Hidden Gems: Meet David Morris of Lake Drive Books

Today we’d like to introduce you to David Morris

Hi David, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
Publishing is sometimes called the accidental profession. I intended to be a psychotherapist, which evolved into aiming for religious studies scholar, but I wound up working for a small publisher during graduate school, and that pulled me into the business. Now, after working for major corporate publishing brands like Guideposts Magazine’s book division and HarperCollins’s Zondervan as its publisher, I’m out on my own now. Publishing is a business that has gone through massive changes during my tenure, and it’s been hard for publishers and authors to keep up. We’ve also changed a lot culturally, and readers need books that often fall out of the status quo of mainstream publishers. That’s why I want our work at Lake Drive Books to be innovative both as a publishing business and as a curator of culture.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
The publishing business is far more challenging than most people realize, and my experience with this start up business is no different; it’s just on a smaller scale. With so much online commerce, it’s hard to create discovery for your book, and at the same time there are opportunities to more directly engage customers and more importantly for authors to engage their readers through technology like e-newsletters, social media, and websites. What hasn’t changed is that publishing is still quite a speculative business. You don’t always know what books will turn out to have robust long-term sales, and it’s such sales that publishers count on to fund so many other books they publish, again waiting for that one breakout title. That said, diligent management and good decision making can go a long way to create slow and steady progress. I managed a major publishing team in the past and we managed that discipline well, and I try to translate that skill to what I do now. The hard part is to not burn out with all the tasks you could complete in a day, a week, and so on. As we’ve grown, we’ve been better able to involve other regular contract employees, and that helps share the “brain load.”

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
I started Lake Drive Books in 2021 to “publish books to help you heal, grow, and discover.” They are mostly spiritual memoir and self help toned books about how to find meaning in a world where religion is less a central feature in our post-industrial lives. So much of the content is telling stories from the margins, stories that people don’t quite understand because they are unnecessarily outside the norm of status quote American religious life. These are stories of overcoming abusive church structures having to do with patriarchy, sexuality and gender, and race. But it’s in these untold stories that we can find the very sense of loving kindness and personal growth that we seek in spirituality and religion. We couple this kind of content with an innovative business model (hybrid publishing) that pays authors better and coaches them on growing their platforms, all while creating a skillfully published book as good as any conventional publisher. If authors publish with Lake Drive, and they and their book have the ingredients for success, they will find it’s a hands on experience that outmatches anything else they might experience in publishing.

What has been the most important lesson you’ve learned along your journey?
Perhaps the most important lesson is simply how long it takes to start a new business, and how long it can take in certain businesses that are more of a long play. It required I rethink how personal finances work, and fortunately I’ve had more ability to rethink things than I thought was possible. Even more importantly, I’ve learned so much. I thought I knew a lot after being in publishing for thirty years, but I’ve probably learned more in the last four years than I learned in a lot more years in a corporate setting. But I couldn’t have done this as well without that corporate experience.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://lakedrivebooks.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lakedrivebooks/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LakeDriveBooks
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@lakedrivebooks