[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?

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

[00:00:38.490] – 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. Welcome to the Publishing Rodeo, where we say the quiet part out loud. We have Richard Swan with us, the author of justice of Kings and the Tyranny of Faith from Orbit Books. Hi, Richard.

[00:01:17.070] – Richard
Hi, Scott. Hi, Sony.

[00:01:19.290] – Sunyi
Hi, Richard.

[00:01:20.350] – Scott
Richard, can you give us a bit of an overview of your journey to publication? And Sunyi and I know bits and pieces, but feel free to give the story to us in whatever level of granularity you wish.

[00:01:39.070] – Richard
Yeah, of course. Yeah, you might regret that. Addendum I’ll cut you off. That’s great, thanks. And moving swiftly on. When I was a wee lad. I was born in North Yorkshire in 1989. I started writing. I started writing as a child, like a young child. But I remember kind of my sort of first concerted effort was in my young teens and I started writing science fiction. And what I considered was was a novel then, but actually was probably about a collection of short stories. And I decided I was going to write and I wrote a story, and then I wrote another one the following year with a friend, which ended up being quite long. I saw like 150,000 words or something. And then when I was in what we would call 6th form, when you’re sort of 1718 at school, I wrote what would become kind of the blueprint for my writing ever since. And I wrote a sort of 136,000 word space opera which was called Mindscape. And that really completely sort of cemented for me how I would approach writing as a structure, as a way of getting the words down on the page.

[00:02:56.150] – Richard
And I had like a plan. So the plan that I used for that is still the kind of format of the plan I use today. I use kind of colour coding for the different kind of povs, which I don’t do anymore, but I did then and it was a kind of three act structure with kind of interweaving storylines and stuff like that. So that kind of really set the basis of how I would approach writing ever since. And then after that, I sort of spent about two or three years on Black Library fan fiction forums, writing huge amounts of Warhammer 40,000 fan fiction, about five or six novels worth. And then that forum went down, they closed it, and so then I returned to kind of my own IP, if I can use that, and there followed my self publishing phase. So I self published some stuff for a couple of years, three or four years. I think it was about 18 books at that point. And then book number 19 was The Justice of Kings, which, when I wrote The Justice of Kings, I kind of sent it to a friend and I said, hey, what do you think of this?

[00:03:57.870] – Richard
And he said, I think it’s really good. And I said, oh, I might just self publish this one as well. And he said, well, why don’t you try and get an agent to try and get it published for six months? And if you don’t get anywhere with it, then you can always self publish it. That’s always an option for everybody. And that turned out to be really good advice. And so I tried to get an agent and, yeah, it’s been about a 20 year journey in that time. Always the goal was traditional publication. That was always sort of the guiding star, weirdly enough. Also Orbit. I think that the first book I submitted. When I was about 14, I sent a book into Orbit because I had a connection there. A friend of my grandma’s, my grandma’s neighbour knew someone who worked to Orbit, weirdly editorial. And so I sent them this dreadful kind of teenage written manuscript and I was like, hey, yeah, I love a book deal. And they were like, God, no thanks. And it was a letter. You sent the manuscript off. Even when I was a teenager, it was a manuscript in a jiffy bag.

[00:05:01.160] – Richard
And they sent a letter back saying, no, thanks. So I wish I’d kept that rejection. I should have had it framed. But, yeah, so that was it in a nutshell. That 20 years, sort of, from start to finish, that was my journey. It was a very painless process for me.

[00:05:18.870] – Scott
People are going to love you, Richard.

[00:05:20.510] – Richard
I know haha. It’s a story I don’t volunteer that often because I only learn months after the fact. Because, of course, as writers, I was never part of any writing group or critique group or writer circles or workshops or whatever. I never did any of that. Writing has always been a very solitary pursuit for me. And so now I am a published author. I know more authors and writers than I have ever done. And now I have a much kind of keener eye on kind of the industry and what goes on in it. And I had no idea that people could be waiting on submission for months, even years sometimes. I had no idea that that was a thing, because my personal journey was so smooth, and so, yeah, the agent thing, I submitted it to I submitted it to three agents, and I think it was three. One guy, I think. I’ve never heard back… Sunyi, you look like you might say something.

[00:06:17.210] – Sunyi
I’m watching Scott’s face.

[00:06:23.450] – Richard
(laughing) and then they just wheeled this big dump truck of money outside my house, and they said, richard, please just write books in perpetuity. Here’s a blank cheque. One agent, I don’t remember his name, but I never had it was almost like an open window or like a competition or something. I can’t even remember what it was, but that went nowhere. And then I applied for what I did was I just went on the Internet, and I just literally Googled science fiction fantasy agents, and a bunch of names came up, and they were listed listicles and things, and I was like, Right, this will do. I just picked one. No idea what I was doing at all. Just picked one, came up, and I applied for him, and he said, no, he passed on it. So I did get one rejection, to be fair. And then the second agent I applied to was Harry Illingworth, the DHA agency in London. But I sent him an email. He asked for the full manuscript. Then he asked to have a phone call, and I just immediately accepted. We had a kind of conversation. He was like, I’d love to represent you.

[00:07:35.670] – Richard
And it didn’t occur to me even slightly to shop around either. I just said, yeah, this guy seems like the stuff. He’s legit, and he is. He’s brilliant. Just to be clear. He’s like a real he’s an excellent agent. Absolutely no problem at all. Glad that I have him. If you’re listening, Harry–

[00:07:59.280] – Scott
he’s definitely not just you with a different email address.

[00:08:01.720] – Richard
Exactly. Hello. I am Mr. Snrub. He’s great, and I’m really glad. I had no agent shopping. I just got Harry. I was like, fantastic. And I was vibrating with excitement. I couldn’t sleep that night. I was like, oh, my God, it’s happening. It’s happening. It all seemed like from there, it was smooth sailing. And to be fair, it was, so I was right to be excited. And then we went on sub. So we spent about a month or two I spent about month or two edits and went on sub, but he submitted it to the big five to stop because it was August, I think, a bunch of them on holiday, and it went to James at Orbit, and he came back quite quickly. So I think it went out late August. And from what I’ve seen, the email chain between him and Harry, and I think James came back maybe a week and a half later or something, saying, I like it. Keep me posted. If you hear from anyone else, any other answers, let me know. And then a deal came in almost exactly one month after we sent it out to pitch out.

[00:09:14.540] – Richard
And that was a preempt. So for those who don’t know, that’s the kind of they get in before anyone else gets the chance to make an offer. So they say, here’s a big sum of money for you to completely remove the pitch from the market. So that’s what happened in Orbit offered. It was a six figure sum of money for the three books and we did a bit of negotiation to get that number a little bit higher and that was that. So it was very smooth sailing or just hitting every kind of dream target in the space of several months.

[00:09:49.450] – Sunyi
At least someone gets the dream boat store. Yeah, for me, that’s part of it. I know you’ve not had a chance to hear the last few episodes. That basically there’s probably more bad stories than good and publishing. But good stories do happen and sometimes things work out and that is what we all hope for.

[00:10:06.920] – Richard
Things did fall into place very nicely, but there is a culmination of a lot of work as well.

[00:10:11.960] – Sunyi
I mean, I’ve not written 18 books!

[00:10:14.690] – Richard
Sure. That’s not the be all and end all, of course. And some people can just write one book and it’d be wonderfully good. And I think a huge part of the reason why I’ve written so many books is because I’ve been doing it for so long. For the longest time, it was just a hobby for me.

[00:10:31.370] – Scott
But it sounds like you had a wild adolescence.

[00:10:36.810] – Richard
Stories I could tell you these walls. The more interesting stories I could tell you.

[00:10:46.590] – Scott
Yeah, no, I totally get what you mean. You have definitely put in the work and I think that shows. Right? I’ve read your books and unfortunately loved them.

[00:11:01.810] – Sunyi
Richard are nemeses officially for their behaviour, the behaviours of sexual tension. We’re all undecided.

[00:11:11.910] – Scott
Richard seems to attract a whole lot of nemeses. But no, really?

[00:11:18.330] – Richard
Yeah.

[00:11:18.920] – Scott
Shut up, Richard. Really. I really like Richard, for the record, and that can go on record, I.

[00:11:29.440] – Richard
Don’T like use scope.

[00:11:30.900] – Scott
I appreciate that too. Honesty is very valuable. The funny part of that story is that when things go wrong, like I would say they did for me, and they do for so many others, I think the temptation, or the tendency, at least in my case, is to look back and think, what could I have done better? Where could I have mitigated the risk? I should have researched more, I should have known more, I should have been more involved, whatever. So it is really just hilarious to hear that you picked agents off a random list. It was some friend that read your book and was like, no, you shouldn’t self publish this one like the other 18. You should actually submit this. And you’re like, oh, okay, yeah, maybe. (laughing)

[00:12:22.530] – Richard
(laughing) That’s a good idea. Yeah, right, okay, I’ll try to get this one published. If you think that’s a good idea, I’ll do it.

[00:12:32.900] – Scott
If you insist.

[00:12:33.790] – Richard
Yeah, okay. No, that’s probably right.

[00:12:37.730] – Scott
That’s good.

[00:12:38.900] – Richard
It is like I say. But also it was about hitting the market at the right time as well. And so much of it is complete luck. And I think there was I saw chatter online about mediaeval fantasy, which of course, Empire of the Wolf series, which is justice of King’s, Tyranny of Faith, which very much is this is a late mediaeval kind of fantasy. And there was this whole idea of, well, mediaeval fantasy has kind of had its day. We’re all looking for other things now, and I don’t think that’s true at all. And when I was talking to my editor about it, when we had our first conversation after the deal was all kind of signed up, we were getting into the editorial process, and he was saying what grabbed him about the book, what he liked about it specifically and why they offered such a large sum of money for it was they used the phrase familiar, but different. And I think that is absolutely spot on. Correct. If you look at fantasy as a genre and what fantasy readers like, it’s very rare that you get something that is really kind of esoteric, off the wall zany and occasionally it works, and it works very well.

[00:13:54.890] – Richard
But more often than not, what you’re seeing is broadly the same sort of thing being published, the same sort of walls, mediaeval cities, knights on horseback, swords and sorcery. And what they liked about mine was it just had an angle. So it’s familiar. We know all of the tropes. There’s nothing incredibly unique about the setting in The Empire of Wolf. It’s a kind of broad, kind of Holy Roman Empire, angosaxon, kind of mediaeval European setting that we are all very familiar with. But it’s fantasy lawyers, right? And we haven’t seen that before, or if we have, not in any great kind of detail or not in the same way. And that was the hook. Okay, mediaeval, nothing groundbreaking. There fantasy lawyers who do magic. That’s really cool. And so it was to me and to my editor and to Orbit more broadly, it was about hitting the broad notes, but injecting something interesting and unique. And because I was a lawyer, I was a litigator for ten years, I was able to bring a lot of knowledge to that. And so they had a very similar to it that you wouldn’t get as someone who was a non lawyer, say.

[00:15:05.630] – Richard
I think you can always tell when someone is an expert, when a doctor writes a kind of novel or whatever, you know that they know what they’re talking about. I think I was able to kind of bring that to the book. It had that angle. And I think if we’re giving listeners, writers advice, whatever, it’s find the angle. What they call the high concept isn’t it. You can still do mediaeval fantasy, you can do any kind of fantasy. But what’s the new thing, the new slant that you’re kind of putting on it, I think, is why, in my case, it was as successful as it was.

[00:15:40.590] – Sunyi
I think I probably fall on the other side where I went full out on the weird a little bit I’ll get into more because I do think that basically the ways in which my book Hit List in the UK. I can’t talk about the US side because I didn’t hit List there. A lot of that was out of my control. But at least as far as the writing went, I don’t know. I think I have this approach like any idea can work. And it’s structured, it’s commercial. And I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it has worked for me so far. So I spent a whole year reading thrillers because thrillers are the most commercial genre. And I was trying to understand why people like them, what makes them compelling, how they draw the plot forward, how they draw the reader in. And I had this belief that you could pair a thriller structure with a fantasy setting, even if that fantasy setting is a traditionally dead genre. Because at the time, contemporary fantasy was seen as dead. And this is how you’ve ended up with a book about vampires who eat books.

[00:16:42.570] – Sunyi
But it’s also like a thriller. And I kind of was gambling on the fact that if you can be cross genre, you do get a broad audience. But everyone’s trying to do that kind of thing, aren’t they? To some extent. I don’t know how much people think about market when they write. I’m not sure I know that I think about it a lot because to me, the point of writing a book is to communicate with other people. And the way you do that is to have more readers. And the way do you have more readers is to be assessful at different levels.

[00:17:15.130] – Richard
I didn’t think about the market. That’s interesting, because I didn’t think about the market at all. And I think a huge part of that for me was just the way I’ve approached writing. And because I’ve been doing it for so long, I didn’t sit down as like a 30 year old and think, right now my life’s goal is to tell a story and have it published. And I’m sorry, and I don’t think that was what you did.

[00:17:34.280] – Sunyi
No isolation. And that’s very helpful in a way that you can develop your own voice. And I started writing at the same time I started looking into publishing. So I have always been shaped by the agent quest, the querying, the rejection letters that say not marketable, not marketable, not accessible, not commercial. I won’t say it does damage. I will say that it shapes the way that you write and the things you write for. And I don’t think that’s always good. There’s definitely something to be said for developing kind of your art and your voice without that hideous publishing influence commercial hanging over you.

[00:18:16.030] – Richard
I think that’s absolutely right. The reason I agree with that is because, again, I’ve never done that. I’ve never written to market. I’m very late to the publishing process. And so either hitherto I’ve always just written for myself as a hobby and read my own stories and enjoy them or when I was self publishing even when I was self publishing back in 2015, my space opera, I never had any kind of editorial because now these days, they get like the hire freelance editors and they have to cover artists. It’s a cottage industry of freelancers who kind of come together and have all of the apparatus, same apparatus as a publishing house, but it’s all just freelancers coming together, briefly coalescing around novels, but I didn’t have any of that. I hired a proof reader, there’s going to be no errors and mistakes, but I never had any kind of editorial oversight or anything. And it was all very much just like, this is my book, I’ve enjoyed writing it and let’s just see what happens. And I think for me personally and I’m not saying either way is right or wrong, I think for me personally, when you have spent so long writing and you’ve only really been writing for yourself and you have developed your voice in that more organic way, what tends to happen.

[00:19:30.170] – Richard
I said this to someone else the other day. If you write what you want to write, if you love what you’re writing, you will write a good book. Good books are commercial books and commercial books sell. And it’s obviously a bit reductive to say that, but I mean, I think it’s broadly true. And as you know, Sony, I’ve been writing a contemporary novel, which I’ve absolutely loathed writing, and I absolutely hated the process of writing that. And it’s been a real drag and it’s been so difficult to write it. And that is me writing to market. That’s me writing what I think a commercial thriller should look like. And it’s been excruciatingly painful. I absolutely hated the creative process of that. And I finally finished the thing yesterday that was my success, trying to write.

[00:20:21.130] – Sunyi
An epic fantasy as well, and why I bailed on at me. And even though epic fantasy is a better sell, I just couldn’t do it. But you got to draw the line for what you’re willing to do on it.

[00:20:31.690] – Richard
Yeah, right. So I’ve never went to market. And the one time I have, and God help me if this ends up being my most popular book, I’m going to jump off a bridge. That’s a binding contract. You can’t avoid frillsy. The one time I did try and write to market, I suffered greatly creatively. I detested the process. So it’s interesting. My advice would be never write to what you think the market wants, just write the book that you fucking love, because that will end up being your best work.

[00:21:12.070] – Scott
So this is really interesting because being friends with you both have tried to look objectively at what I enjoyed in each of your books and what may have contributed, and you hit on every aspect that I had come up with. And in particular, you both seem to enjoy the high concept thing of a distinguishable theme or elevator pitch, whatever. That comes across very quickly. But what I think doesn’t happen as much as you might think in genre fiction is the depth that you both talked about. And people talk about not just writing what you love like you’re talking about, but writing what you know. Right. In your case, Richard, you mentioned that fantasy lawyers was your thing. Right. And you really could and did write about that authoritatively because you understand that world and you could kind of model your experience in a fantasy setting. And it’s obvious, at least to those of us, like me, who aren’t great students of history, it’s obvious that you had at least a rudimentary understanding of several empires or civilizations in the past.

[00:22:45.910] – Richard
Absolutely.

[00:22:46.600] – Scott
Studied them to some degree, and you had something to say about how they formed, how they functioned, and in the end, how they might decline. Right.

[00:23:00.220] – Richard
Yeah.

[00:23:00.570] – Scott
Which is really interesting. In you. Sunyi, your book was I know you’re very humble about your book, but in my opinion, it was extremely powerful because of the aspects of motherhood and parenthood and what it looks like to care for a child even when the circumstances aren’t ideal and the depths that somebody would go to to protect their own, even when that might not be, quote unquote, for the greater good of any given society, what it might be like to be a relatively oppressed person, et cetera. And so we talk about write what you love. But I think, at least to me, that aspect of both of your writing came through very clearly and very powerfully. Where it was obvious, even though it’s not you writing necessarily your life story or projecting yourself into the book. It was very obvious that both of you did harness your own understanding of a certain set of potential situations and put that into your writing. And it worked. Right?

[00:24:23.490] – Richard
I think, yeah. Certainly some of the earliest writing advice I got was Write what you know. And actually, I hated that advice because I just wanted to write about spaceships and people getting blown up and stuff, and I didn’t know anything about that except for what I seen it in cinema and played on computer games. So it’s very aggravating to find that that actually was good advice only years later. I think you have to be right, Scott. When you do bring something that you do know a lot about into your fiction, it adds that sort of quality to it. But you can absolutely write quality fiction without knowing about something. You just got to research it. Right. I remember a good example, I think. I thought William Gibson in Pattern Recognition did an excellent job of describing kind of London, like a near future London or a sort of contemporaneous London. And it transpired. He’d never been there, or certainly not for the purposes of writing this book. He had just got his Google Street view out, spoken to some people who did live there, and he’d done an excellent job of I had assumed he had spent two or three weeks in the city, but he hadn’t at all.

[00:25:32.410] – Richard
And so it is possible, I think when you’re doing a deeper dive into a character or a situation or whatever, that you do have personal experience and obviously adds to a lot of it, rounds out the novel in a way that maybe you can’t quite achieve if you share that experience. But it’s not to say it’s insmountable.

[00:25:54.930] – Sunyi
Authenticity.

[00:25:56.930] – Richard
Yeah, exactly.

[00:26:04.150] – Scott
One of the other aspects you both touched on was structure. And I know Sunyi in particular, you pay very close attention to structure. Do either or both of you care to go into kind of some of the familiar patterns or patterns you’ve settled on in your work and what seems to work for you? Sonny, I know you talked about thriller structure, but what does that mean to you?

[00:26:33.150] – Sunyi
I write to something that we’ve talked a bit about in private, which is kind of the reader’s journey. And it’s not a set template, the way Hero’s journey is, but it’s basically this concept that everything in the book exists to engage the reader. And if that means the plot is told out of chronological order, I will do that so that I can control withholding information. If that means changing point of view, changing tense, I don’t worry about it. I just do it. The only thing that matters to me is propelling the reader through the story, to tell it in the most engaging way and to keep their interest. And I think if you actually read, some of the thrillers have done really well. They have sometimes, surprisingly, characters with flat arcs. But the story is told in such a way that the reader is experiencing an arc of emotion, even if the character isn’t experiencing an arc of progression. And so for me, that was an important part of writing. I don’t know if that works or if the book was a fluke. We’ll find out the next one. I do tend to write in four or five act structures because I like having a double climax.

[00:27:32.750] – Sunyi
(laughing) That sounds rude.

[00:27:35.890] – Richard
Don’t we all.

[00:27:45.030] – Sunyi
I guess, things like that. I’m trying to stay out of a craft too, too much. But yeah, those are things that work for me. I try not to be too formulaic. I think there’s a risk of that happening. You can fall into your own traps and kind of ruts.

[00:28:00.790] – Scott
Yeah, I’ve I’ve read at least most of that second book, as you know. And book one, your first book, was not a fluke. Not at all.

[00:28:12.430] – Richard
I think for me personally, when I especially because I’ve written a lot of trilogies, or certainly that’s kind of like my default setting, I always think of in terms of structure, you know, book one needs to stand relatively by itself because that’s the book that most people will read. And then you always get drop off. It can be quite significant, drop off between books two and three. So for me, a trilogy is book one, and then books two and three are really two halves of one story. And so when I was approaching book one, I was like, I want to have an investigation that is basically self contained, so that by the end, there is a resolution that a reader can feel satisfied with, but then a broader trilogy arc which spans the whole series. And I try to kind of mimic that same structure in book two because I thought it worked very well for book one. And I wanted to have another investigation in book two that started and finished within that book. So, again, having something that concludes because notoriously, lots of book two don’t really conclude, they just set up book three.

[00:29:13.650] – Richard
And there’s actually a detestable phrase called middle book syndrome, which I’ve come to completely loathe because it’s part of the tropication of reading and reviewing books is coming up with kind of phrases that often don’t really apply. And so the success of a book will live or die on how much middle book syndrome. It’s a completely nonsensical phrase. I hate it. But anyway so I wanted to avoid that sort of thing where you have a book without a beginning and end by giving it a beginning and an end, at least internally. So it’s contriving for that to be the case. But really, books two and three are two sides of one coin, much more so than you have a trilogy, but really it’s book one and then books two and three, rather than book one, two, three. So I was conscious of that structure as I approached it. And then within the books, I follow a classic three act structure and I always have done so that was how I sort of tackled the Empire of the Wolf. And I think, to be fair, my self published stuff had exactly the same thing as well.

[00:30:23.350] – Richard
So that’s kind of the way I go about things. But that’s not to say I haven’t experimented with different structures before. One of the things I have done, a bit like Sony with thriller kind of examinations, is I do like to send the chapters on cliffhangers, and sometimes it can wind people up a little bit because it can be a bit kind of a bit cheeky and a bit kind of. Lame if you do it too much, but it’s a great way of just keeping people hooked. What you have to avoid is having it be a false climax. So, like, just resolving it in a really lame way at the very start of the next chapter because then you’re just going to piss me block but I did try and kind of add a little bit of a cliffhanger at the end of each chapter to kind of pull people through the novel at quite a quick pace.

[00:31:08.070] – Scott
Yeah, I’m not quite all the way through Tyranny of Faith, but I’ve noticed the similar structure to Book One. Not hard to notice, but I’ve noticed.

[00:31:18.900] – Richard
Actually.

[00:31:21.530] – Scott
No, I mean that in a very good way.

[00:31:27.310] – Richard
A child could have noticed this simple structure. (laughing) Indeed.

[00:31:36.030] – Scott
Okay, so if you two are okay with it, I’ll move us into what I think people are tuning into this podcast for, which is the business side of it and your experience with your publisher and things. So going kind of to the beginning. Richard, what did the contract negotiations look like with Orbit when it came in? And I’m guessing the answer is no, based on what you said thus far. But did you do anything or see anything that made you optimistic that they would follow through with everything that you expected of them? Or was it really just, oh, that’s a good amount of money, let’s sign.

[00:32:24.910] – Richard
There was definitely an element of a good amount of money. Let’s sign. For sure. And I think my agent was obviously optimistic in terms of when he got the manuscript because he liked it, because he offered to represent me. I don’t think either of us were expecting the deal that we got out of the gate. And so the contract itself was probably a pretty standard contract. I don’t remember Harry saying anything like, oh, this is weird. And I think the fact that it was Orbit, a large reputable science fiction fantasy publisher, did a huge amount of the heavy lifting to us. And I come from a corporate background as well. I was a management consultant. I was a lawyer and contracted my bread and butter. The only thing I looked in that contract and I thought, I don’t like that was the reserve on returns clause, which for the uninitiated is the way I understand it. And Scott, maybe you’ll be able to correct me if this is wrong, but the way I understand it, it is. There came a point some years ago where publishers and bookshops kind of reached this agreement and that was kind of supposed to be the best of both worlds.

[00:33:36.800] – Richard
Where, in order to give everybody certainty, a publisher will say, I want to sell you Waterstones. Or you. Barnes and Noble. 10,000 copies of X book. And Waterstones are like, well, there’s no way I’m going to buy 10,000 copies of it because we might only shift five. And then we’ve bought 5000 copies, we’re never going to shift. And so the solution was, okay, well, you can return the books that you don’t sell, but hold on a second, that seems like a terrible deal then for the publisher and also the author. So then they capture that to twelve months. So you can return the books that you don’t sell, but only within a year. And I think they’re unless I’m wrong, I think that’s kind of an industry standard.

[00:34:14.210] – Sunyi
It is in States, in the UK. In the States I think it’s as long as the book is in print, but functionally that’s a year or less in a lot of cases.

[00:34:23.580] – Richard
Yeah, because it’s certainly with the hardcover. So in my case, when I look at the data, I only have sort of granularity on the data from my US book sales. But when I look at the returns of the books that went back to Orbit, they were like 95% of those were hardbacks. And I think obviously hardbacks are the most difficult thing to sell, especially in debut. So that would make sense to me. I think broadly speaking, maybe it’s codified as a year in the UK, but realistically it’s not going to be much longer than a year in the States either way because it’s mostly the hardbacks that go back anyway. But the reserve on the return clause was like if a book of yours is returned to the publisher, they pass that back onto you. So they reserve a portion of your royalty payments to account for the fact that some of your books may be returned to the publisher. And I sort of saw that clause and I was like, that seems like bullshit to me. That’s a risk that the publisher should shoulder, not the author. But apparently that was completely standard clause in industry contracts and so I just had to eat it.

[00:35:28.390] – Richard
But the contract itself was ungiving to understand, a very standard one. And there was obviously some negotiations about getting royalty rates up and all the rest and the purchase of all of that. So all those sort of numbers went up to a degree, but in terms of my personal involvement, it was very minimal. I obviously had to approve the contract before we agreed to it because it was my name on it. And in terms of did I trust Orbitz? You fulfil their own bargain. Absolutely. And they have to be fair.

[00:36:00.290] – Scott
The reason I asked that is because that’s not always the case.

[00:36:03.760] – Richard
Right? Yeah.

[00:36:06.370] – Scott
And I happen to know that, Sunyi, you had a very good marketing plan that was put together and presented to you and Richard, I don’t know whether you had a plan like that, but I know that Orbit did some really cool things for your release. Were those marketing plans or even just verbal ideas for how this was going to be promoted? Was that communicated to you two at time of acquisition and contract or did that come later?

[00:36:38.670] – Sunyi
Because our preempt had to be done for Tor in about three or 4 hours. I went on trust with Naomi, where Naomi basically said, Lindsay, is a friend, I think this person is right for you. And I trust Naomi. And I do think Naomi is right. I think there’s a reason why so many people want Lindsay for an editor. She’s amazing. On the Harper side, the UK rights for us went a lot slower. So I’ll mention this distinction because I think we have slightly different deals. I think Richard sold world rights to Orbit, and that has some benefits in some things, but I’ll let him explain that in a minute. So my rights were parcelled up. My UK rights went to Harper Voyager, and there was kind of a mini auction between Titan and Harper, which I don’t think Titan realistically could have won. But anyway, Harper actually sent a document to us while that was going on because auctions are very slow in publishing, they take days. And this document was something they called a marketing deck. And I had never seen a marketing deck in my life because I’m not a marketing person.

[00:37:36.450] – Sunyi
It was a series of PowerPoint slides where they detailed basically their vision for the book, how they imagine marketing it, the kind of readership it would have, the kind of blurbs it would have, the kind of COVID and art and the things that they could offer and that they could bring to the table. And when I saw that document, you know, when you get those rejections from editors, they say, I don’t have a vision for this manuscript. That was the moment where I understood what that word meant. That vision was this kind of document. That vision is unique. Basically, when editors say I have or don’t have a vision for a book, they’re thinking the whole package. They can envision, cover, marketing blurbs, campaigns, adverts, they can see what this book would look like in totality were they to pick it up. Yeah, we had that strong sense from Harper from that. And when I could see their vision for the book, because I don’t have marketing vision, I don’t have a fucking clue how to sell anything, I was like, okay, wow, I’ve never seen my book in this light before as a product, the way that they see it, and I was kind of impressed.

[00:38:40.130] – Sunyi
So we did have those reassurances on both sides.

[00:38:45.430] – Richard
I had a sort of similar experience, actually. I think after the deal was done, I had conversations with marketing the team both in New York and in London. And then they also presented my agent asked for, but they were going to give me one anyway. Marketing. Plan, which was a sort of fairly granular kind of email, which detailed what they were going to do both on social media and separately in terms of stuff that I wouldn’t see. So they said, you’ll see the social media stuff because we’ll tag you in it, whatever. And they also gave me like a social media guide as well. Like, this is the kind of thing you should be doing. You should change your Twitter handle to your name, for example, because it wasn’t my name before. It was like Zwan Zwan, for example, have a photo professionally taken, blah, blah, blah. But we’re also going to be doing this behind the scenes. We’re going to be spending some money on ad, place targeted ads, blah, blah, blah. They did in conversation with RJ Barker, I think it was, set that up at times, contemporary of mine, Orbit, and they did a whole bunch of stuff.

[00:39:49.240] – Richard
So we had several meetings about it, their ideas for how it would go and same thing again, actually, for Tyranny of Faith, we had a call a couple of months ago about and they were just telling me, right, this is our plan, this is what we’re going to do. Just so you know, we are doing stuff. You’re not going to be seeing a lot of it because it’s going to be like targeted ads on things like Facebook and Amazon or whatever, but this is what’s happening. So I was really pleased and impressed with those efforts. I felt like they really kind of were putting their money where their mouth is. And I think also it’s good, actually. Before we came on, you mentioned and I had forgotten, but they did the limited edition Arcs as well, which was a nice touch. They did a run of 100 signed Arc. So I went into Caramel House, which is on the Victorian bankment on the Thames, which is where the office is. It’s a beautiful office. And went in and they had a stack of 100 special edition Arcs and I signed them and numbered them and that was a nice it created Buzz, right?

[00:40:43.650] – Richard
And I’ve seen those books be traded in the aftermarket now for fragile sums of money, which is maybe unethical, but I thought it was really cool. So they did a good job of building Buzz and telling me what buzz they were going to build. And I was happy. I was happy with all of it. I didn’t have a problem with any I never felt like I was being kept in the dark at all.

[00:41:08.390] – Sunyi
I think the marketing meetings were the first point where I realised how different this route is going to go, because I think they sent the document. They’re like, are we going to have the marketing meeting at this point in future? And I remember asking one of my critique partners, whose mid list like, what do you do in these marketing meetings? And she said, well, most of us don’t get marketing meetings.

[00:41:25.690] – Scott
Marketing meetings, yeah, sorry.

[00:41:30.570] – Sunyi
That was part of the whole okay, now. And I’m starting to understand the divide and how essentially privileged I was. Also, I was going to ask a quick question. You don’t have to answer, Richard, but am I right in remembering that your contract was joint accounting? And if so, do you feel like explaining that for people who are listening?

[00:41:49.570] – Richard
I think so, and I think I understand what that is. Basically, you don’t earn any royalties until all three books have earned out, so it’s not like, yeah, and so that’s it. So we sell world rights, which is a slightly different thing anyway, but I’ll explain that too, because I know that my agent initially offered UK rights, or maybe it was UK and Commonwealth. And this is this idea of it’s better for you as an author if you can parcel out your rights, because then more money flows to you and it flows to you more or less more quickly as well. So with world rights, what you are doing is basically giving up everything all over, as it sounds, all over the world, global rights to be published in any country. So Orbit own the rights to the empire of the authority to exploit that novel in whatever form, audio, ebook, whatever, everywhere in the world. Now, that’s not always a good deal for people. It was a good deal for me because they offered me a lot of money for it. And so eventually Harry and I went around the houses on it, but we decided to go for it.

[00:42:50.740] – Richard
And I think Orbit, they like doing that because they’re split across the UK and the US anyway, and there were some specific contractual benefits that were specific to Orbit as well in doing that. So things like US royalties, because normally, if your publisher owns the rights and they shop your book in, say, Germany or France or whatever, your publisher then steps into the shoes of your agent, essentially. So they’re taking a commission on foreign sales as well before they pass royalties onto you. Whereas with Orbit, they don’t do that in the US. 100% of it comes to you. There was a tangent, and most of my sales are in the US, so it’s orders of magnitude more than it is anywhere else. So that worked out very nicely for me because I earn more money personally on my US sales as a result of being with Orbit, having sold them world rights. The downside to your world rights contract, and I’m sure there may be some agents or somebody listening who think, this guy hasn’t got a fucking clue what he’s talking about.

[00:43:49.850] – Sunyi
I’m on a correction.

[00:43:51.350] – Richard
Exactly, yeah. Prove me wrong, kids. We sold the book in like five or six territories, so there was a Spanish edition that just came out. There’s a German edition that just came out. Other editions are in the pipeline. There’s a Russian a Czech Polish editions ill Translation editions the downside to that is, for me personally, in terms of financials, the German advance was substantial, it was a lot of money and it was going to be a lead title for a large German publisher. The downside is that money now goes to Orbit, it doesn’t go to me. And so Orbits use that money, obviously, to pay off the advance that they paid me. But what it means is every advance or payment I earn in all these other countries flows through Orbit and they use that to reduce the overall advance. Now, the overall advance is substantial, so I have nothing to complain about. But that money, in another life, with a different contract, would have come straight to me. So that’s the difference. So it’s not necessarily a good thing. If you’re going to get, like the ball bells and whistles, lead debut treatment, then it can be a really nice offer.

[00:45:07.010] – Richard
But it may not necessarily book in.

[00:45:08.960] – Sunyi
Other countries, though, and that’s it.

[00:45:11.520] – Richard
And if they decide to just sit on the book, if it underperforms and they sit on it and they decide, well, we’re not going to spend money on translating it, which is expensive, then you’re stuffed, because then that’s it, the book will then die. But I knew that Orbit and Harry, in his conversations with Orbit and James, had said, well, look, I’m not going to give you world rights if you don’t then exploit them and no one’s going to guarantee that in the negotiation stage. But I had the sense that they would make good on that, and they have. But mine is a best case scenario. Like, few people will get as good a run as I have had and there are lots of imac, one under the spectrum, and lots of people will.

[00:45:56.150] – Scott
Be submitting that to the good case. Right. I don’t know about best case, but in a success case, you’ll eventually see the money still roll through to you in the form of royalties and it’s fine. Right. But the risk you run with Orbit paying off their advance and obviously Orbit paying off their expenses to get your book to market is that they can then relax. Right?

[00:46:26.940] – Richard
Yeah.

[00:46:27.360] – Scott
And that seems to be the golden rule in publishing, is money hanging over a publisher’s head is your only real form of guaranteed to you. Right?

[00:46:41.490] – Richard
Yeah, exactly. I think that all these things, there’s a risk and you have to take and manage that risk. And I was working I’m a full time writer now, but I was working as a lawyer, so there was much less I was earning much more as lawyer than I was as an author. But I completely agree. I think one of the good things about getting a large advance, there’s a risk, right? There’s a risk that you don’t earn out, and if you don’t earn out and one thing that this industry has taught me is that nobody is untouchable. If your book underperforms, they’ll drop you like a sack of shit. But one of the good things about being paid a lot of money is that it is incentivized as a publisher to recoup what is to them a loss, an accounting loss. The advance is to make good that loss. Now, they can make good that loss much more quickly than you will. Orbit will have already earned, I’m almost certain they will have at least broke even. They will on my series, and probably made a healthy profit already, with one and a half books out, they broke even.

[00:47:49.820] – Scott
Well before you earn out your advance, right. They’re going to always structure it that way.

[00:47:55.640] – Richard
Exactly that. And so I’m confident that that’s happened. But the corollary to that is if they say, yeah, well, I’m not saying that they would because they’re nice people, but you didn’t earn out, so this time we’re only going to offer you half. It’s a big kind of falsehood, isn’t it? It doesn’t actually reflect the commercial reality, because the commercial reality is they’ve made the money back and then some. But it’s to stick to the carrot, isn’t it? It’s to say, well, you didn’t earn out. It’s a bit a bit of gaslighting, almost. We didn’t quite earn out, so we’re going to reduce the advance of the next payment on the next deal, or not give you one. And that’s the pregariousness of the author. I’m not saying that that’s what they’re thinking, but publishers generally.

[00:48:45.430] – Sunyi
At some point, I’ll ask Evan Winter to come on because he has some really good maths for the point at which you actually begin to make your publisher a profit. And it’s a lot lower than most people think, or that publishers are kind of happy for you to think. And I’ll just come back to circle back the joint accounting thing very briefly, because I think it’s interesting for people to know. But, yeah, basically, I have a joint accounting contract for Harper, but I have a separate accounting contract for Tor. And what that means is that each of my books is only so I’m on a three book contract and they’re each earning out on their own stream. And to illustrate that kind of it’s like if you get a two book deal and you need $10,000 in sales for each book to earn out the advance, book one sells $12,000 in sales, so it earns out. Book two sells $2,000 in sales and doesn’t. If you’re on a separate accounting contract, you’d be getting royalties from book one and not from book two. If you’re on a joint accounting contract, you’re not getting any royalties because you haven’t earned out the total.

[00:49:52.030] – Sunyi
There’s a very handful few cases where separate accounting sorry, where joint accounting is helpful, but I think it’s like 80% of the time, it’s a clause invented by Satan to make you sad and it just doesn’t benefit you at all as a writer. But it is kind of standard across the industry, so especially for fantasy and Sci-Fi, where we tend to be in trilogies and duologies or even like me, where I’m on a contract with three standalones, everyone will try and get joint accounting out of you. Yeah, it’s a tough one.

[00:50:25.990] – Richard
As a brief aside, when you said 80% of the time there, I just saw in Scott’s mind the anchor man quote, it works every time.

[00:50:34.570] – Scott
80% of the time, it works every time.

[00:50:36.090] – Richard
I knew it was right there in the forefront of his mind.

[00:50:43.710] – Scott
I would absolutely agree. I think authors should know that single accounting, or whatever you call the opposite of joint accounting or basket accounting is always the way to go. Basket accounting. Joint accounting always favours the almost always, I guess I guess maybe somebody could think of a circumstance in which it’s good for the author, but it always favours the publisher. One thing I wanted to mention with foreign rights, Richard, because you brought that up specifically having given world rights, because I have experienced the other side of the spectrum. Right. I had a very negative experience with respect to my publisher utilising the rights that they got out of us and that they wanted when we first signed the contract and wouldn’t get back anybody signing contracts right now that I’ve talked to. I’ve always said try to get separate reversion clauses for every format and every version that you can and I don’t know whether that’s something that publishers will sign, I don’t know if that’s something that agents will even try to negotiate. Yeah, exactly. You can ask. And if it were me, I would have a separate reversion clause for audio for audio territory.

[00:52:06.830] – Scott
So I signed over world English. Not world, but just world English.

[00:52:12.630] – Richard
Right, right.

[00:52:13.470] – Scott
And Tor didn’t publish or shop, really, as far as I can tell, my book into the UK market. And so I wish that I had a reversion clause for the UK specifically and they were very cool about reverting audio before they had to. But everything that you don’t actually have in a contract is something you have to essentially go and beg for after the fact if it doesn’t go the way you hope.

[00:52:43.510] – Richard
I think as an author, what you can always safely assume is that it’s a commercial arrangement, right? And this is where the sort of transparency really should exist within a publisher or author relationship. And I think Orbit, my editor, was always very good at managing my expectations in this regard and still does manage my expectations constantly. He’ll never say when we do a deal, he’ll say, if we do a deal, nothing is a given. And I appreciate that, candour I think once there’s a temptation to think that once you’re in, you’re in. And the reality is it’s a business transaction, and we as authors should always have an eye on it as a commercial relationship. And it’s one of uneven bargaining positions as well, because most authors are desperate to be published and a publisher wants to make money. And so when you’re looking at a contract or any kind of and I’m the contract. Intimately. When you’re looking at any kind of contract, you can safely assume that it’s structured in a way that benefits the publisher over, not necessarily to your detriment, but that’s often what will be the result. And so they’re not going to give you anything for free.

[00:54:01.390] – Richard
If there’s any way that they can avoid, like any service that you provide or any product you provide, no one is going to give up more than they have to. That’s just capitalism, right? That’s how it works. It’s not my kind of like smoking in a kind of dark room, nihilistic kind of I’m so edgy. That’s just the way the capitalism works. So every time you look at your contract, you can assume that your publisher is going to be looking to make as much money off you as possible and pay you as little money as they can get away with. It’s not because they’re bad people, it’s because their duty is not to you, it’s to their shareholders. And that’s a legal duty. It’s not even like an ethical or moral duty. They are legally obligated to act in the best interests of their shareholders. And the best way you act in the interests of your shareholders is to maximise share value, surprisingly enough. And to do that, you maximise your profit. One way you maximise your profit is you minimise your costs. And your costs as a publisher are your authors, the advances that you pay to them.

[00:54:59.470] – Richard
And so that was a separate discussion. But the whole idea of that big merger between whoever it was, Penguin and Simon and Schuster, wherever, the idea that that would be good for authors was just complete nonsense. Like with absolute corporate doublethink, it was complete rubbish. It would have been the complete opposite. It would have only been bad for authors because, as economics professors have long realised, monopolies and hegemony’s are bad. They are bad for competition, they stifle competition, which is why they are legal in a lot of countries. And so when you’re looking at your contract, just always bear in mind that no matter how well you get on with your editor or how nice everybody seems, and obviously everybody will be nice, generally speaking, because we’re human beings that would like to be nice to each other until they aren’t. Ultimately, the answer to the publishing house. The publishing house as a company, the company answers to its shareholders and that’s the dynamic you are contending with. And for as long as you are making money for that company, happy days.

[00:55:58.370] – Sunyi
And I will throw out I really admire and respect all of the individual humans that I have worked with in publishing. I think my editors are incredibly smart, interesting, very informed people. They have good opinions on the books they’re editing and all kinds of things and all the publicists and so on. But as the author, you are the person is your art and you have to look after it. You have to look after your book. And no one will be as invested in your book as you are. Not even your agent. And again, I love my agent and I think they are an amazing person and an amazing advocate. But you’re still your own first, best advocate for your stuff and you should be you can have friendships with people in publishing and you should, and you should respect them and treat them well. But this is separate from having business relationships and looking out for your business interests.

[00:56:50.690] – Scott
Yeah, that’s a good distinction we have. The podcast are big fans of the individuals that exist within those corporations.

[00:57:04.230] – Richard
Blink twice if you’re under duress! (Everyone laughing) Wait, the line is just clicking all of a sudden. Anybody else? (everyone laughing)

[00:57:14.490] – Scott
Even when things haven’t gone exactly as I had hoped, I’ve still been very fortunate to work with some fantastic people, make fantastic friends on the business side, especially. Love my agent and there are some really amazing people at Tor. But yeah, they exist within a corporate structure. And I think that’s the point we’re trying to get across is that at the end of the day, we don’t sign their paychecks, the corporation does. And that’s going to sway their actions far more than any friendship will if push comes to shove. And sometimes it does.

[00:57:50.930] – Sunyi
You’ve been listening to the Publishing Radio podcast with Sunyi Dean and Scott Drakeford. Tune in next time for more in depth discussion on everything publishing industry. See you later.