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How to Start Traditional Publishing?

2K views 23 replies 16 participants last post by  NoCat 
#1 ·
This may seem like a silly place to ask, but Kboards has been an invaluable resource for me in the past. I figured there are hybrid authors out there, or with traditional publishing experience in their past. Although I'm publishing independently, my husband is convinced that traditional is the only path for him, and I'd like to help him. I just don't know where to start.

He's written four ~50k word books in the same series, with the first three being a direct trilogy. Where should we start submitting, and which guidelines do we follow? I've looked up several guidelines for submitting to publishers and formatted the first book's manuscript as well as I can, but not identifying where we want to submit is really holding us back since I read they all have their little quirks and recommendations between each publisher. Is there a well-known list or route for first-time authors? Friendly publishers? Genre-specific? (Dark Fantasy, as far as I can tell).

We appreciate any and all advice on pursuing traditional publishing. Most of all, he's said that what he really wants out of this path is to see his books on shelves in stores - that will make it "real" for him, because that's what he's wanted ever since he was child. Thanks in advance.
 
#2 ·
If he's wanting to be on store shelves, I'm guessing he's more interested in big publishers with wide distribution, versus small presses. That being the case, I'd hop on over to someplace like Agent Query and start searching for a reputable agent with experience selling in the genre. It's hard to get attention from the major publishers without an agent, so securing representation will likely be your first hurdle. One other thing, 50k is a bit short for dark fantasy. You might have better luck getting past the query process with agents if you can get your length up closer to at least 70k. Good luck!

Edited: Forget to add that you might want to check out a copy of 2018 Writer's Market from your local library. It'll have tips on formatting, writing query letters, lists of publishers, etc. At least, my old outdated copies used to have that info. I haven't actually looked at a Writer's Market in a few years.
 
#3 ·
In addition to everything Carol said, you could also check out Jeff's Herman's Guide To Book Publishers, Editors, and Literary Agents. And there's also the manuscript wish list (#mswl on Tumblr, I think it is).

When it comes to submissions always follow the submission guidelines of each individual agent or publisher that you're submitting to. Always personalize every query. And make sure it's a kick-a$$ query letter, with zero spelling mistakes.

And just to add on to something that Carol said, 50k is very short if your hubby wants a print contract. Indies can write whatever length works for the story, but for print runs, publishers usually want longer stories, and often will put a lower limit of 70k-80k on submissions. With stories that short, you're going to have a lot fewer options.

Good luck.
 
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#5 ·
LucasCWheeler said:
Although I'm publishing independently, my husband is convinced that traditional is the only path for him,
Before he does anything, he needs to understand for himself WHY he thinks this way. I run a micro-press, and this is actually a conversation I have had with my own authors. Why are you coming to ME instead of doing this yourself? What is your expectation? What do you expect me to do for you that you can't do yourself? How are you defining success?

I have some books that have sold fewer than a 100 copies. I have others that have sold over 50,000. And yet all of my authors are happy, because they got out of our relationship what they expected.

If he simply has no interest in the business side of publishing: editing, proofreading, layout, marketing, distribution, etc. etc. etc. That is a perfectly legitimate reason to not want to self-publish. If his goal is just to hand off all the front end work to someone else and see a finished book he can be proud of, there are plenty of small presses and regional presses he can look into.

If he feels he needs a lot of hand-holding during the writing process and needs an editor to help him, that is a perfectly legitimate reason to not self-publish. The problem with HIRING your own editor is always that you subconsciously feel it is okay to ignore them. You are less inclined to ignore the advice and guidance of an editor assigned to you. Again, there are a lot of regional and small presses with great editorial teams.

If his reason for looking for a trade publisher is some strange sense of "legitimacy": It is 2018. Legitimacy comes from dollars, not imprint name. Looking to call yourself a "legitimate" author by getting a trade contract is simply feeding a wounded ego.

If his reason for looking for a trade publisher is some misguided belief that he'll get a huge advance and make a lot of money: not gonna happen. The chance of getting the mega deal as a first-time author is about the same as an average high school kid getting an NBA contract. Sure, it happens. But when you consider how many tens of thousands of people are reaching for that same goal and how few get it, well, ...

So before you do anything, you need to have a conversation with him regarding WHT he feels that way. That will help determine the type of agents and publishers he should be looking at as well.
 
#7 ·
There's nothing wrong with going the traditional route, though it can take a long time. It's just a laborious process of targeting and querying agents and/or publishers until one bites. It took me many years, but I decided I was not interested in having a book published unless an independent third party agreed the novel was publishable and put up the money to support that opinion.

I still think the same, but I can certainly see the attractions of self-publishing.
 
#8 ·
anikad said:
Absolute Write has a fairly decent writers forum, probably not what it once was but there is still a lot of useful info there. The Bewares sub forum is good to check out publishers and agents. There are also genre forums for specific info about whatever you are writing. There is also a section on publishing with agent, editor etc. sub forums.
http://absolutewrite.com/forums/forum.php
They also have quite an anti-indie bias. I myself was banned from there for being too pro-indie.
 
#9 ·
LilyBLily said:
Having been the third party in my career, though, I know that the definition of "publishable" is extremely flexible and very much based on what the publisher wants to bring out as product today, including how much work the publisher foresees having to put into it. I have practically rewritten entire mss., and many other editors, needing product and not finding it fast enough, have done the same. And then the glut arrives as submissions in that subgenre and we have to turn down much better written books. Being accepted or rejected by a publisher is not the stamp of quality or the proof of lack of quality you imagine it to be. I get that it makes people feel good to have their mss. accepted and feel bad to have them rejected, but it's often an accident of fate: Your ms. happens to reach the right editor at the right moment.

With that in mind, though, I don't put anyone down who wants to go the traditional route. It's hard enough to write a story without having to contemplate or master all the many steps to making it a professionally produced book. To each his own.
I have no illusions regarding quality or a publisher's ability to assess quality. It's subjective, after all. I wanted a publisher to agree with my assessment of my MS and it didn't matter if we were both misguided. I know publishers, like self-published writers, make mistakes and their assumptions regarding what will work can be way off the mark.

I enjoy writing and have no compulsion to see my words in print, so trad felt right and whether I succeeded or not was not a major consideration. I was just fortunate to find a small publisher of (in my opinion, after reading quite a few of them) high quality novels.

It's all part of the vast tapestry of publishing, where there are no right or wrong ways of doing anything. Just ways.
 
#10 ·
Thank you to everyone who replied, with both professional and personal advice. I'll make sure he gets it all, and all of the resources have been bookmarked. We're going to talk about everything presented to us here and see what he wants to do moving forward. More advice is welcome if anyone has it, but I would like to extend a thank you to everyone who gave us more perspective on the issue.

I feel much better regarding how we can handle his work, and yes, a part of this was my attempt to get him in the right direction, so that he can be empowered to choose, and we'll talk to make sure that he understands the responsibility and work involved in whatever he chooses to do.

Thanks again! :)
 
#11 ·
This is what I would do:
Decide who are your dream agents. (These people will probably represent authors in your genre whose career and work you admire. It's fairly easy to find out who represents who. One way is to read an author's acknowledgement page.)
Then try and find a writers' conference where you might meet this agent (or another agent who works for the same agency)
Sign up for a pitch session.
Make sure you have a kick-butt query, pitch, sample pages, an author's social media platform, and even a marketing plan. If they like what they hear, they'll request a full or partial manuscript. Be sure yours is professionally edited. Then be prepared to wait for eons for them to get back to you.
Be professional and respectful.
 
#12 ·
Kristy Tate said:
This is what I would do:
Decide who are your dream agents. (These people will probably represent authors in your genre whose career and work you admire. It's fairly easy to find out who represents who. One way is to read an author's acknowledgement page.)
Then try and find a writers' conference where you might meet this agent (or another agent who works for the same agency)
Sign up for a pitch session.
Make sure you have a kick-butt query, pitch, sample pages, an author's social media platform, and even a marketing plan. If they like what they hear, they'll request a full or partial manuscript. Be sure yours is professionally edited. Then be prepared to wait for eons for them to get back to you.
Be professional and respectful.
Also, when you're developing that dream list of agents, READ the books they represent. That'll help you understand what they're interested in and what they're passionate about selling. Some agents have online presences, so do your research. But esp read the books they represent.
 
#13 ·
LucasCWheeler said:
Although I'm publishing independently, my husband is convinced that traditional is the only path for him, and I'd like to help him. I just don't know where to start.
He's quite right, of course. 99 of 100 authors will always do better with a reputable publisher behind them. The problem of course is that said publisher is much harder to get than formerly. When I began writing, there were huge obstacles between the author and the publisher. Can you imagine what it cost to have a manuscript professionally typed? And how many submissions you could make with that ms before it became too shabby to be submitted? And what it cost to mail it in a box, with return postage? Even when the fabulous Xerox machine came along, that was ten cents a page, roughly a dollar in today's much-debauched currency.

Now it's virtually cost-free -- you can email the thing to fifty "authors' representatives" in a few minutes. So where one author persevered, now there are thousands.

I got my first agent through a friend who had an agent, and the friend got her name from a published author of his acquaintance. That's still a valid way to go about it. Start looking!

It's worth the effort if it succeeds! Despite what you'll read here and on other writer-forums, a publisher will sell tens of thousands of books where an individual is lucky to sell a thousand.
 
#14 ·
notjohn said:
It's worth the effort if it succeeds! Despite what you'll read here and on other writer-forums, a publisher will sell tens of thousands of books where an individual is lucky to sell a thousand.
A publisher *could* sell tens of thousands of copies. But there are no guarantees that they will. Especially with the way returns are handled by book stores - I worked in the receiving department of a big box book store for six years, so I've returned a lot of debut novels - unless a debut author gets a big marketing push, their book could be returned within a couple of months of being published, and never ordered to be stocked on the shelves again.
 
#16 ·
notjohn said:
It's worth the effort if it succeeds! Despite what you'll read here and on other writer-forums, a publisher will sell tens of thousands of books where an individual is lucky to sell a thousand.
Traditional publishing and self publishing are both valid paths, depending on one's objectives, but what you're saying about trad publishers is only true to a limited extent. An A-list author with a Big Five contract is surely better off, but that's only a very small portion of trad published authors. There's plenty of anecdotal evidence that a lot of midlisters aren't making a living at writing anymore even with the Big Five, and small publishers frequently can't do more for a writer than the writer can do for himself or herself. The last Author Earning Report on the subject suggested that twice as many indie authors who debuted in the last three years were making a living at it as trad pubbed authors who debuted in the same time frame.

I'd consider myself a prawn, but even I've sold more than a thousand copies of one title (five thousand plus for all my titles combined--I haven't updated my counts recently). I couldn't make a living at it, but I know people who publish with small presses who have sold in the same range--or less. I also know people who left a small press and did better on their own--sometimes even with the same books! That doesn't mean people who sell modestly with a small press aren't happy. As Steve Harrison points out, everybody's goal is not necessarily to make a pile of money. I know people who are perfectly happy with what their small press does for them. But I'm happy, too.

There is also the problem that someone could wait for years and never get that trad nod. We have no way of knowing how many great books were lost forever because they didn't hit the right editor at the right time. JK Rowling got her first contract partly by luck, and many future bestsellers have gone through far more than the seven rejections she got. Given that data, it seems likely that at least a few writers of equal potential just never made it or gave up at some point. I suppose one could argue that other great novels were lost because their authors self pubbed and didn't know what they were doing--but at least that's something an author could control.
 
#17 ·
Traditional publishing and self publishing are both valid paths, depending on one's objectives, but what you're saying about trad publishers is only true to a limited extent.
I was never an A-list author, but my first two novels sold more than a hundred thousand copies each. (The third, not so much, and Doubleday dropped me.) With a university press, my first non-fiction book sold forty thousand copies, whereupon HarperCollins picked it up and sold fifty thousand more in paperback and digital. One story was made into a movie and translated into Dutch; the non-fiction book is now out in a Chinese-language hardcover.

Even my books with various regional presses have sold in the range of ten or twenty thousand copies. By comparison, none of my self-published books has sold as many as five thousand, digital and paper combined.
 
#19 ·
Jim Johnson said:
Also, when you're developing that dream list of agents, READ the books they represent. That'll help you understand what they're interested in and what they're passionate about selling. Some agents have online presences, so do your research. But esp read the books they represent.
That's the best advice you can find.

Reverse engineer the process.

Find out what they have taken and see if your story is similar.
 
#20 ·
notjohn said:
I was never an A-list author, but my first two novels sold more than a hundred thousand copies each. (The third, not so much, and Doubleday dropped me.) With a university press, my first non-fiction book sold forty thousand copies, whereupon HarperCollins picked it up and sold fifty thousand more in paperback and digital. One story was made into a movie and translated into Dutch; the non-fiction book is now out in a Chinese-language hardcover.

Even my books with various regional presses have sold in the range of ten or twenty thousand copies. By comparison, none of my self-published books has sold as many as five thousand, digital and paper combined.
Yes, but you aren't an author starting out today. I may be mistaken in the chronology, but didn't a lot of the successes you're talking about happen quite a few years ago? From what I can tell, conditions seem to have changed quite a bit recently.

I have no doubt trad publishing was a really good deal at one point. It still can be under some circumstances, but I'm not as optimistic as your 99 times out of 100 estimate.

Of course, it would be nice to have solid data, and we don't have anything approaching industry-wide statistics. Anecdotal data doesn't generally seem to support trad publishing, though. I've seen far more horror stories than success stories, and the small presses I looked at when I was thinking about going that route didn't fill me with confidence. I can hire an editor, cover designer, etc. What I need is marketing muscle, and many small presses now expect an author to handle the bulk of that. Some require a marketing plan submitted along with a manuscript. Others outright say that they expect the author to handle promotion. One said it was looking for authors who had been able to make at least $5000 a year on their own. It's also small presses that have generated many of the reports of greater success once the rights reverted, and the book could be self published. I also checked for their titles at Barnes and Noble. (The website at the time let a buyer check for the presence of a book in the nearest brick and mortar store.) A lot of those small press titles weren't even on the B & N website, and none of them were in the local physical stores.

Big Five imprints are definitely better, but I've heard some horror stories even about them. A few years back I met an author who had published with Little, Brown and Company (Hatchette). She was pleased, but her earnings weren't exactly huge, and her book, which I think had been out about a year, at the time was ranking below several of my self published efforts on Amazon. She also talked about how difficult it was to find an agent. Her first one wanted to take her thought-provoking literary fiction and turn it in to a murder mystery. She found a more sympathetic one eventually, but the process took a long time. Given that she was writing literary fiction, trad pubbing was a better fit, but even with a major publisher behind her, her book didn't end up being much of a long-term earner.

More recently, someone I have known for years got a contract with Simon and Schuster. His book was on the NYT bestseller list at one point, but even so, his earnings were hardly life-changing. Now his book is hanging out in the cellar with some of my slower moving titles.

Both those stories illustrate that trad pub is geared pretty heavily toward whatever the next big thing is. Sure, there are perennial favorites that keep selling, but even most trad published books only get a brief moment in the sun. If they don't make a huge pile initially and/or keep selling on their own, that moment may be all they get. The more ambitious self-pubbers end up with better selling backlists because they can control pricing and promotional strategy in ways they couldn't with a trad pubbed book.

And yes, both of these authors worked hard to get trad pubbed, only to be one-hit wonders. To be fair, the first one wasn't really trying to publish multiple novels. I think the second might have been interested in other projects--but the interest wasn't mutual.

Again, I'm not saying traditional publishing isn't a good fit for what some people want to do. However, it isn't what it once was, and it certainly isn't the golden ticket to success.
 
#21 ·
I am traditionally published through a small press. I always had a lot of problems getting interest from agents, but publishers were far more keen.

Personally, at least at this level, the only main benefit is that you do have a team of people behind you, helping you along the way.That can be great starting out if you have no clue what you are doing (like myself). However, in the end, you need to realize that most of the marketing you will have to do yourself. I've heard it isn't much different if you are with the Big-5, otherwise, you just have the brand to lend legitimacy.
 
#22 ·
Wisescarab said:
I am traditionally published through a small press. I always had a lot of problems getting interest from agents, but publishers were far more keen.
...
I've heard it isn't much different if you are with the Big-5, otherwise, you just have the brand to lend legitimacy.
One big difference is that most small presses aren't going to get your book onto a lot of physical bookstore shelves, which was one of the reasons the OP said his hubby wanted to go traditional.
 
#23 ·
ShayneRutherford said:
One big difference is that most small presses aren't going to get your book onto a lot of physical bookstore shelves, which was one of the reasons the OP said his hubby wanted to go traditional.
This is true. Though I wonder how feasible it would be for any new author to land in the Big 5 right off the bat, nowadays.
 
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