Five Things I Wish I’d Known About Trade Pub
Part of the problem with being Old and Cynical️ is that it’s impossible not to expend some energy on things you should have done differently.I realized long ago that if I could go back and talk to 2013 Liz, she wasn’t going to listen. She had a plan: spend six months querying the book, and if nothing panned out, self-publish. She didn’t really care, at that point, if she snagged an agent or not, because she had a Plan and it would be Fine. (She had a lot more confidence than I do.)No matter what I might say to 2013 Liz, even if she believed down to her bones every horrible story I told her, she wouldn’t have changed her path. She’d have started out exactly the same way, convinced that foreknowledge would allow her to avoid the worst.Maybe she’d be right, which is why I’m writing this.The world is full of authors. I’m in contact with so many more of them now than I was then. Some of that is hanging out so much on Absolute Write–of course there are authors there. But I also see people on social media, and on Discord, and in discussion forums. A lot of them are far more naive than 2013 Liz was, which is saying something.This post isn’t for the folks who already know this stuff. Anyone who’s been through trade on any level has learned all this, for good or ill. I’ve tried to think of the things that would actually have helped 2013 Liz, that might have changed her trajectory enough to prevent the worst of her missteps. Maybe they’ll help somebody else.So here we go!1. Publishers are in it for the money.This is not a bad thing, but for some reason, it comes as a shock to a lot of writers. Some even see it as an outrage–how dare a publishing house think about profit and loss statements when they’re reliant on art?Publishers are in it for the money because:a) we live in a capitalistic society; andb) people who work in publishing need to eat.(I’ll take out of the equation the issue of massive, consolidating conglomerates, overpaid C-suiters, and the deep risk-aversion that ends up hobbling a publisher’s ability to, well, publish. That’s also very much reality, but it’s reality in pretty much every business these days.)What does this mean for the writer?It means the love and toil you’ve poured into this work of art for months/years/decades is not relevant to the publisher. How much an acquiring editor, or even the folks on the editorial board, might actually like the book is also not relevant. They need to be able to make a credible case for the book earning them back what they pay for it.Which is not a simple equation, and for sure, publishing houses take on loss leaders. I read somewhere (nice cite there, Liz) that most celebrity non-fiction books are big money losers, but they can contribute to a publisher’s reputation.Advance-wise? Most books don’t earn out. (My cite here is someone I knew who’d worked in publishing for 30+ years–her sense was about 70% of books never earned out their advances.) That doesn’t mean they lose the publisher money–it just means the writer will never see royalties.So as a practical matter, how does this piece of information help the aspiring trade-published author?Here’s what would have made a difference to 2013 Liz:You are absolutely permitted to ask money questions of your publisher. You can do this before you sign, after you sign, at any point in the process. You should do this. They have a P&L statement for your book before they decide what advance to offer you. They know their plans and expectations. It’s OK for you to know, too.You do not have to take an offer just because it’s a lot of $$$. I was told by a couple of people that the advance represents, roughly, what the publisher intends to spend on marketing, thus a higher advance theoretically gets you better marketing. What I can tell you now is that unless they are positioning you as a Big Book, you’re not going to get much more of a push than anyone else. So sure, take the money! But a publisher who offers less but has a marketing plan that makes sense to you is a better bet than one who throws big money at you and waxes poetic about storylines you have no intention of writing. (Weirdly specific there, Liz.)2013 Liz would have made different choices if she’d known these things. But she’d also have been with a different agent. Which brings me to:2. There really is no good way to vet agents.This is a hard one to write, because y’all know my absolutely shit experiences with two separate agents. And yet I’ve talked to agents who were very different than the two I signed with, and I’ve talked to many authors with productive, professional relationships with their agents. There are a lot of good people out there doing the job.But what 2013 Liz would have liked to know is that there’s no good way of vetting these people ahead of time.You can find a lot of advice about seeking an agent. Check their sales! See how long they’ve been in business! See if they have any long-running clients! Check their social media! Check their #MSWL!When the rubber meets the road, almost all of that is irrelevant.What you need from an agent is someone with enough contacts in the right corners of the industry to be able to sell your sort of book.As a practical matter, though–what does that mean?Damned if I know. In general, I can imagine one would prefer an agent who’s made some good sales, so when their email pitch for your book appears in an editor’s mailbox, the editor doesn’t frown, say “Who?”, and shift it to the Junk folder. I also suspect an agent who doesn’t have many/any sales yet would be a decent bet if they’re with an agency that’s got some experience under its belt. As I understand it, agenting is largely a mentor-driven profession–I’d cheerfully work with someone new and enthusiastic if I knew others in their agency were able to help them make contacts.But once you’re comfortable with an agent’s contacts/adjacent contacts, you don’t know what you’re going to get. You don’t know if they’re going to push you to make changes, if they’re going to want to be very editorial (that one you can ask about when you talk, and I recommend you do; I like editorial agents, but some people really don’t), if they’re going to advocate for you with the publisher. If they’re going to be the sort of agent who blows off new clients for bigger-selling ones. If all the lovely inclusiveness you saw on their social media is carefully crafted and has nothing to do with what they believe.Because once they decide they want to sell your book, they will woo you. It’s whiplash. You’ve been writing, probably for a long time, and suddenly you’re on the phone with someone who can get you published, who’s telling you how terrific your work is. My God, that can feel amazing. It especially feels amazing because literally moments before you open that email, you’ve been steeling yourself for rejection.You’ve gone from hoping against hope for attention, to having someone fall all over you. And I don’t care who you are–that makes you very vulnerable. They want you! And by God, you want them back. You want this to be It: the answer to all your hopes and dreams. The beginning of your book’s success. The moment in your career you’ll look back on fondly once you’ve Made It (however you define that).This is a very bad psychological place from which to make a decision.As I said at the start of this section, there are some amazing agents out there. And of course there are ones who are good at what they do, but might not mesh well with your personality, and maybe neither of you care about that and you can have a politely distant, mutually successful relationship.The thing is, though–there are people out there who are … not nice. Who are unprofessional. Who you’re better off avoiding–even if it means the book you’re pitching never gets you an agent. Because your agent is representating you to the publishing industry, and if that relationship goes awry, you may find you have more to recover from than you’d like.So what could 2013 Liz (and, *cough*, 2019 Liz) have done differently?Pay attention to red flags. You’re not going to want to do this, and it’s going to be hard to see the difference between “this is not a person I’d chat much with if we were both stuck at the back table at a family wedding” and “oohhhhh something is really off here and this is not somebody I should be entering into a contractual relationship with.” (See #5.)Do not put too much weight on the Big, Successful Authors they represent. The making of a Big, Successful Author relies on so much more than the agent. The vast majority of success in trade publishing is luck.If you recognize these red flags later on, it is absolutely okay to end the relationship. If you can, do it before you’re on sub, but if you can’t? That’s fine. You can be halfway through writing another book. You can be ushering it through final copy edits in the weeks before it’s published. There will be termination terms in your contract (your agent will get their percentage on anything they’ve negotiated for you, and that’s appropriate), and you can exercise them any time you want. Do not fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy. Once you see the problem? Get out while the getting’s good.This would have been a rough one for 2013 Liz, and is the most likely place she’d have made the same damn mistakes, even knowing what I know now. Because yeah, she was vulnerable to flattery. And she didn’t understand how an awful lot of people in publishing talk about books.In other words:3. Everything you are told will happen is speculative.Folx, this one sucks and I hate it. But it’s possibly the most important lesson I learned.Remember what I said above about wooing? Here’s the truth: none of that is about you.It’s about your agent, your acquiring editor, your marketing people, your publicist. It’s about all the people trade pub assembles to swirl around your book, figuring out how to package and push it out of the nest. It’s about them–quite naturally–hoping they’ve hit on something that’s going to take flight organically, that’ll rocket to the top of the Bestseller List du Jour, that’ll be a crowning achievement in their own careers.It’s not about you, it’s not about your book, it’s not about real expectations for sales. It’s about their own professional aspirations. Their hopes and dreams.And if it doesn’t happen with your book? They’ll transfer all that starry-eyed enthusiasm to the book being released right after yours. Because they have an endless supply of hopeful books by hopeful authors. They can feed their hopes and dreams eternally.Even after you’ve bounced out of the back of the truck and watched trade pub zip away along the highway without you.This is not to say that these people don’t like you. This is not to say they don’t like, or even love, your work. This is not to say they don’t really, really, really want your book to be hugely successful, the one that fulfills their dreams.But the rah-rah, this is so cool and it’s going so well–that’s completely disconnected from you, your career, what you’ve written, what you want.What would I have said to 2013 Liz?See #1, and FFS, talk to someone in depth about the marketing plan for your book. Find out how they’re spinning it. Find out their sales goals. Yeah, yeah, the book is amazing, it’s gonna be the next big Crossover Whatever, etc. etc.–don’t waste my time. Tell me what you are doing, and what your hard expectations are. Have your pipe dreams on your own time.If the marketing plan seems counterproductive (i.e. utter bullshit), push back hard, and if they won’t listen, back out. Seriously. Return the money, fire your agent (if they don’t support your position, and if they don’t fire you first), and start over. Even if it means writing a new book. This is one 2013 Liz might actually have paid attention to. Because she did object to the marketing. She just let herself get talked out of her objections, because everybody was preaching rainbows and unicorns, and she didn’t understand none of that was about what she’d actually written.This blurs into:4. Your book’s success is dependent on how much the publisher spends on marketing.And, as it happens, if they market it correctly.Some years ago (and no, I can’t find the link, because if I had actual foresight I wouldn’t be writing this post, now would I?) I ran across someone’s dissertation, in which they showed a correlation between a publisher’s marketing spend and a book’s commercial success. The correlation was so strong that nothing–not even the book’s perceived quality–came close to having as strong an influence.The TL;DR of this is a publisher (almost) always chooses how much a book is going to sell.What puzzles some writers is that publishers don’t expect every book to sell hundreds of thousands of copies. Remember that P&L statement? The one they put together before they even make you an offer? They have a pretty good idea of where your book is going to sit, sales-wise. If the book exceeds expectations? Wonderful! But if it does as well as they’d hoped, that’s a good thing–even if it looks, to the author, like the book is a failure.I mention this, because everyone is talking about death of the midlist, and that’s true. Medium-selling books are hard to place with a publisher. Having said that? I’ve seen a lot of spec fic books in recent years that ship, land in the 10,000-50,000 bestseller rank on Amazon for a while, and eventually drop to 100,000-500,000. And those authors are still writing, and still selling to the same publishers. Midlist may be dead, but steady, mid-level sellers still get published, and those authors still build careers.(Having said that–spec fic is a pretty specific market, so maybe do some research into whatever genre/subgenre you’re writing in to set your expectations.)Where all of this can become a problem is if the publisher gets the marketing wrong.I should say up front this is a very uncommon problem, despite being near and dear to my heart.But it does happen, and it’s well worth staying on your toes.Most writers are also readers. Most of us have been shopping for books (or seeking them out at the library) since we were kids. We all have, on some level, a sense of marketing. We know what we expect when we look at a cover and read a blurb. This knowledge does not become irrelevant once you sell a book.As with everything else, of course, there’s nuance here. A good marketing team will probably understand fine details far better than you do. They’re also largely marketing not to readers, but to reviewers and booksellers. The audience is going to be a little different.But here’s another thing: the marketing team probably has not read your book. Which means if they latch on to the wrong thing, you may have some trouble shifting them off it.I remember the marketing meeting where I brought up my objections. I remember the silence that followed my statement, and the cheerful publicist who told me, basically, that I was wrong and it would be fine. Somewhere I’m sure I still have the email from my agent, who told me the publisher knew what they were doing and I should trust them. I know I saved the later email where she said I’d been right in my objections, and she wished she’d pushed back a little more. (I’d have settled for at all.)So what should 2013 Liz have done at this point?She should have returned the advance and yanked the book.No bullet points here. I’m dead serious about this one.If they’re marketing your work as something it’s not, you are absolutely screwed, and if you want to have any kind of future in publishing, pull every plug you need to pull. And if it loses you your agent as well? Good riddance. They weren’t looking after your interests anyway.It’s hard. It’s terrifying. But you can do it. You can stand up and be a professional, and walk away from a bad business situation.Speaking of professionals:5. Social norms are still social norms.Look. I spent 34 years in the software business. I know all about social anxiety, neurodiversity, brilliant assholes, charming fools. You don’t get a more varied set of personalities than you do in the computer business. They’re not all weirdos (I really hate the stereotyping most TV shows indulge in), or even mostly weirdos; but weirdos are welcomed, and thus are everywhere.Since software was the only business I’d ever been in, when I ran into Weirdos In Publishing, I assumed it was just the way publishing people were.I was not correct about this.Here’s the thing: trade pub may be the gateway to an author’s dreams, but it’s really just an industry like any other. It’s big and distributed and messy and full of pockets of dysfunction, just like every other business out there. In most ways, it’s pretty typical. In terms of the people working within it? It’s absolutely typical. There are lovely people, and interesting people, and clever and not-so-clever people. And assholes, just like everywhere else.Publishing isn’t special. And they don’t have different social norms.This is maybe a hard one to buy, since ghosting is a tool often used by agents (and even publishers) towards aspiring writers. I have Opinions about ghosting, but I also get it. It only takes opening up one unwanted, soul-sucking dialogue with someone you’ve rejected to make you realize nobody has time for that. Agents and publishers are doing a job (see #1), and sometimes that means they need to defend themselves against the angsty baggage of aspiring artists. (We are, notoriously, an emotional bunch.)But I’m not talking about Authors Behaving Badly. I’m talking about professional behavior. Basic human interactions.If you run into someone who has trouble with these things, run away.Early on, I went to a con with Spouse. It was a business thing for me, so when I went off and had lunch with a few publishing people, he hung around and did con things. The lunch was nice; we all chatted, and it felt very relaxed and normal.When we returned to the con and I met up with Spouse, I introduced him to them, as you do when you’re in a social situation with people you’ve just spent an hour being social with.They ignored him.I’m not even kidding.One of them may have mumbled a “hello” or a perfunctory “nice to meet you”; I can’t remember precisely. Another wouldn’t even look at him. Just stood there, next to him, as if the introduction hadn’t even happened.I flailed, as I do, because I tend to go into Hostess Mode at times like that. Fortunately, cons being cons, we all drifted apart shortly afterward. But it was pretty appalling.I tried, for years, to tell myself it was a Weirdos In Publishing issue. But the one person I kept most in touch with proved, over time, to be exactly the sort of rude, uncivilized person they’d shown themselves to be in that moment.In that time, I met a lot of other publishing people. Just like in software, there were a wide variety of personalities. (More extroverts than I would have expected. A lot of writers, as it turns out, are extroverts, which surprised me.) But they all behaved normally. Even if they were arrogant assholes, they observed the pleasantries. (“Enough about me! What do you think of me?” Arrogant assholes, I’ve found, can be wildly entertaining.) The majority of these people I quite liked, and would have had a perfectly pleasant conversation at that back table at the family wedding. In other words: publishing people are normal, for the entire broad spectrum of “normal”.Which means if you find yourself making excuses for someone because “oh, publishing is different,” maybe don’t do that.As to how you handle it? Well, if you have no choice about working with that person, you’ll have to look into the “difficult colleagues” corner of the internet. There are lots of strategies, and it’ll depend on how this person is difficult, and what your options actually are.If you do have a choice about working with that person, don’t work with them.I feel like I’ve got a theme going here. And no, I don’t really expect most people to listen. But … have you ever had a job interview, and the whole place just smelled off? Have you ever felt, down in your bones, that this was the wrong place for you, even if you couldn’t articulate why?If you need the job to pay your bills, then yeah, you steel yourself and take it.But nobody is getting into trade pub to pay their bills.If you run into people that tweak your Spidey sense, pay attention. If you don’t have a Spidey sense, but you can’t confirm the things they’re telling you, or their promises seem exaggerated, or their behavior is inconsistent–pay attention. Cut your losses. Get out. Start over.That sounds terrifying. What if this is your only chance?I know how that feels. Start over anyway.There’s a tendency for authors to view the entire publishing industry, the whole chain between their words and their readers’ hearts, as almost a spiritual thing. Which makes some sense, really; creativity is about tapping into parts of ourselves that are deep, amorphous, indescribable. A business that takes those pieces of our soul and connects them with readers who recognize themselves in what we’ve created? It has to be magic! It has to be pure and altruistic! The nature of our art–our effort, our passion, our commitment–that must matter. That must be the driving force behind all of it.That’s not true, at all. You are producing widgets, and publishing is figuring out if they can locate enough customers to make money off your widgets. If they can’t, they will proceed to someone else’s widgets.I want to say again that a lot of people in publishing adore widgets. They may even have entered the business because widgets have been so meaningful to their lives, and they want to be surrounded by them. But no publisher can publish all the widgets, and their choices are made for material reasons. Love can help! It’s not enough.I’ve been lucky, in that self-publishing was always on my radar, even back in the day when I was hopelessly naive. It’s not for everyone, but I’ve enjoyed it. It has its satisfactions, although they’re not the same. It’s certainly a better place for me, mentally. The only Weirdo In Publishing I have to deal with is myself.But if you want a trade publisher?All of this distills down to one thing: value your work. Don’t accept bad marketing. Don’t accept dismissal of your concerns. Find out relevant information. Read and understand everything you sign. Protect yourself, and your career. Keep your feet on the ground, no matter how hard they try to haul you off them.Trade pub can be hard to negotiate, but it’s not impossible. It’s just, in the end, a business like any other.
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