There are as many publication stories as there are books.
For many years, I thought only one kind of publication counted as success. I imagined I’d someday emerge from the querying trenches with an agent, big publishers would bicker over my amazing story, and then it would become a bestseller. I’d sit back and relax once I an agent fell in love with my work.
I don’t think it works that way for anyone.
Major publishers put out fewer books as a percentage of all books published in a year than ever before. Even the Big 5 publishers can’t manufacture a bestseller — no one can predict that. An agent advocating for your manuscript doesn’t guarantee the book will sell to a publisher. And the fantasy that an author’s work ends with revisions is just that — a fantasy.
In publishing Platformed, I forced myself to stop focusing on external markers of success and instead sought the right publisher for this book, at this time. It was a lot like looking for a college: you should consider whether graduates find jobs and whether the economics of a given degree make sense, but ultimately you’re not just looking at rankings — you’re looking for a fit.
Once I started researching, I decided pretty quickly that I wanted a small publisher. Platformed felt very timely amid the pandemic last year, and I knew it needed to get out into the world sometime in 2021. Since timelines with large publishers are around two years in the best of times, that ruled out the agent-auction-best-seller dreams of my younger days. Upon looking more closely at which books succeeded in that pipeline, I realized that Platformed wasn’t a great candidate for that route, anyway. It had a different home awaiting it.
The problem with small publishers is that it’s much harder to figure out how reputable and capable they are. There are publishers that will acquire the rights to your book and then never pay you (landing authors in lengthy and expensive court battles), or publish it and not support you at all in marketing it, or even charge you money for useless services that you could do on your own or that would be covered by most publishers.
Beyond avoiding a scam, there were a few superficial things that I wanted from a publisher: a good website and online presence, communication skills that boded well for working together, and nice-looking covers for their previous books. It’s remarkable how many of the publishers I researched couldn’t make it over this bar. In 2021, it’s critical that we as authors present ourselves well online — I think we all agonize over our online presence, knowing that agents and publishers will be looking us up. But publishers need to understand that authors are looking them up, too — and so are booksellers, reviewers, and other people who will be judging the books they put out. If a website looks bad or it’s easy to find examples of them behaving unprofessionally online, it makes me as an author very wary.
If I’m joining my author brand to that of a publisher, I want to be sure it’s mutually beneficial! One of the biggest complaints I’ve heard from self-published authors is that if you work with a publisher, you lose control of your brand and that of your book. It’s true that a publisher will probably not let you design your own cover — which is why it’s so important you trust their design team! It’s true that your book will have their name next to it everywhere — which is why it’s so important that it be one you’re proud to have there!
I found a fair number of publishers who did make it past this filter, though, and began receiving offers.
Many of these contracts seemed written for massive behemoth publishers, with restrictions and royalty rates that don’t suit a situation where the publisher has limited power and influence in the market. If they don’t provide any marketing services, why do they require all of your promotional efforts go through them? If they’ve never sold film rights and say they have no plans to, why are they acquiring them? Why would a small publisher that does much less for an author in terms of design and branding than a Big 5 publisher offer the same royalty rates?
Even if all of the details surrounding professionalism and fairness were okay, I still wanted to be sure the publisher and I aligned on the vision for this book — or at least that they had a vision for it. Every book is different, and publishers that communicated as if they viewed books as interchangeable threw up red flags for me. There are seasonality effects for when people buy different kinds of books (a beach read and a cozy mystery should be timed to come out in the right seasons). It matters how crowded the market is in a subgenre (if there are too many similar books, there should be plans for how the cover design and copy will make this book stand out).
I wanted to know how they planned to present Platformed, since I knew I wouldn’t get to decide what the blurbs were or how the cover was designed. Would they lean into the female software engineer protagonist and market to techies? Would they highlight the environmental themes and launch it around Earth Day?
Many of the conversations I had with publishers suggested they were unwilling to have these discussions until after I signed a contract. But why would I trust someone with the design and presentation of my book without evidence they were thinking about these things?
I was elated when I received my first publishing contract, but I noticed worrying details almost immediately. The website was very old. Most of their books were in a different genre. When they sent me the contract, they spelled my name wrong — then corrected it to a different misspelling.
Even after realizing that there were so many things that felt off about the offer, it was still very hard to turn down a publishing contract. I’d longed for one for years. What if I was doing the wrong thing? What if I was losing my one chance?
But I knew my manuscript had promise. I knew I had more great stories in me, waiting to be written. If I could get one bookdeal, I could get more.
And I did!
Once I began discussions with All She Wrote, it became clear very quickly that it was a better home for this book than the other publishers I considered.
It was a bigger risk in many ways: it’s less-established and smaller than my other options. But unlike them, the entire process was utterly transparent. I knew exactly what I would have decision making power over and what the publisher would decide, and when they were to make a decision, I knew what consideration went into it! The contract I signed was specific to my book — a gentle dystopia being released in the middle of a pandemic by a small publisher — not boilerplate that seemed to match a giant publisher putting out a generic unnamed book in 2005.
Some will say I had unrealistic expectations, but I don’t think so. I expected to discuss the future of my book professionally with a publisher who took me and my work seriously. I expected to be viewed as a partner in the process, not interchangeable with every other author out there. I don’t see how anyone could think that a less specific process would work better.
I am still a very new author. My debut novel only came out a week ago!
But I know far more about publishing than I did when I started out. The strongest advice I have is this: focus on doing what is best for your book at the current moment, not necessarily what your idealistic publishing dreams are, or what writing Twitter proclaims to be the best way. That might mean seeking out an agent and Big 5 publisher. It might mean self-publishing. You should consider all of your options and figure out what will work best for the project you are currently working on.
I’m now going through the same process with my next book — I hope to have big news there soon! It might have the same ideal home as Platformed, or it might not: the genre is different, and it’s not 2020 anymore. If I reflexively signed the first offer I received for it, I’d feel like I hadn’t thought things through well enough.
I’m once again considering my options, looking for the perfect fit.