| Chapter Ten: The Process: What Now? |
After spending two or three years developing a book idea, researching the material, and writing and polishing the manuscript, an author invariably squirms around on pins and needles for the agonizing time it takes for both agents and publishers to decide whether or not they want to adopt the book. What could possibly be taking them so long to make a decision? In most cases, the decision to chose this book project over another one to take a risk on and to spend an agency’s or publishing house’s time and money on is neither a fast nor an easy process. The larger the agency or the publishing house, the more decision points there are to get past and red tape there likely is to cut through before a book reaches adoption.
Also, whereas the author often assumes that the agent or publisher only has to decide the book is intrinsically worthy of being published, the agent or publisher is actually faced with far more questions than this: Is this a book I can sell with my current sales outlets? Does this book have strength against the competition of books that will be available when it’s ready? Is there a niche for this book in one of my next two seasonal catalogs? Can this book be profitably produced? It often takes considerable time and help from specialists before the answers to all these questions come up as a "yes."
Getting a book published and sold is a process—usually a long process—not an event. After the intense process of writing and polishing a book manuscript and after having been instrumental in the process of landing an agent, often the author only infrequently is asked to become involved in the processes of the agent selling the book to a publisher, the publisher preparing the book for publication, and the agent and publisher promoting and managing the sale of the book. The author all too often also succumbs to the inability to see that she/he is only one author and that his/her’s is only one book in processes in which both the agent and the publisher have many authors and books in various stages of acceptance, production, promotion, and distribution. An author who can understand and appreciate what is involved in the various processes is an author who is less prone to having a stroke from impatience than one who doesn’t understand what is going on while he/she is either stewing or trying to work on another project. |
An agent asked for a partial (or a full manuscript) and told me she’d get back to me within three months. I wrote the thing in two months; why can’t she get right back to me?
Invariably agents take a long time (or so it seems to the author) considering whether to offer an author a representation contract. In most cases this just means the author is trying to enlist the services of an agent who is good enough that lots of other prospective authors are also trying to sign with her. In fact, if an agent gets back to the author quickly and offers a contract, this often means that she either doesn’t have a lot of business (and therefore might not be all that good at it) or that the author’s pocketbook is of more interest to her than the author’s manuscript is. (Granted it could also mean the author wrote a whambang of a book, the significance of which came across in a stellar query letter.)
In most cases, agents take a long time to respond to a submitting author because they have more on their plate than just reading that one author’s query letter/partial/full manuscript, contemplating whether/how their work fits in with the type and quality of work the agent is able to place, and then writing out and sending a response. First, the author probably isn’t the only one who submitted a query to the agent today—plus there are all of those query letters that came in yesterday, and the day before that, and . . . . In addition to query letters, the agent has most likely asked for partials and full manuscripts from a good many authors and must spend time reviewing and winnowing those down to the ones the agent wishes to represent (and then contacting those to offer contracts as well as sending "no thanks" rejections to all the rest).
Also, if the agent is any good, she already has clients to attend to—a set of clients whose work is being polished up before it can be submitted; a set of clients whose work she’s actively trying to sell to publishers; a set of clients whose sales are in contract negotiations; a set of clients who have publishing contracts and the agent is trying to sell subsidiary rights for; a set of clients who need support in the book promotion field; a set of clients whose royalties are coming in and require management; and a set of clients who need to be told as tactfully as possible that an end to the author-agent partnership is looming. If she’s going to give each one of these concurrently happening activities the attention it deserves—including whatever submission the author now has added to her desktop—she’s going to need considerable time and energy—and patience from all of those who are either working with her already or who would like to be working with her on the book projects. |
OK, so I signed and sent my contract, as well as two copies of my novel, to my agent. Today, she e-mailed me to let me know she’s received the materials. So what happens at this point?
The author typically is exhausted and feeling completely spent when the agent is landed and is full of hope that the ordeal of getting the work published is over. But it isn’t—not for either the author or the newly acquired agent. At this point, the agent’s work as the book’s representative goes into full swing, and he has to initiate a chain of events that includes the author in a finely balanced way that provides all of the contact and coordination necessary without soaking up the time of either the author or the agent needlessly. The agent’s representation-through-sales period runs generally on the following schedule, and although in larger agencies more than one person in the office may work with the author on specific elements of the project, generally a single agent handles most of the work:
- The agent helps the author revise the manuscript, if necessary and as agreed (usually by making suggestions that the author uses in revisions and rewrites), as well as the query, synopsis, and biographical material.
- The agent starts contacting publishers and goes down through the possibilities from the best-deal possibility downward.
- The agent fields the rejections and the "maybe if" responses from publishers and works with the author in adjusting to these, as agreed and as possible.
- The agent (in consultation with the author) accepts the best verbal offer from a publisher and negotiates the best-possible contract.
- The agent guides and supports the author through the contract negotiations and signing process.
- The agent starts working on trying to sell the subsidiary rights, sets up the management mechanisms for the project’s accounts, and starts helping the author respond to the publisher’s production process queries.
- And while the book is in production, the agent normally will help negotiate the marketing plans for the book (to the extent the publisher will let the agent do this—the author and agent usually lose veto power on this at contract signing—if the author is lucky and isn’t bound by the contract to carry a significant amount of the promotion burden him/herself). Then, after the book has been released, the agent will help the author keep track of the author’s responsibilities in the promotional activities for the book. The agent sometimes will also help get reviews for the book and ensure that the publisher has seen reviews that are appearing.
- The agent functions as the author’s designated cheering section.
Agent Jenny Bent provides a comprehensive discussion at http://www.jennybent.com/expect/index.html of what to expect after you’ve landed an agent. Also, the response of a literary agent to the question of what part the agent plays in the publishing process after a book is sold can be found at http://wordsmitten.com/diana_interview.htm.
Why does it take so long for a publishing house to decide to offer a publication contract?
The acceptance process is greatly controlled by the size and formality/informality of the publishing house. Those involved can run from a one-person operation to a big New York publishing house. What is described here is the likely process at an "in-the-middle" house. Larger houses will have even more hoops the manuscript has to jump through. At smaller houses, the decisions can come much more swiftly (but also tend to be more subject to personal whim).
The acquisition editor reviews the incoming submissions and makes a judgment on what best fits the current holes in the projected publishing house catalog. As there usually are multiple acquisition editors, there usually are more likely adoptions identified than can be handled by the house’s schedule, although this is cut down somewhat by acquisition-editor specialization by topic/genre.
The acquisition editor makes up a proposal package and sends it around for rough add-on comment to the managing editor (for editorial comment), production editor (for comment on design/format issues), and marketing director (for comment on marketability and in what production numbers). When this package comes back, the acquisition editor determines whether the book project is still promising enough to pursue.
If a peer review is needed (for academic-type books at both academic and trade publishers), the acquisition editor must find those doing the peer review, send the book out, receive the review, decide whether the book is still viable, and contact the author to determine whether/when any questions or research holes that have surfaced in the review are going to be cleaned up. If peer review is required, this part of the process alone might take many months and invariably will involve multiple rounds of the author reviewing comments on the book, advising how/if he/she will adjust the book to take care of these comments, and the reviewer(s) responding whether this answers the expressed concerns.
The acquisition editor then makes up another, more detailed proposal and sends it to the managing editor, production editor, marketing director, and publisher for more detailed comments/estimates in their area of specialization.
Depending on how busy the publishing house is, the main characters try to become familiar with the most likely books to be adopted. The acquisition editor usually reads the whole manuscript. The managing editor scans the book and reads more deeply in selected parts (and also is often concentrating more on the format and copyright issues of the book than how the content flows or characters develop). The production editor usually only scans for design/formatting issues. The marketing director usually reads blurbs, the synopsis/proposal, and the first chapter or two. The publisher reads whatever pleases him/her—but usually with enough spot reading to bring up probing comments/questions at the adoption meeting and to keep everyone else on their toes.
When the acquisition editor determines all of the comments/estimates are in hand, the acquisition editor brings the proposal to an adoption meeting attended by the other acquisition editors, the managing editor, the production editor, the publisher, and often the financial officer and any other people in the organization with significant power over what is going to get published. (There frequently are not-to-be-ignored silent partners behind the press who are providing much of the capital, who don’t want to have to provide more to keep the press afloat, and who have very definite ideas about what will make the necessary profit and what won’t.) Those attending this meeting yammer about the various projects brought to the table and thumbs go up or down (with the outcome being based on the levers of power in the room—although the marketing director is listened to very carefully in any publishing house wanting to stay in business) or the package is sent back to an earlier point in the process for more work.
When/if everything is determined to be a go, the publishing house’s lawyer draws up a contract (or the acquisitions editor tailors a boilerplate contract), and negotiations with the author/agent begin.
The acquisition editor is responsible for riding herd on all books in the process and fielding all contact with/from the agent/author. With lots of book proposals in play in all different stages of submission and development, this is like juggling the White House, Pentagon, Eiffel Tower, and Marlon Brando simultaneously.
This is the acquisitions process—of course all, or most, of these folks are simultaneously engaged in work on other processes (i.e., production and marketing) as well. |
| After Landing a Publisher |
What does the publisher have to do to get a book into print and marketed, and what will I be expected to do during that process?
The total time usually required for the actual production process (manuscript acceptance to bound books) in the typical publishing house is at least nine months, although a month or so can be shaved off this if the book’s release is being expedited to pair release with a particular promotional or news event. In fact, however, publishing houses typically release their books in two catalog seasons (fall and spring), and a book does not just drop into a conveyer-belt-like production schedule on the day the manuscript is accepted—nor in the order in which manuscripts are accepted. The books are scheduled for particular future catalog seasons, and their production schedule can be accelerated or, more typically, elongated to meet a target release season. It is thus typical for a book not to launch in bound form for a year or eighteen months after the manuscript has been accepted.
In many nonfiction book cases, of course, the first thing that usually has to be done after the author signs the publishing contract is to actually go off and write the book. In the case of a completed manuscript, however, the first thing that happens to a manuscript in the publishing house is that all material is checked over to ensure the manuscript is complete. If new graphics—photographs, tables, figures, charts, maps, or illustrations—are to be included or written permissions are needed for existing graphics or to use quotes from previously published books, copies of these either need to be in hand at this stage, or the author needs to be committed to a drop-dead date on providing these. (It almost always will be the author’s responsibility to obtain and pay for permissions). At this point a tentative production schedule is drawn up for the book—and, contrary to what the author might think and probably would like, this schedule is driven by the release season that has been chosen for the book, not by a "first in/first out" service rule. If it is now winter, and the book is slated for the spring catalog of the next year, the production schedule will be expedited. But, more typically, the book may be scheduled for the fall catalog—or an even later one—in which case the book manuscript will just be shelved until its production schedule becomes a priority.
After the production schedule is established (and approved by all departments)—and it has been decided that production can commence—the acquisition editor often will do a substantive edit of the book and return it to the author for explanations and rewrites based on issues surfaced with the content. When the author has finished responding to the substantive edit, he/she returns an updated electronic disk to the publishing house. The editorial department then cleans up the electronic disk, making it compatible for the specific publishing house’s composition machinery, and the managing editor assigns copyediting of the book either to an in-house editor or to a freelance copyeditor. This editor, in turn, sometimes returns the edited manuscript, showing the edits and flagging queries to be addressed, directly to the author. But sometimes the time is even further elongated, because the publishing house’s procedure may be that the editor returns the edited manuscript to the managing editor for review before the edited manuscript is sent back to the author for comment. When the author has responded to the suggested edits and queries, the manuscript is either returned to the copyeditor for file corrections and cleanup and hence back to the publishing house’s editorial department or returned directly to the publishing house’s editorial department for in-house cleanup.
In the meantime, the production department is "casting off" (determining layout and the number of final pages in the book) and designing the format of the book and the cover (often farming cover design out to a specialty design company or freelance designer). The author will be consulted about the cover design, but in a traditional publishing house, the author will not have veto power over the cover design. The cover will be designed to attract and sell in comparison to other similar-category books, and thus will be designed within the limits of what marketing research determines will sell well at a given market moment. The marketing department is devising a promotion plan for the book and folding this into the house’s overall promotion campaign. (Books rarely are marketed individually; they usually are involved in combined ad campaigns with other books from that season’s catalog.) The author usually will either be asked to provide a marketing plan of their own or, more typically, will be asked to fill out a marketing questionnaire. This is designed to find out any and all connections to paying readers the author may have to help sales and to help target promotion.
When the edited book comes back and is checked over by the editorial department, it’s sent to the production department to be composed in the interior design elements (e.g., font type, font size, head presentation style, section dingbats, drop to chapter openers, chapter opener style, looseness of leading—spacing—within and around the text) that have been selected for it. The production department then sends it to the selected printer. (Based on the figures obtained from the earlier "cast off" procedure, the production department has put out bids to the various printers used by the publishing house and received these along with a confirmation of a period during which the printer can schedule press time for the book, and has identified the winning bid.)
The composition files for the book, including the cover and any graphics, are sent to the printer, which produces at least one round of "blue lines" (called "blue" because they traditionally have a bluish tinge to the paper)—a paginated dummy of the final copy. These come back to the publishing house, where the editorial department scans them for various problems that might have crept into the content, and the production department scans them for flaws in adherence to design. This is when both the acquisitions editor for the book and the marketing department are writing up the jacket copy and trying to line up endorsements and prime book reviewers—which they often will ask the author to help acquire—and, often, are sending blue-line copies of the book to the most important reviewers who have agreed to consider reviewing the book.
Having noted any problem areas on the blue lines, the editorial department then sends them to the proofreaders, which in today’s world almost always means the author. Book proofs are rarely more than scanned—really for production problems—in house anymore. If there is to be an index, this is when one is constructed. Typically this is a responsibility delegated to the author or to a professional indexer the author hires.
At this point bound copies of the galleys, known as advance review copies (ARCs), typically also are sent out for prerelease book reviews and/or solicitation of cover endorsements.
When corrections to the blue lines are finished, these are sent to the printer for final corrections, and book is printed. In most cases, the printer distributes copies of the books (based on order information provided by the publishing house) directly to the big distribution clearing houses in time for a release date, at which time the book moves from the production to the marketing phase.
For an amusing, but pretty accurate description of the publishing process itself by a top literary agent Sheree Bykofsky, go to http://users.rcn.com/sheree.interport/process.html.
If I am going to have a profitable writing career with regularly released books, what will the rhythm of my life be like?
Prolific novelists who keep themselves and their work in the public eye typically release one or two novels a year, although another schedule many, less-energetic authors follow is the release of one book every eighteen months. Those who are this prolific can find themselves in a tight production (and living) schedule. For instance, in a March 2003 book festival interview, legal thriller best-selling author John Grisham said that he now maintains a strict writing schedule, which produces one book a year, and soon, he hopes, will produce two. He writes from a highly detailed outline. He takes one or two years to create the outline and has several book possibilities in development at one time. Outline in hand, he starts writing, in desultory fashion, by the beginning of April of each year. He starts writing in earnest in late August, when his kids return to school, and, by contract, has a polished draft finished by 1 November. The month of November is for revisions; the book goes to the printer in early December; and the book is launched at the beginning of February at book signings at his two favorite independent bookstores (in Oxford, Mississippi, and Charlottesville, Virginia).
Note here that the schedule of an author at this level of success does not include the time-consuming process of constantly looking for new agents and publishers that a preponderance of authors at lower success levels have to add into their time demands.
Grisham said that for several years he has tried a lighter "winter" book, starting in December, but thus far he has found only one of these, Skipping Christmas, worthy (to him) to publish. Although Grisham does not become as directly involved in the promotion of his books as most popular authors do, like any author he has to spend time and energy on the books he has in the stores in addition to those he’s currently writing.
In a similar interview in March 2002, best-selling Victorian England mystery author Anne Perry, an even more prolific author than Grisham, gave insights into an extremely demanding writing schedule. Perry writes multiple series of books, each based on separate main characters. She says that she researches each of her intricate period novels for approximately a year, writes each in about six months (typically finishing two each year), has each one in the production process between nine months and a year, and then has to spend considerable time on the road promoting books that have been released in the previous year. And these activities must go on concurrently rather than consecutively.
From these glimpses of writing and promotion schedules of established authors, it should become clear to writers anticipating a continuing career in writing books, short stories, and/or articles that the writer’s process isn’t confined to putting words on paper until a single book emerges, mailing that book off to the agent and/or publisher, and then starting putting the next set of words on paper. Once you are into full swing as a writer—and all at one time—you will working on subsidiary rights and royalty maintenance for last year’s book; you’ll be on the road helping to promote this year’s book; you’ll be rewriting, reviewing edits, approving covers and blurbs, and helping to construct marketing plans for next year’s book; you will be creating the manuscript for the book to be released the year after next; and you will be investing time and attention to developing, researching, and setting up one or more book ideas for three years hence. This is the time to realize why you decided to link up with an agent who was willing and able to take some at least some of the paperwork and administrative load off of your shoulders. |
Print
Diane Athill, Stet: An Editing Life (Grove Press, 2002). This book gives background on the life of a top editor in a top publishing house.
John F. Baker, Literary Agents: A Writer’s Introduction (Hungry Minds, Inc., 1999). Background on what agents do and on specific agents who do it.
Richard Curtis, Beyond the Bestseller: A Literary Agent Takes You Inside the Book (Plume, 1998)
Michael Larsen, Literary Agents: What They Do, How They Do It, and How to Find and Work with the Right One for You (John Wiley, 1996)
Debby Mayer and Rosellen Brown, Literary Agents: The Essential Guide for Writers (Penguin, 1998)
Paul Parsens, Getting Published: The Acquisition Process at University Presses (University of Tennessee Press, 1989)
Lori Perkins, The Insider’s Guide to Getting an Agent (Writer’s Digest Books, 1999). More about what agents do then about what the title claims.
Dominique Raccah and Jon Malysiak, How a Book Is Made: An Insider’s Look at the Publishing Process from Manuscript to Reader (Sourcebooks Trade, 2004)
Arthur T. Vanderbilt, The Making of a Bestseller: From Author to Reader (McFarland & Company, 1999). Traces the progress of a best seller through the publishing process.
Internet Links
Literary Agent Jenny Bent’s article, "What to Expect When You Get Published," at http://www.jennybent.com/expect/index.html.
A literary agent’s response to the question of what part the agent plays in the publishing process after a book is sold can be found at http://wordsmitten.com/diana_interview.htm.
Ron Kaye, "Do you Need to Have a Literary Agent?" from the Association of Authors & Publishers newsletter, is provided at http://www.authorsandpublishers.org/pubpoints-archives.html. Includes a point-by-point rundown on "what does the agent do?"
Robert E. Shepard literary agency Web site posts an interesting article on the agent’s role in the publishing process at http://www.shepardagency.com/agents.html.
A personal description of the publishing process by a top literary agent Sheree Bykofsky, can be found at http://users.rcn.com/sheree.interport/process.html.
A description of the book production process is provided at the Oxford University Press/Canada Web site at http://www.oup.com/ca/about/publishing/.
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