This post is for friends and family who are curious about what I’ve learned while working on my book. For readers who walk the writer’s path, there won’t be much news here. Folks who are farther along the path may even roll their eyes or gently shake their heads.

I am pursuing a publishing deal for Raether’s Enzyme. I would like a book publisher to pay me money for the right to print my story as a book and sell copies on the open market. The terms are negotiable, but I’d expect a certain portion of the proceeds for each copy sold. This general arrangement is quite old and used to be pretty much the only way to bring a novel to market. Here in the 21st Century, e-books and print-on-demand technologies have changed things enough that the classic author-and-publisher business model is now referred to as traditional publishing. In the course my pursuits, I have learned enough to refine my very hazy notion of how the publishing business works to where I can now form a 10,000-foot view*.

From my 10,000-foot perch, the traditional publishing world (in the United States) looks something like this**:

Feel free to correct me in the comments.
Attribution for crowd scene: By Sérgio Valle Duarte
Wikidata has entry Q16269994 with data related to this item. CC BY 3.0, from Wikimedia Commons

Working our way from top-to-bottom and left-to right…

Readers

  • There are still a lot of them.
  • Their appetites range from voracious to picky, so each year an author may have many or few opportunities to connect with them.
  • Their tastes range from refined literary fiction to fun commercial genre fare to a wide variety of nonfiction subjects.
  • They consume novels as eBooks, paperbacks, hardbacks, and audiobooks. The latter three formats remain a strong suit for traditional publishers.
  • Usually prefer novels from authors they’ve read before and non-fiction from authors with established platforms.

Sellers

  • Buy books from publishers. There is usually a clause in their agreement that allows the seller to return unsold books after a specified time.
  • Present books for sale to readers in their bookstores and on their websites.
  • Promote a limited number of new books by placing them near the front of the store, on the aisle endcaps, and higher in their web pages. This can make or break a book’s commercial success.
  • Amazon and Barnes & Noble are also publishers. Self-publishing authors can place eBooks in their marketplaces directly and offer paperbacks via print-on-demand services like CreateSpace.

Publishers

  • Acquire publishing rights for manuscripts from authors via contracts brokered by literary agents.
  • Edit manuscripts to raise the quality and character of the writing to meet their standards and commercial goals.
  • Format and design the interior of the book in consultation with the author and agent.
  • Produce cover art and jacket text for the exterior of the book.
  • Print, or arrange to print, paperbacks and hardbacks.
  • Design and prepare eBooks for electronic distribution.
  • May produce or edit the audio book.
  • Provide variable amounts of sales and marketing support. New authors can expect less of this in the modern publishing world.
  • Take a risk by publishing new authors.
  • Have a finite catalog of books, new and old, that they publish.
  • Have a limited number of slots in their publishing calendars, most of which are spoken for by established authors.

Para-marketing

This is my term for a portion of the industry which is outside of the sellers and publishers. It serves readers by informing them about new books and serves publishers and sellers by bringing new books to the attention of the readers.

  • Provides readers with reviews of new books.
  • Prominent reviewers are courted by authors and publicists.
  • Favorable (or cleverly excerpted) reviews are blurbed on and within books, promotional materials, and on web sites.

Agents

  • Buffer the publishers from the vast number author manuscript submissions enabled by the word processing revolution.
  • Solicit submission of author query letters matching the agent’s interests/specialization by announcing their interest via websites, wish lists, and by participation in real-life events such as writers’ conferences and workshops.
  • Represent a small number of authors at a given time.
  • Pour through large numbers of query letters and manuscript samples to find the rare query or proposal that justifies the risk of investing their time.
  • Work on spec. The agent gets paid a percentage of the books sales (typically 15%). If the book doesn’t sell, the agent doesn’t get paid.
  • May offer to edit the manuscript make it more marketable.
  • Use their experience, tastes, market insights, and intuition to identify which publisher’s editors are in the market for a story that matches the author’s manuscript.
  • Pitch their clients’ stories to appropriate editors.
  • Broker publishing deals between authors and publishers.
  • May offer career management services for authors they represent.

Pre/para-publishing

Another one of my terms. Here I’m talking about a segment of the industry that is largely invisible to the reading public. It’s general function is to provide advice to authors on the craft and business of writing. No one organization is likely to do all of the following, but they link to and advertise each other.

  • Provides how-to advice on a wide range to topics: story structure, genre conventions, characters, pacing, market trends, writing query letters, etc.
  • Publishes directories of literary agents and publishers.
  • Offers freelance editing services that scale from developmental (structure, plot, characters, pacing, tone, etc.) to proofreading (this word is misspelled, needs a comma here, the word you want here is abstruse – not obtuse).
  • Organizes conferences and workshops where writer’s gather to learn craft and business, usually from speakers with industry experience.

Writers’ Conferences

  • May be organized by para-publishing organizations or writers’ groups.
  • Speakers may include literary agents or publisher’s representatives.
  • May offer opportunities to pitch stories to literary agents in-person.
  • Provide opportunities for real-time Q&A with industry and para-industry professionals.
  • Provide opportunities to network/commiserate with other writers and contact new writers’ groups.

Writers’ Groups

  • Provide authors with socialization in an endeavor that can be very, very lonely. Oh, so very lonely.
  • Provide a first line of readers to critique and encourage a writing project.
  • The success of one member can benefit other members with referrals to agents, blurb-able endorsements, etc.
  • You have people to hang out with at Writers’ Conferences.

Authors

  • Make up stories about people and events that aren’t even real.
  • Struggle to make these lies compelling enough that readers will want to believe them.
  • Want someone, somewhere, to affirm these made-up stories with praise and/or renumeration.

Oooops! I did it again!

Okay, for all its 10,000-footness, that’s probably more than any of my friends and family really wanted to know. Friends who were also coworkers might offer a rueful smile in memory of my overstuffed Brownbag talks*. Sorry. Then, as now, I have trouble with the short story format.

* Back in the day, there was a program within the engineering division called Brownbag Talks. These were scheduled at lunchtime. Bring your own lunch. An engineer prepared a thirty-to-forty-minute presentation about something her or she was working on. There were PowerPoint slides. Early in such talks, the engineer oriented the audience with a high-level overview of the subject. “How high?” you ask. The number typically cited was 10,000 feet. That’s a ways up there. You don’t see any intricate details, but the whole of the landscape is visible.

** In the unlikely event that someone working in the industry reads this, the choices here were the result of googling in August 2018. No offense of exclusion was intended.