[00:00:01.490] - Sunyi
Hi, I'm Sunyi Dean.

[00:00:03.610] - Scott
And I'm Scott Drakeford, and this is The publishing rodeo podcast.

[00:00:06.550] - Sunyi
In 2022, we both launched debut novels in the same genre with the same publisher in the same year. But despite having very similar starts, our books, and subsequently each of our careers, went in very different directions.

[00:00:21.890] - Scott
That pattern repeats itself throughout the industry, over, over and over. Why do some books succeed while others seem to be dead on arrival?

[00:00:30.570] - Sunyi
In this podcast, we aim to answer those questions and many more, along with how to build and maintain an author career.

[00:00:38.410] - Scott
Everyone signing a contract deserves to know what they're really signing up for. In an industry that loves its secrets. We'll be sharing real details from real people. We'll cover the gamut of life as a big five published author, from agents to publishing contracts, finances, and more.

[00:00:59.730] - Sunyi
He's doing the intro. Make Jeremy do it. No, that's mean.

[00:01:03.250] - Jeremy
Welcome to.

[00:01:05.490] - Sunyi
There you go.

[00:01:06.800] - Jeremy
I'm not your host.

[00:01:11.010] - Sunyi
Yeah, I guess. Welcome to publish. Oh, sorry. Go for it.

[00:01:14.540] - Scott
No!

[00:01:18.170] - Sunyi
Damn it! Welcome to publishing radio season two. We are back after what feels like a very short break, but it's probably quite long, and we are kind of approaching season two this year, I think, with a view towards author empowerment as just like a theme running through our episodes, because I think we don't ever want to lose sight of the reality of publishing and what it's like for authors, and particularly people who are not at the celebrity status side of things. But we do want to look at what are the things people are doing to make their careers work, if they can, what is in your control? Because sometimes things are. And we're actually going to kick off the start of season one with a sort of return guest, JT Greathouse, who we know as Jeremy, because although JT has been on episode two with us before, Secrets of Books, the secret world of bookselling, he didn't really have much of a chance to talk, which was fine. We were focusing on his bookseller friends, but also because particularly I wanted to open with a situation JT's in which I think a lot of authors will find useful, which is that he's got a book deal for one side of the Atlantic, but not the other, and is in a unique position where his book is sort of partially self pubged in the States, but trad pubbed in the UK.

[00:02:38.540] - Sunyi
And also just being a bookseller, he's got a lot of knowledge of what's involved and how to actually get your books into stores, and that's useful for small press and indie folks as well. If they're still listening in, so feel free to introduce yourself. Jeremy.

[00:02:51.990] - Jeremy
Yeah, well, thanks for having me back in my capacity as a writer this time, as opposed to. As a bookseller. Yeah, I'm a fantasy author. My first book came out in 2021, the Hand of the Sun King, first book in the pact and Pattern trilogy, which is now complete with the Garden of Empire and the Pattern of the world and eligible for the Hugo award for best series. I would be remiss, not to mention. And as Sunny said, I ended up with a deal in the UK with Galantz. So a fairly major science fiction publisher on that side of the pond. But then, despite our best efforts, my agent was unable to secure a deal in the United States. So what we decided to do was self publish, sort of air quotes. I'm not really doing it. My agency is handling 90% of the logistics of self publishing for me, but I still own the copyright and I still own all of that, and have to deal with Amazon to some extent and deal with Ingram ipage for distributing to bookstores and all of those delightful things that come with doing a business by yourself.

[00:03:58.830] - Jeremy
Beyond that, I've had some short fiction published in a few places. I've been writing for longer than you probably think, if you are familiar with my novels. I think I had my first published story in 20 17 20 17 20 18. Anyway, that's me. I'm also a teacher and I work part time at a bookstore because I can't stop having a 40% discount on books. It would destroy my finances.

[00:04:23.970] - Scott
Jeremy, you've told us a little bit of the story and you know the drill. Don't go into more detail than you're comfortable with, because Sony will keep it. But I am curious to hear more of how that went down with your submission to UK and US publishers. Whatever you're comfortable sharing with everybody about what was said and why you ended up with a UK deal but not us. And then I do have questions too, about what your numbers look like, UK versus us, with your different setups.

[00:04:59.890] - Jeremy
Sure. Yeah. So the story is basically just, we did a relatively wide submission to the big five major imprints at the big five publishers, and then in addition to that, some smaller imprints like Solaris, and we also sent to UK only publishers like agents. So Jabberwocky, my agency, has an interesting attitude towards rights. I think it's not that common anymore for agencies to be very conservative in what rights they will sell. Jabberwocky likes to have the author retain as much control of different language rights and different region rights as possible. So, Joshua, my agent's ideal setup is actually one US only publisher, one UK only publisher, just because, in his opinion, you basically get two shots on goal for the same book, as opposed to one publisher controlling rights on both sides, where they may. Like, if you sell to tor us, they might send it to tor UK, they might not. You can sell world rights and still end up effectively only published in one territory. And so in Joshua's attitude, you want to maximize your potential in every territory. So having each publisher control one set of rights is optimal. And so when we sold to Galantz, we sold them UK exclusive rights and global english non exclusive rights, so they can sell the book in other territories in the english language other than the North America, but they don't have the exclusive right to do that.

[00:06:38.740] - Jeremy
So I could, theoretically, if I wanted to sell my self published version of it in France in English, if for some reason that were a thing that made any sense. But the point is, it's very parceled out in terms of what they can do and what different people can do. So we were on submission, and we were getting rejections from Tor and orbit and everything. And so I was kind of feeling like maybe the book was going to die, which was disappointing. And so I was already kind of thinking about whether or not I wanted to self publish it or whether I wanted to just write something else. Try again. But then we got an offer from galance, and the offer was fairly modest, but the enthusiasm that the editor who was offering had for the book was pretty encouraging. And when I saw his prospectus of, like, these are the things that I'm going to suggest in the edits and everything, it felt like a good fit. And so I decided, let's do this. And then, so after that, Joshua pinged the three us publishers, or the three publishers that still had the option to buy us rights, which were, I think saga, I remember, was one of them.

[00:07:45.330] - Jeremy
Solaris was the other one. I can't remember who the third one was because it was like, a very small. He was like, yeah, I don't remember, but it was a very small publisher. And so saga came back and was like, give us a week, and then we'll let you know if we want to buy it. And the ultimate decision that we heard was like, well, this is good, but we also publish Ken Liu. And so we're very careful about Asia set fiction that we publish, or Asia set fantasy. And then the other two we never heard back from after we pinged them. So it ended up we had an offer from Galantz and nowhere else. And then the decision to make was, do we let the Galance deal happen and then try again in the. The. If the Galantz publication takes off, or do we self publish? And Jabberwockies got this fairly robust sort of service suite that they offer to authors who want to self publish books. And they had done it with Elliot de Bedard before. They'd done it with Ben Aronovich to get some of his UK only books in the US before.

[00:08:47.100] - Jeremy
Really? Yeah. Not like his major releases, but a couple of smaller things. And so Joshua kind of laid this out for me of, here's how this works. We still take our 15% cut on the self published income, but we handle cover, we handle typesetting, we handle negotiating with anyone we need to negotiate with. We make sure that it gets set up on Ingram and Amazon and everywhere that needs to go, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so knowing what I know as a bookseller, this sounded like a much better situation than self publishing it on my own. And I can talk more about why that is, maybe in a different section, but the fact that they had already done it, already knew how to do everything, and were basically just offering to do it for the cost of being my agent was pretty great. So that's what we did, and it's done surprisingly well, actually. I'm not a blockbuster self published author or anything, but we just bought a house, and so I had to game out my finances, my income, and I was sort of surprised at how much I actually make from the self published side of things.

[00:09:52.110] - Jeremy
It's like, it averages out to like 500, $600 a month. Like, some months are much higher, some are much lower, but that's like very past. It's not bad at all. Yeah, that's enough to indulge some of my less responsible hobbies without feeling very much.

[00:10:08.370] - Scott
Is that primarily coming from just Amazon, or are you in a lot of bookstores? How does that.

[00:10:14.920] - Jeremy
So let's talk about how to get in bookstore thing as a self published author, because that's actually something I feel like most people have no idea about. And when I worked full time at the bookstore, I used to be responsible for helping local authors get their books in the store and making sure that we could carry them. And there are basically two ways if you self publish that. You can get a book in a store, you can bring it in yourself on consignment, which will only be a thing at independent bookstores that are very nice and want to encourage having local author books in their store. And the way that works is they'll tell you, like, we'll take five copies, we'll pay you 60% of the COVID price on sale, but we won't pay you anything up front. And if they sit on the shelf for six months without selling, we'll return them. And that is not a great system, because you have to physically transport the books yourself. It's a huge pain in the butt, and you have to keep stock on hand in case they need restock. The other option is you can go through a fulfillment warehouse like Ingram.

[00:11:22.530] - Jeremy
So if you don't know what Ingram is, you should. If you're a writer in the United States, they are the number one book distributor in the country. They are basically a network of warehouses that hold books, and then stores can order from them, and they have contracts with every major publisher, most small presses, and if you are a self published author, you can contract with them as well. And the nice thing is, they also offer a print on demand service, where instead of just having to pay for a print run of your books to then be housed in Ingram's warehouses, you can set it up so that they print as orders come in, and then they will keep a certain number on hand based on volume of orders. So if they're consistently getting, like, 30 books ordered a month, they'll keep about 30 on hand at all times. It's not exactly like. That's not the exact math, but that's the concept. The benefit of this is now the store can just order your book from Ingram. They don't have to talk to you. You don't have to bring them to the store. But the thing is, unless you are very careful about how your contract with Ingram is set up, no bookstore will order your book.

[00:12:29.310] - Jeremy
Because, one, the bookstore needs to get their 40% discount, which means that they are only paying you 60% of the COVID price for the book. And that's just standard, what every bookstore expects, so that their profit margins make sense. Very nice stores will go down to, like, 25% if they know you and like you, or you're doing an event at their store, and otherwise, they just won't, because it doesn't make any sense to put a book on the shelf that they're only making that much money from, just, like, financially. And two, it needs to be returnable, because another thing bookstores can't deal with is having a bunch of books on hand that they can't return, that just are locked on the shelf until they sell or they end up, just like throwing away. A little known fact about the book selling business is it is a credit and return based business. So the way it works is the store has a credit account with each publisher and with Ingram and any other distributors they work with. And when they order books, those get charged to the credit account, and when they return books, they get refunded to the credit account.

[00:13:32.080] - Jeremy
And so bookstores financials depend on this enormously. If they had to pay upfront for every book that they put on the shelf, they would not be able to put any books on the shelf. Right. So if your book is not returnable, they can't charge it to their credit account. They have to pay for it up front, and they're stuck with it. Right. So when you're setting up your just distribution with Ingram, you need to make sure of those two things. 40% discount returnable. The downside of this is you make less money on the sales than you would with a smaller discount. But if you have a smaller discount, it won't get on store shelves anyway. So there's basically no point in doing it. And two, if there are a lot of returns, you get stuck with the printing costs, which can happen. So, anyway, that's how it all works. The end result of this, for me is my local bookstore carries all of my books at a pretty significant level. They push the book for me, but they also know me, and I, like.

[00:14:25.910] - Scott
Work there, so it'd be weird if they didn't.

[00:14:29.190] - Sunyi
Don't buy his books. He's a bad employee.

[00:14:32.070] - Jeremy
He's a nice guy. But also, it's been in a couple of barnes and nobles. There's, like, a random store in Connecticut where a friend of mine on the east coast found it, and I've been able to go to conventions, and I did Grand Rapids Comic Con over, like, in October or, no, in November, and they had it, and they wouldn't have been able to get it. If not for this setup. I would have had to schlep the books on an airplane myself. So it's great. If you're going to self publish and you want to sell physical copies of your book in any way other than through your own website or Kickstarter or something, I think you need to make sure that you have that kind of a set up where you are able to have bookstores and booksellers order the books through a distributor that they already work with that they can charge on credit.

[00:15:21.160] - Sunyi
So I actually wrote down three questions throughout that, if that's okay, because otherwise I'll forget them. While listening to the answers, the first one is, I read an article ages ago on writer aware on the difference between Ingram as distributor and Ingram as a warehouse, where she was basically saying of a lot of people who self pub in a lot of smaller presses that are kind of new and finding their feet, they'll say, oh, we're with Ingram. But what they mean is your book is like in a catalog, and that this is different from Ingram working for you as a distributor and actually pushing the book. Does that make any kind of sense, or can you explain that a bit more?

[00:15:57.750] - Jeremy
That does kind of make. So. I don't know that much about that part of it, because I didn't actually do the negotiating and I didn't actually set up the arrangement with Ingram. But from the bookseller side, there is a distinction between. This is a book that I can get from. This is a book that is distributed by Ingram. And it's really the distinction. There's. There's this other sort of subsidiary of Ingram called. I think it's Ingram publisher services or Ingram author services. It's one of those two, and that's what I have a deal with. And that is where they are distributing for you. So it's not just like the arrangement that they have. Yeah. So the other hand is the arrangement that they have with Penguin Random House is they are not a distributor for Penguin Random House. What they are is they're like a centralized location where they hold copies of Penguin Random House's books, and then you can order them from Ingram. But Penguin Random House has their own distribution system, their own catalog, their own reps, et cetera. So if Ingram is your distributor, you go in Ingram's list of new releases and stuff like that.

[00:17:13.770] - Jeremy
But I didn't pay a ton of attention to that part of it, again, because my agency handles it for me. But I do know that it's through. It's Ingram Publication services or Ingram publisher Services.

[00:17:26.640] - Sunyi
So you can choose when you go, like, if you're approaching Ingram, say, a self pub or indy or small press or something, can you specify what you want to be with them? Because my understanding is, like, to get them to distribute you properly, they need to really be making a fair amount of money off you. Usually.

[00:17:45.010] - Jeremy
Yeah, I think in order to go into their catalog and have their sales reps push your book, they need to feel like it's going to be profitable. I don't think they do that for me, but I'm through their distribution network because that's the only way to have them print your books for you, as I understand it. So, again, I wish I did know exactly how that all hashed out, but since my agency did it for me, I don't. Again, though, I think if you're going to work with them, you should talk to them about your options and make sure that you know what you're signing up for and what the deal is going to be.

[00:18:26.930] - Sunyi
Because one of the reservations that I have with some small presses, not in terms of their ethics or how they work, but it's just on the distribution side, you will get presses that say, well, we distribute through Ingram, and I think. But unless you have the right kind of distribution through Ingram, that's not actually any different than what you can do yourself for self pub. And that, for me, is like an issue. Like, if I were considering a small press, it would come down to, do they have what I would consider to be more helpful? Distribution, basically. And I guess off the back of. Oh, sorry, go on.

[00:18:59.880] - Jeremy
Well, I was going to say, the upside, regardless of whether they're officially distributed through Ingram's catalog or just warehoused in Ingram, as long as they have the right terms, in terms of 40% discount returnable, that is better than doing it on your own. Just because bookstores already have an account with Ingram, already order from Ingram. Whereas if you're doing it on your own and you are the one mailing the books to the bookstores, they don't have an account with you. They don't know who you are. They might take it on consignment if they're really nice. But then again, you have to deal with the logistics of getting the books to the store, potentially taking the books back if they need to return them, tracking down invoices, blah, blah, blah. Right. Small presses are kind of a different thing than what I'm doing, where, in effect, I am self publishing. Jabberwocky is handling the paperwork side of things, more or less, and then Ingram is the place that carries the books that stores can order from.

[00:19:57.540] - Scott
So I think there are a few different terms. I actually just looked up Ingram's different services from their content group, so there's a whole bunch of different pieces here. And I think we're talking about maybe talking about a couple of things as if they are one. Yeah. I want to walk through it, just so I understand it, and you can correct me if I'm wrong. So what we've talked about so far is Ingram handles your actual production, right? So book printing sounds like there's content prep and that kind of thing. That Jabberwock is doing for you, which is pretty freaking awesome, by the way. I'm a fan of them offering that and how it turned out, because, I mean, like, the copies of your books I got here in the US, they were great. And then there's inventory management. Right? And so we talked about actually warehousing books, and obviously, with a print on demand setup, that's not as much of a thing. But for traditional publishers, and anybody printing in lots, they're doing that because obviously, they get a better price on printing a large lot at once. But then you have to have somewhere to store it.

[00:21:10.330] - Scott
So that's typically known as third party logistics, where there will be. And this exists in a bunch of different industries. And I used to actually work for a company that had a three PL arm and helped set that up. So third party logistics is where they'll actually warehouse it and ship it out for you. And I think what worked with the industry term for shipping shit somewhere is usually distribution, right? Yes. That's not just we will hold it on our shelf, but we have the capability to send it to different places, and they can send it to us, and we make that possible easy. And then there's sales and marketing, which I think Sun Yi maybe is more what you were talking about, that small presses aren't set up to do, and they probably aren't getting from Ingram. And it does look like Ingram. And there used to be somebody besides Ingram, right? Like something with a B. Baker something. Anyway. But anyway, so sales and marketing. It does look like Ingram offers sales and marketing, which surprises me, because every large publisher I've heard of, and what we heard, Jeremy, from your friends at Auntie's bookstore, is that the really influential people are sales reps directly from publishers.

[00:22:37.240] - Scott
Right?

[00:22:37.700] - Jeremy
Publishing. Exactly. That is correct. But I know that Ingram has a sales rep, and Ingram has a catalog. I'm not in it. I don't know how you get in it. I presume that you hire them to do your sales and marketing for you.

[00:22:54.070] - Sunyi
On the writer aware website, they said basically they have to be making about 25 grand off you, kind of basically a bigger company. Bearing in mind that article is about ten years out of date now, although it's still worth a read. So I'll put a link to in show notes.

[00:23:09.860] - Scott
Probably 50 now.

[00:23:12.430] - Jeremy
Yeah, I don't know that much about the hiring Ingram to do that sales and marketing stuff for you angle. As far as my marketing, the book in the US goes similarly to how they help me with the logistics of self publishing. Jabberwocky also will occasionally track down. There's a newsletter that goes out to this demographic that we think would be a good place to put an ad for your book. Or we did some experiments with Facebook ads and Twitter ads and stuff, and that all comes out of disbursements, so they charge me for it. But so far, everything we've done has paid for itself. I don't know that anything we've done has moved the needle significantly enough for me to say, like, oh, yeah, Facebook ads are great. They worked okay, but they do all that stuff for me. I haven't hired out any sales or marketing services to Ingram, but just having your books in their warehouse so that bookstores can order them, that's the service Ingram provides that I think self published people benefit from enormous.

[00:24:18.350] - Scott
The reason I wanted to clarify that is because I think it's awesome, right. For you and anybody else who's self publishing or whatever you want to call it, right? Different variations to have that available, to produce your book, to get it somewhere that bookstores can order. It sounds like obviously you have the inside track on what kind of terms you have to set up to make that viable for bookstores. But the next step, and where I think publishers really own the business, is in that sales and marketing and convincing bookstores to get your book on shelves and then sell to go into that. So it sounds like Sunny has a question. I'd love to go into that after she asked her question. But one thing I want to point out there, or maybe just bring up is that is the hard part, because there is that human element, but also because there are so many people to convince.

[00:25:27.670] - Jeremy
Right.

[00:25:28.000] - Scott
I don't know exactly how many indie bookstores there are that carry genre fiction, but I have in my possession a list of about 200 of them nationwide in the US. And I just googled it. And the Internet says that there are 592 barnes and noble retail locations in the US. So between those two, there are 800 some OD bookstores that you'd have to sell into as either obviously, a publisher or as an indie. And selling into 800 bookstores that you then have to convince to not just put it on the shelf, but to sell it and convince 800 plus humans, maybe in the thousands of humans, that this is a book out of all the thousands of other books that they have on their shelves that they should pay attention to. That's the difficult part.

[00:26:23.450] - Jeremy
Yes, that is absolutely the difficult part. But let's have Sunny's question.

[00:26:28.540] - Sunyi
Yeah, sorry, I'm not sure all that build up now. Basically, I don't want to sound like I'm ragging on small presses, because I'm not. It's just that my priorities are aligned with protecting authors over businesses, and small presses are businesses, and statistically, a lot of the very small ones do fold. I've had friends who've lost their ip and stuff from bad contracts and small presses folding. But one thing that always kind of gives me a bit of a red flag is when I see places that say, oh, we give 75% royalties to authors, or 55% of print. And I always think, surely that means they have no distribution. And I'm just curious, what goes through your mind, Jeremy, when you see that, or if you have a better perspective on that. Those very high royalty print presses?

[00:27:18.730] - Jeremy
Yeah, I don't think those are much better than self publishing. So I think they are probably worse for you financially. But there are different reasons people want to publish, right? And I've definitely developed this perspective through working with local authors at an independent bookstore. A lot of people want a book to make money, right? I want to publish a book, and I would like to be paid for it. That is a significant number of people. But there's, I think, an equally significant number of people who have an idea for a book and they want to write it, and they want it to be a thing that exists in the world and is available to their friends and family and lends them, perhaps a little bit of social prestige. And I think everybody has both of those motivations, but it's like a sliding scale. Which one is more important to you than the other? And a lot of those high royalty small press contracts don't really exist to make anybody money. They really exist to put out books that then create that element of social prestige for someone, which is not the same as self publishing.

[00:28:35.710] - Jeremy
If you self publish your book, some people will think that's cool, but it's very different from saying, like, oh, my book is being published by so and so press, right? And then this is actually a thing that matters a lot. If you are, like, a college professor who is a poet who needs publication contracts as part of your tenure or as part of your pay scale or whatever. And there are many very small publishers that do not make any money, really, that do not make the authors any money, that mostly publish poetry, so that MFA poets can have their career. That's just a thing. And we've encountered much of this at the bookstore. Like, lots and lots of people come into the store, and they're like, oh, this is my poetry book. And it's cool. And we'll carry it because they're local. But nobody's making any money off of that book.

[00:29:33.820] - Sunyi
No, that's fair. And I guess my only concern with it is when I see people say stuff online like, oh, this press offers like 60% royalties. Not like big presses who are just greedy and choose not to.

[00:29:46.750] - Jeremy
And I always think, sure, it's a wild misunderstanding of the business, right? And it represents a failure to recognize the value that those big publishers are bringing to the table and why they need. Well, need, they don't need to, but why they will take 75% to 90% of the profit that comes in from the book, because they are doing a lot. If they're doing a good job.

[00:30:12.930] - Sunyi
I do think they are greedy, just not. They don't set the price for distribution. I think the greediness comes in in other things with stingy contract clauses or low advances or things like that.

[00:30:25.830] - Jeremy
And I'm the last person who will rise to the defense of corporations. But I am also very realistic in the sense that they exist to make money. Right? Like tor Galantz orbit. These are businesses that exist to make money as part of much larger, vast empires of businesses that exist to make money. And they don't care about you. They care about how much money they can make from you. Small presses might actually care about you. That is a fact. However, they don't exist to make money. And insofar as they do exist to make money, it's at a much smaller scale and in a much less efficient way than the big presses. So if you're signing a small press contract, even if it's like a good small press, Gray Wolf press is a small press that does great, and those authors do well. For small press authors, you are necessarily signing on to a much smaller partner, literally, than one of the big.

[00:31:30.300] - Scott
Yep.

[00:31:30.950] - Jeremy
Yep.

[00:31:31.450] - Sunyi
Sorry, I'm waiting on Scott to carry.

[00:31:34.110] - Scott
I was waiting on you because I feel like I've been talking a lot. So go ahead.

[00:31:40.030] - Sunyi
I always feel like I've been talking a lot. I guess this is a disconnected question. I might have to move it. Do you happen to know what good presale numbers look like for a book?

[00:31:49.620] - Jeremy
I mean, if it's your debut novel and you get 5000 preorders, you're killing it. Yeah. If it's your 6th novel and you've been a frontlister the whole time and you're still only getting 5000 preorders, your publisher probably wishes you were doing better than you are. Right? It varies a lot depending on where you are in your career, what the publisher's expectations for the book, and it depends on, is it us or UK? UK is obviously going to be smaller because it's a smaller market. If it's both, then it's going to be a bigger number than if it's just one or the other. But generally, if you think about it in terms of your advance, it's pretty easy to figure out if you're falling apart or not. So for every $1,000 of advance money you got, you probably won about 100 preorders to hit a good amount of money coming in before the book comes out. And that's not hard math, but that is a vibe check.

[00:32:56.330] - Sunyi
So if you get 100,000, you want 1000 preorders or something?

[00:33:00.890] - Jeremy
Yeah, at least. And if you get less than that, you're falling apart and more is better. Right. But you don't need to be that worried about it. And I'm talking about debuts right now. You don't need to be worried about it if you're not getting a ton of preorders for a debut novel unless you were given a massive contract and they are throwing tons and tons of marketing weight behind it and it's not moving the needle. If they gave you a $200,000 advance for one book and have spent $150,000 on pushing it, and you have 1000 preorders or even 2000 preorders, that's not Roi, that makes the publisher happy. But there are so many books that don't take off immediately. This is the thing that bothers me about the Internet. I feel like the book community online is very obsessed with the brand new release book that just came out. But there are a lot, a lot, a lot of books that don't rocket to the top of the charts on release that take a while for word of mouth to build, and then they become massive. Like Daisy Jones and the six is a good example of this.

[00:34:16.720] - Jeremy
Not that big when it came out. Like pretty big, but not like as big as it became. Or another one would be where the Crawdads sing, which was in hardback on the bestseller list for like two years, but it wasn't like an instant, massive success. I think it might have been an instant bestseller, but it wasn't to the degree that it became. So books build. If a good book hits a sort of critical mass of people reading it, then you get word of mouth, then you get people going into the bookstore looking for it. Which, having worked at a bookstore, you know, a book is taking off when a couple of weeks after release. Tons of people are coming in to check to see if you still have copies. Right.

[00:34:55.900] - Sunyi
That's really interesting.

[00:34:57.250] - Scott
The counterpoint to that, and maybe it's just that the book doesn't find an audience and that would have happened anyway. But the counterpoint to that is if a book really just lands on shelves, never goes anywhere, never sells a significant amount up front, it really does have a pretty short lifespan where it can live on that shelf and have a chance to do that. Right. You have to hit a first level of you're staying on shelves for long enough to get that build.

[00:35:33.290] - Jeremy
Most stores will leave something on shelves for six months, and they only will delist something if it's been on shelves for six months and sold zero copies. It's not that hard to have one copy of your book on a bookstore shelf for a couple of years. I think that, again, the perception we have as people who are perhaps too online, is that unless people are talking about something constantly, nobody is talking about it. But a lot of community around books doesn't exist on the Internet. It exists at library events, it exists at bookstores, it exists at literally book clubs, and there's an enormous amount of invisible word of mouth. Right? And yeah, if your book comes out and doesn't do anything and sits on shelves for six months and doesn't sell any copies, it'll die. That'll happen. But similarly, your book can come out and not sell very much for a couple of months, but then maybe like, a handful of people read it for a book club and really like it and tell all their friends, and suddenly it's like a hot book in that city, right? This can happen. And I think the myth of the Instant bestseller is the myth that being an instant bestseller is the only way to have publishing success is very damaging to debut authors psychologically, because everybody's constantly worried about, like, oh, my God, is my book gonna.

[00:37:07.320] - Jeremy
Am I getting enough pre orders? Were my first week's sales numbers high enough? Did I hit the Sunday Times bestseller list? And if those things are going well for you, that's awesome. Those are good signs. But you're not doomed to failure because you didn't hit the top 1% of book sales the week that your book came out. It's not as much of an all or nothing situation as I think many of us believe.

[00:37:34.020] - Sunyi
You're sounding real hopeful in episode one already. I was just curious very briefly, actually coming back, you talk about books building and stuff. Did you ever consider sitting on your american rights and waiting out and see if offers came. I know that there was a UK book here that did very well, called Godkiller. It only had a UK deal, and Hannah's book did fantastically and then got picked up in the States. And now it's kind of taken off a bit, which is really lovely to see because she's a fantastic author and lovely person. But was that a calculation for you?

[00:38:08.440] - Jeremy
I did think about that as an option, and I think I would have done that if I had a stronger sense that my book was going to be, like the front list title from galance for the month that it came out. But I did not get that sense. And so I didn't think that it was going to be that kind of a situation. And lo and behold, it wasn't. So the book came out and it did fine. I got another contract with Galantz, so they're happy with how the trilogy did, but it didn't hit any bestseller lists or really do that well. It did okay. Right. And I don't think at any point we had sufficient leverage to go to a us publisher who had already considered it and rejected it and be like, well, look how well it's doing. You should publish this now. That kind of thing is like, I sounded very hopeful a minute ago. Now it's time for me to sound a little bit pessimistic. Books build, but not that many books build. It's not that many more than bust out the gate, like at mach ten. Right. There are multiple pathways to success, but the fact of the matter still is 90% of books come out and die and disappear forever.

[00:39:21.530] - Jeremy
There are just so many books published. There's nowhere near enough readership, there's nowhere near enough attention for the majority of books to succeed. So the calculation in my mind was like, well, my book is coming out. I would like it to be available at the bookstore where I work because that would be cool. That's like a lifelong dream kind of thing. I have no guarantee I will ever get another book deal, and it does not seem to me that this is being positioned to be a big enough success for me to have leverage on a us deal in the future. So I'm going to self publish it and try to ride the glance marketing online as much as I can and have it come out at the same time as the glance one. And that worked out.

[00:40:02.670] - Scott
So, yeah, I think that's really smart. And I think what I was thinking the whole time you were going through your whole books can build thing is, I agree, but I do think that even in the event that you're one of those, as you mentioned, fairly few that does build success. I think that the level you launch at and that is primarily determined by your publisher. Right. Or you. If you're self published, if you put a ton of money and effort into building your debut or your launch of any book, I suppose that kind of does determine your level. And I feel this is just my perception. I don't have any data to back this, but my perception is that that sets your level, and you kind of grow within that tier, and it's even harder to grow outside of that tier of success. Right.

[00:41:00.850] - Jeremy
I don't know that I want to describe it in terms of tiers. I would describe it as, like, there is a pyramid that is very narrow at the top and very wide at the base. And depending on where you start on that pyramid, in terms of who your publisher is and what your advance was and how much the initial marketing spend was, that sets your initial position on the pyramid, and then you have to work your way the rest of the way up if you want to get a.

[00:41:28.560] - Scott
You just literally described tears, but it's.

[00:41:33.810] - Jeremy
Not tears in the sense that it's not, like, discrete section.

[00:41:39.470] - Scott
If I had to describe tears without saying the word tear, that would be my description. Like, whatever. Scott.

[00:41:48.210] - Jeremy
Maybe we have different understandings of the meaning of the word tier. When I think of tears, I'm thinking of discrete sections that are stacked on top of each other.

[00:41:56.150] - Scott
You've seen a pyramid, right?

[00:41:57.480] - Sunyi
Like a cake.

[00:42:01.270] - Jeremy
Like a cake, yes.

[00:42:03.430] - Scott
What do they call the different levels of that cake?

[00:42:07.200] - Jeremy
Pyramids are smooth, Scott.

[00:42:08.720] - Sunyi
Are they all, though?

[00:42:10.330] - Jeremy
Yes.

[00:42:10.990] - Sunyi
You're saying it's more of a gradient.

[00:42:13.210] - Jeremy
Yes, it's more of a gradient. And I think the reason I don't want to use the word tears is, in my mind, it has, like, an implication that there's a point at which it gets harder to continue moving up. Like, oh, I've hit the ceiling of my tier, and I can't get beyond that point, or it'll be harder to get beyond that point. And I think it's literally just, you start at a certain position, and then it's equally hard to move up from where you start, no matter where you start. But the closer to this top you start, the easier it is to get to the pinnacle. Right. So, anyway, whatever. Semantic nonsense. But, yeah, I think where you start matters. It's not impossible to grow, but the further down you start, the harder it is to grow.

[00:42:57.070] - Scott
Completely agree on that. Yeah. Killing me, Jeremy. Okay, so.

[00:43:07.950] - Jeremy
Precision of language.

[00:43:09.540] - Scott
Well, okay. That's what you want to call it?

[00:43:13.120] - Jeremy
Yes.

[00:43:16.510] - Scott
So I think we went a little bit into this with your bookstore buds, but is it worth talking about? What a. I don't know if I want to even say best selling, but, like, an effective early or debut book launch looks like in terms of convincing bookstore folks to put effort into your book, or do you think we covered that well enough in that previous episode?

[00:43:51.370] - Jeremy
I think we covered it pretty well. But if you're listening and you didn't listen to season one, episode two, or three, or whatever it was, two of publishing rodeo, you should go listen to that, because Carrie and Claire actually do book ordering. And so they are the people that the publishers are trying to convince to order books to the store, and they definitely have a lot of thoughts about what works and what doesn't. I would say in general, some of the gimmicky things that publishers do don't have any impact. We get sent boxes of cologne or random shit all the time, and it's like, why are you sending us this? We don't care about this. And they're never very good.

[00:44:36.080] - Sunyi
You tested them out?

[00:44:38.010] - Jeremy
Yeah, of course.

[00:44:42.010] - Scott
Who wouldn't?

[00:44:43.850] - Jeremy
Yeah, if they were great, maybe we would have ordered more copies of the book. And you see stuff like that on social media all the time of authors being like, oh, my God, I'm so excited that my arcs are being sent out with this care package of random crap that the booksellers might want, but we don't want that. And it's usually not very high quality, and it's a waste of time. Again, Carrie and Claire, better people to talk about this than me, but the thing that seems to work the best, from my perspective, is just the enthusiasm of the sales. The, and the reason for that is not necessarily because it indicates that the book is good. It indicates that the sales team is excited about it and are talking about it all the time, which means it's going to be pushed consistently all over the place and it's going to have a lot of word of mouth. The people ordering books at bookstores are not. They are somewhat concerned with, do I think this book is cool? They are more concerned with, does this feel like a book the publisher is going to spend a lot of effort and energy selling?

[00:45:42.360] - Jeremy
Because then we can piggyback on that. We don't have to sell it if they are selling it, we just have to carry it. Right.

[00:45:48.800] - Scott
Which is why marketing plans and things are so prominently placed in Edelweiss and wherever else you order shit from. And get info on up front because, yeah, I heard the same thing from God. Who was it? Daniel Roman from winter is coming. That they review popular books and books that they can tell a publisher is going to put a lot behind for the same reason they get a lot more traffic if they cover something that everybody else is covering, and that's getting a lot of traffic elsewhere versus trying to be the one outlet that's covering a certain thing that they think is really cool. Right, right.

[00:46:36.510] - Jeremy
The knock on effect of something already having a lot of attention means that the work you have to do to get a customer to buy it is much lower. So if something's already got a lot of attention, it's going to be easier to sell. We're more likely to carry a bunch of copies of it.

[00:46:53.530] - Scott
Yes, totally makes sense.

[00:46:56.870] - Jeremy
This is obviously a vicious cycle if you don't get a lot of hype. Right. So that is, I think, why there is some justification to people being nervous about what's my marketing spend going to look like or whatever. But I also think that we worry about that too much, especially since it's fundamentally out of our control once we've signed a contract.

[00:47:17.390] - Sunyi
Yeah, I've had a couple of people message me asking, saying, oh, I got this from my advance, relatively low for my genre. What can I do to make my publisher give me basically a lead marketing plan? And the answer is, nothing. And they're saying, oh, how do I get this minimum number of arcs? It's like, you can ask if there are arcs, you can ask for a minimum number.

[00:47:38.710] - Jeremy
Yeah.

[00:47:39.160] - Scott
Your time to do that was when you were contracting.

[00:47:42.070] - Sunyi
I mean, you can, but the answer will just be no.

[00:47:44.310] - Jeremy
Right. You can go into things you can do. Yes. Yeah. My black hat for a minute here, my slightly less than legal perspective. You can just send pdfs of your book to people. The publisher is not going to stop you from doing that. So even if it's not an official arc, if you have a connection at a bookstore and you're like, hey, I have a book coming out. My publisher is not doing arcs, but I have a PDF or an ePub. Are you interested in reading it? You can do that. It's not probably something you should advertise that you are doing to your publisher. They probably won't care, but they might. And you don't technically have the right to do that. But there are things you can do. Will any of those things have even remotely the same level of impact as your publisher printing 10,000 arcs with three different cover variations? No, absolutely not. But you're not totally powerless. And again, if you're focused on small, achievable goals, like, I want to get my book in my local bookstore, that's far more achievable on your own than I want to get distributed in all 800 barnes and nobles, or whatever.

[00:48:53.980] - Jeremy
Or all 500 barnes and nobles.

[00:48:56.570] - Sunyi
So I've added in a new kind of in section for the podcast this season, where, basically I invite people to talk to us about the smallest hill they are willing to die on just for fun and just for interest. And I believe we are going to hear from Jeremy about why Kelvin is the only true temperature measurement that we should use.

[00:49:16.130] - Jeremy
Yes. So I'm glad that you've offered up your platform for the truth, the divine truth, the holy truth, that we only need one temperature system, which is Kelvin, because Kelvin is the only temperature system which accurately represents temperature in terms of movement of subatomic particles, which is what temperature is supposed to measure. Right? Zero on the Kelvin scale means there is no movement of subatomic particles, which is only logical. You have zero movement. Therefore you have zero as the number. Right. And then everything after that is just a gradient scale of how much movement there is. Now, detractors will say silly things like, well, what matters is the human experience, maybe, but you can just do that in terms of Kelvin, right? So you could just say, like, oh, 273 is pretty comfortable. That's where we are as human beings, right. I think Kelvin gives us a better sense of our place in the universe as just like, random animals and not the center of all things. It gives us a better sense of how hot and cold things actually are in terms of, again, absolute cold. And it helps kids understand physics better, because then you don't have to explain to them why there's negative temperature when temperature is supposed to represent how much particles are moving, right?

[00:50:36.140] - Jeremy
If you're trying to tell a kid, oh, it's negative 100, they're like, how can particles move? -100 are they going backwards? What's going on here? No, it's just zero. There's no movement. Or there is some movement.

[00:50:46.760] - Scott
Dark matter.

[00:50:47.570] - Jeremy
There you go. I look forward to the United States government reaching out to me for a plan on implementing this very important and necessary change.

[00:50:56.520] - Sunyi
To any baffle listeners, this is like, I don't know. It's kind of a running joke, but also slightly serious, I think, for.

[00:51:03.030] - Jeremy
So it started out as a joke, but the more I lean into the joke, the more I think it's.

[00:51:09.990] - Sunyi
Mean. I think it's brilliant.

[00:51:13.190] - Jeremy
Also, if you're writing science fiction and you're using any temperature scale. But Kelvin, you're a silly.

[00:51:20.150] - Sunyi
Lot of Sci-Fi writers writing in.

[00:51:22.890] - Scott
I was an engineer for, if you count my college time, which I do for about a decade, and many of the calculations we did were in Kelvin for simplicity.

[00:51:37.870] - Jeremy
Right. Why? Why muddy the waters? Know, weird scales and negative numbers?

[00:51:44.870] - Scott
Yes, it makes sense. Logically consistent, cosigned.

[00:51:49.580] - Sunyi
Oh, can we get you to plug yourself, Jeremy, before we all call it a night?

[00:51:53.670] - Jeremy
Yes. So again, I'm JT Greathouse, author of the Pact and Pattern trilogy, which is again up for the best series Yugo award and will never be up for the best series Yugo award ever again. So if you want to vote for it, this is your time. The Hand of the Sun King is the first book in the trilogy. It was nominated for the best newcomer award from the british fantasy awards and is good. I think it's a good book and I wrote it, and usually authors have the lowest opinion of their work, so that should tell you.

[00:52:22.510] - Scott
Also, Scott liked it. I did. Yeah.

[00:52:24.720] - Sunyi
That's totally fair.

[00:52:26.430] - Scott
I was waiting for my. Yeah, I. Truth be told, I like very few books that I read I DNF books all the time, and it's very stressful now, but Jeremy's book was not one of them. I loved his series. If you hear Jeremy tell it, he will tell you that it's weird and super unique, blah, blah, blah. And it is unique and has just enough weirdness to be fun. But I think it is one of the better coming of age stories I've read in the last decade. And Jeremy's just a really good writer, so I think I would probably read anything he wrote, but I would encourage you to check it out and vote for it for whatever award he just talked about.

[00:53:24.770] - Sunyi
Whatever award he says. I mean, I wasn't even going to mention it until you said that, but we are technically eligible as well for a Hugo award. The fan cast. And I'm not saying that because I want to win. I'm saying that because it is actually one of my life's ambitions to go to the losers party. So if by some miracle people felt magnanimous enough to vote us onto the shortlist but not allow us to win, I will be extremely grateful. I want to see the famous losers party. Nobody wants to be a winner, right? That's boring. And then I can put Hugo award losing author on every book from now on.

[00:53:59.690] - Jeremy
So what you're saying is nominate, but then do not subsequently vote for publishing rodeo for best fan cast. For the Hugo.

[00:54:06.660] - Sunyi
Yeah. Vote for someone better. Oh, I've probably phrased that really badly. I might have to edit that out, but it's fine. Thank you so much, Beth. What a fun one. To start off the season, you've been listening to the publishing radio podcast with Sunny Dean and Scott Drakeford. Tune in next time for more in depth discussion on everything publishing industry. See you later.