A Book is Born – Part III
Finding a publisher is one of the more frustrating aspects of writing a book. The famous “blood, sweat, and tears” aspect of finding an outlet for your creative narrative – whether fiction, memoir, or nonfiction, becomes a hunt through a morass of information. It soon becomes clear that the publishing industry is one of constant change, frustration, and opportunities.
The Gold Standard is securing an agent who successfully auctions the book to a major publisher for a big advance. The publisher whips the manuscript into a shape they think will sell and starts publicity. They send out advance reading copies (ARCs) to bookstores, get blurbs of praise and after a year or two, voila, the professionally designed book appears in bookstores. Sometime later a paperback and maybe an audiobook are produced. The author goes on book tours and hopes to sell enough copies that she won’t have to pay back the advance.
There’s another reality for most authors: Try to pick the best publishing option based on goals – is the book just for family? Only to be digital but for a wide audience? Paperback or hard cover to compete with all the other titles available? The opportunities range do it yourself, hiring a printing company to run off a few copies as gifts, small publishers who do little to no marketing, to expensive “assisted publishing” where the author submits their manuscript and for various fees depending on the services required, the company will produce a quality book including some marketing. And there’s true vanity presses that require a big investment with little to no return.
The middle ground I chose was to find a small publisher who does not require an agent. But it still required writing the dreaded query letter and a synopsis. The object of these two documents, both usually just one page, is to attract an acquisition editor’s interest in the book’s concept, story arc, characters and setting. I already had the synopsis prepared but trying to craft the query was difficult no matter how much advice I received from various websites and manuals.
Eventually I succeeded with one small press. It’s exciting to receive a contract – some have negotiable clauses others are take it or leave it. My acquisition editor suggested changes in a gentle manner: would you be okay with changing this scene or paragraph, etc. I mostly acquiesced knowing that too many times balking wasn’t going to help me proceed to publication. Finally, I was finished, one of the publisher’s in-house artists designed the cover, and a publication date was established. This whole process took a year, not atypical.
It was time to polish my marketing plan.
