to allow us to be nimble — in the sense that our decisions are our own, and things like rising interest rates aren’t impacting us the way they are impacting so many others.
Do we still wish our pockets were just a little deeper? Of course! But we are also very clear that the publishing business is not the one to get into for someone really want to make it rich quick. This is a passion industry, where margins are tight and profits are fluid. We’re okay with that.
- 3. Don’t sweat the small stuff
When you add up the events and lessons covered in #1 and #2, what’s come out of this loud and clear for me as publisher and cofounder of Ingenium Books, is that it is never helpful for me to sweat the small stuff.
I’m talking about trusting the journey: knowing I will be okay even if the worst possible thing were to happen; keeping an eye on the big picture and what I want the future to look like; and accepting and even embracing that I’m human and will continue to make mistakes.
- 4. Nurture and protect your self-care
Starting in 2020, I got serious about this one, and I’m continually amazed at the positive difference it has made. I have a morning routine that goes something like this:
- 3:30 or 4am, wake up
- meditate before getting out of bed
- write down ten things I’m grateful for (also before getting out of bed)
- personal writing: sometimes this is both journal writing and writing my novel, but it’s always writing
- 6am – 7am Monday to Friday, at the gym with personal trainer, Saturday and Sunday it’s an extra hour of writing time!
- 7am – 7:45 am, breakfast
- 7:45 am – 9:00 am, shower, more personal writing
- 9:00 am, start working on the business or with clients.
I also do not drink alcohol, eat sugar or wheat or soy, weigh and measure all my food.
This may sound ridiculous to some, but the focused energy it pays into the rest of my day cannot be disputed. It helps me bring a positive mindset to everything else — because I’ve taken care of me, my health, and my creative passions first.
I spent decades of my life doing it the other way around — starting my day with all the things I did for others, and by the end of the day I had nothing left in the tank for me. So this really works.
On a lighter note, if you had the ability to pick any business superpower, what would it be and how would you put it into practice?
Boni Wagner-Stafford: This is a tough one! But with my tongue planted firmly in my cheek, I’ll say that the business superpower I’d pick would be to magically make mountains of money materialize that would fund our growth with absolutely no strings attached! Now, wouldn’t that be fun?
Jerome Knyszewski, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Boni Wagner-Stafford for taking the time to do this interview and share her knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Boni Wagner-Stafford or her company, you can do it through her – Linkedin Page
Disclaimer: The ValiantCEO Community welcomes voices from many spheres on our open platform. We publish pieces as written by outside contributors with a wide range of opinions, which don’t necessarily reflect our own. Community stories are not commissioned by our editorial team and must meet our guidelines prior to being published.
