Mari Andrew’s Iceberg of Creative Success

I came across this infographic from the talented Mari Andrew on social media, and although her iceberg is not explicitly aimed at authors, it works pretty well for our purposes.  Most overnight successes were (quiet, lonely, arguably desperate) years in the making, and while there are a few, charmed, fairy- godmother-type-tales out there— wunderkind author commands astronomical advance and widely praised debut novel becomes instant NYT bestseller—these shimmering breaths of fairy dust are the exceptions that prove a much less sparkly rule.

Tonight was back to school night at my son’s elementary school, so I’ve got education on the brain, but it’s worth thinking of a book contract as an acceptance letter to the college of (ideally) your dreams. Which is to say, it’s a starting point, but what happens next has a great deal to do with you. As education is far from passive, so too is publishing. And a great house and even a healthy advance do not mean that you graduate with a bestseller.

Houses large and small market and promote books along broadly predictable lines. These include creating and sending out press releases, mailing out galleys/arcs to bookselling accounts and long-lead media outlets, followed by a finished copy mailing to more of the same, bloggers, big-mouth influencers, and anyone you might have listed on the jaw-droppingly voluminous author questionnaire you struggled to complete some months earlier. Publicists will pitch and follow up with a tailored list of editors, producers and gatekeepers, the house may buy ad space, an online marketing department can help generate (or more likely amplify) buzz on social media, but unless the book starts selling like mad, this all-hands-on-deck campaign is in full swing for a finite period, typically about three months.

And while it’s true that in-house publicists have carefully cultivated connections that few among us may possess, they are no stranger to rejection or wholesale lack of response. There are, after all, many publicists, many more books, and a limited number of career-altering media outlets, or outlets, period. Frustratingly, book publicity is a field in which there can be little relationship between effort and result. In-house publicists also divide their time between several projects of varying importance to the house, and they report not to author or agent, but to the publisher. So writers are well-advised to enter into even the most dazzling book contracts with their own clear-eyed plans for promotion, ideally something more concrete than here is my book—do your magic!  A publisher’s bag of tricks can be effective, but it’s limited. While publishers generally do their level best to help their books succeed (it is, after all, in their interest as well as yours) they rarely engineer do-overs when their efforts fall short.  They want your book to be a break-out success, but you want it more.

At some point, the task of promoting the book will belong mostly to its creator, and as much as I sympathize with complaints over the indignities and puzzlements of self-promotion, it makes sense that writers invest some fraction of the effort they spent writing their book in working to connect it with the audience that very likely exists, if only they could find it. Plugging away at promotion does not sound, or feel, especially glamorous, but as the infographic shows, long marches (don’t forget sad emails to mom) are a necessary precondition to spontaneous success. My advice: see how authors whom you admire promote, create a strategy, and then choose a method that you don’t loathe.  Something you can do tolerably well, tolerably often.

In a follow-up post I’ll address specific ideas I’ve picked up–some from freelance publicists, others from savvy, dogged authors (please feel free to share your own ideas) and I’ll talk about why your connections, energy and commitment matter.

This recent piece in newrepublic.com speaks to a specific, if not new, concern for publishers and the book business – the potential demise of Barnes & Noble. Bear in mind, this has been a topic of conversation for many years and despite rumors, challenges and financial constraints, B&N is still in business.

Alex Shephard mentions in the piece: “In a world without Barnes & Noble, risk-averse publishers will double down on celebrity authors and surefire hits.” That might be true, but we’ve been seeing this for a long time. Same with his assertion that “Literary writers without proven sales records will have difficulty getting published, as will young, debut novelists. The most literary of novels will be shunted to smaller publishers. Some will probably never be published at all.” This has been a refrain we’ve heard on repeat for years.

My sense about the retailer’s impact on the book business if it were to shutter its doors is that it would be a significant and negative impact, but not an insurmountable one. No question, B&N has been a wonderful partner for bringing books to a wider audience. They provide some very nice opportunities for books and authors, from in-store events to co-op advertising (front of store placement) to their now 25 year-old Discover Great New Writers program. And while publishers still rely heavily on B&N’s feedback on many things, including covers (I’ve had several covers change at the last minute because B&N didn’t like it), the truth is that the number of books they purchase for their stores has dropped dramatically over the years. Yes, they still carry lots of copies of the big bestsellers, as do all the retailers, but they take a lot fewer copies of almost everything else.

This, in part, has resulted in smaller first printings for most books from years past with the hope that if the book starts selling, publishers can quickly hit the reprint button and fulfill market demand. But that doesn’t feel like new news to me. I hope B&N can survive and find a way to thrive in a very difficult market, but I feel strongly that even if that doesn’t happen, authors, publishers and agents will figure out a way to make it work, just like we’ve always done.

Now, this is a common side-effect of working in publishing – you hear so much buzz that by the time you actually read a book, your chances of coming into it without expectations are practically nil. And it’s also a side-effect of agenting – our brains are trained to look for flaws and pick apart ways to improve, and it can be really difficult to turn that engine off for pleasure reading.

But I was most intrigued to compare these books – let’s call them Red Book and Blue Book to protect the innocent – to books I read and did love. Red Book came out from the same publisher in the same season as a title in the same category – we’ll call it Green Book – that I devoured and have been recommending non-stop! To me, Red Book was tired and unoriginal, Green Book was twisty and unforgettable; yet Red Book has been tremendously outperforming Green Book in both buzz and sales! And coming from the same publisher, with similar marketing campaigns going into publication. Grrrrrrr, I say to myself, but it’s not fair! Green Book is so much better than Red Book!

I had similar feelings about Blue Book, the editor of which had passed on a manuscript I submitted, Yellow Book. I liked Blue Book fine…but Yellow Book is so much better! Yellow Book would appeal to the same readers now buying Blue Book in droves, and is strong in places that Blue Book is flawed. Ugh, wtf, editor!

So you see, agents are not immune to rejection and confusion. As Miriam recently discussed, the “I’m just not loving it” excuse is as valid as it is frustrating. Miriam described the feeling when you don’t like a bestseller: “I always wonder what’s wrong with me as a reader and then, because I’m judgy and have the power of my convictions, what’s wrong with all the other readers.” I too am judgy, with an unshakeable faith in my own taste, so a case like Red Book and Green Book where there are so many similarities makes me think on the X Factor in publishing. You never know what unseeable details of timing and taste are working for or against the story elements and marketing muscle to make one book a bestseller and banish another to obscurity.

So what’s the takeaway? Embrace the lack of control! Just kidding. I love control. And what you CAN control is being as loud as possible for the books you DO love, especially if you see them missing from Best Book of the Whatever lists! Talk about books you love on Twitter and Facebook, leave a copy in an airport, suggest them to friends in book groups and coworkers with free time.

Don’t waste your energy worrying about books you don’t like –keep yelling (or whispering, if you’re in a library) about the ones you can’t forget.

In the last couple of months, I find that clients are really rushing to get their proposals ready.  In doing so, they are making mistakes – both large and small – and ultimately prolonging the process of creating this very important document.

Book proposals really are the backbone of the non-fiction publishing process.  They identify an idea, discuss who the reader will be for that idea, both demographically and statistically, and discuss other titles which would be comparable, in terms of audience, to the one the author is proposing.

Proposals provide a structure for the book and demonstrate (with a sample chapter) the author’s writing ability.

Finally, with a bio and links of supporting material, the proposal highlights the author’s credentials and platform.

I tell my clients that doing the proposal is probably more difficult than writing the actual book but that once they have a proposal that a publisher wants to buy, they will have the blueprint for their book.

I also tell them “better late than lousy” and I mean that because a poorly constructed and written proposal will not sell in this challenging market.

So, take your time in creating your book proposal.  Think it through carefully and consider every element.  Taking the necessary time to do this right is important and will ultimately pay off.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject.  Let me know what you think.

One of the things that attracted me to interning and later working at a literary agency in the first place was the array of things I got to do with my day. Everyone I spoke with hemmed and hawed when I asked them what an “average day” looked like. To tell you the truth, there is no real average day at an agency. Sure, there are tasks that you may do every week, but there’s always something different to tackle or get your hands on.

I was lucky enough to see a few different areas of work at DGLM—first as the royalties and subsidiary rights assistant, and now as Jane’s assistant. When I thought about literary agencies and publishing in college, I didn’t consider publishing as a business, per se. Like many people (young and old), I regarded it as a mythical place where people chose and read books they liked and turned them into the things that we saw on the bookshelves of our local Barnes & Noble.

Ha.

How wrong I was. Naturally, we read. We read a lot. We edit, we comment, we do all the expected things. But what I didn’t expect was the whole business side of an agency: from the financials and contracts that keep the agency moving forward, the administrative side that makes sure everything is running smoothly, to the foreign deals that get authors more recognition in an ever growing global market.

On a less glamorous note, we also email a lot. Dear authors, who are worried about the status of their manuscript or making sure that we’ve received it: we are desperately trying to get back to you. We’ve probably seen it, marked it, and are trying to fight through the swelter of our inboxes to get back to your lovely query. We’ll get there, we promise.

One of the things that keeps me so excited about coming to work every day is knowing that my day will never be quite the same as the day before it.

What were your conceptions of publishing/literary agencies? What other things are you curious about?

I didn’t think so. It was Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman (the former blurbing about the latter), according to this piece by NPR. The article touches on the origins of the blurb and its efficacy in persuasiveness. It’s certainly worth reading it in its entirety. Personally, no one has ever told me that they picked up a book because of the blurb on the cover, but the fact that booksellers appear to be taking them into account says something.

In fact, that blurbs have greater traction with publishing professionals behind the scenes rather than consumers in bookstores speaks to their continued pervasiveness. Because the truth is that it’s increasingly difficult to make a book stand out to the general reader, and if there’s even a chance that a blurb might cause a consumer to take a closer look, you take it. Same goes for generating any buzz you can pre-publication and arming your sales teams with as much firepower as possible.

What do our readers think? As a reader, do you take blurbs into account? How important are they to you as a writer?

I’m not just gossiping about my little family excitement – these stories about my new brother-in-law reminded me of the road a lot of writers travel on their way to finding an agent. When you’re an aspiring author, you want to be published so badly. It’s all you can think about. Your loved ones get tired of you talking about it morning, noon, and night – maybe they even tease you about how obsessed you are, or how outrageous your dream is. You write, revise, and revise again, go to workshops and writing groups, send your manuscript out to agent after agent after agent. You get a few requests, then heartbreaking “not for me”s. It’s so discouraging.

Don’t give up! Visit the How-I-Got-My-Agent stories on any blog or writing forum and you’ll find that many represented writers went through months or years of disappointing responses before finding the agent that was right for them. Many writers got their agent with the second or third (or more!) manuscript that made the rounds. For example, my client Rena Olsen wrote very frankly about the years of self-doubt and disappointment before she signed with me. And a writer pal of hers pulled together this informal poll on when authors got published – the numbers are fairly evenly split, with only 16% debuting with the first MS they wrote.

So keep at it! Keep writing, keep reading, keep researching, keep querying – that’s what it takes. And it will be a great story to tell when you finally win an agent’s heart.

What success stories inspire you when you get discouraged about your writing? What are your best #persistence tips? 

Which is not to say that Ms. Maum doesn’t make some valid points.  The comedown after years of intense yearning for the pot of gold at the end of the publishing rainbow can be vertiginous.  As with most of the things we covet, success, as represented by a first-time book deal, is not the cure-all for all our problems nor the magic carpet ride to a suddenly fabulous life. 

And, yet, I think that celebrating the validation of oftentimes years of chipping away at one’s craft should be the greater impulse than bemoaning the problems that come with a new state of authorial life.  No, having your novel published isn’t the ticket to nirvana you may have hoped and dreamed it would be as you sat in your roach infested apartment eating ramen noodles at every meal while your parents relentlessly hinted at you to get a real job…with insurance.    But, it’s a pretty great accomplishment and, hopefully, the beginning of a long publishing career.   And, even though (to quote the immortal lyrics of Taylor Swift) haters gonna hate, writers, both published and un- are a lovely community to be a part of.

What’s your take on being a debut author—both from the wishing-that-was-me to the been-there-done-that-and-survived perspective?

Photo by Salvatore Vuono courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net

While I can’t promise to ever be quite as entertaining, one thing I can do is explain how some of the facets of publishing work.  I’ll start today with sublicenses—something I’m called on to explain fairly regularly—but if there are any other things about publishing you’d like to understand better, give me a topic in the comments and I’ll do my best to explain it or ask a colleague to take it on.

As with most things, there are exceptions to every rule, but here’s how sublicenses typically work:

So what’s a sublicense?  Basically, when you sign a deal with a publisher, you grant them some rights and reserve others to yourself.  (Those others are the ones that your agency would represent for you, which is where my job as Subsidiary Rights Director for DGLM comes in.)  So let’s say you sign a deal with Random House, and in that deal you’d generally give them print book rights and e-book rights, and you’d generally keep multimedia and film/TV rights.  Other things will be a part of the negotiation your agent is doing, like audio rights, translation rights, and the breadth of the territory granted to the publisher in English.  So let’s say you grant translation rights to the publisher as part of the deal.  That means that the publisher is the party empowered to sell those rights to another publisher.  When you do your deal with Random House, that’s a license.  When they sell your French rights to, let’s say, Hachette, that’s a sublicense.

That part is relatively straightforward. The thing that tends to trip people up is the money.  Now in your contract with Random House, terms will be set for how you earn money on that sublicense. Typically, Random House is going to get to keep 25% for their efforts.  The other 75% is for you, but it’s not really going straight into your pocket.  When Hachette pays Random House, 75% of the money goes into your royalty account and works to earn back your advance.  Advance with RH already earned out?  Great, then that money is coming your way soon.  Advance with RH still left to earn back? Then the money isn’t going to leave Random House. The French rights are part of what they bought from you in that advance, so they can use their French deal to earn back that investment.

Think of sublicenses like Russian nesting dolls full of coins:  your deal with Random House is the biggest of the dolls. When that dolls is full of coins—meaning once your royalty account has earned as much as they advanced you—the coins that don’t fit (aka, the amount above the amount previously advanced to you) come spilling out and get paid out to you!*  But inside your deal with Random House is Random House’s deal with Hachette, and that doll starts off empty, too.  Hachette paid an advance to Random House, which added to the coins inside the larger doll, but then the Hachette doll has to fill up with earnings from the French sale of the book.  Once the Hachette doll is full, coins spill into the Random House doll, and if the Random House doll is full, they spill over to you.  And yes, there can be a third doll inside the Hachette doll, where Hachette sublicenses, say, French audio rights.  As you might imagine, the French audio nesting doll is pretty tiny and doesn’t always exist.

So, does that make sublicenses clearer?  Or are you now just wondering why I think nesting dolls have coins inside them?  Any other questions about sublicenses?  And what topic should I tackle next?

*We don’t really pay our clients in coins.  But if they chose to withdraw their money from the bank in coins so they could Scrooge McDuck it up, we would never judge.