I would love to know how you would disrupt the publishing industry. If you could wave a magic wand and fix three current fundamental flaws, what would they be? And how would you fix them? From what I see, everyone in publishing — authors, agents, PR reps & marketing folks, editors, even the CEOs — no one seems satisfied or particularly happy with how things are being run. You are one of the smartest people in this industry that I have come across, and your ability to break down some of these complex issues is so helpful! So… how do you think we fix it?
I have two concerns about publishing. (I'm coming at this from the perspective of a writer and former management consultant.)
First, the big five publishers appear to be growing more risk averse, despite having more resources from their parent companies to take risks. Big publishing is evolving like the big movie studios - dependent on blockbuster books, brand authors, and story franchises to support the overhead expense of the parent company. (For example, I'm quite sure that somewhere on the financial statement of PRH there is a line item for a Bertelsmann corporate charge.) This results in publishing 'same but different books' rather truly original work. Meanwhile, small presses and hybrids struggle to stay afloat while publishing great books that don't get the visibility they deserve because the big five crowd them out of a duopoly distribution system.
Second, on the creative side, it seems editorial work is getting pushed further and further away from publishers, and mid-list or new authors must pay for editorial work or find a robust writers group. One hundred years ago editors like Max Perkins at Scribners (now part of S&S) worked directly with authors to refine their work. Even as recently as fifty years ago this occurred (Look-up how Cormac McCarthy's career evolved - a path that people in publishing readily admit could not happen today). Then along came the literary agent. Most publishers will not consider unrepresented work or work from authors without an MFA. For the last few decades agents became editors and worked with authors on refining their material, turning acquiring editors at the publishers into book production project managers who dabble in classic prose editing. Now, literary agents are becoming loath to edit an author's work. Enter the manuscript consultant. My concern is - where does this stop? How many non-value add middlemen will this process tolerate?
if a person were to go with a small or indie press, what sorts of things could writers do for themselves to amp up their audience (without spending thousands of dollars)?
consolidation of big publishers and the homogenization of the workforce (low salaries, expensive cities, mean that the only people who can afford to work there are people who already have money, no? any conversation about diversity and inclusion that doesn't start there is not a serious conversation). the incredibly low morale and dwindling resources at a lot of places doesn't help. i know more people who have burnt out of publishing than those who stuck it out and that's a big problem. as someone above me said, the move towards fewer employees with larger workloads doesn't benefit anybody but those at the very top. the fact that this is a "prestige" type industry allows for a lot of workplace toxicity and abuse (because if you really love it you're gonna stick it out, right? plus with how difficult it is to get started, there's a sunk/cost fallacy that gets involved...) most of this refers to big 5 nyc workplaces naturally but you see echoes of it in regional/small/indie presses as well. it's rough out here lol
How will upstart publishers, like authors equity, or those offering more modest advances woo agents to submit quality work to them? And if they can’t, how can they mine the plethora of online/self-published work in a way that can scale with a small team?
What concern? From an author's point-of-view, the lack of meaningful marketing/publicity support from publishers today (from Big 5 to indie to small presses) that zaps an author's writing time, resources, energy and creativity. Why do publishers today think they can sell a product effectively without advertising it? Even GM, Boeing and Tesla continue to advertise and publicize their products.
I'd love your thoughts on how the sales team at Big 5 versus mid-size vs. small press and how they work with major retailers (think B&N or Target), libraries, and independent bookstores. It's especially helpful to understand what the publisher at each size does versus what the author might be expected to do. Also, I'd love your take on book tours and whether it ever pays off.
I would love to know more about indie publishing and small presses. When to "give up" on the agent/traditional/5 big houses route if we try that first, or whether our project might even be more suited to Indie or small presses. Are there any indie presses that work with agents ? Or is this a case of the writer sending a query directly to the smaller presses? What are the best resources for lists of indie and small presses? Thanks Kathleen.
Thank you for this forum and for sharing your expertise!
I'm concerned about all that is noted here, but also the Catch-22 in trying to find a path toward exploiting subrights. My first book is coming out in a few days with a small, traditional publisher. I went to them unagented and they are very good at communication and the actual work of publishing, backend, etc. But I recently attended an Author's Guild session on subrights and realized that to get anywhere with selling those, I will need an agent. (My book is a feminist,optimistic, adult fantasy). But I'm one into a series, and am wondering whether there is any realistic hope of attracting an agent at this stage.
I'm also concerned about the often built-in assumption in conversations like this that either one is agented, with traditional (meaning, mostly, big 5 or very large) publishers or one is self-published. There is often not much conversation about those, like me, who are with small, traditional publishers. The reason this is important is that there are issues like the one I mentioned above that don't get discussed, and also, typically very small presses like the one I'm with do not allow returns (unless the author buys the books back). This means that most bookstores will not stock them. I'd like to see more discussion about the real meaning of this. Is it important? We, as authors, are supposed to support our local bookseller (and I do), but mostly they won't stock our books, because the books are a greater financial risk than the Big 5's buyback-guaranteed titles.
I’m stuck at the moment. I can’t decide whether I should seek traditional publishing or possibly find an agent or self-publish. I attended a presentation with an agent on how to get an agent, and it seems like there are benefits to using one to publish as they would help find a publisher and make sure the contract is good.
I have experience publishing through a small press and self publishing. If I use self publishing again, I would create a business and purchase the isbn numbers for wider distribution and the ability to have the books available to bookstores and libraries.
With both, an author is expected to do most of the marketing, so I’m not sure which would really be best.
Here’s a hard one, and one where I personally struggle. To wit: I *want* to support indie bookstores, abstractly speaking. But we’ve got one giant industry vendor whose convenience and pricing and return policies tend to outstrip everyone else’s, so most of my book purchases go through them. Can you offer any advice (or words of encouragement) on how I could approach this differently?
Thanks for your newsletter -- have enjoyed reading it after being introduced to your work via Brad Listi's podcast.
I have two questions/concerns. Hopefully both are pretty simple. I'm a longtime writer and hopefully, maybe one day author. The advice we writers get is to do good work and focus on the process, not the outcome, but also that persistence pays off. I take 'persistence' to mean that you can eventually get something published if you keep at it and don't give up. (I'm not even talking about being able to make money off of your writing and most literary writers seem to also supplement with teaching these days anyway.) But writers (myself included) feed off of those stories of someone plugging away at their craft for years and years and years before they 'make it.' Is this still true? Does persistence still pay off?
Also, how should writers navigate the relationship with agents now? Understandably I get that there is little incentive for agents to submit manuscripts to very few publishers except the big ones if they have any hope of making anything back. As a writer, I assume I'm never gonna make any money ever. But I've also been told it's not worth agents's time to submit to smaller presses. And so sometimes I wonder if the very nature of the agent-writer relationship is outdated precisely because those big advances that (in the past) made an agent's work worth it almost never happen anymore.
Is there a place for authors who aren’t looking to write full-time and publish a book a year, as I see so many do? Is there a stigma against taking 2-3 (or more) years per book instead?
Rejection. Especially rejection from libraries who don’t want to carry your book. I wrote a children’s book about celebrating three different New Years (Lunar New Year, Rosh Hashanah and Gregorian/New Year) and was recently rejected by a municipal library system because they didn’t take independently published authors or those from smaller publishers. It was a double whammy for me because this particular suburb has a huge Chinese demographic so they were the first public libraries I approached.
As a writer who finished the first draft of their first (complete) novel, who also has zero social media presence, & no real writer community, I am overwhelmed by what I should do next, apart from working on my novel.
I would love to know how you would disrupt the publishing industry. If you could wave a magic wand and fix three current fundamental flaws, what would they be? And how would you fix them? From what I see, everyone in publishing — authors, agents, PR reps & marketing folks, editors, even the CEOs — no one seems satisfied or particularly happy with how things are being run. You are one of the smartest people in this industry that I have come across, and your ability to break down some of these complex issues is so helpful! So… how do you think we fix it?
I have two concerns about publishing. (I'm coming at this from the perspective of a writer and former management consultant.)
First, the big five publishers appear to be growing more risk averse, despite having more resources from their parent companies to take risks. Big publishing is evolving like the big movie studios - dependent on blockbuster books, brand authors, and story franchises to support the overhead expense of the parent company. (For example, I'm quite sure that somewhere on the financial statement of PRH there is a line item for a Bertelsmann corporate charge.) This results in publishing 'same but different books' rather truly original work. Meanwhile, small presses and hybrids struggle to stay afloat while publishing great books that don't get the visibility they deserve because the big five crowd them out of a duopoly distribution system.
Second, on the creative side, it seems editorial work is getting pushed further and further away from publishers, and mid-list or new authors must pay for editorial work or find a robust writers group. One hundred years ago editors like Max Perkins at Scribners (now part of S&S) worked directly with authors to refine their work. Even as recently as fifty years ago this occurred (Look-up how Cormac McCarthy's career evolved - a path that people in publishing readily admit could not happen today). Then along came the literary agent. Most publishers will not consider unrepresented work or work from authors without an MFA. For the last few decades agents became editors and worked with authors on refining their material, turning acquiring editors at the publishers into book production project managers who dabble in classic prose editing. Now, literary agents are becoming loath to edit an author's work. Enter the manuscript consultant. My concern is - where does this stop? How many non-value add middlemen will this process tolerate?
if a person were to go with a small or indie press, what sorts of things could writers do for themselves to amp up their audience (without spending thousands of dollars)?
consolidation of big publishers and the homogenization of the workforce (low salaries, expensive cities, mean that the only people who can afford to work there are people who already have money, no? any conversation about diversity and inclusion that doesn't start there is not a serious conversation). the incredibly low morale and dwindling resources at a lot of places doesn't help. i know more people who have burnt out of publishing than those who stuck it out and that's a big problem. as someone above me said, the move towards fewer employees with larger workloads doesn't benefit anybody but those at the very top. the fact that this is a "prestige" type industry allows for a lot of workplace toxicity and abuse (because if you really love it you're gonna stick it out, right? plus with how difficult it is to get started, there's a sunk/cost fallacy that gets involved...) most of this refers to big 5 nyc workplaces naturally but you see echoes of it in regional/small/indie presses as well. it's rough out here lol
How will upstart publishers, like authors equity, or those offering more modest advances woo agents to submit quality work to them? And if they can’t, how can they mine the plethora of online/self-published work in a way that can scale with a small team?
What concern? From an author's point-of-view, the lack of meaningful marketing/publicity support from publishers today (from Big 5 to indie to small presses) that zaps an author's writing time, resources, energy and creativity. Why do publishers today think they can sell a product effectively without advertising it? Even GM, Boeing and Tesla continue to advertise and publicize their products.
I'd love your thoughts on how the sales team at Big 5 versus mid-size vs. small press and how they work with major retailers (think B&N or Target), libraries, and independent bookstores. It's especially helpful to understand what the publisher at each size does versus what the author might be expected to do. Also, I'd love your take on book tours and whether it ever pays off.
I would love to know more about indie publishing and small presses. When to "give up" on the agent/traditional/5 big houses route if we try that first, or whether our project might even be more suited to Indie or small presses. Are there any indie presses that work with agents ? Or is this a case of the writer sending a query directly to the smaller presses? What are the best resources for lists of indie and small presses? Thanks Kathleen.
Thank you for this forum and for sharing your expertise!
I'm concerned about all that is noted here, but also the Catch-22 in trying to find a path toward exploiting subrights. My first book is coming out in a few days with a small, traditional publisher. I went to them unagented and they are very good at communication and the actual work of publishing, backend, etc. But I recently attended an Author's Guild session on subrights and realized that to get anywhere with selling those, I will need an agent. (My book is a feminist,optimistic, adult fantasy). But I'm one into a series, and am wondering whether there is any realistic hope of attracting an agent at this stage.
I'm also concerned about the often built-in assumption in conversations like this that either one is agented, with traditional (meaning, mostly, big 5 or very large) publishers or one is self-published. There is often not much conversation about those, like me, who are with small, traditional publishers. The reason this is important is that there are issues like the one I mentioned above that don't get discussed, and also, typically very small presses like the one I'm with do not allow returns (unless the author buys the books back). This means that most bookstores will not stock them. I'd like to see more discussion about the real meaning of this. Is it important? We, as authors, are supposed to support our local bookseller (and I do), but mostly they won't stock our books, because the books are a greater financial risk than the Big 5's buyback-guaranteed titles.
I’m stuck at the moment. I can’t decide whether I should seek traditional publishing or possibly find an agent or self-publish. I attended a presentation with an agent on how to get an agent, and it seems like there are benefits to using one to publish as they would help find a publisher and make sure the contract is good.
I have experience publishing through a small press and self publishing. If I use self publishing again, I would create a business and purchase the isbn numbers for wider distribution and the ability to have the books available to bookstores and libraries.
With both, an author is expected to do most of the marketing, so I’m not sure which would really be best.
Here’s a hard one, and one where I personally struggle. To wit: I *want* to support indie bookstores, abstractly speaking. But we’ve got one giant industry vendor whose convenience and pricing and return policies tend to outstrip everyone else’s, so most of my book purchases go through them. Can you offer any advice (or words of encouragement) on how I could approach this differently?
Worried about it crumbling honestly, and authors going elsewhere. It will be sad. I love books !! xo
Thanks for your newsletter -- have enjoyed reading it after being introduced to your work via Brad Listi's podcast.
I have two questions/concerns. Hopefully both are pretty simple. I'm a longtime writer and hopefully, maybe one day author. The advice we writers get is to do good work and focus on the process, not the outcome, but also that persistence pays off. I take 'persistence' to mean that you can eventually get something published if you keep at it and don't give up. (I'm not even talking about being able to make money off of your writing and most literary writers seem to also supplement with teaching these days anyway.) But writers (myself included) feed off of those stories of someone plugging away at their craft for years and years and years before they 'make it.' Is this still true? Does persistence still pay off?
Also, how should writers navigate the relationship with agents now? Understandably I get that there is little incentive for agents to submit manuscripts to very few publishers except the big ones if they have any hope of making anything back. As a writer, I assume I'm never gonna make any money ever. But I've also been told it's not worth agents's time to submit to smaller presses. And so sometimes I wonder if the very nature of the agent-writer relationship is outdated precisely because those big advances that (in the past) made an agent's work worth it almost never happen anymore.
Is there a place for authors who aren’t looking to write full-time and publish a book a year, as I see so many do? Is there a stigma against taking 2-3 (or more) years per book instead?
Rejection. Especially rejection from libraries who don’t want to carry your book. I wrote a children’s book about celebrating three different New Years (Lunar New Year, Rosh Hashanah and Gregorian/New Year) and was recently rejected by a municipal library system because they didn’t take independently published authors or those from smaller publishers. It was a double whammy for me because this particular suburb has a huge Chinese demographic so they were the first public libraries I approached.
As a writer who finished the first draft of their first (complete) novel, who also has zero social media presence, & no real writer community, I am overwhelmed by what I should do next, apart from working on my novel.