[00:00:01.690] – Sunyi Hi, I’m Sunyi Dean. [00:00:03.670] – Scott And I’m Scott Drakeford. [00:00:05.900] – Sunyi And this is the Publishing Rodeo Podcast. 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 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 these questions and many more, along with how to build and maintain an author career. [00:00:38.490] – 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. [00:00:59.810] – Sunyi We are just going to introduce ourselves and explain why we’re here, which is to shed light, promote transparency, and help authors advocate. There is a lot to learn about this industry and a lot that doesn’t make sense. We can’t claim to be experts, but we can give the author perspective from two very different sides of the coin and bring in people who do know a little bit more to talk about their experiences as well. So I’m going to start by allowing Scott to introduce himself. [00:01:28.430] – Scott I shouldn’t be first, but I’ll go anyway. [00:01:31.810] – Sunyi Ladies first. [00:01:34.350] – Scott Thanks for that. I’m Scott Drakeford. I have just one book out right now, Rise of the Mages from Tor Books. That’s all you really need to know about me at this point. I think we’ll get into the whole story and the whole spiel. But long story short, I write tech heavy fantasy. Going to be getting into some historical fiction and other things, but fantasy right now. [00:02:07.110] – Sunyi Yes. And I’m Sunyi Dean. My bio is kind of the same bland bio everywhere, which is I grew up in Hong Kong but was born in Texas or the other way around or something, and I now live in the UK. And I used to want to write epic fantasy and I’ve ended up writing some kind of weird mashup urban fantasy contemporary stuff with Tor. I have The Book Eaters, which came out in August 2022, and an untitled book which nobody can think the title for. And we are both Tor authors. We’re both 2022 debuts. And that’s how we kind of met and got started on this. When I was thinking about this podcast, we’ve been talking about it for over a year. I had this idea to do a writing podcast. It’s maybe a little bit like Print Run or podcasts like that that talk about publishing, not craft. Although craft does get discussed sometimes because we can’t stay away from it. But honestly, we’re writers and we’re looking at writing as a career. So if you’re here to kind of make trade publishing work for you and you don’t know how, which is difficult because there’s not a lot of information floating around, we can talk about that.There’s no formula for success. But there are common ground experiences that people go through, common pitfalls, common things to worry about, especially in your contract, and I guess go over the good and the bad and the bloody ugly. There is some good, but there’s a lot of bad and a lot more ugly. [00:03:40.390] – Scott Just the scarcity of information and the bad information that circulates even among people that are theoretically in the know. I’ve been in the industry, quote, unquote, since, like, 2015, but it’s really only been since meeting you, talking with you and the other authors that have kind of gathered around you, and a few other authors here and there before that. But if you don’t have some sort of ingroup, you really don’t have a good understanding of what publishing really looks like and where you really stand in that landscape. So I do think that, be it good or bad, the info we have to share is going to be helpful for somebody. Right. Because you shouldn’t have to fumble around for ten years to even understand what kind of industry you’re in. [00:04:50.270] – Sunyi Yeah. And the crazy thing to me is it’s at every level. So when you’re querying, there’s all kinds of things, like, what’s the etiquette for approaching agents, for chasing things? You don’t know, no one tells you. You’re just kind of expect to figure it out. [00:06:11.320] – Sunyi You need to write in certain genres to increase your chances of success. And it takes a long time. But yeah, for me, the money was the main barrier. Querying was free and submission was free. Discounting the emotional cost and trauma and getting published is largely free, aside from you’re not having to lay out money or take financial risk. So did you look at indie at all? [00:06:38.830] – Scott Yeah, that’s a big deal. The financial side, for me, indie just wasn’t something I was really familiar with. I started writing in 2012 and I began looking for an agent in 2013. So I was already researching agents and how that world worked. All the books that I had read up to that point were trad books, wanting to be part of that group of authors that I had read and admired and all of that from the financial side and purely business side, trying to get attention in a very crowded space, which indie is, is my absolute nightmare. [00:07:34.450] – Sunyi And I think the thing I would stress, I guess, before I get myself lynched on Twitter, is that I’m not making a judgment on different publishing paths, that the publishing path that works for you is the one that’s right. But definitely the challenges I’m most familiar with are trade. And when I talk about publishing and career things on the rest of this podcast, I’m really talking about a book deal with a publisher that can give you mass market distribution. And that’s the kind of career path, and that’s the kind of problems that we look at. [00:08:09.470] – Scott That’s our expertise, right? Like for those listening, wondering what you’re going to get out of this podcast. Sunyi writes amazing books and she also secured a relatively good debut deal and she has a lot of contacts in the industry, more than anybody I know of at her stage in publishing. And she’s taken the time to learn from a whole bunch of different people and areas of the industry, and I in particular have learned a bunch from her and from the writing group she pulled me into. My function on this podcast is mostly just to be a truth teller. [00:09:01.450] – Sunyi No, I mean that’s very important because I think we’re kind of getting into the meat of why the podcast exists if people haven’t gotten bored at this stage. But it’s effectively that at its heart, publishing is very unfair. I was explaining this as a kind of metaphor to my partner earlier. It’s like if you want a job in a regular industry, you might go to this big corporation and send an application and you come in at the lowest level and you work your way up and it makes sense and there’s progression. You know what you’re getting paid. You know what happens at every level. In publishing, the equivalent is like you want a job in this building, so you send in a general application and you don’t get to pick what position you’ll be in and you have to wait by the door for a long time and maybe no one will answer. Maybe they will, and maybe when they answer they’ll say, well, congratulations, your job is to be our company doormat. Or maybe they’ll say, your job is to be our company CEO and you will go like, that would be ludicrous as a model. [00:09:56.750] – Sunyi But that is a bit what publishing feels like. You query. You get an agent, you go on submission. You don’t actually know how well your book will do until it gets picked up. And when it gets picked up, it’s like its fate is almost decided. I mean, it’s not that rock solid. There are books that get picked up for nothing and do well, and there are books that get picked up for a lot and they bomb and there’s both ends of the extreme. But generally publishing has a very tiered structure where, yeah, it’s like applying for a job in a big corporate building and you just get a job that kind of defines your career right out the gate, almost. That’s what it feels like from our end. This might be a good point for you to start talking about your publishing journey, actually, and what that was like. [00:10:41.870] – Scott You want me to go first again? Yeah, just a quick comment. I definitely agree. That tiered nature of trade publishing and where you might fit in with other books being acquired, debut or otherwise, I didn’t feel was all that well known and I still don’t think it is outside of certain circles. I think even I myself didn’t really know the difference between a lead title and a non lead and whether there were any other tiers besides that. [00:11:21.850] – Sunyi People don’t want to believe it actually, I’ve had this conversation with authors and they hear that and then they turn around and they go, well no, that won’t be me, I’m going to try and work really hard and kind of overcome this and it’s like it’s not really your thing to overcome. [00:11:38.270] – Scott Yeah, you lock yourself in and when people say, oh well you give up control to big publishers when you sign a contract with them. I was one of those that thought I’ll make my own success regardless. Right, but what you don’t realize is that the factors that can actually affect success or at the very least reach to give you a chance of success, they don’t belong to you anymore once you sign that contract. Right, everybody mentions the obvious things like oh, you give up control on your title, on your cover, maybe you’ll have to change certain things about your book to make your editor happy. That kind of thing is always mentioned when the issue of ceding control comes up, but it’s never a matter of oh, you aren’t going to decide whether they send out promotional material for your book, whether they send your book to booksellers and influencers at all, that kind of thing. So yeah, I definitely back when I signed my deal in 2017 was in that camp of not really knowing what it meant to be signing the deal that I was. And that’s why I think it’s pretty important to… or at least useful. [00:13:00.390] – Scott I mean, if I were a prospective author I’d be gobbling up everything that we have planned to say on this podcast so I hope it’s useful to somebody. In 2012, I had just graduated with an engineering degree, though I had been working full time as an engineer for two years, three years at that point, enough to know I didn’t want to do it anymore. I’ve always loved reading and I’ve loved reading fantasy in particular. Fantasy is what turned me into a reader and so I thought, okay, I’ll give writing a shot because it seems more accessible than a lot of other things, starting a business, whatever else I had floating through my head at the time. So I started writing in 2012 and I started with Rise of the Mages. Rise of the Mages is the first book I’ve ever written and ended up getting it published in 2013. I began researching agents, tried to decide what agent I wanted for me. As mentioned, indie versus trade publishing wasn’t much of an internal debate for me. 2013, I narrowed my target agents down to three, mostly just based on books that I had read and liked and you’re going to hate me a little bit for this, but Sanderson, Jim Butcher and Rothfuss were three of the more successful authors I knew of at that point. [00:14:37.340] – Scott And through my very limited reading circle, that was mostly my dad, their agents were three that I wouldn’t mind being represented by and really liked, based on what I could find online, which wasn’t a lot, honestly. I found out that two of those three agents would be at a convention in England, in Brighton, England. My wife’s family is from England, so we decided to fly out, and I met them for the first time. Kaylee, my wife, hadn’t seen them for a long time, and I got to spend three, four days down in Brighton and stalked my prospective agents. I was super awkward. I was very nervous. But of the two I talked to at that convention, I really liked Matt Bialer, who is my current agent, and was really impressed with just how he handled himself. He was very kind, even to an awkward guy approaching him, asking if I could send him my unfinished manuscript. When I had it done, he gave me his card with his personal email, which I think helped a lot. I didn’t just go into his assistance slush pile, I went straight to him. [00:15:51.280] – Scott I thought I was almost done. I thought I was going to send it by the end of that year. It took me until the beginning of 2015 to finish the manuscript, edit it, revise it many times until I was satisfied with it. I queried Matt with an exclusive query because I decided that I’d rather have one of the top agents than just an agent. So my plan was to go one by one with, at the very least, the top three to five agents I had picked out. And Matt was my top choice, so I queried him first. It actually took a bit. At eight weeks, I decided I was going to follow up and just said, hey, we met at World Fantasy Convention. You said I should send it to you here. I hope you got it and had a chance to read. But if you did read it and have any interest, I’m about to send to other agents, so just let me know if you just need a little more time. And he responded and said, I do need a little more time. I remember you. I like what I’ve read so far. [00:16:55.160] – Scott Just give me a few more weeks. Then a few more weeks passed, and he emailed offering rep. And this again was in 2015. And I thought I had it made right. Like I thought I was in, it was done, I was going to be an author. Like, I was counting down my corporate career already. Didn’t quite work that way. It took until 2016, to be ready for sub. So Matt’s a very editorial agent, and he’s had a few different assistants in the time I’ve worked with him, but they’ve all been very good in terms of editorial input as well. So I worked with them on getting the manuscript ready for sub. We subbed, got three very nice… actually, got three rejections out of the nine. I think we subbed two. We decided to pull the sub, the submission to publishers, which basically just means your agent sends another email saying, hey, we’re pulling this to work on some things, and we’ll go back out with it in a bit. So we pulled the sub in late 2016, I think, and I started revising based on some feedback. [00:18:09.350] – Scott Right after we pulled the sub, an editor from Orbit, Kelly something, I should have looked that name up. She emailed Matt and said, hey, I liked this. When you’re done with those revisions, send it back to me. I was revising as quickly as I could, but before I could get the revision done, she left the industry, which is a thing that happens more often than I thought it might with editors. [00:18:34.510] – Sunyi And I didn’t laugh, but you have to laugh because it’s bleakly funny. [00:18:41.110] – Scott Yeah, it happens a lot in this industry. And I didn’t realize at the time, I was obviously devastated because that was, up to that point, the only interested editor in my book that I had at that point been working on for, like, five years, right? But come to find out, Devi Pillai, and please God, let me be saying that, right? She had been, you know, in some leadership position at Orbit, and she was somehow involved with Kelly or this editor who had liked the book but had then left the industry. And she was aware of my book and liked it. And so my agent, being the excellent person he is, talked to Devi about it personally. And then we gave Devi, who had just joined Tor, she had just jumped from Orbit to Tor to be I don’t remember what her initial title was, executive Director or something. And I think she’s now the president. She was one of the top leaders, right. And has since climbed to an even more top leadership position. So we gave Tor an exclusive look after we finished the revision, even though we had six plus other editors that hadn’t responded to the initial submission they offered on it. [00:20:00.880] – Scott I signed a deal for a trilogy, and the advance was 30,000. So 10,000 per book. I had no idea, other than vague mentions of, oh, hey, this person signed a six figure deal for their debut at auction, or whatever. I had no indication at that point in my publishing journey of what that meant to prospective authors. Maybe that sounds pretty okay, right? Like, it’s not livable money and it’s not life changing money, but to get ten grand per book versus zero grand per book sounds pretty okay, right? I didn’t need the money at that point. I had had, thankfully, some pretty solid success in my day job career, as had–and has–my wife. So we were doing well, and I thought, okay, this is my in. The big boss at Tor likes it. It’s one of my favorite publishers, so I was stoked. I’ll try to be brief on the next portion, but my intended debut was to be in 2019, but they wanted me to write the next two books and have them all ready to go by 2019. And we said, okay, we’ll try, but that was a mistake because A, I’m a slow writer, B, I had a very demanding job and a two year old at that point with a wife who had a demanding full time job as well. [00:21:37.070] – Scott So I did not come close to making that deadline. And so it was my fault that Rise of the Mages pushed from 2019 to 2020, but somewhere in there they decided, yeah, fine, we don’t need them all at once. We can just go to a normal publishing schedule, right? So it was then slated for 2020, and then the pandemic hit, and everybody was scrambling, and my book got pushed a year to 2021, which me and Matt felt was pretty okay by that point. It had already been however many years. So we got– [00:22:17.380] – Sunyi –to be honest, that’s probably the nicest thing Tor has done for you, I think, in some ways, because everyone I know who debuted in the pandemic, bar, like, one or two people just face planted, and it’s not their fault. And to some extent, it’s not entirely their publisher’s fault either. I know that in some cases it was, but in a lot of cases, nobody was ready for that. And we’ll go more into how your debut can affect the rest of your career, which is really fun. But anyway, go on. [00:22:46.950] – Scott Yeah, so fun. Yeah, that was a really fucking rough year, right? I had tried to kind of form little author groups of my own. I met Clay, who’s in our little group of friends in 2019, I don’t remember which year. Clay Harmon, author of Flames of Mira, which is an awesome book, by the way, and Clay is fantastic. But I reached out to some other Tor debuts in 2020, and my book was pushed soon thereafter. But I watched them go through debuting in 2020, and it was rough. Like, really, really rough. And so sad because their books are amazing. They’re amazing authors, very dedicated, but they just absolutely got hosed. So, yeah, anyway, I got pushed to 2021. I was supposed to be, I think, at that point, September 2021. I have no idea why I got pushed again from 2021 to 2022. Probably just publishing schedule or whatever. Oh, I was supposed to go in trade paperback. That was kind of an experiment, I think. Tor was running… is releasing in trade paperback, and all right next to each other, book one, two, three in a span of nine to twelve months. Anyway, I changed to a more traditional schedule of roughly a year between books, and they decided to go hardcover instead of trade paperback. [00:24:19.690] – Scott And then I finally debuted in 2022, February 8 of 2022, which is really funny. A full almost ten years after I started writing this same book, finally published in hardcover, and it’s been almost a year since then and a very interesting journey, but I think we can get into those details a little later. But from beginning to publish, that’s my story. [00:24:47.450] – Sunyi It is a really long journey, to be fair. I think before you get into publishing, you don’t know how long it takes to get books out the door. And now when I see books and bookshops, I kind of have this respect for them. Like, oh, this book has been through about 1000 different hoops just to be on the shelf for like six weeks and then get binned or whatever–that came out bleaker than I meant. [00:25:16.470] – Scott I didn’t mention in there that when I was acquired by Tor, Devi was doing boss things and I ended up with Jen Gunnels, who is my editor at Tor Books. [00:25:30.040] – Sunyi Okay, I should probably start talking about mine at some point. So I’m also a Tor author. So, I mean, I’ve written about my incredibly ridiculously, ludicrously dramatic publishing journey before on my long winded blog, where unfortunate people have sometimes stumbled across it. And basically I didn’t want to be a writer originally. I think when I was a kid and I was writing loads of Wheel of Time fan fiction, I had this brief idea when I was twelve that it’d be like the most amazing thing ever to be an author. And I thought this was genius. And then I think when I was about 13, I met some other people just online, and was like, oh, wait, everyone wants to be an author. This is probably a really bad idea because everyone wants to do it and none of us will succeed. Sometime when I was about 29 and I had a kid and no life and we were kind of living in poverty and had been for a while, and I had a little bit of a midlife crisis about this and decided I did want to write a book after all. And I wrote a horrible first book and it was so bad I couldn’t find anyone to read it. [00:26:34.750] – Sunyi My partner at the time read 200 words and he said, is it all like this because I want to stop already? So I rewrote that book a lot over a year and kept trying to query it. I sent out some of the worst query letters this world has ever seen. I think I sent out one which said, imagine if, like, aliens landed on a fantasy planet and tried to start Plato’s Republic. And that was like, literally the query letter. And it was so bad. We’ll talk a little bit about agents and other things. This is not really for querying authors as such, but we’ll do that another episode. I wrote a second book in about seven months. I think I sacrificed a lot of health. I’m a slow writer as well, so I sacrificed a lot of health and not having hobbies or free time to do that with kids and everything else going on. That book found me my agent, who is Naomi Davis. We went on submission and that book didn’t sell. And I remember one of the podcasts I used to listen to, I think it’s called Shipping and Handling. They said that the day you sign with your agent is one of the best days of your writing career, because you’re just happy and you don’t know all the shit that’s coming ahead of you. [00:27:40.870] – Sunyi And there is some truth to that. I thought I had it made. I had an agent. That was it. Yeah. Then that book spent 18 months dying on submission, and I really struggled to write for a lot of that. I think in the first six months, I was just tired, I needed a break. And then it was like, I need to know what’s going to happen with this book. And what happened with this book is everybody rejected it. Some people had nice things to say, some people not so nice. I remember one editor said that it was pulpy and too actiony and didn’t have depth or something, whatever. [00:28:14.510] – Scott Not that you remember that specific comment or that specific person at all. [00:28:18.830] – Sunyi Right, who’s keeping track. And then I was talking to Naomi about the future, and she said, well, you’ve written contemporary adult fantasy, which was a hard sell at the time. That was back when YA was everything and no one was writing adult. And Naomi said, well, if you’ve got a few different ideas, epic fantasy is always a good market. It’s reliable. So I tried to write an epic fantasy, and after, I think, four months, I realized this was not working and I wasn’t interested. So I told Naomi I was going to go back and write another idea I had, which turned into The Book Eaters. At the time, it was called Paperflesh, and it was another contemporary adult fantasy, urban fantasy. But Naomi was supportive of that, so they liked the idea. I took a long time to finish that book because my life was falling apart a little bit without making it sound like a sob story. And the end result of that is eventually I moved out kind of at the early bit of lockdown from my ex husband’s house with this unfinished manuscript of no money, and finished that book and sent it to my agent and said, I’m really sorry, this book is a hot mess and I don’t know how to fix it. And they sent it off. And I thought, okay, well, that’s going on. Eventually lock down will lift a bit and I can go and, like, retrain because I’ve been out of work nine years or something ridiculous. I’ll retrain, find something else to do. I know submission will take a year or longer because it’s COVID. Everything’s slow. Naomi’s warned me advances have gone down since COVID–more on advances in another episode–and that didn’t happen. We were preempted by Tor in four days, which, I almost had a heart attack, I think. I was sitting on the couch watching TV with my then boyfriend, new boyfriend, and Naomi sent me a text on Twitter and on Facebook and, like, by email, like, can we get a call? Can you get a call? Can you get a call? And the end result of that is that Lindsay Hall, who’s my editor, had wanted to buy this book, and she’d read it overnight. She’d made her team read it the next day, and then they’d gone to acquisitions and they’d come back with an offer. [00:30:22.230] – Sunyi And if you don’t know how these things work. Preempts are basically where a publisher comes to you and says, we’re going to try and buy you out to prevent an auction happening. My agent trusts Lindsay as an editor, so I hadn’t talked to her or anything, didn’t know her, and she said, this is the right deal for you and we should accept it. And part of that reasoning is Tor has the deepest pockets of our genre, so if we go to an auction, they’ll probably still win, but we’ll piss them off and we might get less money in the end, and this just saves a lot of time. So we accepted that preempt, and it came to $300,000 for three books. I couldn’t sleep for about two days and I couldn’t do an editor call because I was just like… Lindsey offered a call after the deal closed, and I said, Naomi, I can’t speak to her right now. I think after ten ridiculous months where I rewrote a third of that book and we did a ton of edits, it eventually came out two years after being acquired, August 2022. And I’ve also had an interesting year. [00:31:27.930] – Sunyi I’ve gone on really long now, so I’m going to stop. [00:31:31.290] – Scott No, not at all. [00:31:33.450] – Sunyi I’ll go into how I met you, actually, because I hope this doesn’t make you feel bad. (laughter from Scott.) No, I was trying to make friends. I was trying to make friends with other Tor debuts. And I found it… because my critique partner, who’s with Orbit, Orbit was kind of like, it gets its debut authors together and they put them together in, like, a group and they all get to… new Orbit voices! Tor doesn’t have very many debuts. There were not very many of us. And so I was trying to get to know some of the Tor authors, and they already all sort of paired off in their own clique, which is fine. They’ve got their own groups and things and they didn’t really want to know. And basically Scott was like the first Tor author I found who was coming out in my year and who was happy to talk to me. Okay, that’s cool. And then I looked him up on Edelweiss and by then I’d learned quite a lot about what was going on with my deal and what it meant. Because when someone hands you a lot of money, you start researching or you should. [00:32:31.150] – Sunyi And I kind of looked at his page on Edelweiss, I thought, shit, they’re going to screw him over. And I sent it to another friend of mine. I said, I think they’re going to screw this author over. And they’re like, yeah, he’s going to get screwed. (laughter from Scott) No man. I’m so sorry, mate. I think I have terrible author’s guilt. [00:32:49.590] – Scott (still laughing) No, you shouldn’t. That’s so funny though [00:32:54.940] – Sunyi Because I became aware very quickly over that summer that my book had been picked for success. And I was happy about that. But also it’s kind of not fair on books that aren’t picked for success. So I was very aware of that. Yeah, I don’t know, started connecting with people and chatting to people and actually I think I met Clay through Scott and discovered I had already met Clay years ago on Absolute Write, where I critiqued an early version of his manuscript, which is now a book. And now we kind of have a little discord group together and we share information and we try and talk about things going on in publishing really openly and honestly and to keep our feet grounded. Because I do see people get swept away at the high end, like Lead Titles talk to Lead Titles and Mid List talk to Mid List. And there’s not always cross pollination between those groups. So I guess the first lesson of today’s episode is we both kind of went into this more or less… we had our advantages and disadvantages in life, but publishing decided, your book goes here, your book goes there. If you’re not aware of it, that is a thing. [00:34:04.450] – Sunyi There’s lead titles and there’s midlist. And we ended up on different sides of that fence. [00:34:09.310] – Scott Yeah. And to be clear, in, you know, in 2020 watching and then in 2021, really even to watch some releases, some debuts go one way and some go a very different way, really started to open my eyes to, hey, something’s not clear here. Things are being hidden from me and everyone, and I don’t understand what’s going on. So I was really desperately looking for people who would talk to me and who would be real and tell me what’s going on. So I consider myself very fortunate for having connected with you and you being willing to dumpster dive in terms of writing friendships. (laughing) [00:35:14.290] – Sunyi What’s that saying? You need to be nice to people on your way up because you see them on your way down. I mean, that’s the other side of pub. You can be a lead title one year and you can be out in your ass the next year. Stay humble, folks. Life comes at you fast. [00:35:29.610] – Scott Yeah. It really is an absolutely brutal industry. And we have quite a few episodes planned where I think that will become more obvious. Right. But one note I wanted to make is that, you know, the discrepancy there between me signing a $30,000 deal and Sunny signing a $300,000 deal, there are very real factors that went into that. Right. So Lindsay at Tor obviously thought The Book Eaters was good enough that other people were going to offer on it, and they wanted to put a significant amount of money on the table to lock not just The Book Eaters down, but lock Sunyi down four or three books. Right. So, I mean, she, being Sunyi, did something very, very right in terms of writing a fantastic book. And The Book Eaters is a fantastic book. So it’s not like it’s just random. Right? The randomness is where potentially a very good book could still get screwed or a very bad book could still get picked up for a lot of money. I don’t remember your number of how many editors Naomi sub to, but I remember it was more than mine. But my book was only sub to nine people, right, nine acquiring editors. So you have to impress and have a perfect match of interests, of style, of catching that editor when they have a budget, when they have an opening in their schedule, whatever else. With nine people, like, that’s ridiculous. [00:37:28.020] – Sunyi It’s about eight to ten editors, depending on who’s away or on mat leave or on vacation or whatever. There’s eight to ten editors in our genre, which is adult scifi fantasy. When you run out of them to sub to, you’re out of the big five and you’re looking elsewhere, which can work. There are really good publishers, like Rebellion. It’s quite a good press, for example. They have a shedload of money. I think when we talk about smaller presses, you have to understand that even smaller presses, you being the listener, not Scott. Smaller presses can still be pretty big. It’s just that the big presses are vast, heaving behemoths of corporations that are even bigger. [00:38:12.030] – Scott I think, knowing what I do now, obviously you want to take a shot at signing a huge deal with a huge publisher, but I don’t think I would hesitate at signing a good deal with a non big five as long as they had a pretty solid track record, like Rebellion, Titan, whoever. [00:38:30.630] – Sunyi Yeah, I guess that’s the first part, really. When you’re looking at your career, money does matter. I think you can get stuff. Like, sometimes there will be reasons to accept a smaller deal. For me, when I was doing the calculations, like when I went on sub, I was living basically on the dole, which is the… you call them Social Security. In the States, we call them benefits here. And there was a point where it’s like this weird median number where if I’d gotten between, I can’t remember the number, but between ten and 20 grand of a book advance, it would have done nothing except take me off the dole for a year. Where I was kind of thinking, if I get that, I’d have to think about whether I actually take it, whether it’s worth the time. You hear people say things like, oh, there can be downsides to a big deal. And I think, actually, I don’t think so. (Scott: I don’t think so either.) I think if someone gives you a big check, you take that money and you run to your bank as fast as your little feet can carry you and you cash it. That is money in the bank that they cannot take off you because anything can go wrong. [00:39:32.150] – Sunyi Anything can go wrong whether they give you $10 or 10 million. But one of these ways you’ve got 10 million. [00:39:39.930] – Scott And it’s not just that, right? And to be clear, I’m specifically talking about if I had at a non big five, but still a very established publisher, if I had a similar deal offered there versus at a bigger publisher. I now understand that if that came with significantly more enthusiasm, what have you at the non big five? That there’s a discussion to be had there between one and the other.. [00:40:13.860] – Sunyi Maybe depends on the publisher, because some publishers can offer less. But if what they’re offering is a lot for what they usually offer, then that means they’re throwing their weight behind it. [00:40:20.150] – Scott Yeah. [00:40:20.860] – Sunyi I mean, Orbit advances tend to be a bit lower, but Orbit lead titles will probably have an advance. It’s a bit less than Tor lead titles, but you’re better off being an Orbit lead than a Tor midlist, for example. [00:40:31.920] – Scott Bingo. Bingo. Yeah. And yet another question that you raised is, is it worth signing a small deal with these bigger publishers or any of these publishers? A small deal being roughly what I got. And that’s a discussion to be had. A lot goes into that, something that I’ve thought about a lot. And in my situation, I’m not sure. I’m not sure I would have, if I knew back then what I do now. I’m not sure I would’ve signed that deal. Because what you’re talking about is very real. You’ve got money in the bank, but what does that mean from their side, right? And again, we’ve talked about this a bit, and I think we’ll definitely go into this in future episodes. But what that means for them is that they then have to work a lot harder on your book and for your book to earn that money back that they just handed. [00:41:24.900] – Sunyi Boy, do they work. People will say publishers don’t market. The heck they do. They may not have marketed all the books on their list but when they choose to, they can throw the kitchen sink, they can throw a warehouse of kitchen sinks at a book to make it float. It doesn’t always succeed, but it’s much more likely to. [00:41:44.930] – Scott Yeah, and it’s not always visible. That’s the big thing. [00:41:47.800] – Sunyi Yes. I think people forget publishers can’t sell directly to readers and that’s why they’re not there on street corners with flyers saying, buy Rise of Mages because that doesn’t work for them, that their entire business model is flogging it to stores. Well, I won’t say their entire business model, but like, stores, libraries, booksellers, blah, blah, blah, corporate buys the big pieces behind business to business purchases. But yeah, I guess we should probably pick a point to stop there. And I was going to ask this last question, which is, do you think the experience so far is worthwhile? [00:42:33.890] – Scott (laughing) God almighty, a lot goes into that. Right? And I’ve actually thought a lot about that over the last few years just because of how my publishing journey has gone. Right. My debut launch certainly didn’t go quite how I hoped it would. So there’s a lot of reasons to be negative about having spent the time and effort and put the hope into this industry and this career. But overall, where I’m at, I’m happier than I’ve ever been. I have a very good home life and things are comfortable there, so I have the privilege of being okay with that kind of shit outcome. Right. And not everybody has that. I certainly wouldn’t recommend my journey for most people, but for me, I do have a book that I love and Rise of the Mages on shelves and more in the trilogy coming. And I have acquired skills and friends that I value very highly. So writing and the publishing industry are still very important to me and I still have a lot of optimism for the future. So, yeah, I think for me it’s very worth it. But would I recommend somebody make the choices that I made? [00:44:06.620] – Scott Probably not. [00:44:08.990] – Sunyi The real friends were the rejections we got along the way. [00:44:16.370] – Scott (laughing) In this case, the real friends were the real friends I made along the way. Right? Yeah. There are some pretty amazing people in the industry that I’ve been fortunate to connect with, but I would ask the same back to you. But I think that’s pretty clear, right? [00:44:39.070] – Sunyi I guess because we’re going to get into so much negative stuff, I will say that that book deal completely changed my life, like a year on oh, my God, we were living in the shittiest place in Leeds I swear, and…. I don’t have an amazing house, but I have a house that functions and it’s fine and the kids live in it and I have a car and I can drive. And for now I live off my writing and can still look after the kids and all that jazz. So, yeah, for me it was life changing. I’ll do a money breakdown sometime of what it’s like to live off that amount because you’re not actually just rolling in money, as fun as that would sound. For one thing, everything gets cut up and also taxes are a thing and double taxes are a thing. But I’m very lucky and I’m not complaining. And it didn’t feel worth it when I was dying on submission, but it felt worth it now. So who knows, maybe in a year’s time I’ll be like, no, it was the worst thing that ever happened to me. I don’t know. Caused the end of the world somehow. [00:45:35.620] – Sunyi But for now, yeah. [00:45:38.190] – Scott I, for one, strongly believe that you will be around in this industry for a very, very long time. [00:45:46.270] – Sunyi I hope so. Mostly because I’m committed now, right. I can’t do anything else other than be a housewife. So it’s housewife or it’s books and the kids are growing up. [00:45:58.050] – Scott I’m now in the house-husband-or-book life. So I get it. I totally get it. [00:46:05.650] – Sunyi You’ve been listening to the Publishing Rodeo Podcast with Sunyi Dean and Scott Drakeford Tune in next time for more in depth discussion on everything publishing industry. See you later.