[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.

[00:00:21.970] – Scott
That pattern repeats itself throughout the industry over and over. Why do some books succeed while others seem to be dead on arrival?

[00:00:30.650] – Sunyi
In this podcast, we aim to answer these questions and many more, along with how to build and maintain an alter 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.

[00:01:01.810] – Sunyi
We are here for episode three with Clay Harmon, author of Flames of Mira. And today we’re really going to focus on a very different publishing experience, which is what it looks like to publish with the mid-size press and what that means, what the different sizes of publishers mean and how it compares. Because when you’re an author is on submission, you might have a lot of different scenarios that come up in terms of publishing deals and there’s a lot to work through, a really complicated decision to make and what goes into that.

[00:01:31.100] – Clay
Yeah, no, I’m happy to be here. I’ve been really looking forward to doing this. For those who don’t know, all three of us have been friends for a good while now. We all debuted in the same year and people who debut in the same year tend to search one another out and so that’s how we all connected with each other. And when I found out that Suni and Scott were doing a podcast, I definitely had to jump on that wagon and have to do an episode with you guys. So, yeah, looking forward to it.

[00:01:59.830] – Sunyi
Yeah. So we’re talking about different sizes of press and roughly speaking, there’s the Big Five, and people know those. The Big Five companies have dozens of imprints, actually hundreds of imprints total. And outside of that, you have what we call mid-sized publishers like Rebellion, Angry Robots, Kensington Scholastic, they really vary as well. Some of them have almost as much money as a large publisher like Penguin or Macmillan. Some of them are on the smaller side and there’s a massive range of experiences that they can offer and money that they can offer authors and signing with them can mean different things for your career. But we are talking about publishers who offer mass market distribution, offer marketing, but aren’t technically one of the Big Five.

[00:02:50.630] – Clay
Yeah, that was kind of just how my impression of what a mid sized publisher was, was that they had national distribution, but just wasn’t one of those Big Five publishers. And that’s how they differ from, say, a small press, because it seems like small presses in general have a pretty tough time getting into bookstore chains like Barnes and Noble.

[00:03:12.980] – Scott
Yeah, and I’m not an expert. From my perspective, though, the only real difference between most of those mid sized publishers this is assuming that they’re fairly competent. The only difference is, really they don’t have the cash to sign huge, huge deals, especially for debuts. They’re not signing big deals right out of the gate. But other than that, I don’t see a huge difference, especially if they do have the ability to get books into Barnes and Noble, into indie bookstores. They’re doing all the work to get audio books out, multinational distribution in, I think, UK and US at the very least. Right. Clay, isn’t your book in both the UK and US?

[00:04:07.620] – Clay
Yeah, it is. I actually got to see it in Waterstones here in the UK the other day. It was very exciting. But, yeah, it’s available both in the US and the UK. But, yeah, I think that distinction of money really seems to make all of the difference. It seems that way just because of the amount of money that a Big Five publisher can put into a title. As far as marketing wise, to build a pipe before the book comes out seems to be a very big thing. And so, excluding that, it seems like most things are the same. We’ve all compared our publishing journeys leading up to our release and after, and there does seem to be a lot of similarities there. So my book came out last July, and that July seemed pretty similar to how your release month went. Scott. There were definitely some differences, which we can get into, but, yeah, there’s a lot of similarities between the mid size and the Big Five.

[00:05:17.460] – Sunyi
Yeah. Should we be a good time to get into Clay’s journey to publication? Actually, yeah.

[00:05:23.590] – Clay
No, I can start from the very beginning, kind of go in the Cliff Notes. This is covering ten years of history, so I can be brief for some of those stretches. But I started writing January of 2010. I finished the first draft of my first book in August of 2011. So a year and a half the very next day, I sent my first query letter. That was a huge mistake. I ended up probably querying that 150 times. And then while I was doing that, I was writing the sequel to that book, which turned out was a big mistake, because writing the sequel, if the first book doesn’t sell, then I wouldn’t say it was a waste of time because it helped me home my craft a little bit. But you can’t quarry a sequel. So when I was halfway through the third book, I kind of realized that maybe I need to work on a different project. And so I ended up putting the first book into a drawer and started writing. I didn’t finish the third book of that series I wrote halfway, so I don’t really count. That is the number of manuscripts I had to write before I became published.

[00:06:34.260] – Clay
But the first book after that big project of the three books was I was writing Y at the time, and so the first book was like a contemporary fantasy. And then I went and the the separate project after that was a Y horror. That’s the book that I got into pitch wars with. That was back in 2016. That book went from YA to more Ya contemporary. And I continued querying after Pitch Wars after that, ended up putting that in the drawer. And that was the book after that. Oh man, I’ve written so many manuscripts and getting mixed up. So the the one I got in the Pitch Wars with the… was that came after another Ya Sci-Fi that I wrote. And so 1234, I actually ended up getting an agent offer for that one, but I ended up declining that agent offer because the agent was a very nice agent. They seemed really great. I really vibed with them on the phone. But afterwards I started doing more research for the agency at large, and I was not a fan of the stuff that I was reading about. So it just I was kind of on the fence enough as it was because they were a newer agent.

[00:07:56.360] – Clay
Typically, as a querying author, if you’re looking into signing with a newer agent, you got to look at the support network that they have. If they have a good mentor, if they’re at an established agency, then in a lot of cases it can be great to sign with a newer agent. But this particular agency didn’t have that kind of track record that I was looking for. They seemed to really exclusively sell to small presses. And my dream was to be in Barnes and Noble someday because I’d worked at Barnes and Noble. And that was part of the dream, was to be on the other side of that and have a book there. So I ended up declining the offer and I ended up ultimately putting that book in the drawer. And then I kind of made the decision that I wasn’t very good at writing young adult, and so I made the switch to adult fantasy, and that book ended up being Flames of Mira. So I wrote that. I probably sent out a dozen or so queries before I queried. Joshua, my current agent, I met him at San Jose Worldcon back in 2018, and this was when he had just 50 pages of my book at that time.

[00:09:05.540] – Clay
After I met him, he offered an R and R a revise and resubmit. And then what began was several months of edits with him, just a lot of back and forth. And I ended up signing with him about a year after I sent that first query. And so I signed with him may I think, of 2019, and I’ve been with him ever since. I went on Submission in 2019 in the summertime, and I was on Submission for several months. I think I got the email from Michael Rowley at Rebellion that he was looking to take my book to Acquisitions in February of 2020. And then the offer came in right around when the whole COVID thing happened. So that was a brief amount of uncertainty day. They assured me that they were going to continue on with publishing my book. It would just end up getting published a little later than initially offered. So originally the book was supposed to come out fall of 2021. And then after COVID happened, it got pushed to spring of 2022. And then about within the the year within before it released, the the supply chain issues started happening and there was a paper shortage.

[00:10:28.960] – Clay
And so it got pushed from from April of 2022 to July of 2022. And that’s that’s when my book came out. So, yeah, that’s the the 10,000 foot view of ten years of of writing before I actually got a book published.

[00:10:43.470] – Scott
Did I hear right that your book was on Submission for six months?

[00:10:49.150] – Clay
Six months? No, I mean, it was close. I think it was eight or nine months. Officially, I think it was nine months.

[00:10:55.810] – Scott
It was on Submission for nine months.

[00:10:58.610] – Clay
Yeah. Does that surprise you?

[00:11:03.010] – Scott
Not necessarily. Especially doesn’t surprise me, given how I’ve seen publishing operate since, you know, becoming a published author and meeting all of you and hearing your stories. Right.

[00:11:19.210] – Sunyi
The unofficial figure that I was told by Naomi is that for debut, scifi and fantasy, you expect to be on Submission six to ten months. On average. But then COVID happened, and that went out the window, and now it’s God knows.

[00:11:35.870] – Clay
Yeah, I kind of got my foot in the door right. As COVID happened. That’s when all the normal stuff stopped.

[00:11:43.480] – Scott
Yeah. That’s incredible, because I’m just flashing back to when I was on Submission. Right. I think that was 2016, and I was very impatient right when it went out. And it had been a few months, and I think I got three rejections out of nine that my agent Matt had sent to, like, it was full panic mode. And Matt told me that, hey, this might be a good opportunity for us to take some of the feedback and do a few more edits just in case the other editors agree with some of these things that have been brought up by the people that rejected. Right. But had I known that it was typical for a book to be on Submission for six to ten months for a debut, I might have been able to breathe a little easier. So that’s very good to hear.

[00:12:42.240] – Sunyi
It’s hard to say what typical is, because it really does vary. Like I’ve told you guys the story before, the shortest person I’ve ever known for writing adult fantasy, so the legend goes, went from agent offer to publishing deal in 48 hours. And then I’ve known people who were on Submission for three to five years with the same book. But, yeah, I think usually three to four months is when I started getting rejections for Anchor. And that means that that’s when people are actually getting around to it and reading it and then if they consider it or they’re asking colleagues to read it, that’s another three or four months. Which is why you get that kind of figure, I think.

[00:13:18.380] – Clay
Yeah, in my specific instance because, like Sunyi said, it’s so circumstantial from person to person. In my specific case, my agent, Joshua, he reps some very big names. He’s a bit of a rock star in the industry. And so oftentimes when he submits to editors, editors really take notice to his submissions. And so I got a fair number of rejections fairly quickly, I would say, within the first three months. Let me preface it by saying that my agent submitted my book to, I think, roughly 18 or so editors all at once. I know that some agents will kind of do multiple rounds of submission, see how one goes before possibly going back and doing edits.

[00:14:04.100] – Sunyi
Naomi did that as well. One blast. Shotgun blast.

[00:14:06.810] – Clay
Yeah, the shotgun submission. So Joshua sent it out to almost two dozen editors and we got a good number of rejections within those first few months. And I think it was because I went on Submission, I would say the last week of June in 2019, I think around September or so, we had gotten, you know, a fair number of rejections. And that was when I was kind of really starting to get worried that my book wasn’t going to sell. And it stayed. And we got a number of rejections kind of trickling over the following six months after that. And when Joshua emailed me that Michael at Rebellion was seriously considering acquiring my book, that was well past the point where I was kind of figuring that the Flames of Mirror was a lost cause. It was a very long nine months. I’d have to say, being on Submission for that long, while it can be typical for some people, that definitely doesn’t lessen the impact that it has on your mental state because you’ll hear from a lot of published authors that being on Submission is worse than being in the query trenches. While being in the query trenches is really awful in its own way, when you’re on Submission, there’s just something so tangible about it’s, just so much easier to visualize.

[00:15:34.210] – Clay
You’re almost at the finish line. All you have to get is a yes from an editor. And basically the dream that you’ve been pursuing for X number of months or X number of years is being fulfilled. So knowing that you’re that close makes the rejections that much tougher. When I was on submission for those nine months or so. I don’t think I really wrote at all for the first couple of months. And I had been writing more or less non stop for the ten years prior. It was just so I was checking my email day in and day out, hoping for that. Yes. So once I was able to finally pick up writing again after a couple of months, that made it easier to cope with submission.

[00:16:22.550] – Scott
My question, I guess my general question is that’s going through my mind is whether there’s a strong correlation between deal size and deal type and how long it takes to be acquired. Because my book sat on submission for a while and there was a whole back and forth process there. But I do know of others that didn’t go immediately right. That weren’t the 48 hours acquisition thing. And Sunyi, if I remember right, book Eaters was a pretty quick acquisition. Right. You got to preempt from Tor.

[00:16:58.630] – Sunyi
The answer that Essa always gives, and I think shipping handling used to always give, is it depends. But the thing that people say, the quiet part out loud, I guess, is that generally the faster submission goes, the better off, because it means there’s buzz, it means there’s excitement, it means someone is afraid that your book will be bought by somebody else if they don’t buy it first. And obviously that’s not always the case. I guess the standout example is she who should not be named JK. Rowling on submission for twelve months. The last publisher bought it for like a middleing amount, and obviously that took off, but for most people, that’s kind of not what goes on. Yeah. Generally there is a link.

[00:17:44.470] – Scott
The example that comes to mind is one that I won’t share on behalf of another person. But I do know, and I think we know of someone who sold, I think, after two or three months, is what I remember them saying, two or three months on submission, and it sold for a very good amount. The publisher wrote a good check and supported the book really well, and it’s done fairly well. So it doesn’t seem like a hard and fast rule that you have to go within 48 hours or weeks or even the first few months to get your your dream deal, but it certainly doesn’t hurt.

[00:18:26.890] – Clay
Yeah. So one of the hard truths that I really learned when it came to publishing was just how much hype dictated the whole process from beginning to end. On the editor’s side, people like to get excited about things just like the stock market.

[00:18:42.860] – Sunyi
People are speculating on what they think will be big and then it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, kind of a little bit.

[00:18:48.640] – Clay
Yeah. And then even later on in the process, when it comes to, say, marketing on the bookseller’s behalf, for instance, they want to see the shiny new project that’s coming out in three months. And even on a consumer part, people only read so many books per year, and so they tend to gravitate toward the titles that everyone else is talking about. And so, yeah, it was hard to accept that merit doesn’t get you 100% of the way there that you can write a great book, but if people don’t know about it, they’re not going to read it. And a lot of times the way people learn about books is by hearing it from other people through buzz and through hype.

[00:19:37.930] – Scott
Yeah. And it’s crazy to think that submission process where your book is going to in my case, nine, your case, 18 different editors, that process dictates so much of the hype that your book is going to get right. Nine people or 18 people, whatever it is, it’s still a hand and or foot full of people are dictating almost everything about how your book launch is going to go. And that just sucks.

[00:20:16.530] – Clay
Going back to the point about there being a rough correlation to how quickly a book sells to how good the the deal ends up being. So my book was on submission for nine months, and the deal that I was offered was $5,000 per title. And so Joshua ended up negotiating it up from $10,000 because it was a two book deal from ten thousand dollars to ten thousand, two hundred and fifty dollars. They weren’t willing to budge, more or less. And we also even had to give up the audio rights, too. It was unfortunate because when we got the offer from Rebellion, we ended up also getting an offer from it might have been recorded books or there was an audio company that had made an offer just on the audio rights, and they were offering, I think, another 10,000 for that. And so that effectively doubled my deal size. But Rebellion refused to give up audio rights. And the reason I was told was that they had recently signed a partnership with Penguin in the UK. And so they were having Penguin produce all of their audio books, and so they weren’t budging on it.

[00:21:34.820] – Clay
Joshua did a really great job of trying to raise hell on my behalf to try and retain those audio rights. But it’s only speculation. But what was the alternative? For me, if I said no? That was saying no to fulfilling this dream that I had pursued for a decade. And so we ended up letting them keep the audio rights. I mean, Penguin audio produced it, and I got a really fantastic narrator. He did an amazing job. His name is Luke Francis. So it worked out in that sense, but it definitely took a big I took a big hit as far as the advanced number went. So that kind of goes back to the early point that the big difference between a mid sized publisher and one of the big five is money. From my understanding, a lot of the mid sized publishers tend to run in that very rough range. I’ve heard them doing larger deals, but that tends to be definitely the exception and not the rule.

[00:22:43.570] – Sunyi
What did you kind of think when this deal offer came through? Did you know who Rebellion was? Did you know that they were not Big Five? Did you have a kind of sense of like what the advance meant or how you felt about it or any of that?

[00:22:58.490] – Clay
That’s a surprisingly hard question to answer because over the course of years, as you’re pursuing this, you’re slowly learning bits and pieces about publishing and how it works. And so I would consider myself very well informed these days versus how it was back then. So trying to remember my thoughts of Rebellion at the time because this was March of 2023 and when I got the offer, it was about three years ago from now. And so what I knew back then was definitely different. I don’t think I knew much about Rebellion at the time. I knew that they had international distribution. They were asking to purchase the world rights, which for those who don’t know that’s, typically in North America, in the UK. And so they had the ability to fulfill on those world rights of getting my books into the US. And into the UK. I didn’t know this at the time, but during one call that I had with Joshua, he said that this was probably, I would say, a few months after my book came out, that my book was in approximately 50% to 75% of all Barnes and Nobles in the US.

[00:24:16.530] – Clay
Which I was, that’s that was higher than I expected, to be honest, because at that point I had accepted the fact that my book was going to have a fairly modest release. And I guess I kind of told myself that modest meant much smaller than it really was. And so, yeah, I was pleasantly surprised when I found out that it was in that many bookstores. But of course, when it comes to selling a book, getting it into the bookstores is one thing, but actually getting it to getting readers to notice it is something else entirely, which comes to the marketing aspect of it.

[00:24:56.300] – Scott
Now, did your publisher, did Rebellion tell you that they were going to publish in the UK and that they were going to produce the audiobook up front end? Or was this really just them asking for the rights and you had to take it on faith that they were going to do that and it ended up that they did.

[00:25:19.590] – Clay
At the time, I had no reason to suspect anything else. They had told me that they had to keep the audio rights to give to Penguin to produce it. And as far as I was concerned, at that point, the audio book was going to be made. And in my situation, that’s exactly what happened, I would say, because my book came out in July 2022. I think around April or so, maybe a little earlier, they put me into contact, or actually, I got an email from someone at Rebellion saying that the the question was, hey, Clay, we’re looking into producing, you know, your your audiobook. Do you want an American accent or a British accent? And I was like, oh boy, it’s starting. And so it was fantasy. So I picked British accent because I thought that was super cool.

[00:26:06.310] – Scott
Of course, yeah.

[00:26:07.830] – Clay
And then shortly afterward, or I can’t remember, but they gave me three options of voice actors, and all three of them had recorded some various lengths of the first chapter that I got to listen to. And so I got to pick my favorite one. And my favorite one by far was Luke Francis. Like I said, he did a really great job with my audiobook. And so after I chose him, he actually reached out to me on Twitter and had some really nice things to say about my book. He had read it at that point and was doing a second read through to just come up with all the questions that he had regarding pronunciations. But I think more importantly, just kind of the dispositions of the characters and or how I might have imagined how they sounded. And so I kind of had a bit of a back and forth with him, gave him my thoughts, and then I don’t think I really heard from him after that. The audio book came out and I gave it a listen and I was just yeah, I was blown away by how well he did. And so, yeah, overall it was a really positive experience for the audiobook.

[00:27:17.670] – Sunyi
That’s probably almost identical, actually, to the experience I had with Tor and the audio books. They asked about preferences and had a selection of three, and they looked for authors who were northern and neurodiverse, and I thought that was really cool of them because they didn’t–sorry, Harper produced audio–I thought that’s really cool of them because they didn’t have to go that extra mile. I don’t know. If you want to, you can cut it. If not, Scott. But feel free to go into your experiences with audio, which I know is possibly a sore point.

[00:27:41.560] – Scott
Zero cuts here, motherfuckers! I will offer a little nugget of wisdom, or at the very least a hypothesis here. Right. So Rebellion, even though their deal sizes that Clay is talking about was pretty much set in stone, it is on the lower end of what a big five would offer, though not really that far from what I got from Tor. Right. Their initial offer was three books for 25, and my agent got them up to three books for 30. Right. My guess is that that money meant a lot more to Rebellion and was really just their expenditure they felt like they could put out in terms of securing the rights with a significant intent to then utilize those rights to the fullest because that contract and that expenditure mattered to them, right, and they track it. Whereas with Big Five, I am not the only one that I know of, right, that signed over audio rights, signed over World English rights, and then didn’t have one or the other or both produced, right. So in my case, they produced the book, obviously, and published hardcover into the US. But did not publish into the UK, as far as I know.

[00:29:19.570] – Scott
Didn’t shop the rights with UK publishers further than, I guess, making it available to Tor UK or McMillan, somebody in the UK. And I got vague answers as to what that process looked like, but it didn’t seem like an active process to really try to push it into the UK and audio. We basically had radio silence up until a month before launch, maybe two months before launch, at which point we finally got an answer of, yes, we’re not making the audio or we’re not making it yet. And luckily, Tor was super cool about giving the rights back, like my agent only had to ask once and we’ve already got them back and we’re trying to figure out what to do with them now. But, yeah, I think there is something to be said for a publisher who’s invested in you and in your book, regardless of that deal size. And that deal size might make more of a difference when you also account for who’s cutting that check. Because I’m not the only one published by Big Five at the lower end, right? The lower ranges of Big Five debut deal sizes that didn’t get into the UK or didn’t get an audiobook or both, that seems to be pretty common, actually, with pretty recent debuts that got smaller deal sizes.

[00:30:59.980] – Clay
And I mean, that’s kind of my sense of the point of this podcast is to really inform the listener of all of these intangibles or things that are going on behind the curtain that they would otherwise have no access to. People tend to think that the more money that a publisher offers a prospective author, the better off they’re going to be. But while Scott got a much higher advance than I did, it seems that overall, my publishing experience has been better than his, as far as marketing goes, specifically, is what I mean.

[00:31:43.560] – Scott
I’ll say this too, Clay, your cover is gorgeous. Right? And I’m far from the only person who said that, but your cover is gorgeous. They put out audio, they got your book into Barnes and Noble, into the UK, so that’s awesome. And that’s something people should know when they’re looking at, even when they’re talking to their agent about who should we submit to? And I think a lot of authors with high hopes are going to say, only Big Five, only go Big Five. But I think it’s really worth exploring those. Options with publishers that might not have the upfront deal size, but are going to do right by the author.

[00:32:24.770] – Clay
Yeah. And you actually brought up something that I wanted to talk about regarding the benefits that may not be immediately obvious, specifically about the cover and how it relates to input that the author has with their publisher. In my specific case, I had a very specific image in my head of what I wanted the cover to be, and I shared those thoughts with Michael, my editor, who was kind of acting as liaison for the rest of the publisher. And that’s what editors often do, is they’re project managers and they tend to connect with the authorial input with the other departments that are involved in the project. But I had this image of this arm with a clenched fist and lava dripping off of the fist, and I shared that with Michael, and I didn’t really hear anything from him for a while because this was still pretty early on in the process. And then he eventually reached out to me, saying that they had hired that Rebellion had hired on a graphic design company out of London to do some, I think, work on spec, which basically means they do, like, a quick work up of what the cover might be, and then if the client wants to go forward to it, then they’ll refine it.

[00:33:49.920] – Clay
But the images that this graphic design company provided were not images that I liked. I was very diplomatic in how I shared my feedback, but it just wasn’t something that I wanted as a cover. And so I shared that with Michael, and then he ended up doing another round with them and got another potential image for my cover, and I didn’t like that one either. And I shared that with Michael, and he kind of was very vague and uncertain about where things were going to go after that point. And so I didn’t really hear from him for a while. And then I would say probably six weeks later, he emailed me saying that he had gone through a couple more rounds with this graphic design company and ended up just moving forward with someone else. And the person that they ended up going with was Larry Rostan, who, when I looked up the covers he had done, I was blown away by the covers. He’s done some really well known books. And so I got really excited at that point. And I was assured, or I felt very reassured, that my publisher was actually listening to me and actually taking what I had to say into account, which I had heard.

[00:35:07.650] – Clay
So many horror stories of authors giving up creative control because that’s the name of the game in publishing and getting these things that just they did not like at all. And so when I heard it was Larry, I got excited. And then I didn’t hear back for a couple of months and then I ended up getting an initial draft of Flames of Mirrors cover and it was basically what it is now. And I was just flabbergasted that not only did it look awesome, but the thing that I had suggested like six months prior, they had actually listened to me and ran with it. And I was really happy with that. And so I had maybe some minor suggestions here or there, but even with the minor stuff, they took what I had to say into account, and I will always be thankful for that. And that trend continues with the sequels cover as well because I don’t know if it’s live at the time of people listening to this, but the COVID was basically what I had suggested during that initial conversation with what I wanted the sequels cover to be. And so that’s a big thing that people overlook or people just don’t have information on is when it comes to collaborating with your publisher, how willing they are to listen.

[00:36:26.570] – Clay
So I don’t know how your guys’ experiences differed from mine.

[00:36:29.700] – Sunyi
Oh, sorry. I’ve heard from other friends with midsize presses, specifically Angry Robot are apparently pretty good at allowing collaboration. I have a friend who designed his own cover for Angry Robot. He’s an artist, which is amazing. So obviously he got exactly what he wanted. I had no input, really. I think it was written into the contract. The Torah had to get approval from us and everything they sent to us. I mean, we suggested changes and they basically said very politely, no, we’re not doing that. And I think it came from a good place. It just came from this place of like, look, we’re investing in this book. You don’t know what the fuck you’re doing. Let the adults handle this. But in a nice way. And we were kind of like, okay, fine, as long as you don’t my only request to the Tor is to not have a boobs ass woman on the cover the one which is like facing away, twisting. I hate those covers. And they had no intention of doing that, so it was fine.

[00:37:29.810] – Scott
That’s funny. I got basically the same treatment from Tor. I was somewhat involved in the thematic brainstorming session with my editor, but then I really didn’t see or hear anything for months and then got the artwork back and said, well, here are a whole bunch of things that aren’t quite right with respect to not only what we had talked about, but with what was in the book. And they were basically like, well, it’s kind of what it is. And they made minor changes from there. But, yeah, I wasn’t super involved and.

[00:38:13.970] – Sunyi
I was going to ask as well because you both had hardback releases and so did I. And I think there’s like an interesting distinction there. I don’t know if Rebellion was involved in that thought process, but Scott and I talked to in our bookseller chat last week. One of the things they said is that hardback is a very difficult sell for debut authors and it often doesn’t work so well unless it’s for a lead title.

[00:38:36.610] – Clay
Yeah, I mean, when I found out that my book was going to be hardcover, I was really excited at first, but then I got really nervous after that because typically when a book is released, if it’s released as paperback, you’re not going to get a hard cover afterwards. That’s the typical situation. And so the fact that I was going hardcover, it was going to eventually come with a paperback release anyway, so getting the best of both worlds in my mind sounded like a really great thing. But then as I started doing more research, I realized that a lot of readers tend to not buy hardcovers and that’s a personal, that’s a preference of mine as well, because I prefer reading paperbacks as well. And so once I made that connection in my mind that I’m an unknown author with a lot writing on this debut release, and that there were a significant portion of the readership that weren’t going to buy my book just because it was hard covered, that’s when I really started getting a little worried as far as how it’s been overall. I’m still happy that I was able to do the hardcover release just because that initial point that getting the best of both worlds.

[00:39:55.380] – Clay
My paperback is slated to release later this summer, July, and it’s going to come with a new cover as well. So getting all of that is nice. But I know that my sales have taken a hit because it releases hard cover.

[00:40:10.470] – Scott
Mine was supposed to be trade paperback release. That’s what we signed our contract based on. And then I don’t even remember exactly when it was, but probably six months before what eventually became my actual publication date, they said, we’re doing this in hardcover, by the way, and no other discussion, no anything. I just was told that it’s going to be hard cover now. And I remember I asked, is this a good thing? And both my editor and agent said… yes? but still wouldn’t go into it much. And my hope at the time, besides the brief ego boost, right? Because I think authors want their book to be in hardcover and there’s kind of this legacy feeling of if you’re a legit author, your book is going to be in hardcover and it’s going to be a big deal. My thought at the time was, okay, maybe this means that they’re going to invest in it more because they’re putting out a more expensive edition and it’s going to be more expensive for them to produce, et cetera. But I really think it’s more about margin. I think my guess is that publishers margin is better on hardcovers.

[00:41:29.250] – Clay
Oh, absolutely.

[00:41:30.670] – Scott
So to boost their ability to at least break even and not take a hit on producing your book, I think, or at least my book, they went to hardcover, and hard to say, but I agree with you anecdotally. My preferences for paperback and trade paperback in particular and the price point is obviously a whole lot better on a paperback. And for a debut author that nobody’s heard of and that doesn’t get the really big push of, oh, look at this, look at this book, and doesn’t have sales reps really pushing it to bookstores and whatever else, hardcover is kind of a hard sell.

[00:42:11.870] – Sunyi
But yeah, I guess the thing that I kind of want to hone in on for readers is to look across all these factors and… when we’re looking at books from the perspective of why does one book succeed and why does one fail… Because publishers are taking these lots of different decisions that would create a feedback loop. You buy the world rights, but you don’t choose to publish it in certain countries. You buy the audio rights, but you don’t make the audio or you make it late, which effectively shoots your audio sales in the foot, or you release in the wrong format because it’s slightly better for you and you don’t mind taking the gamble, but it might tank an author’s career. And all of that creates additional issues where they come back. So I have friends where the audio for the book was produced, but it’s produced eight months after the book released, so sales for it sucked. And then the publisher comes back and says, well, your audio didn’t sell, so we’re not doing audio for the next book, and so on, and it’s a vicious cycle. Or your hardback didn’t sell because you’re a debut author, so your next book deal doesn’t happen or smaller.

[00:43:13.450] – Sunyi
And all of these things collate together into one big picture of what’s going on and why books are kind of shifting up and down these sales ranks.

[00:43:21.960] – Clay
Yeah, and just going back to the hard cover, at first I was told that Flames of Mira was going to release as a paperback. And then when I found out it was going to release in a hardcover, I found out that they were kind of trying this string of releases where all of the books were going to come out in hardcover. And it kind of made me come to this realization that I imagine a lot of people that work in publishing love the idea of connecting great books with readers who are going to love them. But at the end of the day, publishing is a business. They’re there to make money. And so when I realized that these decisions that were being made about that would significantly affect the performance of my book, it wasn’t about getting my book into the hands of readers who might enjoy it. It was about being able to make the most amount of money with my book. And so I wouldn’t say it was a hard truth I work in marketing as a day job. So I kind of more or less knew that that’s how things were. But just the fact that this was my passion project that I had pursued for a long time, it made it hard in that sense.

[00:44:34.980] – Clay
And I feel like that’s a point that a lot of authors, they might be able to acknowledge it, but they might forget it over the course of their publishing journey, is that publishers aren’t there to be your friend. They’re there to make money off of a product that you’ve produced. And so that’s really something that people need to remember if they’re trying to get published.

[00:44:55.810] – Sunyi
I started describing my job as product designer to people.

[00:45:00.110] – Clay
Yeah, that’s what we are. We’re making a product and publishers are there to sell it. So there’s a lot of love that goes into it. I know there are a lot of people in publishing that are there because they love books, but that love is not the bottom line. It’s definitely colder than that.

[00:45:18.520] – Scott
Yeah, for sure. And I think a pretty solid corollary is software development, right? In their day jobs or whatever they’re doing, they’re writing code that is turned into a product and marketed and what have you. There’s not anything sentimental about code, but when it comes to our stories, which is really a pretty similar product if you think about it, there tends to be a lot of sentimentality on the part of authors. And understandably so, I think, especially being an author myself and knowing what goes into coming up with and writing a story. But you’re right, that’s just not what it is once it hits the commercial world. And I think we need to understand that that’s going to significantly change, or rather, the people that we’re working with have a significantly different idea of who we are and what we’re producing than we do right now. I think unless you two want to go deeper into mid sized publishers and what the deal looked like in that whole process for Clay. My big question for you, Clay, and I suppose you sent me, but Clay, knowing what you do now, is there anything you would have done differently?

[00:46:46.410] – Scott
So say you’re coaching I know you mentor a lot of people. Say you’re coaching somebody that finds themselves in roughly the same situation. They’re on sub and have been for a while, and maybe they’re getting an offer from Rebellion but have a few outstanding that haven’t said no or yes yet. Is there anything you would do differently knowing what you do?

[00:47:10.140] – Clay
That’s a tough question to answer, I would say, because the answer is going to be different versus before my book sold compared to after it’s sold. If we’re talking about before it’s sold. I think once you get an offer that rolls in, just reaching out to other authors, that can be pretty difficult at times. Connecting with a published author with a specific imprint just to pick their brain and try and get an idea of all of the benefits that they might have gotten that go beyond just deal size. I feel like that’s pretty straightforward advice that everyone should just to do your research and get a better grasp of it. There was just so much that I didn’t know, but I didn’t know that I didn’t know it. So it was very difficult for me to follow those threads. But as far as after my deal, what I would do differently, I don’t know if I would do anything differently. I think if I were to do things differently, it would be mostly pertaining to my mental health and properly managing it. But the thing is that once you sign your deal and the ball gets rolling, there’s so many things outside of your control.

[00:48:29.410] – Clay
If I were to be critical of my publisher doing this versus doing that, I don’t know if critiquing that would have really made any difference because they were still going to make the decisions that they ended up making. It would just be about protecting myself mentally and properly. Managing my expectations would probably be the big thing that I would do differently.

[00:48:54.730] – Scott
So just one quick comment. Your suggestion to reach out to published authors to do some more research and get the real lay of the land. I think what I didn’t realize at first is that reaching out to just any author with first my agent, right? When I got an offer from my agent, I reached out to other authors who had been or were with him to ask what the relationship looked like and whether it had gone well. And then when it came to my publisher, I did even less. Right. There wasn’t a whole lot of research I did. It was just, wow, this is Tor and I’m stoked to be with them. Right. But what I might suggest to somebody, especially if they find themselves in the situation that I did and they don’t really know upfront what signing their deal means and what their deal size might mean, I wonder if a publisher would be open to a request for references, basically.

[00:50:00.690] – Clay
Wouldn’t that be nice?

[00:50:02.530] – Scott
Yes, it really would. I would have loved to talk to a few authors who had signed similar deals to mine a year, two or even three in the past, because two or three years down the road might be the first time that they really understand what they signed. So whether you can get that information from your prospective publisher or not, that’s what I’d be looking for is who has signed deals like the one I have on the table with this exact publisher. And not just like a year ago or six months ago, because they probably don’t know much more than you do who signed these deals and actually been published and their books out in the world and they’ve gone through the process I’m about to go through because that’s who I ended up learning the most from. And especially once we got our little friend group together and we is mostly Sunyi got our little group together. But that’s been life changing in terms of my experience as an author and my outlook on potentially being an author for quite some time. That’s been huge. So Friend group is one thing, but I think that reference of people who went through something with that same publisher would have been hugely valuable.

[00:51:23.430] – Sunyi
And, are they still in the industry! Because for those who don’t know the statistics, 60% of people never publish more than one book. By three books, 80% of us are gone from the industry, by… was it six books? 90% of us are gone. Something like that. It’s really bleak statistics. Basically, most people are gone within five or six years. So if you can find people who are still in the game….

[00:51:47.600] – Scott
Do we ave somewhere to point people or point ourselves for those statistics? Because I really want to see those numbers. That’s incredible.

[00:51:54.620] – Sunyi
There’s a variety of resources. I would struggle to pin them all down, but I do have concrete ones I recommend. So one is a book called before and after the book deal by Courtney Maum. I’m not affiliated with her, but it was the first thing I’d read that’s close to an industry bible. I mean, she goes into detail, she goes into how much you can expect to get. And it’s a brilliantly, funny book. It’s very informative. It has wonderful chapter headings like “my Sales suck. Should I Crawl under a Rock and Die?” And just handles all the difficulties of publishing with a lot of humor and grace. If you can’t afford to buy the book or you can’t find it in a library, there is a nine episode podcast called Track Changes First Draft with Sarah Enni, which covers most of the material that’s in Courtney Maum’s book. And it just goes like each episode is like agents, publishers, deal, marketing, that kind of thing. If you don’t like listening to podcasts, it’s in transcripts much tidier than our transcripts. So that is all there online and that’s free. The other one is print run podcast with Laura Zats and Eric Hayne.

[00:52:58.320] – Sunyi
And that’s a very good, very informative one. And it’s still ongoing and updating. They have tons of between those two. You’ve got a ton of info and data there. And I guess if I was going to pass things on to new writers, it would just be that you probably should have goals going into publishing. I think goals are almost taboo. People are like, oh, I don’t want to hope to have lots of money because that’s like arrogant or something. And it’s like but if you don’t have a goal, you can’t work towards it. I think goals help you decide what… Clay had this clear goal of, I want to be with a certain kind of publisher and have been Barnes and Noble. So I can say no to this agent offer and that informs that decision. Or I want to be, yeah, I’ve met some people who are like, I want to hit the New York Times list. It’s like, okay, that’s not my goal, but it’s yours. So that means you need big five probably and stuff like that. You just have to think about it, I guess. Think about the future.

[00:53:54.510] – Scott
Yeah. If you want to hit the list, you have to be not just big Five, but probably a big contract with big five.

[00:54:01.530] – Sunyi
Yeah, but it’s just like, if you have specific ideas of like, I need this much money, it’s not worth my time, that’s fine. But then you go into knowing what you walk away from.

[00:54:11.330] – Scott
Yeah. And you should know how that reduces your odds of success as well.

[00:54:17.040] – Clay
And going back to my suggestion about reaching out to authors to get an idea of what the experience might be like, that comes with an asterisk because it just kind of goes back to the very nature of why this information is so hard to come across. Authors tend to not want to share that information just due to power dynamics. They’re really afraid of souring the relationship with their publisher because writing means so much to them and they want to keep publishing, and they’re afraid that they might jeopardize that by being truthful. And then on the opposite side of the spectrum, you might get authors who have had really great experiences with publishers, but you can’t necessarily trust what they have to say because they might be one of those the darling of their publisher, and so their experience might not be representative of what you might end up experiencing going into it. It’s hard to really know what to expect when you don’t know people and you’re trying to break in and get to know those people. Because like you said, Scott, so much of this information is just accrued very slowly over time by making friends with among your peer group of authors and comparing what your experience is with them.

[00:55:36.860] – Sunyi
And falling into pit traps and discovering the hard way.

[00:55:41.210] – Clay
Yes, but I mean, hopefully that’s what podcasts like these are for is you’ve got authors who are willing to share all this information to anyone who’s willing to listen and hopefully help them manage their expectations. Going to publishing, that’s exactly our intent.

[00:55:59.070] – Scott
To be the friend to the friendless and help people get a real sense of what the publishing world looks like for people in it, rather than the gold tinged view that people tend to put off. Because I think I’d add to your asterisk the very frequent finding that people in the industry, even if their experience hasn’t been positive, they try to spin it as positive. They want to just continue to build their brand, and they have this hope that there can be some grassroots movement to find that success they’ve been hoping for. People are very hesitant to associate themselves with any sort of negative experience or admit that they didn’t have exactly the result or the journey that they had hoped to in publishing.

[00:56:52.830] – Sunyi
Fake it till you make it.

[00:56:54.230] – Scott
Yeah, there’s a lot of that. There’s a lot of fake it till you make it.

[00:56:57.110] – Clay
I mean, I can totally understand why people go that route. Some really helpful advice that I ended up getting is to never bad mouth your own product. Because if people see that you don’t believe in yourself, then they won’t have any reason to believe in you either. And so I can get the wanting to make things come off as everything is fine and dandy. So it’s a really fine line to follow of wanting to be realistic and help others out by giving them good information of what to expect, while at the same time not wanting to be too down on yourself.

[00:57:35.750] – Scott
Well, like you said, a very good book or very good product in this industry can absolutely be buried by the process. Right. And there are really good books out there that never get past the agenting process or the submission process.

[00:57:52.220] – Clay
I think it’s a lot of it too, is just people buying into the whole concept of hype that seems to dominate publishing, is wanting, by making everything sound as great as is, they’re hoping to contribute to their own little bubble of hype for their product that they’re putting out.

[00:58:12.560] – Sunyi
Well, thank you for that, Clay. That was genuinely fantastic. I guess if you want a chance to plug yourself, feel free and go for it.

[00:58:21.420] – Clay
Yeah. So in case you didn’t find out by now, my book, Flames of Mira came out July of 2022 through Rebellion Publishing. It is a dark fantasy novel. The paperback should be releasing later this summer and the sequel was supposed to come out this year, but after some technical difficulties, you could say it’s getting pushed back to next year. If it hasn’t been announced by the time this airs, then consider me announcing it now. Right now. It’s supposed to come out July of 2023. So yes, looking forward to it. And you can find me on Twitter at clayharman roman numeral two. And Clayharmanauthor.com. And I have an author instagram, too. I think it’s Clay Harmon Author.

[00:59:07.240] – Sunyi
And a TikTok!

[00:59:09.160] – Clay
And I have a TikTok. Yeah. Follow me on TikTok. Clay Harmon, author. I post really stupid fun videos on that too, because I have nothing better to do with my time.

[00:59:22.050] – Scott
Well, you heard the man. Go check out Flames of Mira and find his fantastic TikTok videos. You won’t regret it.

[00:59:30.870] – Sunyi
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.