Posts by Parul Bavishi
A big publishing house equals more clout, more marketing, more sales… right? I thought so, until I moved jobs from a small indie publisher to a publishing giant. Turns out, the answer is more nuanced than I thought. Here’s what I figured out:
A bigger publisher does not mean bigger sales.
My friend, a fellow editor who sat opposite me at our decorated desks, handed me an innocent piece of paper.
‘Depressing’ she said.
She’d just received the standard, weekly sales sheet. This was my first one, as I’d just joined Random House from a then-indie publisher called Quercus (now part of Hachette). I scanned the sheet — author names on the left, number of books sold that week on the right. We all had to sign it to show that we’d read it.
Not good. Only a few stand-out authors had sold books in the thousands, but they were the outliers. Some newly launched authors had sold well below a thousand copies, some sub-100, some weren’t even on the chart. On weeks where a new John Boyne or Jacqueline Wilson launched, obviously the sheet would look different, but that only happened a few times a year.
If you plotted all the sales on a graph it would be a hockey stick for the big hitters and a long tail for everyone else.
These figures didn’t look that different from the sales I had seen at Quercus. Back when I started there, there were just three of us, setting up a brand new children’s list for a startup publisher. And our Sales Director was snooty about children’s books. Yet the sales figures at Quercus were only mildly lower than what I saw at RH. (Maybe we just punched above our weight at Quercus.)
Publicity is down to the tenacity of the publicist.
I had the privilege of watching Nicci Praca at Quercus lead the campaign to get an unknown Scandinavian writer in front of reviewers, bloggers and journalists. The author was doing well in his home country but the UK was (back then) notoriously uninterested in translated fiction. But Nicci’s obsession for Steig Larsson was infectious, and spread to the point where I was having a competition with the marketing director about who could read the unpublished The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest first. We were all talking about this great series we were publishing, and soon the obsession was too big for just our company; it spilled out everywhere. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo hit the bestseller charts worldwide, won awards and was made into a film with Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara. I make it sound simple, though obviously it wasn’t.
At the smaller publishing house, Quercus, the Publishing Director questioned me about the publicity plan for every book. At Quercus, I worked with Nicci to push hard for every single book on our children’s list. I called TV networks and radio stations; I befriended bloggers and threw them parties. I even tried to hire a wolf for a […]
Read More
Literary Scouts know a lot, but they’re not mind readers.
My story starts with J.K Rowling…
It was my first week as a Scout at what was then Anne Louise Fisher’s agency (now Eccles Fisher), and the office was buzzing. Constant phone calls. It was the buzz of publishers from around the world; the news had come out that Robert Galbraith, a low-profile crime author who had sold 500 copies on publication, was in fact J.K Rowling.
‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ a publishing client asked our agency.
Well, of course, we didn’t know; NO ONE knew. It was leaked by Rowling’s lawyer, for which he was sued. Rowling had wanted to live like common people and she had succeeded, for a bit.
Our clients were a dozen European and US publishers across the world like Penguin Random House Spain, Montadori Italy, and they relied on us, their Scouts, to keep them in the know over which unpublished and published books were being talked about, which authors were rising, and anything significant in the book industry.
At any one time, a good Scout can tell you the top 10 books editors or agents are reading ; their job is to know. But they are human and, as in the case of J.K Rowling’s secret, there are things that simply can’t be known.
But let’s rewind a bit.
Scouts fit into the big puzzle of international rights, so to understand them you need to know the basics of how books are sold from writer to publisher to foreign publisher.
My simplified version of how author get their books published around the world. (Skip if you already understand this.)
Authors sell books to a publishing house, normally in their home country. That publishing house will often ask if they can buy the international rights as well, so that they can sell the rights to publishing houses in different territories like Germany, France, Spain, etc. In other situations, agents will try to sell international rights themselves. In the case of Robert Galbraith/Rowling, her agent, The Blair Partnership, held onto international rights. Whoever has the rights, they try to sell them to other publishing houses , and take a fee for sales. Open the book market and of course it’s like any other industry, a complex marketplace–the products are books, the brands are authors.
Now, the official way of selling rights is for the rights team to contact editors in international publishing houses and persuade them to buy. For example, see below for how Little Brown advertised Robert Galbraith’s book, available for sale in their Frankfurt Book Fair 2012 catalogue. You can see they’re naming the Blair Partnership (an agent) for translation rights. It would be a year later before the secret became public.
Credit: William Ivan, Unsplash
Please welcome self-proclaimed book junkie Parul Macdonald to Writer Unboxed! Parul will be joining us 4x/year to add a new and valuable perspective to the site. Parul has been an editor at Random House, Quercus and Cornerstones, and a Literary Scout. For an editor’s view on indie-publishing and a look at publishing uncovered, follow her on Twitter @parulmac or visit her new blog, Publishing Squared.
Welcome, Parul!
What an Editor at a Publishing House Is Looking For: 6 Myths & Truths
Dial back a good few years, and I had just put the phone down with an agent. I had acquired the UK rights for Never Fall Down, by Patricia McCormick, a powerful, hard-hitting book about a boy escaping the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. I know, cheery stuff. But to me it was an astonishing book, and a book I felt readers in the UK needed to read.
The boss, the Publisher, walked across the room to my desk — ‘Have you already signed the contract for your book?’
I told her I had. Trouble was, they had just read another hard-hitting book, and she thought that one was more commercial. But it was too late, I’d already made my move on the book I loved, so she had to pass on the opportunity for this second book.
Who knows what we told the agent or the writer about why we rejected the second book , but the truth was we only had space for one of that type of book that year and my acquisition had taken the slot. There was nothing wrong with that second book. It had nothing to do with the author’s social media followers or her publicity plan. Nothing to do with her cover letter. Just plain bad luck and unfortunate timing.
Sometimes I wonder if authors and aspiring writers really know what’s going on in publishing houses — what motivates editors and why they say yes or no to an unpublished book.
I regularly scroll through advice given online to aspiring writers about how to approach editors and how to stand out. More often than not, I wrack my brains to remember: Did I ever care about that as an Editor at Random House, or did I hear fellow editors worry about this in editorial meetings?
Sometimes yes, the advice is spot on. Sometimes the advice doesn’t match my or my friends’ experiences at all.
The obvious thing I want to point out is that editors have two forces at play when they look at a manuscript.
So here are some things I often read, and here’s what I think are myths and truths.
Myth #1: An editor is looking for an author who ‘speaks the right language’ of the genre, and has a compelling cover letter.
While it’s nice if an author can make comparisons between his/her book and other bestsellers in the market, I’ve certainly invited authors in who don’t read in their genre […]
Read More
