[00:00:01.590] - Sunyi
Hi, I'm Sunyi Dean.

[00:00:03.690] - Scott
And I'm Sunyi Drakeford.

[00:00:05.910] - 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 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.

[00:00:59.890] - Sunyi
On Publishing Radio today, we have Michael Marme with us. He is a Sci-Fi author and a good online writer friend for both me and Scott and honestly to writers everywhere. In addition to all the wise things you're going to hear from Michael today, one of the big reasons I really wanted to bring him on is that a lot of the information we talk about in this podcast is out there. It's just it's often you have to pay for it. So there are newsletters, substacs patreons, you can subscribe to them, you can get access, but all of that information is often paywalled. And if you were like me, if you were not really able or willing to fork out for that information, your only source of learning about the industry is kind authors who take time out of their day to explain how shit works to you. Michael Mame was one of those people for me. He explained a ton of things that were going on. He helped me meet new writers, he helped connect me to people, and he helped fundamentally build the little community that we have going and is definitely one of the reasons this podcast exists today.

[00:02:01.290] - Sunyi
So we'd like to welcome Michael. If you'd like to introduce yourself, that.

[00:02:05.770] - Mike
Was a little humbling. I am Michael Mammay. You can call me Mike, that's fine. Michael's on my books and the things that my wife calls me when she's mad at me. I am a science fiction author. I have five books out in the world. The first one was planet side. The most recent one was The Weight of Command. And then my next book, Generation Ship, comes out in October. I don't want to hold myself out, like, as an expert, right, because I know that I'm in a group where our group is mostly debut authors, or it was at the time. I mean, Richard has two books out now, but it was mostly debut authors at the time that I came in. So here's me with like four or five books out in the world at the time, and they think I know everything because they don't know anything. And it's not but it's like being a junior in high school and having a friend who's a senior telling you which teachers what to do in each class because they just did it.

[00:03:04.990] - Scott
Which class you can get an A in.

[00:03:07.020] - Mike
Exactly. If you are an author who has had any measure of success, I would encourage you to take new authors and talk to them and be approachable to them, because when you get there, you'll feel really, really smart and they'll be very appreciative. A lot of times in our community, everybody is waiting for someone to talk to them. Yes, everybody. Right. Have you met a writer that doesn't have imposter syndrome? I don't know. Maybe. Neil gaiman. Who else? I don't know. Somebody, somewhere. Right.

[00:03:48.280] - Sunyi
Neil Gaiman says he's got it.

[00:03:50.300] - Mike
Okay, well, after her contract, maybe Leigh Bardugo feels good. If not, she can sleep on her bed of money and she'll be okay. But I find that at all levels, people are just afraid to talk to people. And then when you do, you find out one that we all love to talk about writing because we just like to talk about this stuff and share information.

[00:04:12.610] - Sunyi
I think people also are scared to reach out because I feel like so many people have disappointing experiences with publishing and a lot of people carry this sense of shame about it. And I remember it reminds me of after my daughter was born and I used to go to these baby groups and everyone there always seemed, like really on top of it and really happy and really buzzy. And then about like four or five years down the line, when our kids were older, one of the women that I knew in those groups started talking about how she'd really been going through lots of postnatal depression and just generally been completely fucking miserable. And we were all like, oh, yeah, we were all feeling that. And it is like everyone was miserable and no one would say it first. And there's a lot of that in writer groups. There's a lot of people struggling or just unsure of what's going on. They don't know what's normal or they feel bad or they feel like their sales are their fault.

[00:05:00.090] - Sunyi
Or their career is their fault and nobody will say it first because we're all trying to keep up appearances, right?

[00:05:06.870] - Mike
Well, it's embarrassing. It's embarrassing to come and say, like, when I say the misfit soldier undersold, it's not that bad for me, right? Because I have a successful series and well, this must be the blip. It might not be, but it's okay. I will tell you that Sunyi coming on here and talking about his situation is like, one of the gutsiest things that I've seen in publishing because people don't talk about people don't talk about, hey, I wrote my first book and it failed. They talk about it in private, in private groups all the time. But to come on here and say that is really something, because it's shining light on something that happens to, I don't know, 60, 70% of all midlist debuts. I don't know what the number is. I heard you all throw some numbers out in a previous episode, but I can't source that. More than not, the default position of a midlist author is failure. Right? If you do nothing, if you just turn in the best book, you do and do everything you can, more mid list debut writers are going to fail than succeed. And that is just a fact of life, and it's not your fault.

[00:06:18.470] - Sunyi
I'm glad we got that line in because you said it earlier and I thought, that's really good.

[00:06:22.650] - Mike
You can't cut that part. I mean, that's part of my preaching. I should be a motivational speaker.

[00:06:27.930] - Sunyi
A lot of the people messaging me will say that there's like, I just can't believe he's out there, like Sunyi hanging himself to dry and just like, being honest and being up front, hanging himself to dry is my phrase.

[00:06:39.310] - Scott
We'll see. I might get real dry here soon. We'll see.

[00:06:44.290] - Mike
Just to give you some of the history, kind of of how we got here and how I got here, I signed my first book deal in early 2017. I signed with my agent, Lisa Rogers, in 2016. We did some edits for a few months on Planetside, but it was pretty clean. And then we went out on Sub in June, and we finished submission in about seven to eight months total, all total. And then I signed a two book deal, which was a one book deal when they offered so they offered one book, $7,500 for planetside, and overnight my agent turned that into two books, both at $7,500. So $15,000 total for two books, which was good. And I'm going to kind of talk a little bit later about why I thought having a two book deal was great. It wasn't so great that the second book in the deal, which I did not know until I got the draft contract, was for book two in the Planet Side series, and Planet Side was a standalone. So I did have to go figure out how to make that into a series, which turned out to be a really good decision for me because the series has done really well.

[00:07:49.620] - Mike
Planetside has done very, very well. Okay. I signed a $7,500 deal that book has made for me in royalties as of today, probably $65,000. So between eight and nine times earned out, and it earned out, like, in five months from when it started. Then spaceide came out, earned out in three months. In between there, we signed another two book deal for planet side three and a book to be named later. That book to be named later became the misfit Soldier, which is my fourth novel. And at that same time, with that negotiation, harper Collins, I'm with Harper voyager. Those books are all with Harper voyager. Harper voyager did not want one of the books that we offered him, which was the weight of Command. So my agent got that exempted from that Harper Collins contract, and we sold that to audible originals for the same amount of money that we were getting for the Harper books, just for audio, which is nice. And then I had to write two books in a year, and we'll talk about that when it comes to burning out and why you shouldn't do that or why I shouldn't do that.

[00:08:59.790] - Mike
You should do whatever works for you. Between my third and fourth book while we were I had written the Misfit Soldier and turned it in, and while we were waiting for that to come out, we signed a deal for generationship, which is the book I've always wanted to write. I dreamed it up in 2018. I was not a good enough writer at the time to write it, and I probably couldn't have sold it. I couldn't have written it, let alone sold it, and I kind of leveled up since then as a writer, and I was ready to take it on, and I wrote a 4200 word pitch to try to sell it to Harper, and they bought that. And I have signed another deal since then for one book for what will be planet side four, which is tentatively titled dark side. I don't know if I'll get to keep that title or not, because I think SEO wise, that might not be great, but it's going to have a side in it, and it'll be the fourth Carl Butler book, and that should be out in 2024. And that's what I was working on before I got on here with you guys today.

[00:10:00.700] - Sunyi
Yeah, see, that's fantastic, because I know, I mean, last episode, we kind of were talking to Richard about how he went wandering in the unicorn forest, tripped over an agent, and fell into the arms of a book deal and accidentally became a lead title. And I think you can get the impression from listening to this podcast that there is just no life outside of lead titles, but I don't think that's true. At least, I hope it's not true. And I hope that even if it's harder to kind of build a career in midlist, it's still doable.

[00:10:33.290] - Scott
I've talked to a few people who found or created success for themselves, right, despite signing a small deal or whatever the potentially negative circumstances might have been. But, I mean, your case with Planetside and the success you've seen from Planet Side seems pretty extraordinary. Like, it does happen, but I don't hear of it nearly as much as.

[00:11:00.710] - Mike
Honestly, when you say Richard's a unicorn, I think his deal is much more normal than mine. Honestly, I think more people will sign a lead deal this year than we'll sign deals like mine and then break out, become successful. And I don't want to say break out or be successful. Let's talk. Can we talk about what the word success means?

[00:11:26.460] - Mike
First of all, I should absolutely define success, because success is super relative, right?

[00:11:33.100] - Scott
Yeah.

[00:11:33.840] - Mike
Okay. So I'm just going to lay numbers. Okay. When I signed my deal for Generation Ship, which was going to be my 6th book, which will be my 6th book, it's scheduled to come out in October. You can preorder that anywhere. Right. I signed a deal for $25,000, a 2 payment advance for $25,000 advance. So two payments at $12,500. I've received one. I should get the next one next week for completion. I don't have to wait. Harper structures their deals for me very, very nicely. We could talk about that if you want to in some bit. Two payment advances are good for authors, and that's what we get, and so that's nice. So I got $25,000. So do we consider that success or not right. For your 6th book? Well, for me, whose first book was $7,500, when I first published Planetside, my definition for success for myself was, I want to sell enough books that someone will continue paying me to write books. I have since moved that goalpost quite a bit. So $25,000 for that book, for me, is good. That is success in my mind for my life and what I need. I have been successful.

[00:12:49.630] - Mike
I get to keep writing books at least two more, at least generationship and Planet Side Four after that. It's really, really debatable. And we could talk about that, too, because that's interesting, but if Sony is writing her 6th book and she's getting paid $25,000, her career has gone completely off the rails. Right. That's not good. She would not at this moment, nor should she consider that to be success, because she got more money than that for her first book. And I heard you talk about that on the first episode, so I don't think we're not no, you're fine to talk money out of line talking about that.

[00:13:22.540] - Scott
Yeah, you're good.

[00:13:23.810] - Mike
So, yeah, for me, it's successful, and I get to keep writing books. And because my first three books have earned out, I actually make a reasonable living at it because I'm continuing to make money on those books. That is the key to your longevity in your career as a midlist author is having some books that have earned out because you get this great thing where they pay you on the same day every year, right? I will get a check on April 1, give or take three days from Harper Collins for all the royalties that I have earned out on my first three books. Now, that's not huge for me, but it's probably $9,000 twice a year. So that's before any deals that I sign, any contracts that I fulfill, just every year until my book stops selling. But we sell enough copies to make about $9,000 every six months for me. So I'll get about that.

[00:14:22.850] - Scott
Has that stayed pretty constant, especially for the Planet Side books that have been out for some time? Has that yearly sum yearly it has.

[00:14:32.890] - Mike
Stayed about the same. It bounces up and down a lot based on a book going on sale. So if they put Planet Side on sale, you can almost watch the ripple in my sales. Planet Side will explode because of the sale and then the other two books will trend upward because a certain percentage of the people who read Planetside are going to continue on to read Spaceide, and then a larger percentage of who read Spaceide will continue on to read Colony Side. And unfortunately, not a lot of that traffic moves over to my other books. So writing outside of a series, which you should bring someone smarter than me to talk about that because it happens a lot. Right. Where can you carry over your audience from a series to another series or another book or another genre? And there are people who can the.

[00:15:19.130] - Sunyi
Received wisdom that I had been told by my agent, which I know publishing is working very rough figures, but they said it was something like when you write three books, you can move to another series and take some year of readership and you write five. You can move to another subgenre or genre and take some of them. I don't know if that's just I don't know how rough that is. I don't know the research for it.

[00:15:39.790] - Mike
Well, that's exactly what I've done. So we'll see if she's right or wrong. Right? I wrote a three book series and then went over and wrote two standalones in the same subgenre. And then my 6th book will be in a new subgenre. Right. Generation Ship is not military science fiction. It is straight science fiction. You call it space opera, I guess so we'll see. We're following the received wisdom. So far, that wisdom has not held true. People have not come from the planet side. Series to the misfit soldier. And the Misfit Soldier, to be frank, is underperformed. And that has put some pressure on my career.

[00:16:17.690] - Sunyi
My entire deal is predicated on that prediction being wrong because I'm moving genre every book because I'm on a three book standalone contract and I've moved from contemporary urban fantasy to historical literary fantasy between book one and book two. And God knows what the third one will be. I hope it's not too true, basically. I hope it's not a universal law, but there are very few universal rules in publishing, I think.

[00:16:45.600] - Mike
I think you're in a different spot because of your position on the list. Right. Because you're going to do We Hope, right? We don't know.

[00:16:54.930] - Sunyi
We Hope.

[00:16:55.890] - Mike
Right. Well, I mean, you got the marketing on book one, and we kind of hope you get it on book two. And it could be that you're looking for a completely different audience. You don't necessarily have to bring your people with you. You might find new people who might go backwards and find your other book based on hey, they like the genre that you're going to write in with Book Two. So it's almost like a second debut, which is horrifying. It's terrifying, but there's a whole ton of potential there. So it could go either way.

[00:17:26.480] - Sunyi
It terrifies me less than being in a series, because if you launch a series and it doesn't work, then the famous publishing death barrel kicks in where the read through is just dropping with every book and you're chained to that series until you finish it. Scott's nodding vehemently on camera

[00:17:40.120] - Scott
You're describing... that is true.

[00:17:46.260] - Mike
Because if book one doesn't sell writing, book two is I don't want to say pointless, because book two will sell copies of... soul destroying yeah, well, you just know that you're not likely to break out with it from there. Right. For me, it's slightly different because Planet Side is not really a series, it's more of a serial. That's cool. You could read Book Three without having read book one and two.

[00:18:12.510] - Sunyi
Right.

[00:18:13.280] - Mike
And it's written that way.

[00:18:14.850] - Scott
People say that a lot, like authors seem to say that a lot, but I don't think readers trust that.

[00:18:20.830] - Mike
Well, they don't have to trust it. At the end of Spaceside, you are not required to go on to read Colony Side to get the story. Each book is its own story. Right. Dark Side is going to be a book with a beginning, middle and end. Yes. Some of the characters come back from it's. More like watching season four of a show. Yeah. Right.

[00:18:42.840] - Scott
That totally makes sense.

[00:18:44.070] - Mike
And if there's any Hollywood people listening, it's written like seasons of a show. You could come by. I'll make you a deal on all four of them.

[00:18:54.140] - Scott
The option is available, is what I'm gathering.

[00:18:56.830] - Mike
Here it is.

[00:18:58.110] - Scott
Okay. So, Mike, I have a specific question. Feel free to answer it or not, but you mentioned both that Planet Side exceeded expectations, obviously, and that misfit Soldier didn't. Right? Yeah. And maybe Weight of Command, which I loved, by the way. Weight of command was fantastic. 

[00:19:21.120] - Mike
Thank you. Yeah.

[00:19:22.530] - Scott
Thank you for giving me access to an early listen that was the highlight of my cross country drive this past summer. Do you have any takeaways that you feel good about with respect to why planetside did well and why the weight of command didn't? Given that they're on pretty similar deals with the same publisher, same editor, et cetera, is there anything to learn there, or is it just kind of random chance?

[00:19:55.150] - Mike
Let's not talk about the weight of command in this. Let's talk about the misfit soldier. The weight of the command was with audible. The Misfit soldier was the fourth harper book. Good point. On the second contract. So planetside and spaceide were on one deal, $7,500 each, and then we signed the second deal before spaceide came out. Planet side was quite successful and they knew it then. And they were willing to talk offer on two more books right then, and they asked for planet side three and planet side four, because planet side was doing well, I had some leverage, and we could talk about when you have leverage and when you don't, because there's very few points in your career where you have leverage. And when you do have it, it's a really good idea to take advantage of it because you won't have it forever. I don't have it anymore. So I had it then, and I was able to say, no, I'm not going to write planet side four. I'm artistically just burn out on those characters. I don't feel it. And we signed a contract for planet side three, which became colony side, and a book to be named later, and that book later became the misfit soldier.

[00:20:57.970] - Mike
I pitched the weight of Command to them to be that book, and they said no. And then so I pitched my other book, which was the misfit soldier, and they said, yes, that's it. So I wrote that. And those two books were $15,000 advances each. So at $30,000 for two books. And so the expectation on those was higher, right? Because the money is higher. The expectation. No one is ever going to tell you, or no one has ever told me. I'll be very accurate here. No one has ever told me that these are your expectations. You have met them, you've exceeded them. You've not that's just me doing math, right? I can look at how much money harper has made on planetside, and I know that they're good with that, right? Because if I've made $65,000 on it, they've made three times that. That means they've made $200,000 because I get 25% of receipts. So less their costs for their sunk costs, producing the audio, editing, all the stuff that they pay for the COVID they've made about $200,000 on that book, okay? For a book that they initially invested in me, $7,500, that's a good deal for them.

[00:22:10.440] - Mike
There's no way around that. We can all see that math and why it works for them.

[00:22:14.400] - Sunyi
The thing that scared me the most when I initially signed my deal, and after the euphoria died down, I was like, wait, how many copies do I need to sell to make this money back? But it wasn't as bad as I thought, I think, with my really shit math, I kind of worked out that it was maybe in the region of 35 to 40K copies where they would start to feel okay, assuming hardcover prices. Obviously, that gets very dicey when you throw an audio and paperback and discounts and all kinds of stuff, but it's daunting, I guess. And it's weird as well that no one says we need to sell these mini copies and they don't have an exact number. I mean, I remember reading Courtney mom's book where she interviews all these editors, and the editors were like, well, we start to feel quite good if a title sells 15,000 in hardcover. It's like, what does that mean? You feel good? Are you actually in the red and the black? Why doesn't anyone have a number? They must know. Someone must know.

[00:23:13.710] - Mike
Even if somebody knows, if they do, it's either not people I talk to or the people I talk to are being disingenuous, which I don't believe the second one. So I just don't think on the editor side, again, with planet side, we know it's good, right? I mean, once you go over a line that's we're so far past the line with that book, but again, it's not really making them that much money. It's making them money relative on a percentage basis. Right. But there's a very good chance that your book will make more for your publisher before you earn out your advance than my book makes after I've earned it out, because at the end of the day, I've only sold 65,000 copies or whatever, somewhere in that range. Right. And those are paperback. I didn't have a hardcover. Right. So we're not making that $2 something royalty per book. My paperbacks were sold cheap. They were mass market. They were 799, which helped me a lot, I think. It didn't help me on the number side, for sure, on the money side. But asking people to take a chance on a debut author for $28 is a lot different than asking someone to take a chance on a debut author for $8.

[00:24:30.710] - Mike
So I feel like that really helped me find an audience that you could go get my ebook for 6.99, 5.99 now, I think, right? So, yeah, you've never read me, but you heard it was good, and it's only $8. And I think psychologically, being below $10 is a thing. Being below $20 is another thing. Right. I don't think there's any difference between 12.99 and 17.99 mentally, but there's a big difference between ten and 20, which is ridiculous, but that's how our brains work, and that's why they price things in your store at 8.99 instead of $9 now.

[00:25:07.750] - Sunyi
Yeah, I don't sorry. Go on.

[00:25:09.560] - Scott
No. After you. Sunyi.

[00:25:11.890] - Sunyi
I was just going to say that I really think editors themselves don't know. Like the the money people are different from the editorial teams and they're already effectively project managers who have to oversee marketing, publicity, cover editing, production, acquisition, blurbs. Blurbs too much.

[00:25:31.230] - Mike
They do a lot. Yeah, they do too much. And I think they know, okay, if an editor has been in the game for a minute, they certainly know when their boss is happy with them and when their boss is not happy with them. Yes. Do they know the exact copy number of copies that go no. But do they have a range where they think, okay, this is what's really bad, this is what's okay, and this is where we get good and this is where I'm a superstar. They have to if they've done any number of books, they have a better guess than we do.

[00:26:08.710] - Sunyi
Oh yeah. I remembered two things I wanted to say. Sorry. The first was that I've struggled to explain before. That concept you're just talking about of not a lot of money. Like to a corporation making a couple hundred thousand dollars is not a lot of money. And that sounds weird, but it's really difficult when you're mid list and somewhere up there the big numbers person is crunching and going, we think this book will only make us 150 grand. That's not worth our time. That's so weird to hear for people because and I think this is why, like indies come in and, and they can actually make money that's sustainable. Because what's sustainable for one person is different from what a corporation thinks is sustainable. That the big publishers are in it for the Twilights, the books that sell 10 million copies.

[00:26:54.330] - Mike
They are, but I don't want to be too negative about that. I think if an editor today knew that this book was going to make $150,000 for corporation, they would sign that deal. It's the risk that comes with it, right? Do we want to invest? And also it's the lack of upside, right? If I'm capped at $150,000 and you know that I'm not going to go beyond that, aren't you better off taking a chance at the next big thing that might sell a million? It might be the next Leigh Bardugo. Who knows.

[00:27:24.990] - Sunyi
The other thing I learned at launch is something my agent told me, which is that they generally look for fantasy debuts to sell between 301,000 or something like that on the first week of sales. So if you kind of earn that bracket, they're generally happy. And if you're above that, you're doing well. I mean, obviously that includes pre orders and things. And that was the first time I'd heard any kind of concrete figure. And if anyone has better data than that, feel free to correct me. I'm sure we get things wrong on the show, but that's because we have to scrabble in the dark for numbers.

[00:27:55.240] - Mike
That's the first time I've actually heard that. No one ever told me what I should do. Earning out in five months, I didn't need anyone to tell me that was good. I had a pretty good idea. Yeah.

[00:28:07.610] - Sunyi
I think my first week we were over 2K, and I said to Naomi, Is that good? It's like, that's lower than my UK figures. And she said, yeah, that's fine. That's really good for what you want. I was like, all right.

[00:28:21.330] - Mike
The other thing that's gone on with Planetside is that it didn't really sell that much the first year. I mean, I think it earned out. It certainly earned out. I think it probably I probably had made 20,000, but then it sold the same number the next year, which doesn't happen, right? It doesn't really happen. And then it sold the same amount the third year, and then it's selling about the same amount this year. It just keeps so when Spaceide came out, Planetside had dipped and we were not selling hardly at all. We had kind of capped out around 20,000. Then Spaceide came out and then Planetside took back off again and hit top thousand on Audible, which is where I sell most of my copies. That's the other thing that's really unique about my deal, right? 60% of the money that Planetside has made has been on audio.

[00:29:16.820] - Mike
Which is high. That's extremely high, right? I don't know how high. It's just really high. And there's a lot of reasons for that. And that's part of the luck that I talk about with Planetside, because you're going to ask me, how do you do this? And I'm going to say, well, you get lucky. My publisher and I together made a couple of really good decisions. We had some really good luck with timing, and most of it was and it's a good book. And those things came together in a unique concoction of things that made it work. And if I could replicate it, I would be doing that for other people, and I can't replicate it, and I don't know that you can. So chasing it is but I will talk about the things that I do do to try to give yourself the best shot. I think that's going to be my theme throughout this, is you can't control anything.

[00:30:18.100] - Sunyi
Yes.

[00:30:18.790] - Mike
Except the book that you write. And even then, you may not be able to control it because your editor might have thoughts on how long that book wants to be, and you may disagree with them, or they may want a love triangle and you don't. And those are negotiations that you're going to have. That one you can win. You might want a certain audio narrator, and your publisher may not want to pay for that. I had that very specifically with The Misfit Soldier, and that's one of the reasons that it didn't do as well, because the narrator audio what's that?

[00:30:53.330] - Sunyi
I was going to say you might want audio. Full stop.

[00:30:56.280] - Mike
Yeah, you might not get your audiobook right, you might not get your audiobook, but you can do stuff about that too, because in my first contract, I wanted an audiobook so bad in my first contract because I was an early adopter of audiobooks, okay? I was listening to audiobooks and the inspiration for me to write Planetside was listening to a guy named R. C. Bray, who is my narrator for Planetside. I was listening to him read The Martian and I had his voice in my head as Carl Butler as I was writing it because I was listening to that book at the same time I was writing. And that was the voice, that was Carl Butler's voice in my head. And I really, really wanted, one, I wanted to have an audiobook, and two, I wanted RC. Bray to narrate it. Okay? I had no control over the second one, but I'm going to tell you what I did to make that happen. The first one I told my agent, I will not sign a deal that gives away audio rights unless they promise they're going to use them, okay? I want an audiobook. And so the one thing that she dug in on the contract was a reversion clause on the audiobook.

[00:32:06.800] - Mike
So that if Harper Voyager did not do an audio within twelve weeks of release of the book, that we got the rights back. We never exercised that. And the reason that Harper was more than willing to give us that deal is because they had intended all along to make the audiobook. So it was basically giving us something that had zero value to them because they were going to but at the time you don't know, right? So if you're a new author, ask your agent to get your reversion clause on your audiobook. That's a very specific doable thing that they can pursue. It doesn't mean that that publisher is going to say yes, but you get to pick the one or two things in your contract that you want to fight for. The pay is the pay. You can try to negotiate the money and your agent is going to do that regardless because everyone knows that that's the most important thing. But then there's one or two things in your contract that you are going to want and you just need to communicate with your agent and make it as clear as possible and a good agent is going to work to get you the things that matter to you.

[00:33:11.710] - Scott
But going back to this audio question, and specifically that question of what went right with Planet Side versus not so right with Misfit Soldier, and you mentioned that you believe that that narrator matchup was a big deal and that didn't happen on the Misfit Soldier. And this has a follow up question, but do you think that that dynamic of having just. Really the perfect narrator and a really good production for Planetside. Audio was one of the big differences between the outcomes.

[00:33:46.430] - Sunyi
There are a few things, there are a few factors there. One is the timing. The second is the narrator. So RC. Bray had done The Martian and everybody that is like a lot of science fiction fans first, audiobook, and I don't know why, but just the timing of when audio started to kind of explode. Right. The other thing was when Planetside came out on Audible, if you searched military Sci-Fi books, there were 800. If you go today, there's 4000. Okay. So there's a significant difference in what's available to the audience. And so it took a lot less to become number one because it was easier to be found and follow that with. RC. Bray was doing the most popular military science fiction fiction book series of our generation. He was doing the expeditionary force by Craig Allison. Right. Craig allison's. Military Sci-Fi books regularly go to number one on Audible. And I don't mean number one in military Sci-Fi. I don't mean number one in Sci-Fi. I mean, he goes past Michelle Obama, number one overall on all of Audible when those books come out. Okay. So RC. Bray is his narrator and he more than any other narrator, and there are a few narrators like this who have their own fans and their fans will take chances on new books that they narrate any real audio.

[00:35:25.350] - Mike
I'm sorry, go ahead.

[00:35:26.920] - Sunyi
No, I was just going to say, I didn't want to interrupt your flow. But I do think that my choice of narrator, because I did have a choice, damaged my American sales or at least my American rating quite significantly. I know that I have a not great rating on Audible for that, and I have no regrets for it because essentially my book was set in the north of England. It features very regional accents. I picked a narrator who has a regional accent, which is something a lot of American listeners aren't used to hearing. And boy, they did not like her. A lot of complaints like, oh, we can't understand her, she sounds such a heavy accent, this, that and the other. I don't know, it's just something to bear in mind, I guess, for writers who are outside the States, when you're looking at accents, if that bothers you, think twice. Maybe listening to Mike, I think it probably did have an even bigger impact than I thought. In my case. I think it would be great if they could all bottle their tears and send them to me to drink because I don't give a fuck.

[00:36:26.730] - Sunyi
The reason why their accent is unfamiliar is why I wanted that accent there. So I don't care. They can all be sad.

[00:36:33.670] - Mike
Well, on top of that, right? I know at some point we're going to get to talking about the commercial versus the artistic, and sometimes you're going to pick one and sometimes you're going to pick the other and they're not always going to line up. Sometimes you're going to do something knowing that it's what you want to do artistically. And this comes with book choice. It comes with narrator choice, which people probably don't think about, but there are commercial aspects to narrators. And honestly, I was not thinking about that at the time that I did it. I just had his voice in my head and it was the perfect voice. And it turned out that all this other stuff happened to be true. And I've studied there are certain narrators that add value and add sales to your audio in certain genres. And if you're a fantasy fan, you've heard the same narrators over and over again. If you listen on audio, right, you've heard Joe Jameson over and over again because he does a lot of fantasy books. You've heard somebody with it a ubiquitous British accent, because fantasy books want British accents for whatever reason, because we've all been good.

[00:37:37.970] - Mike
Why did everyone on Game of Thrones speak with an English accent? I don't know. Because we think about fantasy and we think, well, English is England's old. That must be it. I don't know.

[00:37:48.950] - Scott
I don't know if you've seen Between Two Ferns, but there's a scene where Zach Galifanakis is asking Benedict Cumberbatch yeah. If he thinks that people would realize that he's a shitty actor if he didn't have that accent. That was might be a little bit of that you can't really tell certain nuances that you might be able to pick up on if it's not an accent you're used to. That's really interesting, though, right? And you both know this, but I'm going through trying to shop audio rights and may end up doing it myself if that doesn't go well. May not. But I'm embarrassed to say that the potential aspect of narrators bringing an audience with them hadn't really registered to me as something that could be that significant. And maybe it was way back in the day of 2018, a more significant factor than it is now, now that there are tons of audiobooks and popular narrators probably have tons of titles under their belt. But that's really interesting and that's something I'm going to be thinking about for a long time.

[00:39:07.060] - Mike
Yeah. So let's fast forward to The Misfit Soldier to go back to your question that you asked me. Right. What was different about the misfit soldier? So the difference was RC. Bray was online to do that book because it's still military Sci-Fi, and I think it would have done quite well if he had. But his price went up because he was bringing value and he had recognized his value and he was in high. And the audiobook producing community read indies who see these things way before publishers do, right. Because they're faster. And that's one of the things about the indie market. If there is a trend or there is something that is working. There is an indie author who is hustling to get it. And I love that about him. And I also hate it because it kills me because they can beat me because I'm dealing with a publisher. And so his price had gone up by more than threefold per produced hour. So audiobook narrators get paid per produced hour. Okay. And his price had more than tripled, and Harper wasn't willing to pay it. They now realize their mistake. I would say no one's told me that.

[00:40:16.080] - Mike
But given that they have signed him on to do planet side 4, my guess is they understand now that that makes a difference. But at the time, they didn't know that it made I knew it was going to make a difference, but I couldn't make the publisher understand that it was going to make a difference. I fought to get my narrator. They said, no, here's your four. Pick one of them. I said, what about this other guy? They said, no, here's your four. Pick one of them. So I picked a guy artistically who I thought fit the story very well. He did a very good job with it, and it is sold. My sales for Misfit Soldier are more in line with normal books in that genre, which is about probably 40% on the paperback, 30% audio, 30% ebook, which is pretty normal for military Sci-Fi that has paperbacks in a store. It's not crazy, out of line like planetside where there's just a big weight to the audiobook in that book in its first five months. And I only have five months worth of data. Four months worth of data on it came out on February 22 of last year.

[00:41:22.620] - Mike
So I have one royalty statement. I'll get another one in, like, two weeks. And so I'll tell you two I won't tell the world, but I'll tell you two what it looks like after that. But it's not selling real well. So out of its $15,000 advance in the first four months, it did 5000. So not horrible for a paperback, but not nearly at the level that they were hoping. It changed things for me in my relationship with the publisher and how much leverage I had. Now, I did something really, really smart. I negotiated the contract for generationship before Misfit Soldier hit shelves because I saw the possibility and I did it on purpose. I did it on purpose because I saw the possibility of Misfit Soldier not doing well. And I knew that that would impact my career. So I wanted to have a book under contract before that happened. And so we went out and I wrote a big pitch for Generation Ship, and we were able to sell that. And we had closed that deal before they got numbers on Misfit Soldier.

[00:42:33.870] - Scott
Now, is it typical to be able to pitch and sell on that kind of timeline, meaning before a second book has even hit shelves because I know we've talked to other authors in our friend group who have pitched early on purpose, and they've kind of been stonewalled, right. And they've been told that, yeah, well, let's wait and see. I'm guessing you've seen more authors than just yourself and that one other go through that. How common do you think that is?

[00:43:09.050] - Mike
You two know me. I know a lot of people. I talk to a lot of folks about a lot of different things in publishing. That's part of the benefit of I am very open about things. I have literally published my exact publishing income for 2022 on my website, Michaelmame.com, if anyone wants to check that out. But it has my exact income from 2022. And when you share stuff, people are more willing to share stuff back to you, right. So I hear things. I have a pretty good idea of that. It comes down to when do you have leverage and when do you not, okay? And you mostly don't. And if your book is in that middle ground where you're not sure if it's doing real well or it's not doing real well, you may not have a whole lot of leverage. I had a bunch with Planet Side doing as well as it did and them wanting Planet Side Three at that point, I had quite a bit of leverage because they wanted to continue the series. It was profitable for them, and it was continuing to build, and it's still continuing to sell. The Generation Ship, they couldn't not take the deal.

[00:44:27.670] - Mike
Okay? And the reason they couldn't not take it at that point, because they did not know that Misfit Soldier was going to do that. And I don't think they were as worried about it as I was. Because your publisher is not all knowing, right? There gets to be points in time in all negotiations in publishing where there's parody of information, right? Book three in an ongoing series, everybody knows how much that book is worth. Your agent knows, your editor knows, and they have that same information. So the negotiation is really a formality. That book is worth X dollars because it's numbers. But with Misfit Soldier, they had not yet realized that the narrator was going to have that much of an effect on the book. And I already knew that it would. So I was in a hurry to get a deal done on Generation Ship beforehand, and they were not adverse to that because everything that they had seen was that, hey, this book will probably do okay. It'll probably continue him along his trend. He's had an upward trend. He continues to sell. Let's do this. And there's risk for them, right? Because if Misfit Soldier blew up when it came out, now they're paying more for Generation Ship after the fact.

[00:45:45.870] - Mike
We're both doing give and take. Right? There's two factors. There's the risk and there's the leverage. And who has each one. We're both sharing the risk now. I took a smaller deal on books three and four. Then I probably had to because we went early. If I had waited until Spaceide came out and Planet Side kept going before I signed the deal for Colony Side and Misfit Soldier, we probably would have got more per book because they were objectively worth more. I mean, Colony Side was objectively worth more than the $15,000 I got for it because it sold through $15,000 worth of advance in five months. Right. And there was not really any doubt that it was going to do that by the time we got to it. But when I was signing the deal before Spaceide came out, we didn't know for sure. So I was taking some risk on my side by taking a smaller amount, and they were taking some risk on their side by offering and paying me early. But for me, it was artistic, and I wanted Colony Side to come out one year after Space Side, not two. So if we waited to negotiate the deal, then there's a gap of a year.

[00:47:02.550] - Mike
And I did not want that in my trilogy because I had seen the momentum, or I hadn't seen it yet, but I had seen it in other people. The momentum that you can build by getting a book out every year as opposed to every two years. Plus, I'm 54 years old. I only got X number of years left to right, and one book a year for me is good to do, as opposed to if I take three years to do a book, 

[00:47:30.030] - Sunyi
I take three years to do a book.

[00:47:31.970] - Mike
Well, you do different kinds of books, though. Your book is so good. Don't run yourself down. I mean, we all do. I am currently of the belief that no one is going to like my next book that comes out. Even though people have told me it's good.

[00:47:47.520] - Sunyi
I have already liked it and blurbed it!

[00:47:50.360] - Mike
I know that I appreciate that very much. There are days where you feel really, really good about what you do, and then there are days where you absolutely.

[00:47:58.110] - Scott
Yeah, I do know.

[00:48:02.650] - Mike
Do we want to talk about what you negotiate? Yeah, we've been talking about these contracts. Right. And it's important. The thing that you figure out in your second contract that you didn't know in your first contract was where you can get stuff. Okay. And now we're all going to say, we want to put the marketing right into the contract. You're not getting that. Not as a mid lister. I'm sorry. That's just not I'm not saying don't ask for it, go ahead, have at it. But I don't think that's realistic, and it's almost unenforceable. Yeah, right. Because what are they going to say unless they say something specific, like, we're going to spend X dollars on a Facebook ad or whatever, then how do you even enforce it? You probably don't. What you can get is things that are important to me. Delivery date is the most important thing because I don't want to kill myself to turn out this next book, especially when you're paying me $15,000 for it. If you want to crank it up to 100,000, we can set it on your schedule. If we're going to do it for 15,000, we're going to do it for $25,000.

[00:49:15.430] - Mike
I will work with you on schedule, but I am going to give you a date that I feel good about. And I feel good about my ability to turn that book out and make it something that I want it to be the best book I can make. And I want to have the time and space to do that the way that I want.

[00:49:36.600] - Sunyi
I wondered about that because my publishers pushed very hard for specific delivery dates, which we have blown past by a year and a half. For book two. Yeah. I did not deliver on time, and no one's mentioned it or given a shit. I don't know if that's because the position I'm in relatively or they just.

[00:49:59.950] - Mike
If they're not going to do anything about it, why are they pushing for that? I don't understand why they're pushing for that in a negotiation.

[00:50:07.750] - Sunyi
I don't either. They really wanted it pinned down.

[00:50:11.700] - Scott
Oh, I was just going to say I've spent a lot of time managing projects and vendor relationships and things, and that's essentially what we are to them. Right. We're a vendor of sorts. And sometimes you really do just have to pick a due date.

[00:50:28.140] - Sunyi
Right.

[00:50:28.330] - Scott
And you have to pick a go live date, whether it's realistic or not. And you know that that's going to change. You don't really care if that changes. Sometimes it's a relief if it changes on the other end. But I think some of that is really just them spitting in the wind and seeing where it lands.

[00:50:41.690] - Mike
And that's the most important thing in this, is knowing what you want. Right? I know what I want my non compete to look like. That's another place where in your second contract your first contract, non compete is probably bad unless you were an auction and you could play them off of each other, I guess. But you can work your non compete because your publisher has some room to move on that in future books. So this idea of you can't publish anything else for 24 months, I've seen some horrible non competes out there. Just don't sign that. Don't sign anything that gives someone control over you for 24 months for any book in your genre. Right. My non compete on my last contract is for direct sequels to books I've already published with Harper. Those are the only things that I can't take anywhere else.

[00:51:31.870] - Scott
And it seems like a lot of agents are getting, or have gotten the standard non compete clauses. From what I've seen in my own contract and a few others that have floated around the group. Seems like they've gotten to the point of being pretty toothless and unenforceable anyway, and they're kind of there to just scare the author into delivering as fast as possible.

[00:51:52.710] - Mike
Maybe we could talk and then there's options also, there's non competes and there's options. The one thing that we couldn't get off of this time was my publisher really wanted to add novellas into my non compete, which is horrible for the publisher. And David, if you're listening to this, I still think that's horrible and it's not fair. But I didn't care because I'm not writing a novella. So we accepted it because I don't care. And it doesn't affect me in any way. It does affect other authors. And my agent and I were very worried about us being like the standard bearer for accepting this, and now it becomes acceptable for anybody else who does want to do that, but for us, it just didn't matter that much. But I still think it's a horrible clause for authors. But again, because I didn't want to do it, why should I fight about it? I don't care. You're welcome to put that in the contract. You might as well say that I'm not going to drink tea with my breakfast because I'm not going to drink tea with my breakfast, so I don't care. Yeah.

[00:52:51.110] - Scott
And I think one of the big points that I'm getting at least and I think a lot of other up and coming writers should get from a lot of these things you're saying, whether it's the definition of success or picking and choosing the battles you want to fight with your contract is going into the publishing journey or whatever you want to call it to make yourself feel better. It's very important to know what you want upfront in terms of success, in terms of how much time can you realistically put toward this and how quick are you at writing, et cetera, et cetera. Knowing your own life and process and staying true to that is much more important than keeping a publisher happy, or at the very least, more important than agreeing to everything that the publisher puts on paper at the very first, right?

[00:53:40.220] - Mike
I think so. Now to cut yourself some slack as a debut author, I didn't know any of this. I didn't do any of this with my first contract. But yes, your publisher is not going to be mad if you push back on a contract. Your big five publisher is not going to be mad if your agent is pushing for other things. It may slow your contract down, which, by the way, slows your money down. Because until you get all those details, my first contract took eleven months before I signed it. And if you are counting on that money, then you tell your agent, get this done as fast as possible. You're giving up your ability to fight on some of that stuff. So there's some privilege in here. And that first of all, my first deal was for $7,500 per book. It wasn't that much money. And I was working at the time. I was still in the army at the time we were doing that deal. I was still getting a full paycheck. I didn't have to have $7,500, did not materially change my life that year. So I could tell my agent, hey, take all your time you need, but you may not you may want to sign it right away because that money might be your rent money.

[00:54:46.110] - Mike
So everyone's in a different situation. And the second thing is, I didn't know any of this, and I didn't know my own I didn't know what I could do. So the first year I was a and I'll tell you, I'll give you an example of that. The first year I was a full time author, I was quitting my job as a high school English teacher to write full time. And that was the year that Harper had rejected The Way to Command. And so we were going to sell it to we sold it to Audible, and I was going to get two books out in a year, and I did. Just not the year that I thought, because it turns out I can't write two books in a year. There are people who can. There's people who are working on one project in the morning and a different project in the evening. I am linear. I can work on one book until it's done, and then I can work on the next book. And I missed my deadline. And by the way, the pandemic had started too, and there was depression and the stuff that hit all of us in 2020 as I was trying to write these books.

[00:55:48.390] - Mike
And so I was four months late on The Way to Command, and I'm really happy with how it came out, and I'm really, really happy that I took those four months instead of jamming it in. What I've learned about myself is to not over commit to doing more than one book.

[00:56:02.710] - Scott
On the subject of how publishers respond to date changes and whatever else, I've had the same experience, right? And it sounds like SUNY has gone past at least one date and nobody's even mentioned it to her. My editor is very organized and keeps very close track of her schedule and all of the books on her schedule. But even still, and even despite all of the challenges that have come along with my publishing career so far, she and Tor have been excellent about any date changes that I've needed, any extra time, even if it doesn't change a delivery date, right? Any extra time I need to do edits. They even were pretty cool about taking extra time and me doing more than I was supposed to during copy edits, because I got a little bit of a mixed message in terms of how much I could edit. So, yeah, if there are any authors out there floundering and not knowing how much they can or should ask for and are just suffering depression, whatever else comes with feeling like you're chronically disappointing your publisher, I think the answer there is definitely be open about it and just let them know you need more time.

[00:57:28.430] - Scott
Because I think universally they'll be also.

[00:57:31.700] - Mike
It's not like they don't work with authors, right? They've worked with a couple. Have you met authors? Whatever you think is the worst thing you could possibly do, someone's done worse. So I say I delivered everything on time to Harper, actually, with generationship. I got to my due date, and I was ready to turn it in, but I had more work I wanted to do. So I got on the email with David, my editor, and I'm like, hey, when are you actually going to do this? Because his schedule is his schedule, right? My schedule. I have a contractual due date, but he's got 2025 books to get out in a year, and he knows his schedule. And I'm like, when am I actually on your schedule? Because if you're not going to use the time, let me have it. And he's like, Get it to me in seven weeks, because that's when you're on. And then we got to seven weeks. And I'm like, hey, give me one more week. So I did, and I turned it in about eight weeks after what the contract said, but he wasn't going to work on it anyway.

[00:58:36.950] - Mike
But at the same time, when they give me my copy edits on Generation Ship, which I'm supposed to get on the 24th, so ten days from when we're recording this, when they give those to me, I've got 14 days to get them back to them. And if I say, hey, I need a month, they're going to say, Good. Your book's not getting published on the date that it's supposed to get published, because we are in a tight window with production timelines and the lags in production timing. I mean, me taking extra time on that means the book doesn't come out when it's supposed to come out, or we don't have arcs or something that is tangibly. That tangibly matters to me. Yes, they can't make me, right? If I need more time, I'm going to take more time, but it is not in my best interest to take that time.

[00:59:20.070] - Sunyi
Yeah. On the flip side, I told my editor, I think, earlier in the year that I was hoping to hand in the Ghost Fucker Book, which is my Untitled Second Manuscript, and I thought--

[00:59:30.880] - Scott
It's titled. I can't wait for that to come out with title.

[00:59:35.120] - Mike
That's the title. (laughing)

[00:59:36.490] - Sunyi
Yeah. I told her I'd hand it in. I'd try and hand in on the 11 February. And she wrote back and said, Great. I'll make sure I clear my schedule so I've got time for it. Oh, shit, I better really hand it in then, or I've helped everybody out.

[00:59:50.830] - Mike
That's a rookie mistake right there. Don't promise something that you promise what you're going to deliver. And I think that's it, though. Be honest, right?

[00:59:58.980] - Sunyi
So we did actually put out a call this week where we were asking people if there were any specific questions, and we got a load back, and some of them we've tried to cover in this episode or ended up covering organically, specifically talking about how to live with the reality of writing several books and how to time in. What you're doing with that? But there was one particular question that I'm going to read out from an anonymous listener. How do you figure out what happened with the book's publication Journey after it flops? How to do a book post mortem? And this person also says, I'm embarrassed, report. I don't know what went wrong with mine. I don't know how to go about finding out what happened. Everybody says ask someone who might. Everybody says ask your publisher, basically. Or here are some unverifiable and equally unlikely things that might have happened or whatever happened. Pre COVID doesn't matter. Everything's different now. And I'll let Mike get into that in a moment if he wants to, and to take an angle on that. But I think the first thing I would always say is if your book has come out and your sales are not what you want or what your publisher hope for, that is not your fault.

[01:01:06.690] - Sunyi
And I think that is always the thing I want to emphasize with people. There are so many things that need to go right for a book to take off, and if any of them go wrong at any point, then you can immediately have the result that you weren't hoping for. And that fundamentally, sales are not actually inside our control at all. There's so little that we can do to impact sales.

[01:01:27.980] - Mike
Yeah, I think that's good. I don't know that there's a lot of benefit in doing a post mortem in that. One, first of all, whoever said to ask your publisher what went wrong, don't. That's pointless, because one, they're not going to tell you. And two, they don't know because if they knew, it wouldn't have happened, right? They don't know your book didn't sell. Yes, they have some vague idea of what they spent on it and what they did, but if they knew how to make it successful, they would have, because it's in their financial interest to do so. Why they chose to do that on someone else's book and not yours, I don't know. But they're not going to tell you that, so don't ask your publisher. That's a waste of time. They're going to give you vague publishing talk. They're not going to want to hurt your feelings because you're a precious artist. I don't. Know, but they're not going to tell you why it went wrong. And I don't know that anybody can because all the things that went right for me and the luck and the timing and I hit the military Sci-Fi market with the right narrator in the right book at the right time that it did better than people expected it to do.

[01:02:40.690] - Mike
You can't predict that. And if you can, you should be doing indie because you can get your timing right if you're indie, whereas you have no control over your timing. In traditional publishing, it's just really hard to say and it's also pointless because it's happened. If you're asking that question, then your book has already failed and there's nothing you can do about it. It's in the past. And all you can do, whether you're successful or you're not successful, is start from today and figure out what are you going to do. And it might be you're going to make a decision. Is it worth it to even keep going? Maybe you're going to leave the business and a lot of authors do. And I'm not suggesting that you should and I'm not encouraging you to, but you know the facts now, right? If you've written one book, you've written three books, you've written ten books, you have more information than you did before you started and you could make a new decision based on that. Every day we get up and we decide if we're going to write or we're not, and you make that, we decide if we're going to pursue something.

[01:03:47.930] - Mike
If your book didn't do well, the standard advice is write a new book and you're going to go back out and try again. That's hard, right? I'm not saying to do that, but if you want to be a writer and you want to have a career and your first book bombed, there aren't a lot of other options other than write another book and try to find another agent. If you're not with your agent, bad things happen. Agents drop people. Your agent might not jive with you on what you want to write next. Your publisher might not have any interest in doing that. My publisher really doesn't have any interest in any more books by me. We didn't really talk about that. Let's talk about that even when you're successful, right? Misfit soldier bombed. Okay. I had already signed a generationship with them, so they didn't have a choice because they've already signed the deal. Right. And I think they're happy with it. I mean, my publisher, by all intent, from everything that they've said and everything that they're doing to support this book, I think that they are doing what I need them to do to try to make this next one a success.

[01:04:53.950] - Mike
But until it does, until it is right now it's Schrodinger's book, right? We don't know if it's going to be a success or not. And I don't think they're going to want to do a whole lot more with me until we find out, and that's okay. And I know that because I sent seven pitches to them. I sent seven pitches to my editor of hey, here's the stuff that I'd like to do next. And he said he was very nice about it. We have a very good relationship. I like David a lot, but it might as well then, yeah, we're going to wait. I mean, he didn't say it like that, but he might as well have just said, yeah, we're going to wait and we'll see what happens. But I kind of knew I wasn't even sad about that because it was kind of a last ditch pitch, right? I'm going to send these in. I don't think they're going to take them, but let's see. Let's see what happens, right? I have nothing to lose. It didn't cost me anything other than the time it took to write up the pitches. And I have the pitches because these are all books that I want to write and would be willing to write.

[01:05:54.850] - Mike
But if they don't want to work with me, I'm still going to write books because I still think I have things to say and I'm going to find someone to pay me to do it. And if that's an audio company, it's an audio company.

[01:06:04.530] - Sunyi
Do you think that there are things that people can do promotion wise which actually make a difference for launch sales and preorders? And I think I remember we were talking a little bit about this in Discord in regards to making lists of reviewers and concrete things like that. And this is another one of the listener submitted questions I think is a good one, and I might ask a social media person more on it, but I thought you might have some pretty good practical advice for that.

[01:06:30.670] - Mike
Everything that you can mentally, you want to come out of this believing you did everything that you could possibly do. Okay. When I went on Sub, everyone talks about how bad sub was. I was so chill on Sub because I believed at that time I had written the best book I could possibly write. I believe my agent wrote the best pitch she could possibly write, and I believed we sent it to all the editors who made sense for that book. And anything else that happened was beyond my control. An editor was going to decide to buy it or not, and there was nothing I could do to influence that. And the same thing goes with marketing and with everything else. You can't market your own book to success. You just can't. Right. That's the publisher. They can get you placement in bookstores that changes the way your book sells. If you listen to episode two where the booksellers came on and told you where you are in the store is the most important thing to whether you sell or not. You can't control that. If you go to your local Barnes and Noble and say, please put my book in the front of the store, they're going to say, that costs this month money, and it comes through your publisher, they will not do it.

[01:07:52.410] - Mike
They might have a local author's table. I mean, I've seen that occasionally, but generally speaking, those are paid spots, and your publisher either paid for that spot, or they did not pay for that spot. Right. Advertising. Your publisher either advertised, they went out, and they sold hard to get extra copies of your book in store, or they did not. And you're not really going to know because it's all invisible. Anyone who says, my publisher didn't do any marketing for me, you don't know that is your book in a store, then someone did some marketing for you because it doesn't get to store by accident. Somebody got that book into a store. It might not be the marketing you want. It's certainly not the marketing you see. But nobody in the bookstore went into the 600 book book catalog and said, well, I got to have that one without the editor doing something right. If you're with the big five, you're probably going to be assigned a publicist, and you're going to be unless you're a lead title. And I'm not going to talk about lead titles, okay? Because lead titles, it's a different world, and you need to get somebody else to talk about that.

[01:08:54.090] - Mike
So let me just talk about what you can do as a midlist author, okay? So you're going to be assigned a publicist. That publicist is not assigned to you. It's assigned to your book. And that publicist has... first of all, if you're a midlister, you'renot getting a publicist. You're getting the publicist's assistant. They are probably 23. It's probably their first job in the industry coming right out of college, and nothing against that. Everyone starts somewhere, but they are a publishing assistant. They are woefully underpaid. And if you're a publisher and you're listening to this, pay your people better, and we'll get better results because they'll stay in the job. I have been through four publicists with Harper on four books. I had one for my first two books, one for my third book, and then two for my fourth book, and I will get a new one for my fifth book. At some point here in the very near future, they will assign me an assistant publicist, and that publicist will have 20 or 30 or 50 I don't know how many, a lot of books over multiple imprints. My publicist, when that person is assigned, will have books from William Morrow, as well as Harper Voyager, and maybe more.

[01:10:06.440] - Mike
Okay. Other harper imprints. And they will have a list of things that they are going to do, and they are going to have way too much work to do, and it's not their fault. So don't yell at your underpaid publicist, but understand that they're not going to do everything you want them to do because they can't. All right, so how do you work on that? Well, something that I kind of figured during after my first book was I hold a whole bunch of people reviewed my first book. So I kept a list of all those people, and now I hand that list to my next publicist and say, hey, here's all the people I would like to get my book to because they've shown love to my previous work and they are inclined by just knowing my name, to maybe give this book a look. And so I'm going to try to get it out to reviewers. If you're a debut, that's a lot harder, right. Because you're not going to know as much stuff. But one thing you can do is figure out who reviews the kind of books that you are and then likes them.

[01:11:07.060] - Mike
So in your head, who are your comps of, hey, if you like this reader, if you like this writer, you're going to like me. If you like this book, you're going to like my book and figure out who that is and then look at who's done positive reviews on that book and make a list and hand it to your publicist. Will they send it to those people? I don't know, but you just made it a lot easier when you make their job easier, and they can now go to their boss and say, I sent it to these 15 people who all have positive views of this part of the genre, and maybe they like it. You're giving them a way to look good without having to do the work because you did the work for them. If you count on your publicist to go do everything that I just said, good luck. That's probably not going to happen because they don't have time, and that's not their fault. And you could be mad about it if you want, okay. And maybe you are, and maybe that's okay. And maybe you should be mad that they are not doing as much as they should.

[01:11:59.640] - Mike
That's the publicist job. That's the publisher's job, to publicize my book. Okay? You can want on one side and just face reality on another side. And the reality is that publicist is going to do whatever they have to do to fulfill their job, and you don't pay their check. And you could be mad about it, or you can work and do everything in your possibility, everything possible if you're.

[01:12:21.720] - Scott
Mid list or even below midlist. Right. Your book doesn't pay anybody's paycheck. That's right. Yeah. Not only do you not matter to them on a personal level, your book isn't first on their list to do anything for.

[01:12:39.250] - Mike
That's true. Yeah. And it gets worse as it goes, right. Which for those of you who are having book two come out, I have some bad news for you, you're going to get less support on book two than you got on book one, right? Because you're already capped they're counting on book one to sell book two.

[01:12:59.360] - Scott
Yeah. Thanks, Mike. I mean, just to echo what Sunyi said earlier on, right? Like the formation of this group, but specifically you coming in and having a lot of that earned knowledge and being willing to share that with our group was a huge turning point in maybe not my publishing career, but at least how I looked at my publishing career and how I was able to cope and kind of maybe recenter or recalibrate how I am going to proceed from here. Thanks for that and thanks for coming on and sharing a bit of that with everybody.

[01:13:38.690] - Sunyi
You've been listening to the Publishing Radio podcast with Sunny Dean and Sunyi Drakeford. Tune in next time for more in depth discussion on everything publishing industry. See you later.