[00:00:00.570] - Sunyi Hi, I'm Sunyi Dean. [00:00:03.690] - Scott And I'm Scott 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. [00:00:59.570] - Sunyi Okay, I need to stop drinking or we will not get through this. Now I'll just do some kind of lazy intro. We started this podcast with the premise of looking at how our different book deals settle some different paths in publishing, even though we had the same publisher genre debut year. And since then, we've had a good group of guests come and talk to us about their knowledge, their experience, with more on the way who are all looking forward to talking to. But now that we have ourselves a bit more information, we're going to drill down and actually talk about what those paths have translated to in terms of sales. So this is a fun and scary episode. We're going to focus on the months surrounding each of our launch dates because I want listeners to maybe have a really holistic understanding of all the different factors in play. And that means looking at what pubs aren't or aren't or are not doing what we were weren't doing, and looking at the damage. I e the hard sales data in those early months. So, caveat, I don't have my royalty statement, I've just got some sales figures from an editor. [00:02:01.180] - Sunyi But we'll look at that anyway. Yeah. And just as a starting point, we've got some listener questions on sales, marketing and promotion and what makes the difference. And I wasn't going to get into that a whole lot because we've got like three different people coming on in the next few months. Someone who's worked in publicity from the publisher side, someone who's worked in publicity from the media side, and someone who did a whole PhD in marketing and sales in publishing. So their answers will be more informed than us. But we can address the one thing that we think made a lot of difference that we definitely saw, and that's arcs and also tied into that goodreads influencers and trade reviews. So I was going to start by addressing those in the context of our launch months and why I think they made a difference. So just for a recap, in case other people haven't listened to other episodes. Feel free to talk about your arc experience, Scott. [00:02:50.300] - Scott yeah, I'm trying to remember what I said in episode one, to be honest with you, in our first discussion. [00:03:00.030] - Sunyi Something along the lines of Tor saying, we're not doing arcs anymore. [00:03:03.190] - Scott Yes, they did say that. [00:03:05.440] - Scott Well, so the context I'll give is that along the way and I took quite a while between signing and finally debuting, and I think we went over all that in the lead up. I tried to do some interesting things, and this is on my mind because of the whole Brandon Sanderson thing that's swirling around and the quotes in whatever nicer publication did an interview with him where Sanderson basically says, publishers, they just do what they're going to do. And they don't listen to even Sanderson when he says, hey, I want to do XYZ. Different things. Well, I tried a few different things when I was launching to try to maybe punch above my weight of the deal that I signed, because I realized that I signed a small deal, but I was still hoping to get a fair shot at selling well and having a real career in writing. So one thing I tried to do was I tried to give 2% of my royalties, kind of like you would with an agent at 15%, but I tried to offer like a two to 3%, just a small little bit, but hopefully meaningful, and try to start a trend there. [00:04:19.120] - Scott I tried to give that to my editor, and they said, we don't do that. And it was just shut down pretty immediately. Right before launch, I asked if I could give back all of my advance that I had gotten on signing and put all of my future advance contractually toward marketing. At the time, I had a pretty lucrative career going of my own, which I'm not currently doing, which is something we can get into later. But I said, hey, I'd love to just put my entire advance into marketing, especially if you guys would put some kicker into it, since I'm foregoing all advance, or I'd be willing to forego all advance. And they said, no, we don't do that. So they just said no. Then when it came time to launch, finally launch, right? So my date had been moved two, three, four times, something like that. And it was around Christmas time, maybe November in 2021. And my book was due to come out in 2022. Original date was January 25. It got moved to February 8. I said, hey, I'm given to understand that there's like, a marketing meeting that is supposed to happen. [00:05:31.680] - Scott And maybe it was in October, I can't remember. But me being the person I am, I'm like, what are we doing? Let's get this going. I want to know everything about our plans. I want to help. I want to be proactive. I want to do something to try to be successful with this. I've put thousands of hours, years of my life into writing this and more hope than I should have, right? Which is probably the bigger thing. And it just was like, oh, we don't have definite plans. Oh, we don't have definite plans. And then eventually, there was, oh, here's your marketing people. Say hello. And it was just an email. It was my publicist that had been assigned who then kicked it off to another publicist and the marketing person, which, by the way, shout out, rachel, you are a very big bright spot at Tor. I, and everybody that's worked with you greatly appreciates you. She runs the Tor social media and blog, so, like, the Tor Forge blog and does most of the marketing stuff that I see, at least. So anyway, I was like, okay, when do we get Arcs, right? [00:06:35.630] - Scott Because I knew about Arcs, and I had seen and I tried to learn on my own as best I could, what publishers were doing for authors that went well, and that seemed to be a big thing. It was at this very same time.... So Richard Swan and I published right about the same time, right? And Orbit did 100 special edition Arcs, like, signed and numbered for him. And I saw those going out to the same people that I was trying to send e-arcs to, because all I got from Tor was, oh, we sent out some e-arcs to trade and a few reviewers, and we cast a wide net phrases like that that just don't mean anything. And I couldn't get definite names, so I tried to send out e-arcs the best I could, but, yeah, so Richard had those coming out, and I didn't know him well at the time. Then I saw just regular Arcs of his coming out, just surfacing on social media wherever else at the same time. And I was like, damn, they're doing a really good job with him. That's really awesome. So I'm trying to follow up on getting Arcs for my book, and I get the answer back that, oh, we're not doing Arcs anymore. [00:07:45.330] - Scott People aren't in their offices to receive Arcs. And this is at the end of 2021, right, and early 2022. And I'm like, I know for a fact that's not the case, right? You know, there there wasn't a whole whole lot of point in arguing, but, like, I looked up every single other Tor book coming out at the same time. They all had arcs. I looked up every other debut coming out at the same time. They all had arcs. Physical Arcs advanced reader copies. That was about when I knew that I was in trouble. I panicked quite a bit, and I talked to my agent about hiring myown publicist. Matt Bialer, my agent was like, I generally don't... he doesn't recommend it, is what he told me, basically. But he said, if you're determined to do it, I'll do my best to help you find the best one. And he gave me a recommendation of one that I actually didn't end up going with because they wanted like 16 grand for a two or three month commitment. [00:08:51.830] - Sunyi Jesus! Sorry. [00:08:53.850] - Scott They actually have a lot of Sci-Fi and fantasy clients that sign up for that firm, and they're pretty good ex-industry people. So, like ex-Tor. And I didn't end up going with them, but I almost wish I had, even though it's expensive. But anyway, I didn't go with them because I got a recommendation for somebody who was kind of just doing it on the side, had recently left the industry. They had been at two different Sci-Fi and fantasy imprints in the US. Doing publicity on some really big books that punched above their weight in terms of what they had been allotted from the get go and what they eventually did in the market. And so I thought, okay, that's great. And they were doing it on the side, just getting started. So they were half the cost of the other, so eight grand. And I was like, okay, that sucks, but I've been paid a little bit more than that. This is basically me doing what I had asked to do through Tor. Me basically putting my entire advance for the first book, at least post tax advance, into trying to make it successful. [00:10:05.870] - Scott Because I knew that you take 30 grand for three books and you know, that's not going to move the needle, and you're going to have to way out-earn, and this just has to be the start of your career. That publicist, and I'm not mentioning their name on purpose just because I don't want it to seem like I'm throwing them under the bus, because I do think they were well intentioned, and I do think they tried with quite a few different things. They set up a few things that I honestly could have probably set up myself in terms of like blog guest posts. So like the Scalzi guest post, a few other things. But their other big thing was they had curated over the years in the industry a list of indie bookshops, right, and contacts and addresses of those specific booksellers, current booksellers at those indie bookshops. And so Tor seems pretty good at getting books into Barnes and Noble. I don't know how good they are at getting into indie bookshops. So this publicist blessed their heart, gave me that list of about 200, I think it was, indie bookshops. Well, they handed it over to Tor and me and said, hey, we want to get finished copies out to these bookstores in lieu of physical arcs that didn't go out because we know that physical copies make a difference in terms of getting attention. [00:11:30.490] - Scott And I said, I will pay for those books. I will pay for them. I'll even pay shipping. I just want you guys to send it out because it needs to look legit. And I wrote a letter, this publicist, again, third party publicist, had me write a letter, as is pretty common, to go with those books. Like, would go out with an Arc because Tor had a book seller letter. Yeah, tor said no. So they went to the marketing director or something like that, publicity director, I don't know. They did the old my wife says no trick, and my wife won't let me. Right. My boss won't let me. And so they said no. And that's when I really knew that things were going to go south. And my book was put on Edelweiss and Netgalley, and a few people found it through there. I sent out finished copies of my own. So, like, I got my author copies, and then I bought a box of books as well to send out. So I sent out I've probably sent out 30, 40, 50 books to date with varying degrees of success. Like, most of them got it and did, like, a little post of, oh, I got this cool book, and then they threw it in a box in their back room and never looked at it again. [00:12:50.630] - Scott I've gotten a few reviews that way, though, and several of them have been very kind and very good, and I wouldn't have got those otherwise. So, long story short, that's my experience with Arcs is not getting them. And to anyone listening that's up and coming in the industry, I would push very hard for Arcs, and I would push very hard to understand exactly where those Arcs are going and especially look at places they could go that might multiply sales. Right. If that person likes your book, and they might not, that's the other risk you run. But if that person likes your book, it could turn into a whole lot more sales. So that's booksellers who are day in, day out selling books, big influencers, et cetera. But I feel like you should talk about that because you actually had that happen. [00:13:45.430] - Sunyi Oh, man. I guess. Okay. The thing I'm going to say before I get into this is my main point here is please don't crucify me. But also, if your publisher tells you, and I've heard publishers say this, that Arcs don't matter, I'm not going to say that they're lying, but I will tell you that I don't agree and that I don't think that the people in charge of my marketing and publicity would agree either, or they wouldn't have sent so many. We'll hear about it more. But basically, when Robin and Michael Sullivan's episode drop, they talk a lot about how Robin listed what she think is the keys to success. Write a good book. And then she defines what that means and get in front of some people who will like it and wash, rinse, repeat. And it sounds simple, but I do agree with her. I think when you know your audience, you find your audience, you get the book to them. You hope a small percentage of them will push that book to other people. That's what arcs do. That's what publishers do. That's how they work. They sell their books to booksellers. [00:14:45.440] - Sunyi And if you get ten booksellers to love a book, they each sell ten copies. You sold 100 books by convincing ten people to love it. But that's hard to do if you're a debut. So that's why Arcs are important. So I said in an earlier episode that I didn't know how many Arcs I had, and I completely forgot to come back to that in that episode and say that I can guess, which is like, a massively important bit. So this is going to be long. We started out with print galleys. Print galleys are the bound versions of your manuscripts. Those are not easy to get. I know that my editor pushed for them, and we were lucky to get them, especially during COVID 2020. I don't know how many went out, but basically these were sent out to, like, yeah, James Rollins, Shannon Maguire, a bunch of booksellers who were hand picked, right? So that's the main thing. Your publicity team go through, and they pick people who they think will like this book because they don't want to send it out and have someone come back and be like, oh, this was garbage, right? Because that defeats the point of buzz. [00:15:47.070] - Sunyi After that, we then started with the Arcs, and the Arcs were again, they have a soft copy. They're kind of like cheap paperbacks and quality. I got arcs from Tor. First of all, they said, how many do you want? And then they said, well, we can only give you eleven. When I said I wasn't sure and I was like, okay. And then they sent me 15 anyway. So I think they just filled the box because it filled the box, and I got 25 from Harper, I think. So my UK my American arcs look different. I shifted all of those as the buzz was building, and booksellers and reviewers were looking for Arcs if they weren't getting them off Natgalley. I was reaching out on social media saying, hey, give me your address. I'll post it. I spent $300 in postage that year, and I don't regret it. In addition to that, Tor ran a goodreads giveaway, which I'm going to get into in a minute, because goodreads is really important. They gave away 50 print Arcs in that giveaway. They ran a second giveaway. Later, they gave away 50 print copies. Book Eaters was also a feature title in something called Shelf Awareness. [00:16:51.070] - Sunyi If you don't know what shelf awareness is, look it up. It's basically an industry newsletter that goes out to about 450,000 people. So when I tell you in later episodes that I don't think my lack of social media made a difference, that's why I will never have a newsletter that has half a million people on it. Right? And on top of that, there were about 200 Arcs, I think, mailed to Indie Booksellers. I don't even know how many went out in white box mailing. I know that 450 stores are on that list. I don't know if they all got an Arc or if some of them got an Arc or what went on with that. And that was the American side. On the UK side, I went through two of those 25 Arc boxes. One I gave up myself and then one closer to Time Harper came out and they're like, Right, we have this publicity thing we're doing where we want you to take cake pops shaped like your book because it's Book Eaters, you're going to eat the book. Right? Go around to stores. Do you have any Arcs left to do this? [00:17:43.590] - Sunyi I was like, no, I use them all. So they sent me another box, and then they were handing it out like candy. I mean, they were just, like, throwing Arcs at people. They had custom bookmarks, which I've never seen one of I don't know how many Arcs went out. If I had to get us, it would be low estimate, 700 at least. And I don't want people listening to this to hate me, right? But it's like I was tracking the stuff because I've had friends have had all the promises and the promises fall through or they haven't had any promises and it didn't work. And I was keeping track of stuff. [00:18:14.720] - Scott Another lead debut friend of ours said that they got approximately that many. They estimated 1000. Yeah, 1000 Arcs for their book. [00:18:24.820] - Sunyi I would say 700 to 1000 is the ballpark estimate for Arcs that were given out. [00:18:28.580] - Scott And that's physical arcs. Right. That's not netgalley. That's not ercs that were available elsewhere. Right? [00:18:35.580] - Sunyi Yeah. And that doesn't count the audio Arcs as well. I know Libro FM did a giveaway with it. I think it was like 50 downloads that they gave away of Book Eaters. So I had a marketing plan for Book Eaters and I had a separate audio marketing plan that was totally different. So it was like a whole thing. Yeah, I remember, yeah, between those two, they were counting the buzz. And I remember an article came out from Waterstones at one point which said, oh, everyone is talking about this new word of mouth sensation Book Eaters. And it just made me laugh out loud. Folks, books, okay? Word of mouth is bullshit. Right? Occasionally it happens once in a blue moon. There is a book that organically gets word of mouth support despite having no budget and no push. But you're talking about like 50 Shades of Gray. Like that's your once in a blue moon, right? [00:19:33.960] - Scott Well, and I I think so. We're talking to Nick Eames tomorrow and I think his his book kind of fell in that category. Maybe not zero to hero all the way. But I know he's mentioned that. [00:19:49.520] - Sunyi Yeah. But I think basically it doesn't happen without push. And at a very basic level, the word cannot mouth unless it has a book to mouth about. That's a really terrible metaphor. [00:20:04.770] - Scott Yeah, it has to hit a certain number of people to get that, because, and this is something I've thought a lot about stressing about reviews and goodreads reviews and stuff over the last year, plus it really doesn't matter. And looking at other books that have sold a shit ton of books and seeing widely varying goodread scores for that and realizing that goodread scores don't matter for shit, what really matters is finding enough of those people who really love your book. It doesn't matter how many bad reviews you get in the meantime, you have to find that population of people who love your book. And unless it gets to a certain number of people total, and it'd be even better if it were targeted, but unless it gets to a certain number of people total yeah. You're just never, ever going to have. [00:20:58.640] - Sunyi And I remember that's something Richard said. He talked about his editor saying, we can't push a book forever. They push it to try and generate word of mouth, and if it doesn't self sustain, then they drop you like a sack of shit, I think was his phrase. But they try for the lead titles. They're trying to get that word of mouth to happen, and then once it does, it just kind of runs and builds itself. But it's really difficult for it to happen without somebody... without the right people excited. Usually that starts with your editor, and that feeds to the marketing team, which feeds to the booksellers. If the right people are excited, it will sell. So even though my rating on goodreads is not very good, but the right people were excited about it, that enough people keep trying it, I guess. [00:21:42.750] - Scott I mean, the scores that are out there, whether it's goodreads or Amazon or whatever else, can be indicative of so many different things. It's not just cut and dry. Is this good? Is this not it's? Did it hit the right people who like this book? Your main character is a lesbian, right? Is that too much of a spoiler? That's going to piss off a lot of people. A lot of people are going to hate it just for that. [00:22:13.640] - Sunyi Yeah, my parents. [00:22:16.410] - Scott Yeah, exactly. And in your book, the parent child relationship isn't like this sparkling happy thing all the time. Right? It's really an exploration of a pretty fucking dark scenario. [00:22:35.800] - Sunyi That's the same thing for Emrael. I think there's something going on there with Emrael, with readers who are not willing to wait for a character to grow up, I guess, and to follow the arc anymore. I know you've suffered from some reviews from that. [00:22:49.780] - Scott Learned that the hard way. [00:22:51.000] - Sunyi Yeah, no, it's fine. They're always good interruptions. I was just going to say that I felt like I could measure the buzz because I don't trust anything. I guess, in my life. I feel like every time something good has started to happen, something bad has come around to knock it down. So I just did not trust all the good fortune. So I was keeping an eye on stuff and I found that Goodreads was actually a really interesting thing to study if you're some kind of autistic obsessive like I am. I spent ages looking at books in my debut year and books in previous couple of years that come out on Goodreads. And what I found is that books that basically were lead titles and were hitting list reliably had about 35,002 reads on their Goodread profile and that this was like a thing, it was fairly consistent and other books kind of fell in between that and there was a lot of variance. But it was like 35 to 40,000 means you're probably going to hit some lists at least on the UK side when you come out for our genre, I feel like. So I was keeping track of that. [00:23:55.640] - Sunyi I was tracking Edelweiss. If you are worried about whether booksellers are even finding your book, Edelweiss will let you know. You can look on your book's profile and it just lists like how many comments the comments are basically reviews, like reviews that your book has. And I was like watching that tick up and I was tracking it month by month. I was keeping track of other books at like a few months ahead or behind mine because I'm definitely not a sad obsessive and just because I was terrified that it wouldn't pan out and all the signs were good. But that's also how when I was looking at yours I was like, it's not getting any bookseller movement. This guy's getting hosed. Which is why I sort of like guiltily sharing all your Twitter posts. [00:24:37.960] - Scott Well, thank you for taking pity on me. (laughing) [00:24:43.610] - Sunyi But you can tell when they're not spending the money on it. We had a question, someone asking what to pub spend on narrators and covers. Right. And yeah, the thing is this is very tied to your status with the publisher and the answer is it varies. Narrators I think Michael Mama is telling us narrators vary from 200 to 1000. That's assuming you don't get a celebrity. If you get a celebrity. My God, I don't even know how much that cost. [00:25:09.840] - Scott Finished hours. Yeah. [00:25:12.770] - Sunyi For a cover artist, the sky is the limit. I mean, there are people who are basically getting clip art book covers. I wish I was even joking. Some people on my debut year literally got clip art book covers and it was really bad that the publisher did that to them. My American book cover, I don't even want to know how much that cost because they hired this British artist when I say she's well known. Her work appears on Art Syllabuses in high schools here, and she does like paper art, where she cuts up books and makes into shapes, which is what the cover of Book Eaters is. And she took a photo with her daughter, and then she made that photo into a cutout and she cut it out using books that are referenced in my novel. And then back and forth, a tour on the lighting and the positioning. And then a photographer comes in, takes the pictures, like... Jesus fuck, they spent so much on they must have spent so much on this cover. Like, more money than I'd ever had in my life was probably spent on this cover because at the time, it only ever had about like two grand in my account, ever. [00:26:13.990] - Sunyi I didn't ask them. I don't know. But the point is, it really varies. And it varies depending on what your publisher is willing to do. I know that. Was it david Dalglish? I remember watching an Orbit video how they actually did like, a live action photo shoot for his covers. It was really cool. It's on YouTube, you can look at it and they photograph this guy dressed as an assassin jumping in the air with blades. It's great. [00:26:37.230] - Scott And one thing I keep coming back to is just all the signals I got that, oh, maybe Tor actually cares about this, and then, oh, maybe they don't. Right. Like them fighting very hard for the title Rise of the Mages instead of the title I had and I liked that was just ire. I thought it was a sign of them wanting to push it and knowing what would hit the market well, and whatever else. Right, because they were very adamant on that. But I mean, I saw all the same things you did. Right. I saw on Adelweis I still to this day, I think, have like five people from the bookselling community that bothered to review it. And I mentioned all the things oh, one more thing I didn't get is, like, books they care about. Get those graphics where they put together all your quotes and all your blurbs and they have a little thing that they put together to incentivize, basically just to get people to look at it and to make it easier. For booksellers to look at something and quickly determine whether they care about it. [00:27:41.110] - Sunyi And how hard they try to get you blurbs as well. That really varies. [00:27:44.430] - Scott Yeah, but to be fair, I didn't mention the things that I did get. So when they told me no to me buying and sending out finished copies to booksellers, which I probably should have just done myself, but at that point. [00:28:05.610] - Sunyi It'S hard, you don't know. [00:28:07.370] - Scott Yeah, I got a little bit well, yeah, I got a bit depressed about how things were going at that point. And I had some other shit going on in my life at. That point. Right. But they did say that they were going to send the bookseller letter out to their own list of bookstores that they keep in contact with, which I wasn't given that list. I don't know if it cross referenced well with the indies list that my own publicist had, but they sent out my bookseller letter in an email and an invite to go download the book on netgalley. Whether that worked and did anything, I don't know. They at least presumably did that. They did do a goodreads giveaway of finished copies. I don't remember if it was 25 or 50, but it was a decent giveaway. So they did do that. They got me, I think, two Tor Forge blogs. So I got my excerpt put up maybe at the same time as my map reveal, and then I think I had another one. I can't remember. No, that was the two, the excerpt and the map reveal that I had a blog to go with it and then like two or three social media posts and they inexplicably bought a lightspeed ad for my book just for the few days around launch that was at the bottom left of the Lightspeed homepage. [00:29:31.150] - Scott So those are the things I did get, and I did have a blog post on Scalzi's blog, but that's about it. [00:29:37.640] - Sunyi And they sub trade, making them pay attention to them more, I will quickly say, on trades, like if you get the trade reviews, it's good, and if you get a starred one, it's good because books always do pay attention to those. So it does boost sales. It does increase things like getting backing from say, Junior Library Guild, which happened for book eaters, but if you don't get them, it's not going to tank the book either. Most books don't get them. [00:30:07.970] - Scott Yeah, I think I got one from like Midwest Book Review or something I had never heard of, but it's targeted straight at libraries. And we're going to get into our estimated sales, I guess, right, at some point. And I suspect that a big portion of the sales that were unexpected on my end came from the library scene. So whether it was that trade review that was very positive, or whether it was some sales rep that happened to love the cover. [00:30:44.770] - Sunyi If you're ranking them, publishers weekly really. [00:30:48.080] - Sunyi Because if you get, say, starred review and publishers weekly, there's basically a section in every edition of PW, which is like, here are all the books that have a star. If you're a busy bookseller, you're going to just look at that section, be like, right, we're going to get the interesting ones. Just have a star. It shortcuts things, but other books do get bought. And if you get hosed by review, it didn't seem to matter too much. [00:31:16.490] - Scott Did you get a star from Publisher? [00:31:18.030] - Sunyi I think I got a star from everywhere except Kirkus. I'm so sorry hahaha. [00:31:22.250] - Scott God damn. Sunyi good for you. You don't need to be sorry for this. Sunyi, that's fantastic. That's amazing. I didn't and in fact, it was actually a nice review. I remember Publishers Weekly specifically because it was actually a quite nice review if you read it. But they led with a joke, a quip about it being a plural title, even though it's about primarily one character, one mage, even though it's Rise of the Mages. I was like, really, man? That's what you decide to critique up front? Crap title that I didn't even get to choose? [00:32:01.030] - Sunyi It's a total crapshoot. We have a friend, her Publisher's Weekly review had the plot wrong when they summarized it and they gave away spoilers. You don't know who's reading these reviews. You don't know who's writing them. Sorry, we're reading them. I will say, for the goodread stuff, just to briefly wrap up something on that, your publisher, or at least my publisher, did pay attention to those numbers. I know that they were paying attention to how many people entered the giveaways, because they told me proudly in an email, oh, this many people entered in a giveaway and that's good. So they're watching. They do pay attention to the To-Reads. Because if you've ever wondered how books get added to lists or to goodreads articles where they're showcased, or to Goodreads Choice Awards at the end of the year, your To- Reads adds are a big contributing factor that, as far as I can tell, someone is going through it, going so, like Book Eaters is on some of these most anticipated books. Whatever for goodreads lists. How do they get those? Well, they go through it and they go well, these books all have above, I don't know, 10k to read ads. [00:33:10.270] - Sunyi It just builds, isn't it? It's cyclical. It kind of all builds on itself, actually. Yeah. [00:33:21.950] - Scott I have a question for you there, actually so the only thing I saw with my book that reliably increased the To Reads numbers on Goodreads was Goodreads Giveaways. So I saw it at launch. So they did a giveaway at launch, and then they did a giveaway when my paperback copy of the book came out. And each time I got like, I don't know, somewhere in the ballpark of like, 3002 Reads, and that's the vast majority of my 7500 total. But nothing other than the Goodreads Giveaways seemed to budge that number. Did you see anything that made a difference in your numbers to get it above that 35, 40K that you mentioned earlier? [00:34:14.530] - Sunyi Yes, because I'm obsessive and sad. So I did actually track the spikes in ads. So I mentioned, like, the newsletter one that spiked it when it went up to a kind of shelf globe with its 440k subscribers. There was a spike there. Oh, yeah. [00:34:30.020] - Scott I would imagine. [00:34:32.150] - Sunyi Because they stagger it, right? They planned it. So by the time they did the Good Reads giveaway, there was a lot of buzz. And everyone who enters a giveaway gets added to your to-reads automatically. So my first giveaway ended up with like 19,000 people requesting, which blew my mind because my partner went to a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert last year that had 15,000 people and he sent me pictures and it made me feel ill. So the idea of that many people requesting my book also made me feel ill in a good way, I guess. Yeah. So the goodreads ones are big, big authors. Doing Shoutouts was a huge one. Ve Schwab was sent a copy by Harper, which kind of had me panicking a bit. And I think she put it on her Instagram story a couple of times. Every time she did, it spiked the ads. When she blurbed it, it spiked. When Shannon Maguire tweeted about my book early, it spiked. When Tor did the big announcements, it spiked. So stuff like that. And then I think when they were doing the waves of arcs, it would just kind of pick up. [00:35:35.690] - Sunyi And I guess the illumicrate thing was huge as well. The illumicrate one gets a lot of people adding it because they're all like, all right, it's going to be out in this month, and then they all add it because they're expecting to get it. So it's lots of different things, which is what it comes down to. Right. It was like when pubs are trying to put the effort in, they just, they try everything. They just throw all the things at the wall and they hope some of them stick. They hope as many of them as possible stick rather than spreading those resources a bit among books. [00:36:03.230] - Scott So, I mean, we've talked a bit about what we did and didn't get what we think may have made an impact and not we had planned to kind of talk about how that translated into sales, at least our best estimates of sales. Right. Do we want to get into that still? [00:36:21.690] - Sunyi Feel free. [00:36:23.770] - Scott Oh, good. [00:36:25.020] - Sunyi If you're with Macmillan, you're not going to get a sales portal. I'm just going to tell folks up front they don't have one. Your editor-- [00:36:31.410] - Scott Yeah, they can run a sales report. But I'm told yeah, there's a few different things. Right. So via Amazon, you can create an author account and you have access to book scan numbers for your book. There you can get an author report from your editor. Or some imprints seem to have portals for their authors. Like, didn't Mike say Harper has one for him? The the issue is even the reports that, you know, tour editors are running for their authors, they know that it doesn't include certain institutional buys in particular. So library purchases, whatever else. But they also, like book scan admit up front that their numbers are probably only about 80%. Correct. And they tend to say or at least claim that they're 80% of the projected total ish. But it could go either way. So I got my royalty statement, my first royalty statement from tor, and out of all the things that might get me slapped by my publisher on this podcast, I'd guess this is close to it, but I'm going to talk to it anyway. Via book scan and the author reports that I had gotten infrequently through my agent and through tour, I had reason to believe that I probably had somewhere in the ballpark of like 3000 sales between hardcover and ebook, which is like, well, that's probably 3000 more than I would have gotten if I had gone indie. [00:38:09.680] - Scott But 3000 is certainly a far cry from where I had hoped to be and why I got into this business. But I got this royalty statement that's for the period ending June 2022. So this would have been just for the first almost five months, I guess. The royalty statement shows that they shipped somewhere around 8100 books, 8100 hard copies. We had just under 2800 returns by the end of June. So from February 8 to the end of June, bookstores had given up on 2800 copies. Now tor more or less, and publishers, as far as I can tell, more or less accept that period, and then they apply a reserve against returns beyond that to account for future returns. And I'm expecting more returns to come in beyond that. Especially, I think bookstores probably returned my hardcover when the paperback came out. Per our discussion with JT and his bookseller friends from aunties, it seems like there are probably pretty different periods for when different bookstores return things. But especially at Barnes and noble, I've checked periodically, and it seems like they have my hardcover in stock or had my hardcover in stock at a lot of stores up to that point. [00:39:39.420] - Scott So I might not actually know my real sales until not even this next period. I probably won't know until the one after that that we get in like, September. That is for ending June 2023. But per the royalty statement that I have, they're estimating that we have just over 5100 sales of hardcover and 563 ebook sales through those first five months, which is pretty decent. So my sales, per the royalty statement, are about double what other sources of information were telling me, which was a surprise to the upside. So that was good. Something good must have happened, whether it's an actual sale or even just bookstores keeping my book on shelves longer than planned for whatever reason. Now, they did apply a $5,900 reserve against returns, which more or less equates to them saying, we think that another 2000 books might be returned. But even with that reserve against returns, they're saying that 3000 ish hardcovers is a safe number per their accounting folks that they think will have sold through that June 2022 period. So better than I thought I'd be getting. And I'm told by people that those numbers, especially if the 5000 plus sales of hardcover in the first six months, first year ends up being the truth, that that's actually a pretty good number. My agent was pretty stoked about that. Other people I've talked to have said, yeah, that's actually not bad, especially for not getting a whole lot of push up front, right, with the debut release. But it's certainly not in the same ballpark of what happened for you. Right? (laughing) [00:41:43.710] - Sunyi I'm not sure.... (sigh) these conversations are so awkward. [00:41:49.650] - Scott Well, I mean, you don't have to share anything you don't want to, let's say that up front, but it's not awkward for me. I can make it awkward the other way afterwards if you want. [00:42:00.940] - Sunyi That's fine. So I don't have royalty statements, and if you're a Macmillan author, you don't have any access to your sales other than what your editor gives you. I will say that you can request figures from your editor. They usually know within a couple of weeks at least on their side, what their figures are accurate or not, I don't know, but it is there, so if anyone's telling you it's not there, I'd be asking them to check again, maybe. Right? We'll talk about the US side first. The US side, I think as of November 22, that the most accurate figures I'd had from Tor was about 18.5K copies, which was mostly hardcover. I think it was like eleven K hardcover. And then ebook was no Canadian paperback, weirdly was the next biggest one because they don't do hardbacks in Canada. And then ebook and then audio, and that was because their equivalent of Barnes and Noble picked book eaters for like their book of the month when it came out or something. And so that was a big boost. The last time I checked in with my editor, they didn't have figures in front of them, but basically in February I was roundabout. [00:43:13.070] - Sunyi They think 30K for the US side, which I'm really happy with and Tor was very happy with. So on the UK side, I know both more and less than I do about the American side, and that's because I haven't really had any sales figures at all from Harper, aside from the first week and some of the promos they've done. And I have a general sense from booksellers that it's selling well, but of course that's not the same as a hard figure, but I will share what I know. So I'm going to start off by saying my UK side overperforms significantly. I attribute that to the fact that Harper are a marketing machine who have every part of the book market just sewn up from top to bottom, and a great deal of luck, and the fact that it's a book set in England and that attracts English people because we love to navel gaze. My UK book deal, for those who don't remember the details or who are joining the podcast for the first time, my UK deal was 35,000 for three books, which is about 15% of the american deal, which was 300K for three books. [00:44:26.150] - Sunyi That's about standard for a smaller territory like the UK. And generally, if you are lucky enough to have your rights split across North America and UK territories, your UK territory will sell for 12-15% of the USA one usually. And that's just because our country is a lot smaller than America, right? So there's less people and there's less of a market, although the market is here solid. So, bearing that in mind, Harper offered me a deal that was appropriate for the situation. Book Eaters did overperform, largely due to the crates, and I know that it overperformed because I received a royalty check earlier this week, which means that I have earned out my entire trilogy on just Book Eater sales alone, and that I've done so within the first six months of launch, which staggered me. I wasn't expecting it because I hadn't received sales data. I know that for the first week, Book Eaters sold about 5500 in in pre orders and a little bit was the special edition. Some of them were counted into that. And then in total there were about 22,000 various special editions, crate editions floating around that we managed to get the book into, and those all came out round about September, although I don't have a royalty statement yet and I won't get one for another few weeks, despite being paid royalties, which is really odd. [00:46:00.380] - Sunyi I would estimate that the Book Eaters has shifted at least 30K copies or so in the UK. And that means my best guess for my sales in North America and UK Commonwealth territories combined is about 60K copies. And the thing that I really want to point out here is the ratio of difference between my sales and Scots versus the ratio of difference between my advance and Scots. So Scott's advance was 30K for three books on the US side, my advance was 300K for three books plus the UK side, and he didn't get a UK separate deal, right? So that's a ratio of one to ten. And his estimated sales so far as we know at the moment are about 6K 6000 copies shifted. My estimated sales conservatively are about 60,000 copies shifted. Again, that's a ratio of one to ten. And obviously there are a lot of factors there and that data is not fully accurate, but it is really stark how closely our advance sizes are reflected in our sales sizes. And that's because advances that are bigger tend to come with a lot more marketing push that are proportional to the amount of money your book was purchased for. [00:47:16.650] - Sunyi And obviously there will always be exceptions. There'll be the books bought for a lot that sell less than hoped, and there'll be books bought for a more conservative deal which sell really well. But certainly in our particular example you can really see the correlation between marketing spend and sales and how much they're linked, which is one of the main things I really just want to drill in for people. Even with all factors considered, there is a relationship between publisher spending and how a book performs. So all of those things kind of folded in and basically, it doesn't always go that way. I do have friends that had bigger advances than mine or similar advances, and they either ran into COVID or they had bad luck, or they didn't get the independent gatekeeper support, and their books just underperformed relative to what the publishers were hoping for. It's so fickle. I had this real sense, actually, that Harper was kind of I mean, maybe I'm wrong, maybe they'll get angry at me for saying this. I just had the sense that they're kind of waiting to see how the tiles fell, that they weren't sure how the book would go, whether it would actually hit those markets, and that when it did, they pivoted towards it, and at least they did. [00:48:30.450] - Sunyi And the other thing I guess I would say is that for those who don't know, in the UK, we had a big issue with stock. In the summer of 2022. Our equivalent of Barnes and Nobles, which is called Waterstones, bought this other chain bookstore called Blackwells. And when they did that, they tried to integrate the IT system and it went tits up. Like, really tits up. Nothing was working. Booksellers couldn't order books. Books weren't getting distributed. There were books rotting in these, like, warehouses. Harper so, actually, I didn't have a book launch, and I'm glad I didn't. I had no books in stores when I launched in the UK, even though I hit the Sunday Times list at number 2, and I didn't have books in stores-- [00:49:08.150] - Scott Crazy. [00:49:09.470] - Sunyi Except in London. (laughing) Yeah, it was based on pre orders, isn't it? And then, yeah, what Harper was having to do is order the books manually through this one store in London and then ship them out or something insane, which they're not set up to do. They're a publisher, not a bookstore, so it's nice that they did that. They did eventually get my books into stores. They did a good job because this problem went from, like, June 2022 to Christmas and beyond, and that's nice that they did that, and I was really grateful. But they're not set up to do that, and publishers can't do that for every book. So there were people who debuted or published a book in the summer of 2022 here, and they just never got into stores. So I guess one of the many other factors in your success is, like, if your lead title, it's not just about what your publisher does, right, but what they're willing and able to do for you when things go wrong. And my book could have actually tanked in the UK because that happened, but Harper was scrambling to make sure it was there, you know, that it was it was in stock and and there are other titles too, like Babel.There was no shortage of Babel titles in bookstores, but they were making sure that they were there. [00:50:22.780] - Scott It all goes back to what we talked about with Clay, the whole midlist versus mid size or smaller publisher kind of thing. It matters to have your publisher and your editor in particular care about your book, right, on an individual level and go that extra mile. Because in publishing, it seems like there are 100 different things that can tank you and very few that can reliably make you successful. So, yeah, it matters. [00:50:53.880] - Sunyi I think your relationship with your editor is probably the most important one you have in publishing because if your book tanks and editors expire you, then that can be different. [00:51:04.390] - Scott We've talked about this at length, but it is my belief that there are two components, right? One is fit with your editor because all throughout the process, it matters if they get what you're trying to do right, and if they like what you're writing, because they'll be able to help you edit it in the direction you're trying to go and for the market you're trying to hit. Meaning like the readers that you think will like it. Otherwise, you do run a real risk of doing what you talked about earlier, shooting for many different tastes, many different markets, and missing all of them, right? But I think there's also this phenomenon that I didn't understand until really pretty recently, and that is there seemed to be a handful, I'm not even going to try to put a number to it, but a handful of rockstar editors, even at these big five publishers, right? A handful of editors who have the power or clout or whatever you want to call it within the publishers. So this goes beyond taste, right? And this goes beyond subbing to an editor based on taste. But there are a handful who really just do pump out successful book after successful book. [00:52:26.620] - Scott And I think the give a shit factor is a big one, right? They just take a book and an author and they believe in it, and they believe in the person and they help make it an awesome book and they help it go through launch and they help it get all the attention it needs internally and externally. But there's got to be something else at play, too, because it is absolutely wild. And maybe my biggest piece of advice for authors that are querying and that are on sub, or about to go on sub, et cetera, is to have very honest conversations with your agent about the editors that are being submitted to and whether your agent thinks that they have a solid track record of success and in particular, success with your kind of book, but a solid track record of success. Right. Because now that I'm a little deeper in to the business and I've talked to a bunch of different authors. And I've learned a lot through you and through our friends in our group, et cetera. There are a lot of editors out there who edit even big names that you've heard of, but their track record is just not great. [00:53:44.730] - Scott Right? They have a track record of either launching authors into oblivion and they're never heard from again, or their best case scenario tends to be, even if somebody hits a New York Times list or something like that once, they tend to trend downward into midlist. And that's kind of their stable maximum, if you will, for any given editor. But then there are editors like your editor who repeatedly right, can I give away particular secret? I mean, it's not secrets, but are you comfortable with me tooting her horn, so to speak? [00:54:34.710] - Sunyi Yeah, I want Lindsay to get a Hugo. (laughing) [00:54:37.310] - Scott Okay, so your editor in particular, Lindsay Hall, right, she first at Orbit and now at Tor, just has absolute banger after banger. I don't even know who she had at Orbit other than Nick Eames, but he's like, oh, yeah, we have the same editor. And it's like, Holy fuck, has she not edited one of these books that just blew up and then it Tor it's... Yeah. [00:55:05.320] - Sunyi RJ Barker. RJ Barker. Melissa Crusoe. Nick Eames. Christopher Buelhman, which is blacktongue thief. I don't know. AK Larkwood, annalee Newitz, travis Baldree which is Legends and Lattes. Olivie blake, Atlas six. [00:55:28.840] - Scott Yeah. [00:55:30.810] - Sunyi There's loads. [00:55:32.500] - Scott Anyway, my point is, it matters what editor you land with, and we're going to have a whole bunch of agents subbing to Lindsay after this, probably. And hopefully, and hopefully she's not the only one who has this kind of track record, right? But that is a conversation you should have with your agent and with any friends that you can have this conversation with is at any given imprint that you're submitting to, because you should be submitting to all of them. The only way to get money is to get interest from multiple houses or trick a house into thinking that you're going to get interest from multiple houses. But beyond that, you should be well aware of who these editors are and whether they have that track record of success, because it's not enough just to get into a big five. [00:56:25.370] - Sunyi And also their policy, I think, on books in general, because one of the things that was told to me about Harper Voyager UK side, I don't know about the US side, but on the UK side, is that they had made a policy change. Basically, they acquire less titles, but the titles they acquire, they try and put more money into to make each one a success. And I think that's really working for them. I see a lot of Harper UK titles hitting list, just talking about good editors. Vicky Leach is my UK editor. She gets a lot of titles that are just flying off. They launch well and they do well. And I think that's no accident either, that that strategy is working for them. It sounds so simple acquire less, invest more. [00:57:08.240] - Scott But we can hypothesize maybe on another episode about why publishers are acquiring books that they then don't support. [00:57:20.510] - Sunyi Oh, no, I can give that theory. Printrun (podcast) have already said it. Sure, okay. The theory is that basically it doesn't really matter if midlist makes money because midlist books are effectively like an aesthetic or a mood board for a publisher that they can function in that way. A publisher can say, we publish these kinds of books in the way that you as an author might put out a mood board. Say, this is the kind of vibe of my story. This is the vibe of our publisher. So midlist almost functions as an advertisement for lead titles. That was Printrun Podcast's theory, not mine. So I claim no responsibility for revoicing it. But I do think it's accurate, except for some of them. Orbit is very dedicated to having midlist. [00:58:02.070] - Scott A mid list that functions. Yeah. And I've heard you say it. I've heard other industry professionals say it, and apparently it was on print run. So it's a known phenomenon. We see it happen. Right. Because publishers keep picking up books that they then punt into the sun and never hear from again. Right. So it's obviously happening. And this whole aesthetic thing, it just didn't make sense to my business brain. So I had to think about it for quite a long time. And I have a little bit less kind theory behind it. You could assume a level of incompetence because on the face of it, what picking up a whole bunch of these mid list books that don't do all that well does is it dilutes their brand. Right? Like, people know publishers for the big books that come out and all these little books that come out and they look like failures at least, because nobody ever hears about them and they sit on a shelf with the Tor logo or whatever and never move. So at the very least, they're diluting their brand with booksellers. Right. So the less kind theory that makes sense to my business brain is that it's still worth it, even with that brand dilution, because they are effectively hitchhiking on authors hopes, dreams and efforts to push their own books in the midlist and debut midlist in particular. [00:59:49.530] - Scott And they're using that to basically boost their brand, right? So all the little Scott Drakefords that come out and say, hey, look at me, I got published by a big publisher and we spend years of our lives trying to drum up interest for it and represent ourselves well and represent our publisher well, that's good for them. And apparently it's good enough for them to risk that brand dilution to pull attention away from the books they apparently actually care about. Might have to cut that. Probably not, though. (uproarious laughter) [01:00:26.770] - Sunyi No cuts here, right? [01:00:28.440] - Scott No cuts here. For better or worse. Yeah. [01:00:33.530] - Sunyi You've been listening to the Publishing Radio podcast with Sunyi Dean and Scott Drakeford. Tune in next time for more in depth discussion on everything publishing industry. See you later.