AMA: I work in book publishing

[booksandstories]

Recently advertised for a job joining the team I lead and received 200+ applications so I thought there might be interest in book publishing!

I work for one of the Big Five book publishers and have done for several years.

I work across fiction and non fiction.

Ask me anything!

Thank you for the thread, op.
Is every book read by a sensitivity reader? What happens if the author refuses to make the changes required by the sensitivity reader?

The day-long copyediting/proofreading course you mentioned - is it a specific one or are there lots of similar ones? Thanks for the thread, so interesting!

What is Danielle Steel like in real life?

Where's the best place to start with getting a nonfiction book published? It's a help book (not mental/physical or decorating)

I think the two big ones for next year will be much more younger romance (contemporary rather than historical) and book club style upmarket thrillers.

I don't think it'll be anything massively new - buying decisions are becoming much much more conservative and relying on brands again.

Staff are tested but genuinely I think the dip is because people aren't printing off manuscripts as much; they are working from home and trying to proofread on a screen instead.

I completely agree about the Goldfinch OP, loved the book but was tired of reading it by the end!
My question is: what’s your favourite book?

Author pay has never been very good historically, there are lots of diaries of Victorian authors who are penniless! But advances haven't been that good for the last 20 years for many authors. The pay for publishers isn't great either.

The other reason is that many, many more books are published now than there used to be. There's an element of spread betting so the huge advances are getting fewer and fewer.

Even a £100k advance (really good money) is usually paid a third on contract signing, a third on manuscript delivery and a third on publication. So it could be spread over two or three years, realistically.

As for how much an author would make on an £8.99 paperback, it's roughly 50p-£1 a copy as a back-of-fag-packet calculation.

It might cost £8.99 to buy.

But the books are sold to the bookshop at a discount, the publisher takes a cut, the paper costs too, and the distribution costs all come out of that. Plus, the advance that was paid to the author also has to come out of the book sales.

The more copies the book is expected to sell, the higher the advance. If all advances were low no matter what the books sold, authors would just move publisher to one with better advances. Most books don't actually earn out their advance so the author pay is about right. Broadly, quite a few people are comfortable but no one is getting rich out of publishing unless they are a phenomenal success.

Hullo! So, I am an author- but I've come from a successful and fast-paced career elsewhere.

I'm aware that everyone in publishing seems overworked, a little burnt out and stressed. Any clues why? It is an achingly slow business, and I struggle to understand why. It's not unusual for somebody to send me a query, for me to reply within an hour, and them get back to me six months later. Somebody showed me emails this week from a big 5 publisher asking him to write a book on a particular subject. He replied yes immediately. They got back to him TWO YEARS later with the follow-up email.

I'm not bitter about this, by the way (jaded, probably!), I'm genuinely looking for thoughts. Are people just massively overwhelmed? Is publishing full of over thinkers? Is there too much to do? Are the structures of the business organised right? Have they suffered particularly badly with the pandemic?

It feels really weird coming from another organisation. I am expected to send email replies within 24 hours- even if that's a holding email. Coming back to people after six months suggests a level of chaos behind the scenes that I feel stressed about on behalf of publishers!

I'm a qualified academic librarian and advise academics on getting published, as well as doing tasks like buying books and liaising with academic publishers. What I really love though is reading. I also have a sharp eye for detail (e.g. will notice if a writer repeats an adjective 100 pages later) and LOVE grammar. Would it be realistic to try to move into publishing? I couldn't afford to start at the bottom. And being honest I'm not sure if I'd find it hard to adjust to working for a commercial business - is it very fast-paced and target driven? But I have a dream that I can be paid to read one day! I really want to do more book work, less dealing with students / teaching.

Sensitivity readers are still quite new for most books - I'd say the last five years.

Most books don't have them. They are more common in YA publishing and in America.

If an author really didn't want to take on what was in a sensitivity read, the agent might be called in to discuss it. Some authors quite like controversy. If they were absolutely adamant even though they knew it would be contentious, and the lawyers were ok, many publishers would still go ahead. We're a creative industry at heart and authors are supposed to be a bit wild and outlandish rather than conform.

Some publishers feel their role is to drive debate rather than gatekeep what authors should be saying.

There are quite a few - the Publishjng Training Centre runs some.

Each publisher has its own style guide too.

Nobody has met her! She is supposed to be very shy.

She writes insatiably. There aren't any rumours that she uses ghost writers like James Patterson does but she writes three or so books a year so I think she must have a bit of help along the way somewhere.

Well done for writing! Depending on the subject and whether you're an expert in your field or have a social media platform, the best thing to do is to know where it should sit in the market.

If it's say, a psychology book, is it more Dr Julie Smith (Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before) or an academic title? If you've got more than 10,000 social media followers you'll be more likely to be able to demonstrate there is an interest in you, specifically, as the author of this specific topic.

Once you've narrowed it down, I'd pick some comparison titles and get a copy of the Writers and Artists Yearbook and think about submitting it to agents, if that is the way you want to go. That has lists of the agents interested in your area of knowledge.

@iseeyou1234

It's really hard to pick a favourite book. I'd probably say Rebecca by Daphne du Maurice, I LOVED the twist and it really shocked me as a teenager!

What is yours?

Thanks for replying, very helpful.

I self publish because I believe that 1) Publishers are only interested in people who are already famous in a different field, or established authors.
2) They are only interested in unknown authors who have a significant following on social media (10,000 or more followers)
3) They prefer authors to be young.

How true is this? I have self published three novels so far and I am currently working on my fourth, but I think it's a waste of time approaching a publisher as I'm an ordinary, elderly person with zero interest in social media.
How much competition do you have from KDP?

Why are so many books published? I feel you always hear that people read much less year on year and yet there are more and more books published.

I remember hearing the JK Rowling furore about staff not wanting to work on her book. Does this kind of thing happen often and it only hits the headlines if the author is famous?

What genre do you write?

Interesting! I also worked in an incredibly stressful and busy industry before this and it surprised me at first how slow everything is.

In terms of communication, in the day to day I find email the absolute worst. It's usual for me to get 200+ emails a day, every working day on top of the endless meetings. If each of those emails takes a minute to read and answer and file, that is roughly three hours of my time a day just doing emails.

Broadly, we publish too many books is the root of it all!

I have to be quite strict with my email responses as loads of my authors email to chat, to procrastinate from writing and because they are a bit lonely working on their own. So even if I answer I get pondering emails back, or questions about elements of the publishing that take time to respond. Lots of authors are lovely but some are anxious and overthink, so publishing has become quite thoughtful in terms of written responses as staff know they might be read and re-read.

If it's a key author emailing I aim to respond in a day, but if I'm not actively working on a book I tend to go back within a few days.

For your friend who got the response two years later, I'd say his project was probably discussed at editorial, then dismissed, then it came back later and the editor just picked the email chain straight back up. The other thing with editors is that they don't always like to say a straight no so they just go a bit quiet.

Finally I get a weird lack of chasing emails - people sit and stew rather than reminding me of things, so my 'squeaky wheel' authors do get responses earlier to get them off my desk! Broadly, publishers are very under-staffed too.

@Helgadaley I agree completely. I went straight to self publishing as I’m too impatient for traditional publishing, and also feel it’s skewed towards the ‘celebrity’ writer and is unknowns stand very little chance of being picked up.

Having done so, I’m glad I have the control of self publishing.

Do you see kdp becoming more popular @booksandstories ?

US unknowns!

Ha. Thanks for your reply.

And look after yourself too, as well as your authors! I can see that dealing with loads of procrastinating, over-analysing authors must be a nightmare! Tell us to shut up and get back to work occasionally. It's good for us.

You would call it chick lit. I write from experience, mostly taking elements from the time I spent in France - getting involved in the first wine harvest of a close friend, being lifelong friends with a girl I met as a teenager, and vicariously experiencing the trauma she felt on being virtually abandoned by her parents. Getting to know a country with different, societal values, where women were expected to marry and were undervalued.
I didn't bother trying to find an agent or approaching a publisher - I'm a complete nonentity and no-one would have been interested.Thank you for the question!