[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 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.

So we are going to try to focus the conversation today on the anatomy of a best seller and in particular, a bestseller with a debut contract. Right. And we have two Sunday times bestsellers here with us both Sunyi and Richard. I don’t even know that I know the difference, but were you instant bestsellers or how did that go? You can take turns talking about that before we launch into it, I suppose.

[00:01:35.860] – Sunyi
Yes. Richard first go for it.

[00:01:37.860] – Richard
Sure. Yeah. We say it was a week one best seller and then dropped out of the chart like a stone, which was expected. But yeah, I think if you sort of appear in the week I think if you appear in the list in the week that your book is actually published, then it’s an instant it’s an instant bestseller.

[00:02:00.790] – Sunyi
Instant for me, too, and I think that’s because all your pre orders stack up.

[00:02:04.940] – Richard
That’s right.

[00:02:05.740] – Sunyi
So really? Impressive as it sounds to be bestseller out the gate, your best shot at being the best seller is when you launch. And then, like Richard, I was there for one week and the week after, the bestseller list was swept away by a collective title wave of Stephen King, Colleen Hoover, Richard Osmond, and JK. Rowling.

[00:02:23.950] – Richard
Wow. You didn’t have a chance.

[00:02:26.430] – Sunyi
Oh, no one did. Number ten on that list that week was some guy that only sold 20K copies, who that’s five times copies I sold to get on a list. But he couldn’t compete with 127k out the gate, like Richard Osman.

[00:02:43.090] – Richard
Richard Osman was the capstone to my efforts on the Amazon best sellers ranking. I nearly got to number one, a kindle that I say nearly didn’t.

[00:02:52.090] – Sunyi
Nearly.

[00:02:52.380] – Richard
But I got to like number eight. And Richard Osman was number seven. And I was like, well, I’m not going to dethrone him. He is also my nemesis in the best sense. Right.

[00:03:02.380] – Sunyi
For Americans who don’t know, richard Osman is a very popular actor / comedian here who also writes Cosy mystery books. And boy, do they sell like water in a desert.

[00:03:11.060] – Richard
Oh, my God. Yeah.

[00:03:12.120] – Sunyi
I was going to ask then if you want to talk about hitting the Sunday Times list and your experience of that, because I think we could possibly compare notes on that. And I would find it interesting and just, I guess and give an overview of what the Sunday Times list is and how you get on it. And in particular, I kind of want to know if you can answer this when you knew you would hit list. The reason I asked that is because Book Eaters came out in August 2022, and I knew in January 2022 that we were going to hit list.

[00:03:44.230] – Richard
Wow, okay.

[00:03:45.320] – Scott
Just because of pre orders?

[00:03:48.150] – Sunyi
No, well, I think I hit list in a different way from Richard. So yeah, feel free to answer that question and talk about your back to mine.

[00:03:56.790] – Richard
Okay, sure. Yeah. It’s an interesting one. It’s very much like how the Sausage is made, story. It’s not the kind of, like, inspirational, this is just a fucking incredible book, and people kind of falling over themselves to buy it. I remember the process really well. So basically, Sunday Times a list for those who don’t know, the Sunday Times Bestsellers list is like the kind of premier literary list in the UK. So similar to, like, the New York Times list. It’s the UK’s equivalent to the NYT best sellers. Right? And they have lots of different categories now. And it’s published, funnily enough, on in the Sunday Times in the kind of culture supplement. And there’s like, hardback bestsellers, there’s a paperback bestsellers, there’s a nonfiction bestsellers, and it’s the top the top ten in any given category. And what it does is it literally says the book, and it says how many it’s sold in that week. And it used to be the case, and it still is to a large extent that getting on the list, the Scientime’s list or The New York Times list or whatever is like the pinnacle of the career. And it is, and it was wonderful.

[00:05:00.840] – Richard
I think these days the landscape has changed slightly, and suddenly you can talk about this more authoritatively than I can, but crates now form a huge part of that. So what you see with the list is often, as Sunny already said earlier in the podcast, it’s your week one sales, your pre orders, because you get a glass of pre orders and your week one sales, which is an artificially high spike, and then naturally it trails off. And so most people would only get one week in the list. Unless you’re a phenomenal bestseller. And it’s normally the first week, I don’t think I can think of a single example where it’s like your fifth or 6th week after publication that you suddenly hit lift. And so what happened with justice of King’s was Orbit was putting some money behind it. They were marketing it. Everything was going well and then we went out for lunch, me and my agent and my editor in London. And we were talking about how basically what happened was Goldsbrough Books, which is an independent bookshop in the centre of London. They specialise in first editions, obviously, I know that you both know this, and they specialise in first editions.

[00:06:12.170] – Richard
And what they tend to do these days is they do like, lovely editions, they do like, sprayed edges and they do like, sign it and you number it and whatever, and it’s kind of like it’s kind of like induced demand, isn’t it? Like an artificial kind of scarcity, if you like special editions. It’s an absolutely business model that works. And they should have been doing it years ago, but it’s kind of really reached its maturity now. And Goldsboro Books, the guy, the commissioning person who decides whether they do a Goldsboro edition, had decided they were going to do one for the justice of Kings and they’d ordered 2000. Now, 2000 for the Uninitiated is a phenomenally good number for a fantasy hardback. My agent told me most, most fantasy books will never well, first of all, most fantastic books don’t get a hardback full stop, but those that do won’t even sell 2000 over the course of their lifetimes, let alone get this deal. I’m not saying that Justice Gins is the best novel has been written, obviously not, but it was a good number and everyone was really happy with it. And that suddenly changed the thinking, because initially we had been going for, this is a good book, it’s going to do well, we’re going to give it a push, it’s a lead tie debut title for this year, blah, blah, blah, or maybe we can hit the best seller list with this.

[00:07:27.650] – Richard
And what it meant was because not only were they doing a crate edition, but they were doing it. I shouldn’t use the word crate because it wasn’t part of a crate, it was just a special edition, not only doing a special edition, but it was also going to be part of their Goldsbrough subscription service. So Goldsbrough did, I think it was last year, or maybe the year before. You sign up, you pay them 20 or 30 months and they send you a book. They curate a list of books and they send you one. It’s a beautiful first edition, signed, stamped, whatever. And justice of Kings was going to go out in the February version of that. Now, February, this is a real perfect storm for me. So February was in a good way, February is doldrums for media, generally speaking, nothing much happens in February, so the lists were already quite depressed anyway. And so when Sunny was talking earlier about Rowling and Osmond and King hitting the list with like, 50,000 sales week one or something in February, I think, I mean, I have a copy of it somewhere here, but it was something like the number one was like maybe 5000 or something.

[00:08:33.730] – Richard
It was a lot but it wasn’t high, like super high. So it was very achievable. Suddenly we had the Goldsboro subscription, which was going to ship not all 2000, but a large portion of them, certainly maybe 1000 or 1500. There was the groundswell of support that Orbit had already put behind the book with their marketing money. And there was even talk very briefly didn’t happen, of a sales embargo because, as you both know, sometimes books, they kind of bleed out around the edges. Books will go on sale a week or two before the official publication date and there was talk of maybe not letting that happen, putting what their sales emergency sounds a bit dramatic. And it was in the end for me so that you physically prevent booksellers from selling it until the release date because then again, you artificially increase the sales for that crucial week one. But that didn’t happen in the end, but lots of things conspired to happen. And I think it was the week of my editor, because I think the list gets published obviously comes out on Sunday, but I think they know by the Thursday before, something like that.

[00:09:43.230] – Richard
And so he was able to email me and say, congratulations, we’ve made the list on Sunday. And it was number five. I think it was number five on the hardback fiction. So it was wonderful. It was absolutely fantastic. Career high, you know, book one, straight out of the gate, sunday Times phenomenal that will appear in every book I ever write now, forever. Brilliant. But what it wasn’t was Richard Swan has written an absolutely fucking incredible book and everyone around the world just has to have a copy. It was actually a bit more complex. Yeah, there was some orchestration, there was some artificiality to it and yeah, so the special edition certainly helped. There wouldn’t have been a special edition if it wasn’t a good book. So I don’t want to kind of cut myself off at the knees. But having said that, if there hadn’t been the Goldsboro edition, it wouldn’t have hit the Sunday Times list. We would have sold maybe 1000 week one, which is a fantastic number, but in the end we sold like two and a half, which was enough to land in the middle of the list. So it made a huge difference.

[00:10:47.410] – Richard
And now you see, of course, and this is not the cheaper end at all, a lot of Sunday Times bestsellers and a lot of New York Times bestsellers is certainly for debuts or first books. And I think a lot of that is down to these crates, these special editions and Sunyi. You can talk a lot more about that.

[00:11:09.050] – Sunyi
Yeah, so there’s a term, I’ve heard, for special editions, crates and basically subscription services where you get either a book in it that’s like a special version or just a regular version and oftentimes some kind of paraphernalia and gadgets and things like that. And the term I’ve heard for that is independent gatekeepers in relation to… so I know gatekeeper has a really negative context on Twitter, but they mean it in the way that kid lit will talk about parents and teachers as being gatekeepers. Basically people who control which books get bought. The UK Sci-Fi and fantasy market is, I would say, dominated by independent gatekeepers at the moment. Richard talked earlier about how bookstores buy books and they can return them. If a crate or subscription box or other independent gatekeeper buys books for their special edition. Those are not returnable and those sales are guaranteed. And that means that they have a lot of power with publishers. You start seeing…. if you’re wondering why it seems like every new debut in the UK is hitting list, it’s because the ones that are hitting list are often the ones that are picked for crates. And that means that publishers are then looking for books which are crate books.

[00:12:23.220] – Sunyi
That’s a whole podcast issue in itself. Like, what is a book? And it’s a very certain type of Sci-Fi and fantasy novel which can cross into mainstream and cross age categories, usually. But that’s essentially what happened for me, is Harper picked up the book and, they can’t control this. They can only try. They have good relationship with crates. They pitched it to the crates. Crates have different tiers at which they’ll buy the book, depending on how many of their subscribers they think will actually take it. But some of these crates are very big. So at the high end, like the very high end, you can shift 30K copies selling to a crate, which is fucking bananas. Like, that’s my entire American print run. Even at the lower end in the UK, you’re talking like five to seven grand copies, which is still pretty bananas. And I won’t say how many I got with Illumicrate because that information is actually protected. But May of last year, I was signing books for Illumicrate and Broken Binding. And then because of that interest from those crates, Waterstones, which I don’t think was very keen on me at the start, finally got in on it was like, okay, we’ll make a special edition too.

[00:13:32.280] – Sunyi
So in total, there were about 22,000 special edition books of some kind or another of different companies in the UK for book eaters, which is, again, fucking bananas, and really blew my mind from signing. So we found out basically in December that I’d gotten to one of these independent gatekeeper crates and another author, who I won’t name here said, that means you’re going to hit list. Because that’s how it works in the UK now. It’s funny, actually, because of release dates moving around and things, actually, the crate sales didn’t count till later in the month for me, I think in the middle of that JK Rowling, Stephen King storm, but it did push up interest and buzz enough that we hit list anyway, on preorders, and I think Broken Binding sales. So when people are wondering, like, why do some books just seem to step off the debut platform and fly straight into the list? Because there’s like a whole system built around elevating books to that list. And if you’re not in that system, if you don’t have the buzz, you don’t have the crates and all this, it’s really hard for debut books to do that.

[00:14:44.890] – Sunyi
I’m not sure how you would do it other than very fluky cases like Iron Widow with Xiran, and they managed to get an amazing social media platform, stuff like that. I will say one thing for crates, because this is starting to sound a bit cynical. I do think some things about them are really good and one of them is that I know that, like, Illumicrate will read books from smaller publishers. They don’t just pick up the Buzziest book. And in fact, some of the Buzziest books are too buzzy for them because it won’t net them enough sales or interest. So you sometimes see these books come out of Illumicrate and I’m like, who the fuck is that? It’s like, with a smaller publisher and it’s a less known book that they’ve read and they’ve loved and they thought, yeah, we should put that in our subscription box. So it can be a way out for some out of a midsize press. But it is changing the market noticeably. There’s a lot of talk, at least from my friends who are on sub in the past couple of years from UK agents, about like, is this a crate book? We think this is a crate book. Will crates like it? Can you make it more like a crate book? I’m not sure how that’s going to go for us long term. And as well, like, I don’t think my publisher is evil for doing this. If your publisher is working its ass off to get you on list, to get you sales, they’re doing what they should be doing. And that’s a good thing.

[00:16:01.270] – Richard
Absolutely.

[00:16:01.760] – Sunyi
They didn’t make the system, they’re just trying to work with it as best they can. But I realise how disheartening that description of the system a sound to people who don’t know.

[00:16:13.910] – Scott
The only thing that I heard in there and that I happen to know about you two, that I wanted to go back to, is things that publishers do and that maybe upcoming writers can look for to judge whether they’re going to be getting the success they hope for out of the publication. Journey is Arcs and other forms of Hype or Hype building activities on behalf of the author that your publisher is doing. So we talked already about Richard, your publisher, doing Orbit, doing those 100 numbered special edition Arcs, which I thought was really cool. But besides that, you said that they gave out quite a few Arcs. Besides that. Right. And I think Sunyi actually had a number for her Arcs that were given away as well.

[00:17:11.050] – Sunyi
I don’t know the exact number. So we had unbound galleys first that’s like literally just printed pages that don’t recover anything. That went out very early, almost a year. And then on top of that, we later had Arcs, which have a cover and they look kind of like a book, but they’re floppy and they’re kind of smaller and lower quality print than a real book. And there were Arcs on both sides of the Atlantic for that. But I think for me, that the biggest thing is like the biggest sign is people are talking to you. You know how when you’re in kind of Facebook writing groups or on Twitter and you hear people say, like self pub authors or querying authors or just basically people who aren’t quite in the system yet. And one of their biggest fears is I’ll get picked up by a publisher and then they’ll edit my book to death and overwrite me and rewrite my book. And I think I understand that fear, but I don’t think the thing you have to be afraid of as a publisher micromanaging you because they wouldn’t bother. That’s not a good use of their time.

[00:18:10.990] – Sunyi
The thing you have to be afraid of, they’re not going to rewrite your book when they could just get a different author. They wouldn’t do that. And the thing I think you need always–a warning sign is not is a publisher micromanaging me because they don’t tend to it’s a publisher not acknowledging that I exist. Because if they don’t give a fuck about you, that’s when you’re really screwed if they don’t notice that you exist. If you’re sending emails, you don’t get replies, you get vague replies, or if they say things like, oh, we’ll have a marketing meeting at some point, and then it’s kind of like, you just get us one social media document or something. Stuff like that is where I’d be concerned, where there’s a lack of information, where it’s vague, that’s where I would tell people, yeah, they’re kind of maybe sidelining you a bit.

[00:18:53.530] – Richard
I think authors would definitely generally be thrilled to have an overabundance of communications from the editor oh, yes. Rather than the opposite problem, which doesn’t exist at all.

[00:19:05.870] – Sunyi
I love the edit letter that is big and heaving and there’s lots of things to change. I live in dread of the edit letter that’s like, yeah, this is fine, we’ll just send it to print. Because that’s yes.

[00:19:15.090] – Richard
Then you’re absolutely. I think at the moment, it seems to me that the way the world is going and this is sort of not just in terms of publishing, but some of the broader creative industries, there’s becoming an increasing pressure to make a big splash immediately. And if you don’t make a big splash immediately, that’s deemed as a failure. So you’re not like, this is a great book. What we’re going to do is we’re going to kind of organically manage this growth and kind of build your career up. Because I think the market is fundamentally different now than it was even 20 or 30 years ago. And I think maybe the 90s was probably the last decade in which you could sort of comfortably be a midlist author and still have enough money to live on and pay your bills and then some, probably for some people. And I think now, as with many other aspects of life, this idea of the side hustle and working more than one job and whatever, this idea that we’re shifting from author as a job to you do writing as a part time thing aside from your main job.

[00:20:21.910] – Richard
And so once you have that, number one, once you can bank on authors accepting that that’s the system, you can pay them less. Sure. And you could split out the advances into small and small payments because it doesn’t matter because you’re not dependent on that income. But also number two, it’s this idea that everything has to be massive or it’s nothing. And it’s not just writing it’s on TV as well. There was a huge hoohah a few months ago when Neil Gaiman was pounding the pavement on all social media playing, Everybody please watch. Well, I can’t remember that dream, man. What was the sandman? Thank you. Sandman. I didn’t watch it. I’m sure it’s very good. Everybody please watch Sandman. Because if it’s not an immediate success, like immediate success, it’s going to get cancelled. And that was true of like basically every big budget Netflix series. Now that cowboy bebop I was talking about it literally yesterday because I actually really liked that series. But it wasn’t as successful enough that they shit candidate after like a week or something. And I feel like publishing is almost the same and part of it is just a viscosity due to the market.

[00:21:29.240] – Richard
And I kind of feel sympathy for the publishers to a degree where they’re like, right, we’ve got this debut. It’s sink or swim. And it’s a symptom of the marketplace being so crowded. There are so many books being published now, and not just traditionally published, but indie published as well. Literally anybody can write and publish a book these days. So it’s a hugely crowded marketplace already. And there is something to be said for saying, well, if you don’t make a big splash from straight out the gate, you’re just going to sink into the ether and never be heard from again. And there are a thousand books that are going to fill that vacuum. And so I do kind of get this idea that you have to put everything behind the debut. You have to spend a little bit of money, put something behind the debut, really give them the kind of the push that you can get. Because the way that my editor said it to me was, we’ll do all of this marketing stuff right, but at some point, the book has to just catch on and self sustain. We can’t market it forever. We do a bit of marketing upfront, we give it a push, and then it has to kind of just organically spread by word of mouth.

[00:22:32.260] – Richard
That’s the best case scenario. You put some money behind it, and then the word of mouth spreads. And if it’s a good enough book, which is true, if it’s a well written good book that people like reading, it will find its market, people will talk about it, and it will spread. And then you get the self sustaining sales. That’s the dream. That’s the best case scenario. But what happens often is you either have the publisher say, we’ll put some money behind this, and the book comes out and, oh, it’s not actually not quite done what we want, what do we do? Let’s close the doors on it. Let’s cut our losses immediately, and we’ll just write off the whole thing. And then books two and three either don’t really get released at all. They kind of get released quietly and then fade into the ether. Or even worse, the publisher is like, we’ve put some money behind it. We’re not quite getting the traction we would like. Even before book one, there doesn’t seem to be any hype, so we’re going to close the doors a stage earlier still. And then even your book one is dead on arrival, then you’re really stuck.

[00:23:33.170] – Richard
But the death spiral is a well documented phenomenon within publishing. And it all comes down to this thinking, part of which is artificial and part of which just reflects the reality of the market, which is that your debut has to go well. There’s no like, okay, your first trilogy or your first book wasn’t quite where we wanted it to be, but we think it’s a really good book. We know it’s a good book. Hasn’t quite found the market yet, so here’s some more money. Keep writing and you’ll build up. And that’s either then you hit the midlist forever or you just die. But that kind of thing doesn’t seem to happen anymore. Maybe I’m wrong in that, but it does seem like it has to be all or nothing from the get go. I think it comes down to what your goal is, doesn’t it? And there was a discussion on Twitter not long ago about, is it taboo to want success as an author? For the longest time, for me, writing was an end in itself. And before I started self publishing in earnest, I only wrote for myself. And I just enjoyed the process of writing and getting my ideas down on the page.
[00:24:38.300] – Richard
And then when I generated an audience myself, then it became about writing for the reader rather than for me. Now it’s about what I want to be a successful author. I want to be part of the zeitgeist. I want to have a big readership. I want to make lots of money for my books and I also enjoy writing books. And I don’t think any of those things are mutually exclusive. But I think if your goal for the longest time, for me, my goal was my life’s ambition is I want to get one book in print. I want to get one book with a publisher and publisher, and then that can never be taken away from me. Like, I will be a published author. Then no matter what happens, I will die a published author. Now, the goalposts have completely shifted, of course, for me personally, but it is disheartening. If your ultimate end goal is, I want to be a massive successful household author with 20,000 sales to my name sure. Then that’s going to be very difficult. If your goal is, I just want to get a book out in the world and if I reach just one person that will be enough for me, then of course you’re immune to the broader versus duties of the industry.

[00:25:43.790] – Richard
I suspect more people will the former than the latter, but someone will the latter, I’m sure.

[00:25:50.430] – Sunyi
I mean, just speaking from the point of view of someone who’s basically lived on the poverty line for the rest of my life, having money is fucking fantastic. I do recommend it.

[00:26:00.530] – Richard
Money is great. Yeah. (laughing)

[00:26:02.340] – Scott
I mean, people shouldn’t be embarrassed about wanting to be financially successful. And this is a financial enterprise, right? Like, people are paying real money to buy these books from publishers who are paying well. They’re not paying the people who do the actual work very well, but the people at the top are getting really good paychecks.

[00:26:24.890] – Richard
He stopped himself before he went too far. But they’re all really good people out of an individual level.

[00:26:36.590] – Sunyi
That we’ve met.

[00:26:38.110] – Scott
Yes. And that’s the thing, right? It’s like when you’re when you’re dealing with these publishers and things aren’t going quite the way you want, it’s very clear that there are forces you don’t understand at work and that I at least may never understand. But my point was only that authors, in my opinion, should not be embarrassed at all to have a goal of I want to do this for a living and not just do it for a living, but I want to be comfortable financially or I want to be rich as hell. Right. That’s fine. That’s great. People in every industry do that. This is a commercial industry and people don’t treat it like that. And because they don’t, as mentioned previously, also, there’s a huge supply of people who are just happy to see their name on a book. And that’s a life accomplishment and great. That’s not the that’s not the totality of this industry. It should be a moneymaking enterprise for all involved. I just wanted to briefly mention because you talked a lot about the Sunday Times and how it depends heavily on special editions and. Crates and everything. And this is probably a separate episode as well, or several, but I think it’s worth mentioning, and Sunyi in particular can probably tell us more about this, but it’s worth mentioning that the US market doesn’t quite function the same.

[00:28:10.980] – Scott
Right. There aren’t really large crates, at least that I know of. There aren’t huge special edition producers that are swaying the market. It does seem like more of a free for all on the US side, right?

[00:28:26.260] – Sunyi
Yeah, it does. A big crate purchase in the US side is like 2000 or 3000 books, I think we were in a couple of crates for the US side. It was like three or 400 books, which is great, but it’s not like 7000 to 20,000, which is what you get on the UK side. I felt like it was more of a free fall. It was more dependent on trade reviews and independent bookstore recommendations. I don’t actually know how you would go about hitting list in the States. I think we would have to find an author who’s done that and talk to them about that in depth. I suspect there’s more to it that goes on than what it looks like on the outside, if the UK side is any judge.

[00:29:07.160] – Richard
Yeah.

[00:29:08.910] – Scott
All right, we have now reached the portion of our podcast where we ask Richard to sing his favourite song to us.

[00:29:17.890] – Richard
It’s called Author’s Karaoke. (laughing)

[00:29:24.320] – Scott
Go ahead, Sunyi. Sorry!

[00:29:26.230] – Sunyi
No, that’s fine. I completely forgot what I was going to say now.

[00:29:31.270] – Richard
Goodness sake.

[00:29:32.430] – Sunyi
This is something that Richard was talking about. I was thinking about how we’re not stupid, right. And I think publishers have a tendency to kind of either out of compassion for our egos or just it’s easier to manage us, they have a tendency to assume that writers don’t want to know stuff. And no writer I’ve ever met has felt like that. So it’s just frustrating because I think if they were honest and upfront… I mean, Richard even suggested, like, if they’re approaching people saying, look, you’ve got a tier one book deal, a tier two book deal, a tier three book deal, this is what it means, this is what we commit to. I think people would sign that. I think they would still get people saying, fine, I’m happy to be mid list. I know what it means, I know what’s expected of me, I know what my limits are and what I won’t get pitched for.

[00:30:20.790] – Richard
Most people, it’s the difference between having a book deal and having nothing. So people will, I think, in most cases, accept it. I remember Orbit once saying, our goal is to be the number one choice for science fiction and fantasy authors. And I just remember thinking to myself, people will just take any deal they can get, unless they’re swimming in, like, ten publishing deals, but I’m going to go to Orbit because then the premier, it’s like, well, I’ve got one deal. So yes, I’m going to accept it. I mean, it just made me laugh at how kind of the idea that all these authors are just kind of like choosing which publisher they want to go to because they position themselves in that way. But yeah, absolutely. I think, as you said, if a publishing house said, okay, this is our Tier One title, so we’re going to give you this big advance and you’re going to get all of our money. Or this is your tier two title. We’re going to do social media marketing only and blah, blah. And you can move up a tier, but we guarantee you’ll never move down. It’s kind of a baseline of attention and money spent on you.

[00:31:26.750] – Richard
I think people would respond really well to that, but I think it’s just a huge part of it is just that natural tendency of human beings to want to avoid having awkward conversations with one another. And ultimately, as alluded to earlier, no one really wants to think about a book publishing deal as a commercial transaction because you’re mixing creativity with commerciality and of course it’s both. But publisher is interested in commerciality and you’re interested in creativity. And those too often lock horns. And so more often than not, they won’t just come out and say, well, we don’t like this because it doesn’t take these commerciality boxes for us. We can’t sell this aspect of the novel bla blah, because you’re like but that’s how I expressed my allegory. I’ve expressed it in this way and whatever. So they’re uncomfortable bedfellows and nothing is going to change that in the near future. But certainly like, upfront communication about the nature of the relationship would alleviate so much of, I think, also kind of ill feeling in the industry.

[00:32:33.730] – Scott
Yes, I think that would be huge. The other part of why I think it doesn’t happen and probably won’t, is that then if they had very specific and detailed tiers of what they were committing to, they’d then have to do that. Right?

[00:32:55.910] – Richard
Legal obligations. Yeah.

[00:32:58.890] – Scott
Whereas now there’s zero accountability really, on the corporate side as far as the corporation is concerned, that’s perfect.

[00:33:10.090] – 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. See you later.