ADAM: So people are on. It's just not loading
on my Safari or Chrome.
BRANDON: OK. If you guys are in the chat,
let us know. And if you are a student in my
class or not, let us know. You non-students
are perfectly welcome, since we put this up
for everyone.
ADAM: This is coming through. Did you switch
[___]. I didn't switch any channels. So I'll
just know that.
BRANDON: Lots of behind-the-scenes, technical,
interesting things. We need to give a few
minutes for all of the students to make their
way to this link. It's been so much fun to
figure out technology. Right, Adam?
ADAM: Oh, it's a land-- not landfield. Minefield?
BRANDON: Minefield, yes.
ADAM: Seems like a new thing every week that
I'm seeing.
BRANDON: That goes wrong? Yes.
ADAM: Yes. So sound's back on. People are
here.
BRANDON: Great. We'll just give a minute or
two for my students to all get the link from
Isaac to make sure that they know where we
are, and then we'll launch into it. And you've
sent that link to Isaac, and he's sending
it to the students?
ADAM: Isaac is sending it to the students.
And people also put it online, so it's being
spread around.
BRANDON: OK. It's being spread around, so
everybody's getting it. All right. We will
go ahead and start. I should have my phone,
so I know what time it is. Sorry, I'm going
off camera for a sec. So I keep dragging this.
Oh! Only seven minutes late. Not too bad.
All right let's begin. We are going to be
doing the publishing lecture today. We're
going to do two of these. Next week we will
cover indie publishing. This week we are going
to be focusing mostly on traditional publishing.
This is going to be a bit of a firehose lecture.
I apologize for that. I'm going to throw a
lot of information at you. But the good thing
is, it's up on YouTube so you can watch it
again later if some of this is too much for
you.
The way I'm going to format this lecture is
I'm going to step you through how a book is
created and explain all the different kind
of behind-the-scenes people who are involved
in it. We'll be talking about agents. We'll
be talking about marketing yourself to publishers,
and that sort of thing. So lots of whiteboard
this week.
Let's start with the publisher. The publisher
on a book is usually somebody who has started
what we call- or is running what we call an
imprint. Back in the day, 60-70 years ago,
these were all independent publishers. They
would start up a business, usually named after
themselves, and they would be acquiring books
and publishing. These days, almost all of
these are owned by the big five publishers,
though there are some very large book companies
that are not part of that. For instance, Scholastic
is not part of the big five, and they are
a very large publisher. But generally, everything
is under one the big publishers.
And a lot of these imprints are mini, little,
shall we say, cities in the publishing empire.
So in a big company like McMillan, which is
one of my publishers, there is an imprint
called TOR Books, which was founded by Tom
Doherty back in the late '70s, early '80s,
was run as a separate, independent publisher
for a while, and then acquired by McMillan
in the '90s. Tom Doherty is still the publisher
of that imprint at TOR.
A publisher is primarily a businessperson,
and they have several people underneath them
that you probably should know about. They
have what's called an editorial director,
they have editors, and they have acquisitions
editors. And there's also sometimes VPs, or
assistant publishers, different types of names.
So what is this doing? Basically, your publisher's
job is to handle the business side of things,
and the editor's job is to handle editorial.
The editor's job is to acquire books for the
publisher to publish. Now, what you should
understand is these roles are often not held
by separate individuals, depending on the
company.
For instance, at TOR, for many years, Tom
Doherty was also the editorial director. Harriet
McDougal was the editorial director at first.
She retired and became Robert Jordan's editor
only, and his wife, and Tom Doherty basically
became the editorial director. An editorial
director's job is to oversee the editors,
to make sure that they are doing their jobs,
basically middle management in charge of editors.
An editor's job is to work with an author
in ways we'll explain later, to take the book,
to make it better, to perfect it, and kind
of be basically a project manager. Sorry,
barely read that. Editor's kind of like a
project manager. Their job is to oversee each
project, which is a book.
An acquisitions editor is somebody who reads
through what we call the slush pile. The slush
pile is all of the submissions that have been
sent in to the publisher, the people who want
their books to be published. The acquisitions
editor reads through them and finds books
that they want to publish.
Now, at TOR, for example, and at a lot of
companies, these are not two separate jobs
much of the time. Indeed, a lot of times,
the editor is the acquisitions editor, or
the editor has an assistant whose job is to
help them with all of their work and will
also act as a partial acquisitions editor
for them, and that assistant will not be acquiring
themselves, they'll just be looking for promising
manuscripts to give to the editor that the
editor might want to acquire.
My editor at TOR, Moshe Feder, was the assistant
to another editor for many years, helped him
with acquiring books and with editing them,
and then eventually was told, "You are allowed
to now acquire for yourself." Then Moshe went
out and started to look for authors to acquire
for himself and moved up into being an editor.
This is just useful to know about the publishers
you're submitting to, to know which imprint
has who as their publisher. At Random House,
which publishes my teen books, we have a basically
editorial director/publisher all wrapped up
in one, who is not the head publisher, but
is in charge of a small group of editors.
Her name is Beverly. And she doesn't acquire,
she just manages these editors.
Normally, the people in this position are
going to do much less acquisitions. In fact,
they may not do any. Once in a blue moon,
a friend of Tom's would want to publish a
book, and Tom would read it himself and be
like, "You know what? I really like this."
If it's TOR, he would then assign it to one
of his editors and say, "You become the editor
on this project." I don't believe that Beverly
over at Random House, Delacorte is the imprint
there that I publish with, does any acquisition
herself. She just oversees everyone else.
Once in a while, an editorial director will
have their own line of books they're publishing
while they're overseeing everyone else. In
fact, that was the case with Harriet at TOR
before she retired from that position.
It's useful to know because this will influence
who you're sending your books to, who you
are targeting, and who you want to buy them.
For instance, at TOR, approaching Tom Doherty
directly is probably not going to work for
you. Like I said, once in a while, one of
his friends, or someone he knows, or some
contact, will make him say, "You know what?
I'm going to acquire this book." But most
of the time, at TOR, you're going to be looking
directly at the editors and trying to pitch
your books to them.
How do you do that? Well, this takes us into
kind of phase two. Over here we'll talk about
how books get to these people. They come through
two general avenues. One is agents, and one
is direct.
Over the years-- that was a really weird way
to write "direct", Brandon. Over the years,
publishing has moved less direct and more
agented. This has been a continual trend that
began decades ago and is still a continuing
trend that more and more publishers are saying
on their submission guidelines that they do
not take unagented submissions. The big shift
in this, as I understand, happened really
in the '80s and '90s, where agents started
to shoulder more of the burden of reading
slush and picking out the gems and sending
those directly to the editors.
This is how most books, I would say, these
days, are sold traditionally, is that an author
picks up an agent. The agent then takes it
to all the editors in town, pitches the book
to them, picks and gets offers back, goes
back to the author and says, "Here's our offers.
What do you want to do?" and these sorts of
things.
Direct still happens. I sold direct. I sold
Elantris to TOR books in 2003 through a submission
directly to an editor that I had met at a
convention. That was Moshe. Instead of having
an agent. I was submitting to agents at the
same time. But I sold directly.
Now, one of the questions that arises a lot
regarding this is, should I be hunting an
agent? Should I be going direct? As I said,
direct is actually getting harder and harder
to do. Most agents will say to you, and most
editors probably as well, will say your best
bet is to hunt an agent first. Don't submit
the book to editors directly. The reason they
say this is because if an agent picks up a
book, then finds out you've actually submitted
it to every editor already and they've rejected
it, that agent will feel like this book has
already gone through the town and is therefore
"soiled goods." I don't know. It's like they
can't sell this book. That's the fear that
they have.
I will tell you a contrasting opinion to that.
I think that that opinion is wise and valid.
There is an argument for sending directly
to editors. I might be survivorship biasing
this one, because it worked for me. But my
argument to myself was always, I might as
well double the number of places I can send
books to. If it turns out that an agent picks
up a book that I've already sent out a bunch,
well, then they will have better avenues for
selling that and get the editors to take another
look at it, or I will just give them a new
book, because I write quickly enough that
if they feel like this book has already seen
the town, well, then if they're willing to
pick up one of my books, there's a decent
chance, because I write so much, they will
like the other ones as well.
In fact, an agent is not looking for a book.
They are looking for an author. Agents generally
want to represent an author during the early
part of their career, and then reap benefits
later. In fact, this whole industry, for most
of its life, has been focused on this idea,
the idea that a new author is a money-losing
proposition in most cases for a publish. A
brand-new author takes time to launch. A brand-new
author's first books are generally not going
to sell a ton of copies. And it's over time
with that author establishing a fan base and
that author becoming popular, that is what
they are looking for.
In general, through the course of history,
that's what they wanted. I'm a good example
of that. Elantris sold fine. It did just fine,
but it wasn't probably even paying the bills
for TOR in the long run. But Mistborn, the
whole trilogy, ended up selling better. And
then The Way of Kings ended up doing even
better. And suddenly I am one of their best-selling
authors. In fact, I think I might be TOR's
best-selling author. And because of this,
now those books are extremely profitable for
TOR, when early they lost money on me.
In ideal world, everyone is looking for authors
to build up over time. The unfortunate part
about this is, over the years, this has become
less of a theme, and it's become more best-seller
driven.
What do I mean by best-seller driven? For
a long-- for most of entertainment, let's
just say this, in most of entertainment, the
pieces of media that do highly successful
business pay for all the risks you take on
ones that don't sell as well. Then you will
have something in the middle called the midlist
in books. A midlist book is a book that makes
money for the publisher, pays for itself,
but doesn't make so much that it's really
funding anything else. These are successful
books by career authors who have a dedicated
fan base, but not a huge one. These people
were very important to publishing for many,
many, many years, because them in aggregate
would be as much money to the publish as their
few headliners, or which they'd only have
a couple. And so maintaining a really strong
midlist was a very important part of the business.
However, some things have happened. One is
indie publishing. indie publishing has begun
to bite out that midlist quite a bit, take
big chunks out of it. Because generally if
you're a midlist author, it is more profitable
for you to independently publish than it is
to publish with a publisher. This is because
if you have a small, consistent fan base that
is not growing, but is also not shrinking,
and they are willing to buy every book you
put out, you don't need marketing budgets.
You don't need huge marketing campaigns. You
can directly target that audience yourself,
and you can sell to them, and you will make
a much better cut of the money doing that.
Because of that, a bunch of people who would
be midlisters are now indie publishing. Because
of that, publishing has said, well, we need
to focus more on the hits. We need more hits.
The other thing that happened that caused
this is some consolidation in the book industry.
When a lot of the small bookstores folded,
and the large conglomerate chains took over,
which was a big process happening through
the '80s and '90s and into the 2000s, what
happened is a lot of niche bookstores that
were very good sellers for midlist vanished.
For instance, there would be bookstores in
the past-- Tom Doherty tells the story of,
it's not even a bookstore. It's like the corner
store, the truck stop, let's say. He often
uses this one. The truck stop exists, and
in that truck stop there are a bunch of truckers
that come through who really like westerns.
And Tom Doherty could publish a few midlist
western books, and he could get those into
those truck stops, and his bulk of his audience
was these truckers who would buy them.
Well, during the '90s, what happened is, books
started to consolidate into only the big bookstores,
and the truck stops stopped being able to
sell as many books, because people were going
to Barnes & Nobles and things. What was happening
is that some of these niche markets were drying
up. The distributors, it wasn't worth their
money to go to all these little chains anymore
and put these books in, because it was just
so much overhead to hire all those people,
that even though there was an audience for
those books, those books were no longer profitable,
or as profitable, as sending them all to the
big corner bookstore, which then was going
to be more hit driven.
Plus, a lot of your markets started getting
picked up by places like Costco and things
like this, where you weren't selling niche
books, you were selling very hit-driven books.
Someone going to Costco is looking for the
new Dan Brown book. They are not looking for
the new niche western book that a lot of truckers
might like but is a small enough segment that
it's just not profitable.
I could go into this for hours. Trust me,
I'm just giving you a summary. I'm getting
some details wrong on this. But the end result
was the publishers feeling they needed to
be more hit driven. So they started to focus
on, let's buy a book, see if it explodes big.
If it doesn't explode big, we drop that author
and put another author in that slot. Because
the book that hasn't come out yet has that
chance of being really huge. Very rare chance,
but it has a chance. Once an author is a known
quantity, there's this sense that a midlister
will remain a midlister, and that there are
some upper echelons that are like, cut those
midlisters. Let's look for more hits.
This is fallacious. You may be saying, wait
a minute. Do midlisters never become best
sellers? George R. R. Martin was a quintessential
midlister all through the '70s and '80s and
became the biggest epic fantasy writer in
the business in the '90s and the 2000s. Great
example of someone who had a long career with
some dedicated fans, and then wrote a book
that just connected with everybody, and it
spread from those fans, like wildfire, to
the rest of the world.
I think, personally, in the long run, this
old method is still better for writers, readers,
and authors, but that is not necessarily how
some executives think about it. So be warned.
Hit-driven is kind of a thing.
Now, let's go back to this sort of thing,
and let's talk a little bit about agents for
you. Then we'll talk about direct publishing
yourself. This is going to answer some of
your questions that are popping up.
What is an agent? Agents are people who, let's
say, in Hollywood agents kind of have this
reputation where, maybe this whole sliminess
reputation and things. In New York, book agents
generally have a very good reputation. I rarely
hear authors speak ill of their agent, and
if they do, it's a relationship that's on
the rocks, and the author generally leaves
that agent and goes to someone else.
Agents tend to be very good at being their
author's advocate in the business. I really
like my agent. I think highly of him. I think
highly of agents in general. I will give you
the counter argument to agents in a minute
here. But let's talk about what agents do.
So agent's pro-- You know what? Let's do direct
for a minute. It'll explain better if I talk
about direct.
To publish direct, sorry for that lane change
here, to publish direct with a publisher,
for many years, and still viable, what you
would do is you would take a full and completed
novel, you're not selling on proposal in fiction.
Nonfiction you can often sell on proposal.
In nonfiction, let's say you are a person
who has lived their life as a-- in a specialist
career. You are a rock star, or you are somebody
who knows a ton about write loss, or things
like this. You could rely on your credentials
and an outline to say, "I'm going to write
a how-to book on this." You can sell on proposal.
Does not happen in publishing by new authors.
An established author can sell on proposal,
and usually will. You won't yet. You need
a completed novel. All right?
You take your completed novel, and you will
then start sending it out via query letter.
So stage number one is query. A query is a
one-page synopsis of your book. Usually the
format follows a sort of paragraph about the
book, little paragraph about yourself, and
talking about, at the end asking that they
review the book and ask if they're interested.
I'm terrible at queries, so I'm going to refer
you to lots of resources online about how
to write a good query. Google it. There are
people who are way better at it than I am.
I was always terrible at queries. I still
don't really think that I'm good at queries.
When I asked my agent what made a good query,
he basically said, credentials, basic premise,
some sort of hook, few rhetorical questions.
Meaning stay away from the "what would happen
in a world." He doesn't like those. That's
personal to him. But just kind of the premise
in short.
"This is a heist novel about a group of thieves
who want to rob the dark lord of the world
after the prophesies hero failed to bring
the dark lord down." There's your kind of
hook sentence for Mistborn. A little bit about
myself would follow, particularly if you have
credentials, if you've published short stories
or things like this. And then following, a
little bit longer sort of summary about the
book, hitting only maybe one or two key elements
that make it really interesting. Potentially
some comps saying, if I were trying this right
now I'd say, "It has a feel a little bit like
Scott Lynch's series." Don't say, "It's Harry
Potter meets Lord of the Rings." Actually
do, like, a real comp, and then get out.
But I'm going to refer you to other people
to explain to you how to write a good query.
Usually you will send them a query. Then those
queries that you send out, a small, small
percentage of the editors will write back
and ask for sample chapters. In all the years
I was doing this, I got one response to a
query asking for sample chapters, out of dozens
upon dozens that I sent out. That was to Joshua,
the person who eventually became my agent.
He didn't pick me up before I sold my book
somewhere else, but he did pick me up after.
If they like the sample chapters, they will
request a full manuscript. All right? They
will then read the full manuscript, and if
they like it they will then make an offer.
This is the way the process is supposed to
go.
I don't know how often it actually goes like
this. You'd have to ask an editor how often.
I did remember reading an editor once saying
out of every 100 queries they got, they asked
for sample chapters on about 10. Out of every
10 sample chapters, they asked for a full
manuscript on about 1. And on about every
10 full manuscripts they got, they made an
offer on one. That seemed like a pretty too
even number, a percentage split down to be
realistic, but there's at least one look at
it.
Now, this might seem soul crushing to you.
It certainly did to me when I was trying to
break in. Because the odds of getting through
all of this seem really low. There are a few
things that improve your odds, particularly
once you get to this stage. Most people who
want to publish books do not know what they're
doing. Most people have not actually written
a lot. They have written one novel. They may
not have even finished it, despite submitting
it. They have not watched lectures on this.
Most people, their books can get dismissed
very quickly based on the sample chapters.
Queries, I don't know. I hate queries, if
you can't tell. But it seems like the same
way. Ostensibly the reasons for query is that
the agents will take all the books that are
written by people who seem professional. That
was not my experience, but that's what they
say. Your mileage may vary.
One of my goals was always to skip the query
stage. After sending out all those queries
on books I knew were pretty good, in fact,
Elantris was included in that, and getting
no answers, I started to figure, can I somehow
jump to the sample chapters stage. Because
once they're rejecting me on sample chapters,
at least they're rejecting me on my prose
and my storytelling, not on my ability to
write a summary and a good business letter.
The way that I went about this is by trying
to meet the editors directly, going to conventions,
listening to them at conferences, trying to
read what they write online about books and
things like this, and trying to ask them directly,
"Hey, I've got a book that I think would really
match you. Would you be willing to take a
look at it?" Almost every time that I asked
someone in person, they said, "Yeah, send
me sample chapters," which skipped this step
for me.
Again, your mileage may vary. I don't know
how many editors these days, this was 20 years
ago that I was doing this, how many editors
these days are willing to look at unagented
submissions at all. I still know that if you
go to conferences, that a lot of times editors
at conferences will ask for sample chapters.
By the way, this is also the process by which
you get an agent. The same sort of query,
sample chapters, full manuscript, offer, is
almost exactly the same process for picking
up an agent. And agents go to conferences
and conventions as well.
So how do you meet these people? Well, one
of the methods is this conference method.
This conference method is that-- by the way,
I will split conventions and conferences into
two things. When I say a convention, I mean
something like World Fantasy Convention, World
Horror Convention, WorldCon. These are fan-run
conventions that are not professionally focused.
World Fantasy tends to be the most professionally
focused of those. But basically, they're not
for profit. They're gatherings of authors
and agents and editors who get together to
talk about the business and about writing,
or in the case of WorldCon to talk about who's
the best Star Trek captain. Editors happen
to be there, and they are working, and you
can hear them on panels, and you can pitch
to them.
Conferences are different. This is like, locally
we have one called Writers for Young Readers.
Conferences tend to be, you pay a larger ticket
price to get in. An editor or an agent often
is a guest brought in. There are pitch sessions
with them. Professional authors are often--
part of what you're paying for is critiques
from professional authors. A lot of writer's
conferences fall into this category. These
are ways to network both with authors around
your writing skill level or professional level,
and to meet editors and agents. It's still
very hard. It is very difficult, and it is
still a little soul crushing. I understand
that. But this is a method you can use.
You can also follow these editors and agents
on Twitter or on Facebook or things like this.
See what they're saying. You can at least
put into your query letters some personalized
information. I would recommend if you are
going this route, imagine two different query
letters.
We imagine query letter from Author A. Author
A says, "Dear Acquisitions Editor, I would
like you to read my book, Such and Such. It's
really great. Here is why. Thank you for your
consideration." Perfectly professional, well-written
query letter.
Imagine you get another query letter that
says, "Dear--" put in the actual name of the
editor. Saying, "Dear Moshe Feder, I am a
big fan of Brandon Sanderson's work, and I
know you are his editor. I've been following
the other authors you've released lately,
including this one and this one, and think
your editorial eye is very sharp, and indeed,
I feel like the writing that I write matches
what you might enjoy, because I like, for
instance, very intricate magic systems that
are easy to understand and a focus on characters
interaction with their setting. Here is my
book, Such and Such and Such. I hope that
you will give it consideration."
That second query letter, if written well,
is going to probably get a better chance of
response than the first one. This requires
you to do your research. You have to know
who the editors are at the publisher and if
they are acquiring or not. You have to know
which authors they are editing, and which
books, particularly by new authors, that they've
released recently. You have to do a lot of
legwork finding out all this stuff, because
it's not easy to find. Generally, you're looking
at acknowledgements pages of authors' books.
You are Googling online. You are sometimes
asking the author who their editor is, that
sort of stuff, and whether they would recommend
them.
In my case, you probably do not want to submit
to Moshe. Moshe takes very, very few books.
He is a consulting editor at TOR. I can't
remember the last time he picked up a new
author in these most recent years. He's mostly
been editing me. So you would want to find
someone at TOR who is probably newer, and
who is acquiring a lot. That said, Moshe is
a fantastic editor. If by some luck you do
end up with Moshe, he is a really, really
good editor.
You have to do all this work, and it is a
ton of work. We talk about people having a
little black book of all these people they
are interested in dating, and all their phone
numbers and information. You need a little
black book that says, "Here is the publish
of this imprint. Here are the editors at this
imprint who are acquiring. Here are books
they've released in the last couple of years
that they acquired by new authors." And read
those books and start to get a sense for it.
That sounds like a lot of work. One of the
things that agents do, now we're going back
over here, the pros of agents, what they're
going to do. They do all that legwork. One
of their primary jobs is to know, in person,
all of the different editors at all of the
different publishers, and the books that they
have released recently, and things they've
said about what they're looking for.
By the way, never ask an editor what they're
looking for. Quick tip. Ask them what they
bought recently. If you ask what they're looking
for, they won't want to pigeon-hole themselves,
because they wouldn't want to exclude a book
that they don't know they're looking for yet,
that is really fantastic. They all hate that
question. But if you say, "What's the most
recent book that you acquired by a brand-new
author, and why did you acquire it?" Much
better question to ask an editor. Gets them
talking about what made them pick up this
book, and that sort of thing. Granted, you
don't always want to send an editor the exact
thing they just acquired, because they just
acquired that, so they won't need another
book just like that. But it can be really
handy to get a feel for what the editor likes
editorially. All right?
So, agents do all that leg work. They are
going to lunch with these editors. They are
meeting them at cocktail parties. They are
keeping lists of who's bought what recently.
All that stuff.
An agent is also a negotiator. When you get
that offer from a publisher, the agent is
an expert in contracts, specifically publishing
contracts. They will know what should be in
a contract. I should put in here contracts.
They will know what you can argue for and
what you can't argue for as a new author,
or at least how hard it is to argue for things.
You can ask for anything. Anything you can
argue for. But what you're likely to get,
they'll know. They will know your worth as
an author, because they will know-- publishers
need books.
If this is all like, "What? This is so hard."
Understand, you have something they want.
Even though you're a brand-new author, they
need books to publish. They can't rely on
Brandon Sanderson forever, because Brandon
Sanderson is eventually not going to have
books for them anymore. Hopefully not for
many, many years. But they know this. They
need what you have. So you have innate value
to the publisher, and the agents will know
how to exploit that value to its fullest extent
to negotiate for the best deal.
They also can offer editorial. An agent, a
good agent, often knows how to help an author
make a book work better for the editors and
can do kind of a first editorial pass to fix
things that might turn editors off at the
beginning and help them want to pick up the
book.
With all of these things, why would you not
want an agent? Well, let's talk about the
cons, not conventions, but cons of having
agents.
Number one is, they take 15%. They take 15%
off the top of every contract. In fact, the
way that most of the business is done, the
publisher sends money to the agent, who takes
15% out and sends the rest to you. Now, this
can be a slight advantage in consolidation
of your money. For instance, at the end of
the year, I get from my agent a summary and
everything we've gotten, and basically a 1099
from them, saying, here is all the money that
we have paid to you in one easy form for taxes.
But this can also be a con. Some, once in
a while, it doesn't happen often, once in
a while an agent is corrupt. And it has happened
that authors have been not paying attention
to what their actual money in was, and agents
were taking more than they should. Again,
very rare. But there are some people who don't
like agents, say if you do get an agent, make
the money be split at the publisher and not
at the agent, and the publisher sends 15%
to the agent and 85% to you.
Full disclosure, I do not do this. It sounds
like a huge hassle for the publisher, and
I do trust my agent. But this is a legitimate
concern about agents and one reason that people
do not like agents.
Another reason that people don't like agents
is they do not want editorial. As agents have
become more and more the slush pile that people
are submitting to, and that they are then
sending on to editors, sometimes there is
this conflict of interest, where the agent
feels like they don't want to submit anything
but the best work they can find, so that those
editors will always be trusting that this
agent only submits the most high-quality work,
and therefore the agent goes to the top of
the slush pile.
Because of this, agents will sometimes run
authors through many revisions on a book,
looking to get it editorially just as the
agent wants it. Some people, and I think this
is a very legitimate concern, who don't like
agents will say, that's not the agent's job.
The agent's job is to sell the book. The agent's
job is not to be the editor of the book. If
an agent is holding a book back from submitting
it because they want it to be something it's
not, then that's dangerous, because what if
the agent's opinion is wrong, they have it
revised all this other direction, and the
editors would have liked it better if it just
would have been submitted. Some people say
just submit the book. Don't go editorial.
You're going to have to decide for yourself,
if you go traditionally published, how much
editorial you want from an agent, and how
much you're willing to take from an agent.
Some agents, for instance, will not pick up
an author until they've gone through a couple
rounds of revision with every author to see
if the author is willing to revise and is
good at it. Some authors, that's just not
what they look for in an agent. So be aware
of that.
And there is this, sometimes other conflicts
of interest. For instance, let's say an agent
could spend an extra couple of weeks negotiating
on your contract and bring it up from getting
$10,000 in advance to, say, $20,000. And that
agent looks at that and says, "My 15% on an
hourly basis of the amount of work I would
have to do to get this from $10,000 to $20,000
is just not worth that hourly rate. I should
just tell the author to take the 10 grand."
Whereas for you, 10 grand to 20 grand as an
advance could be the dividing line between
you being able to go full time at this or
not.
So sometimes there's this conflict of interest
with agents, and good agents will acknowledge
this, and will kind of have a blanket, "Our
job is to get the best deal for our author,
regardless of how much time it takes, as long
as the author wants to keep pushing," because
otherwise you run into conflict of interest
levels.
This is why I base a lot of what I think a
good agent does on what Joshua does. Joshua
is willing to spend months negotiation a contract
for $500 for foreign rights on a book because
it's kind of a matter of principle that he
doesn't violate, that he is always looking
for the best deal for the author, because
to not be looking for the best deal for the
author leads you down this path of madness.
Pretty legitimate gripes that people don't
like about agents. A lot of indie published
people do not use agents at all. If they do
use agents, they use them for another bonus
that agents have, which is overseas. Overseas
sales are very hard for you to sell on your
own. Most indie authors I know do not sell
overseas and in translation. Usually that
is the agent's job. The agent will take your
book and will have deals with a lot of agents
in other countries, and these agents in other
countries will already have a deal that anything
the US agent picks up, the agent, say in France,
is going to accept as a client and try to
sell in France. This can be really good money,
particularly as a new author.
One of the advantages we have in writing in
the English language is that English language
entertainment is generally entertainment leader
worldwide. Just like French wine, or German
or Japanese cars have a reputation, English
language entertainment has a reputation for
being very high quality. And we benefit from
that in that a lot of our books are able to
be sold in many different countries, for sometimes
small deals, but in aggregate make quite a
bit of money for us. This isn't to say that
other countries don't have really vibrant
and great local publishing enterprises of
their own. A lot of them do. But this is an
advantage we have.
Plus, the English language market is just
so big that starting in English language and
going to smaller markets generally makes a
lot of sense, because if you, for instance,
are writing first language, and you are writing
in a language where there just aren't a lot
of book sales, then your advances will be
so small that you can't live on it. But if
you're English language and then picking up
extra money from other sales, it can work
much better.
So regardless, your agent, one of their jobs,
will be to sell these books overseas. Even
before my first book came out, Joshua had
three deals for me overseas, before the book
was published. This is just a thing that agents
tend to be very good at, because it also makes
a lot of sense for them to have their authors
all around the world.
Let's go ahead and talk about some of the
questions that we have here regarding agents
and up until this point. All right? Then we
will dig into what happens when a book actually
gets an offer on it.
When do you give up on finding an agent? Only
when you decide that you want to go indie
published. As long as you want to be traditionally
published, you should be looking at getting
an agent. If you have these problems, that
would be another reason to not get an agent.
You should not give up on an agent because
of rejections. You should give up on an agent
because you legitimately have problems with
these sorts of things and don't think you
want to use an agent. It is still possible,
very hard, but still possible to do. There
are some indie authors who use an agent only
for overseas contracts or things like that.
Or you have decided to indie publish, which
we'll talk about next week.
There is a good argument for being what we
call a hybrid author, which is an author who's
open to both avenues. And I will talk about
being a hybrid author next week as well. All
right?
"Should agents be approached with complete
books?"
Yes. We already kind of covered that one.
"What can a midlister expect salary-wise?"
A midlister, in general, is someone that I
would consider who is earning a part-time
living at their writing. For instance, they
are making $10,000 to $20,000, all the way
up to somebody who's making $70,000 to $100,000.
That's still midlister money. This is hard
to talk about and give you an expectation
for because your earnings will be directly
tied to how many books you sell. What is it
that counts as a midlister? How many books
count as a midlister? This really depends
on a lot of factors, and I'll try to dig into
this in a few minutes. OK?
"When is a manuscript good enough to submit
to an agent? First, second, third?"
I would recommend third draft is where you
start. This is going to be very individual
to you. But I recommend, finish the book.
Put it aside. Come back to it in six months.
Do a solid revision of it. Get a bunch of
early readers. Do a third draft incorporating
what comments you think that they make that
is good, and then start submitting it. As
you practice revision, you may get better
at doing drafts in the future. And as it's
out for submission, you may want to solicit
another group of readers that can help you
revise that book and make it better. But there's
no one answer. But there's a quick one for
you.
"How hard is it to get a publisher to pick
up a book after it's been indie published?"
It really depends, at that point, on your
success as an indie author. It's been a while,
so ask some editors director. But for a while,
managing to sell 10,000-20,000 copies on your
own was where the publishers started to sit
up and take notice. It depends on the price
point, too. If your book is being read mostly
as part of the Kindle whatever it is, where
you pay a monthly fee and can read as many
of the books that are in that group that you
want, that's not going to be as interesting.
If you're selling your book at $0.99 and you
sell 20,000, that's different than if you
sell your book at $3.99 and you sell 20,000.
I don't have the hard numbers for you. I would
ask around on this to people who've done it.
See, one of the problems you have with me
is, it's now been 20 years since I broke in.
So my information, though I try to keep very
up to date, is just not going to be as good
as people who are selling right now and breaking
in right now, or who are indie publishing
right now. In fact, I'm going to, hopefully--
hopefully you guys are watching, Jen and Becky
are going to give me their notes on indie
publishing. These are two indie published
authors who are in the class right now. They
were going to teach you next week the indie
published lesson. But because of this whole
having to go from houses and things like that
and quarantine, I'm going to still teach it.
I do know a decent amount about it, and hopefully
they will be sending their notes through that
I can use to kind of understand how it's going
right now.
"Is there a magazine website we can follow
that would have this type of publishing industry
information?"
There are a bunch of different places. Again,
I'm not the best at tracking this anymore.
For a long time, the AbsoluteWrite forums,
called the Absolute Write Water Cooler, was
the place to go to find out about publishers
and who the editors were and things like that.
I don't know if it's still up and running.
There are lots of resources for queries online
that people talk about. Publishers Weekly
often will list deals people make, but you
have to belong to their subscription service
to see those deals. Really this is something
that also is going to vary widely depending
on your genre.
I'll try to give you a rundown either this
week or next week of the big five publishers
in sci-fi/fantasy that you can then start
to use as a guide for going out and finding
these things. But I don't even know all the
editors at TOR anymore. Because editors do
tend to change, and TOR's gone through some
big revolutions lately. And so I barely know
the names of anybody at any of the publishers
because now these days that's what my agent's
job was. Back in 2000 when I was trying to
break in, I knew all of their names, and I
had them all written down. I just don't keep
track of that anymore. It's too much work
to do when I don't have to do it, if that
makes sense. I apologize for that.
"Do agents and editors often give feedback
or a reason for declining a book, or is it
radio silence?"
That's a great question. Generally it's radio
silence if you get rejected on query, and
half or more of the time if you get rejected
on sample chapters. Some of the time you will
get feedback on sample chapters that will
say, "This is why we rejected it." Every time
I had a full manuscript get rejected, I got
feedback explaining why. If they are taking
the effort to go through a full manuscript
and read through it, they generally are giving
you feedback. So it depends.
Once you start getting personalized feedback,
it's a really good sign that you're getting
close. About a year before I broke in, I started
getting a lot of personalized feedback on
my rejection letters. That was a very good
sign to me. Granted, most of these were things
that had skipped the querying stage.
All right. "What are some warning signs,"
we'll end with this one on this Q&A part,
"that you should look out for with agents?"
It's a really good question. Because while
there are certain kind of professional groups
that collect agents, that agents can belong
to, bad agents belong to these professional
organizations, and good agents, there are
some that don't belong. So the professional
organizations are not a 1:1 correlation on
a good agent.
What you should be looking out for is, this
agent, if you are going with this agent, they
should work at an agency that has sold books
by new authors recently that you can find
in bookstores. The big danger that you're
looking out for is someone who calls themself
an agent and then is soliciting all of these
things, and then is funneling your books toward
what we call vanity presses.
Vanity presses are the segment of the book
publishing industry that exists to charge
you money to publish your books. This is different
from indie publishing. In indie publishing
you're in control, and you may pay for an
editor, you may pay for a cover. In fact,
you should do both of those things. And that
is legit. That's what you should be doing.
A lot of these kind of vanity presses, they'll
act like they're a traditional publisher.
Some bad agents will exist simply to funnel
people into them. They'll say, "Good news.
We've accepted your book. All we need is $5,000
in order to publish your book." These are
people you should run away from full speed.
An agent who sends to any of these places
is not a legitimate agent, or at least is
a legitimate agent with huge ethical problems
going on, and these publishers are not people
that can do what you want them to do. There
are a very, very small number of people that
vanity presses actually serve legitimately,
in my opinion. This is someone who has a book
that they want to publish so they have lots
of copies of it to give to their friends and
family, but who is not looking to make a career
out of publishing.
There is a small chance that also a celebrity
who does their book and wants to sell it,
like let's say you are a rock star and you
want to have a book for sale at your concerts
to sell with your CDs and things like that.
Vanity publisher probably is a decent option
for you. But in most of these cases, indie
publishing the book on your own can be done
print-on-demand, so you can order as many
copies as you want to sell yourself. They'll
be at a very high price point and you won't
make a lot of money off of those print copies,
but the eBook copies you will be able to make
money off of. There is no reason to go with
a vanity press for the majority of people.
You should just investigate indie publishing,
which again, you will have to pay for, but
you do not need one of these vanity publishers.
And so stay far away.
If you want to read more on them, there is
a website that for a long time was maintained,
I don't know if it is anymore, called Writer
Beware, which was maintained by SFWA, the
Science Fiction Writers Association of America,
where they would list a lot of things about
why vanity presses were just not recommended.
A lot of them have died off in the era of
indie publishing. There's still a bunch of
them around, but a lot of them have died off.
Another warning sign is an agent who is asking
for eternal revisions on your things without
actually sending them out. An agent who says
they've put your book out on submission but
isn't willing to actually tell you the names
of the editors they submitted to, which imprints
they're at, and is not willing to send you
the rejection letters, that's a warning sign.
They should be willing to do all of this stuff.
An agent who asks for a lot of money up front,
bad. The only thing an agent should ever charge
you for is sometimes postage. And even then,
my agent never charges any money. He will
take things out of what he sells. Like, if
he sends a bunch of books overseas, it's part
of our contract that he can charge the postage
of that to me, and that comes out of money
that I've earned. It's never more than a couple
of hundred bucks a pay period, and it's just
like really miniscule. Again, I'm never paying
any money. It's coming out of other things.
Watch out for agents that are asking for money.
Watch out for agents that are asking for reading
fees. Watch out for agents who aren't publishing
books. They don't publish, but you know what
I mean. Who aren't selling books to legitimate
publishers that you can find in the bookstore.
Here's the bottom line. If this publisher
or person you want to work with, if you can't
go to Barnes & Noble and find their books
on the shelf, not orderable, but on the shelf,
you don't need them. You can do indie publishing,
and you can do everything that those people
would do for you on your own, and you probably
should.
If you can go and find a book by a new author,
picked up in the last couple of years, on
the shelves at Barnes & Noble, already there,
not have to be ordered in, then chances are
good that's a legitimate publish/agent, if
they represented that. All right? OK.
How much time do we have left? About 15 minutes.
All right.
We are going to break down what happens when
a book gets acquired. I'm going to go fast
through this part because we only have 15
minutes left, because we got a bit of a late
start.
The book gets acquired. This is great. What
happens is, first there's an offer. This is
usually of an advance. An advance from a publisher
is money up front that is a loan against the
money that book is going to earn for you over
time. It is a loan that does not need to be
paid back if the book does not earn enough
money. It is a loan that needs to be paid
back if you do not deliver the book, or something
like that happens. An advance will be offered.
Usually advances for first-time authors are
around $10K. They range between $5-20K, but
last time I saw one of the polls that said,
"What did you get on your first book?" it
was around $10K. This is $10,000 up front.
It's even a little bit worse than that, because
usually this $10K is split between half on
signing and half on publication, which means
that you're going to get $5K of that when
you sign that contract. Once in a while it's
one-third on signing, one-third on turn in
acceptance of the book, and one-third on publication.
Sometimes it's even split by paperback. So
there's a fourth one, one-fourth on publication
of hard cover, one-fourth on publishing of
paperback. I think that's where mine are now,
because my advances have gotten so astronomically
huge that the publisher wants to space them
out as far as possible.
How high do advances get? They can go all
the way from here up to $10 million is about
what you see, like the highest that you're
seeing for anyone except for the really big
kind of rule-breaking authors, like your J.
K. Rowlings and stuff like that. So it's anywhere
in there.
How do they know what to offer on a book if
it's by a new author? Well, this is where,
as my agent puts it, imaginary numbers come
in, not the actual mathematical sense. But
what will happen is the editor will go to
the publisher and say, "I really like this
book. I think it's really good for our line.
We should publish it." And the publisher,
sometimes working with the marketing director
and other people, depends on the publisher,
the imprint, will get back and say, "All right,
how much do you think it can make?" And the
editor will say, "I put this sheet together,"
it's called a P&L, profit and loss sheet,
"that assumes this book does as well as this
other book that we published by a new author
that's kind of similar. Based on those imaginary
numbers that we've made up; I think we can
offer $20,000 on this book." And the publisher
will be like, "Great. That's your negotiating.
That's like your high end. You can start negotiations
below. If they're demanding more than that,
you need to come back and renegotiate with
us." Sometimes that imaginary number will
be like, "We've hit the zeitgeist. We can
offer up to $100K on this." Or whatever. They
just kind of decide.
Now, how they know partially about this is
if the book has been up for what we call a
bidding war. This is if the agent gets a book
that they think is really hot. Like, "Wow,
this is fantastic. This is by a new author.
Everyone's going to want this." They will
send it out to all the publishers. And instead
of what normally happens when you submit,
you submit to the publisher, they take like
six months to a year to review it and get
back to you. It's this really miserable wait.
It was 18 months I waited for Elantris to
come back to me. Instead the agent will say,
"We're taking offers in two weeks. We expect
this to sell really fast."
And suddenly everyone goes crazy. Like, "Wow,
this agent has a fantastic book." They all
go read it. This is why agents try to keep
a good reputation, because an agent who does
have a good reputation for books in the past
can't get away with this as easily. They all
read the book, and let's say they all like
it. Then they all get back and they start
making their offers. The agent goes back to
them and says, "Well, these people offered
$100K. You're going to have to beat that."
So they'll basically play them all off of
each other, and eventually arrive at a high
number.
Now there's some interesting things about
advances you should know. Because they are
money that you are going to be paying back
out of your royalties, it means that if your
book sells the same number of copies that
a famous author's book sells, you will generally
make the same amount of money as that famous
author. You'll make it on the back end instead
of on the front end, and these numbers do
change slightly, but a lot of publishing contract
language has been the same for years. Basically
the percentages are around the same for everyone.
It's just how many books do you sell. So because
of that, you are kind of insulated against
this sort of-- if your book takes off, you
haven't just sold it for $10,000. If your
book takes off and sells a million copies,
you're going to make $5 million on that book,
regardless if you are a brand new author or
not, at least if you have an industry standard
contract, which all the big publishers should
be offering as boilerplate, you should be
making a certain percentage, which I don't
think we have time to talk about this week,
but we'll try to get in next week.
But one of the things to know about advances,
the more money the publisher has paid up front,
the more likely they are to be like, "Man,
we need to push this book, because we spent
$200,000 on the advance for this, and we only
sell 10,000 copies, we're not going to make
our money back. So we better give it a huge
marketing campaign." So generally, the bigger
your advance, the better, within reason.
There is one reason sometimes it's bad to
have a big advance, and that is if you can
imagine two books, one of which-- both of
these books are going to sell 50,000 copies.
One of these books they paid a $10,000 advance
on and it sold 50,000 copies, and so off of
that the author's earning around $150,000,
maybe $200,000, depending on paperback, stuff
like that, whatever. If it's 50,000 in hardcover
it would be around usually $3.00 to $4.00
a book. This other book, they paid $2 million
for and it sells 50,000 copies. Suddenly,
this book is a flop and this one is a huge
surprise success, selling the same number
of copies.
There is an argument for what my agent will
always call and say, "Here's where it seems
like everyone is settling that this book is
worth. Pushing them higher than this may not
be a good idea, because they all have instincts
about what it'll sell." It's all made up instincts.
No one knows for sure what you'll sell. But
there is that little caveat that I know Joshua
likes it when I put in there to mention why
sometimes pushing the advance astronomically
high may not be a great idea.
But regardless, this book has-- an advance
has been made. Your agent negotiates. Generally,
you want to have a contract where you're selling
more than one book. You don't generally want
to sell a dozen books, because you want to
be able to renegotiate. But you also want
them committed to trying to grow you as an
author.
So for instance, they offered on Elantris.
They offered $10,000 for one book. No, they
offered $5,000 for one book. Joshua got them
argued up to $20,000 for two books, so $10,000
per book, for two different books, and said,
"Let's go with this." He feels like he could
have taken it other places and got higher.
He still thinks that. But since I'd already--
I wanted to be at TOR, and I'd sent it to
TOR already, and I'm like, "I think we should
be at TOR," I took a slightly lower advance
than Joshua thought we probably could have
got if we would have played the field a little
bit more.
The book has been negotiated. All the terms
get negotiated. We'll talk about contracts
next week, and at that point, you start working
directly with the editor. If it's not the
acquisitions editor, generally it's going
to be the person who ended up negotiating
for the book the most. Sometimes it's not.
Sometimes it's handed off to a different editor.
Either way, this is the person that you're
going to have a great relationship with, hopefully.
This is the person who's the project manager
for your book. Their job is to find out from--
talk with you about how to make the book better.
They always want to make a better version
of the book you want to write. Remember that
they bought your book. They're not going to
try to push it to be something it's not. They'll
want to help you make it a better version
of itself.
People ask, do editors ask for things to be
added? Only if they think it's going to make
a better version of the book you are trying
to write. They will make suggestions. It's
your job to make the changes and to decide
if you want them or not. At the end of the
day, you can always pay back the advance and
cancel the contract if it doesn't end up working
out. That happens very rarely. Most of the
time you work with the editor. You try the
things they suggest. Some of the things they
suggest you really like. Some you don't. You
come to a kind of consensus at the end of
the book is now ready.
The editor, meantime, has been working with
the art director to come up with a cover.
Your cover is a movie poster for your book.
It is not an illustration of your book. The
art director's job is to come up with a cover
that will get the right audience to pick up
your book, not to be detail accurate to what's
in the book. Keep that in mind. Editor handles
that. They will show you sketches. They usually
will not let you have too much influence over
the cover, as a new author. Sometimes they
will. Most of the time they won't.
At that point, then they take it out and give
it to their sales force. The sales force takes
it around and sells it to all the markets,
all the bookstores, and says, "You should
carry this number of copies. It's a really
important, cool book that we're releasing."
They come up with negotiations and deals and
things like that about releasing the book
into the stores. And then they do publicity,
which is money they put into the author's
tour and things like that, and they do marketing,
which is money they put into convincing the
book sellers to push the book. At that point
your book gets released.
We'll do more questions about this in two
weeks, because next week we'll do another
publishing lecture, and then we'll do a lot
of your questions. Students make sure you
fill out the form. Make sure you write questions
I didn't get to in that form, and I'll try
to get to it in two weeks. Next week, we'll
do indie publishing and contracts. All right?
Sorry about the firehose, guys. Sorry about
the late start. But keep going. Keep writing.
We'll see you again next week.
