[00:03:43.500] - Sunyi
Welcome to the publishing Radio podcast. It is our first week back recording since Scott absconded from his duties to look after a new small child. Congratulations, Scott.
[00:03:54.310] - Scott
Thank you.
[00:03:56.540] - Sunyi
The Sullivans also pass on their congratulations.
[00:04:00.300] - Scott
That's very kind of them.
[00:04:02.090] - Sunyi
Yeah. In between swearing about the driving in my city and yeah. With us today is Preemee Mohamed, who is a fantastic author. I've read The Annual Migration of Clouds, which is a novella, and it's sort of set in Canada and it's a bit plaguey and a bit weird and a bit literary and all the kind of things that I generally enjoy. But Premee is also one of the first people I remember seeing on Twitter when one of those routine tweet threads go round about, would you continue to write if it didn't make any money? And she had a good distinction between, yes, we would continue to write because we love it, but publishing is not the same as writing and would we publish if we didn't make any money? Maybe not. And just generally being a very funny person in the face of the abyss that we call this industry, which is always appreciated. If you'd like to just talk to us a little bit about your books, your journey, any introductions that you feel are relevant, how you got started.
[00:05:01.300] - Premee
Sure. And yeah, thank you so much for inviting me. I love this podcast. I was so excited to get the invite to come on here and talk about my publishing journey from the abyss into a slightly different abyss with less money. Yeah, I've always been one of those people who's just written as a hobby. Sort of like how some people play golf or do cross stitch or yoga or whatever. I don't know. Growing up, my parents claimed that I was reading around age two because that's the kind of thing I feel like Asian parents or immigrant parents like to claim. I can't prove it. I do know they never read to me because they were claiming that I could read starting from toddlerhood, which okay, I've also been writing down stories for as long as I can remember. I don't think most of my friends knew that that was my hobby. They were just like, oh, what a pale, weirdo, cave fish who stays inside her house with her computer instead of going out with us and going clubbing and playing bail tag and whatever, like normal people. I'm like, don't say anything or they're going to want to read it, or something like that.
[00:06:15.980] - Premee
And then in about 2015, somewhere around there, a buddy of mine urged me to submit a short story to an anthology call, which was she Walks In Shadows, which was a Lovecraftian or Modern Cosmic Horror women centred anthology edited by Paula Guran and Sylvia Silvia Moreno- Garcia. And I was like, oh, well, I haven't written a short story since the last time I was forced to write a short story, which I think was, like, grade nine. But he was like, A, you could make some cash money. And B, this sounds like the kind of stuff you're reading recently, because we were emailing about it. And I was like, okay, well, let's see. So I wrote this short story and submitted it, and they bought it. And so for a while there, my submission to acceptance ratio was one which did not last, but the cheque came in maybe a month or something after it was accepted. And I was like, oh, my God. You can just lie and make a small amount of pocket money. Shattered my paradigm. So I started writing short stories, more or less, for fun and for book money. To make money, you buy books because you have to recycle books back into the writing.
[00:07:35.840] - Premee
And the problem, really, with letting people know that you're a writer is that other writers find you and then you become friends with them, and then some of them start nagging you. They're like, I know you've got a novel hidden away somewhere. The real money isn't in short stories. It's in novels. You should get literary representation and you should sell your novel. I was like, well, first of all, stop bugging me. And they're like, new.
[00:08:04.480] - Sunyi
So why do we do this to each other?
[00:08:08.640] - Premee
Writers are very good at producing peer pressure, and some of us are very susceptible to peer pressure. This is the worst industry to be a people pleaser in. So I dug one of my novels out of the trunk, and I think I've told this story before, but it wasn't what I considered to be my best work. What it was, though, was a completed novel because I had a bad habit of just writing things that went on and on and on and on and on and just never ended. This one, though, had the words the end at the end, so I polished it up a little bit. That novel actually was written during my first degree. So, like, I think I started in, like, 2018 and finished the year I graduated to 2002 writing on it around my work. And I'd take it out over the years. Noodle with it a little bit. Put it back, take it out, put it back, take it out, put it back. I hadn't thought about it for years, actually. And so I queried with that. I did the typical I'm not a huge believer in astrology. I think it's bunk, but it's fun bunk, which I think describes a lot of things.
[00:09:18.340] - Premee
I did the typical virgo Virgo thing, and I made this amazing spreadsheet when I planned to query in 2016: the name of the agent and what agency they were and what sales they had had and who their clients were and whether they were open and what their manuscript wish list said and their email address and blah, blah, blah. And I figured I'd go in batches. They always tell you in case you get feedback back from them. So I picked out sort of my ten dream agents and I queried them and I got six requests for fulls and two offers of rep. Wow. In the first batch. And I was like, oh, this is very exciting. And then I was looking at my spreadsheet like, I just wasted like 100 hours of my life. But lesson learned is I had literally planned to spend like a year querying. And then in about six weeks, I got an offer of rep. And I was like, okay, let's throw away the old plan and rearrange the year. And we went out on sub with that novel. And it took a little while, but it ended up selling in a so it was it was a standalone written as a standalone, pitched as a trilogy.
[00:10:29.090] - Premee
And then it ended up selling in a two book deal, which is why I continually refer to the three books in the completed duology. And people who don't know the joke keep coming back to me. They're like, aren't there three books? I'm like, yes, it's a duology of three books.
[00:10:44.400] - Sunyi
It’s okay, I've read Douglas Adams haha.
[00:10:46.600] - Premee
Yeah, exactly. And yeah, I guess that kind of put me on the publishing treadmill. So I did those two books. And of course the first one debuted straight into the teeth of the pandemic, like, literally March 14, 2020 was when it came out. Like, it came out and then the next day, everything in the world basically locked down. So good timing on that one. Very good for a publishing career, I understand. Yes, I did the sequel a couple of months before the sequel came out. My editor emailed me and my agent like, very perky. So what do we think of a title for the third book? And I kind of sat there. I was like, for the what? So my agent replied quickly. He's like, hey, we're just going to chat about this for a minute. And got back to me like, no, you didn't have a stroke. It's fine. We didn't actually sign anything for the third book. He's making over chores. He wants there to be a third book. And I was like, well, because I thought it was going to be a duology, I really kind of shut a lot of doors at the end of that second book.
[00:11:59.320] - Premee
Like, meaningfully a lot, Michael. And he's like, do you want the cash money or not? I was like, I do. I also don't really want to write a third book. So they ended up making the deal for the third book in the trilogy, plus Untitled Fantasy Novel, which is coming out next year and now has a title. And between then I was writing and I guess selling novellas because I like the novella lengths. I think it's kind of a cool length to work with and short stories also. And all this actually, I should mention while holding down a full time job. And here we are today. My latest book just came out May 16, which is the short story collection. No one will come back for us from undertow publications. And I guess we'll see where things go in the next couple of years. I have, like, five books due out in 2024. 25, I think.
[00:12:55.760] - Scott
Jesus.
[00:12:59.580] - Sunyi
What did you know about the publishing industry when you first started? Because you got on that treadmill very quickly. So there is not most of us, we have a little bit of time to despair and kind of wallow in the query trenches. But you didn't have that preparation. I guess, for better or worse, I.
[00:13:16.880] - Premee
Stepped onto the treadmill and it was already cranked up to like 15 kilometres an hour. And I was like, oh, this doesn't look like it's running that fast. No, you're handing stuff in, like, every freaking couple months. What I knew about it, I mostly knew from Martin Amos's Amis's book, The Information, which I read when I was 17 and continues to be one of my favourite books. I don't know if you guys have read it. No. It's billed as a satire of the publishing industry. But now, this many years on, I'm like, no, he wasn't really exaggerating about a lot of this. It's played for humorous effect, but the actual publishing, like, mechanics part of it is not inaccurate. So I knew about agents, I knew about going on submission. It's a little dated because I think it was published in 98 or 97. But them that's got get more and them that's not got get nothing. So the two characters there, there's one very, very talented writer who makes absolutely zero money and cobbles together a living doing book reviews and other things. Like, he freelances a couple of days a week as an editor for this little magazine and stuff like that.
[00:14:37.040] - Premee
And his wife brings home most of the money and he looks after the kids. And then this other writer who is just terrible and sells millions and millions and millions of books. And most of the book revolves around the rivalry between these two writers who've been friends for years. And the bad writer is now up for all these literary prizes. And so he's going out and schmoozing some of the jurors and stuff. I think I really internalised some of the messages of publishing that I otherwise would not have learned until I was in the trenches. But I guess now that I'm here, I keep thinking I was wrong about the book being funny. The book is accurate. And the only thing that it missed out on was, I guess, kind of some of the behind the scenes stuff that you guys discussed on the podcast, the influence of booksellers and librarians and things like that. But in terms of things like reviews and advances and working with an agent and going on Submission and dealing with editors. I already had a picture of how that worked.
[00:15:53.670] - Sunyi
That's fair.
[00:15:54.120] - Premee
But I kept thinking this was like 15 years ago or 20 years ago or whatever. It'll be different now because it's 2017. Everything will be different. Nothing is different.
[00:16:06.200] - Scott
And on the financial side, did you come in with certain expectations relative to your writing or the industry, or was it really just it sounds like it was almost just, hey, this is fun play money that you kind of just happened into because you were good at writing.
[00:16:29.920] - Premee
Yeah, that's a good question. It very much was. Well, I guess I'll take whatever we get offered, kind of, because I did have a real job. So I was like, I'm not relying on writing to pay my bills. I'm using writing for fun money because I would be writing anyway. And so sometimes if I finish a thing, I go off to sell it, and sometimes I don't, and I just have it because I wanted to write it and I wanted it to exist. That first deal was $10,000 US. So five k per book. And I didn't know that that was considered sort of laughably low until much later talking to friends who were complaining about their advances that were like thirty k and thirty five k and how they were suffering. And I was like, oh, I feel obscurely insulted now.
[00:17:26.180] - Scott
When I took 10 k per book from Tor, I felt like it was low. I didn't feel like it was the money I wanted to see, but I certainly had no idea of the range and what it might mean to take that kind of a deal, et cetera. I had no idea. This leads me into my next question, and I'm sorry, Sony, if this steps on the nose. Okay. This might step on the toes of some of the things you were hoping to get into. I followed a bit of a similar path. Right. I got into writing because I loved books, and writing was a form of self expression that I needed and a form of creating something, putting something out into the world, both creatively and, I guess, economically. Right. I wanted to have something that wasn't just my full time job, but I built a career at the same time as I was building myself as a writer and getting an agent, getting a deal, et cetera. And that became more difficult than I thought it would just because of how much time each of those takes if you want to do them at a high level.
[00:18:45.180] - Scott
Right. So I'm interested to hear from you whether that was a challenge for you and how that all worked out with juggling writing and a full time job career. Right. Because even more can come with the implications of a career and trying to get ahead in whatever field and whatever other personal life stuff you chose to work in. How did that work for you? I guess. How did you handle it and how would you recommend others handle it or not?
[00:19:25.160] - Premee
Oh, big questions on that one. And it's funny because maybe six months ago, I would have had different answers to a lot of this. But the short answer, I guess, is the timing was really weird for this one because, like I said, I've got seven books out now. All seven books have come out during a global pandemic. So there's been that on top of everything else. But in terms of managing just my writing and my job prior to publishing, that was easy because you always make time for your hobbies. I would come home and open up a novel and work on it and relax, kind of, basically, because there's no pressure, there's no one waiting for it, there's no one expected to judge. It nothing like that. It's not going to get reviews, it's not going to get an advance, it's not going to worry about sales. It was just a world where I could go and basically LARP with the characters. After publishing. I guess what surprised me, maybe shouldn't have surprised me that much, but did. What surprised me is all the stuff that's peripheral to publishing because it starts off so slow, it's kind of deceptive.
[00:20:47.910] - Premee
So people finding out that I had a novel coming out, they'd email me and be like, hey, do you want to do an interview for us? So they'd send me five interview questions and I'd type out my answers and send them back. And it's not until like a year and a half later when you realise that you're doing podcasts and interviews and zoom stuff and panels and 400 things a week, as well as doing your own marketing, because otherwise the book is kind of a secret. That is another almost full-time job on top of my actual full time job, on top of actually trying to meet my deadlines to write things to give to people that already paid for them. So where that eventually led was I completely burnt out, probably more than a year ago. And then this year in March, I quit my job. I looked at my finances and my health and my time and the fact that I had basically stopped doing things like cooking and sleeping, and I just was like, okay. So if something in this trifecta of publishing writing job is going to kill me. I really don't want for it to be my job because I already hated my job at that point.
[00:22:20.640] - Premee
I'd hated it for a couple of years. I used to love my job. And then a bunch of changes were made. I got a new supervisor. Several people threatened to quit if that supervisor got the position, and they weren't bluffing and they did quit, so the rest of their work got redistributed to us. And then several more people left the sinking ship. And I was still standing there like, wet up to the waist, like, oh, maybe it's not so bad, maybe it'll get better. Maybe it'll just spontaneously get better. And I'll wake up tomorrow morning and she'll be fantastic. And I kept thinking that for, like, months and months and months and I didn't have the energy to job hunt, so I did the worst possible thing I could think of and I quit without having another job lined up. And I was like, well, you know, I'll I'll survive. I'll coast on savings for a little while. I didn't realise really how burnt out I was like that I had just been digging and digging and digging and finally reached the end of myself, which is like a horrifying feeling. And that was when I decided to leave.
[00:23:24.210] - Premee
I just could not do anymore, could not take anymore, almost couldn't function anymore. And I didn't want to miss any writing deadlines because that would be bad. So since then, I think I've just been recovering. And if I had any advice for past me, it would be something like, don't set yourself on fire to keep the worst people warm. Just evaluate who exactly you're warming by throwing your bones on there, because it's very much the way you're raised too. I think my whole family just hammers it into you, drives it into you that you have to have a job and you have to have a real job. And ideally, if they're going to talk about you in public, you should have a prestigious job. You should be something extremely stable and safe and not like their lives coming to Canada and suffering for years and coming from this very, very underdeveloped South American country where nobody had any money and they literally knew people that starved and they wanted their kids to do better. And that means getting a particular type of job and associating with people who have jobs and not considering the ways that you could make money without a job.
[00:24:52.590] - Premee
Like the formality of a capital J job. So trying to deprogram myself from that has been a journey. I don't think it's over yet. I'm still job hunting.
[00:25:04.980] - Sunyi
Yeah, I've recognised some of those same issues, I guess. Not really quite the same. My parents wouldn't tell anyone I'd written a book until it came out and they still haven't told any of their friends or relatives, really, that I'm divorced, because that's shameful to them, which I find really funny because I fucking had a drink when I was divorced. I was like, this is great. Everyone should get divorces if they want one. Before you had divorce, people just, like, sat around being miserable in relationships they hated. So it's great. But, yeah, I was going to ask, with Burnout, could you feel it creeping into writing? Because I think this is something I've thought about a lot in the past year, where when I wrote Book Eaters and I was really scraping the barrel to get the energy to write, where my life had narrowed to the point of, like, no hobbies, not seeing other people or anything because it was just like, looking after special needs kids and trying to finish this stupid book and trying to get out of my marriage. And that was it. And I really noticed the difference. Writing the next book this past year is the first thing I've ever written where I've not been in critical burnout the whole time.
[00:26:15.980] - Sunyi
And it is such a better experience. It is almost joyful. And I would love for my writer friends who are almost, it seems like most of them in some stage of burnout or another at any given time, to know what it feels like to write a book without that crushing, like, feeling hanging over them. Because it makes me wonder how the books would be different and how our careers would go differently if we weren't writing under that kind of cataclysmic pressure.
[00:26:48.100] - Premee
Yeah. God, that's such a good question. I think also, too, because I had all those years of loving writing and knowing what it felt like when I felt like a story was really coming together and was being its normal self. Kind of while I was being my normal self, when burnout started to really creep in around the edges and I started waking up in the morning wishing I was dead, but also going, what's that smell? It smells like something's on fire. And it's my brain. I was still handing stuff in because the other driving imperative was to not miss any deadlines and not be like that guy who throws off the whole production schedule. And it so much, so often felt angering later on. Like, I was just angry at the way some things had gone, even like stories and stuff that I finished six or eight months ago that I had to hand in for, like an anthology or something. I look at them now and I'm like, this seems technically okay, but emotionally dead. Like, who wrote this? This doesn't seem like something I would write. Most of the words seem to line up in the correct order, but if I had the chance to redo this story, it would look very, very different.
[00:28:07.970] - Premee
And I also like to tell this story, like what it felt like was writing the sequel to my debut novel. So I'd never written a sequel before. I'd only written standalones. I didn't know how you wrote, like, a series or whatever. And of course, all the advice you Google is like, well, here's how you plan a trilogy which presumes that you haven't written the first book and then have to create a sequel out of nowhere from the first book. But I kept writing it, scrapping it, writing it, scrapping it. And that was the early days of the Pandemic. It was due May 31, 2020, and I was just in this haze of, like, terror and anxiety and loneliness and I hadn't seen another human being for like weeks and there was this deadly disease floating around in the air and we weren't supposed to get together with people and there were no vaccines. And anyways, the book ended up being about 119,000 words and I wrote it in eleven days and it was just a few fugue. I don't remember writing it and it ended up going up for a couple of awards later. But I just wanted to pull people aside and be like that book was not the book I would have written if my brain was working.
[00:29:19.160] - Premee
And now I keep thinking over the past year or so, none of what I've handed in has been what I would have written if my brain was working and if I had the actual time to work on the story. If I had more than like 2 hours a week or whatever to write fiction and then trying to frantically write my normal story in those 2 hours a week, it just wasn't sustainable anymore. And I'm so mad now. I'm so mad that I was handing stuff in that I considered to be so subpar.
[00:29:50.240] - Sunyi
It's funny, every time people ask an interview, it's like, where did you get your inspiration for book eaters? And I always like, there's a part of me that just really wants to tell them. Look, it was a story that made sense when I was just really fucking tired. And then later when I was less tired, I had to fix it and make it work. It didn't make any sense when I first finished it, that's for sure. It's sleep deprivation plotline.
[00:30:14.840] - Premee
Yeah.
[00:30:17.880] - Scott
I understand that my journey is a little different because I worked and reworked my one book and now my sequel so many times. So I didn't necessarily capture the essence of any epic of my life quite so cleanly as what you're talking about. But there is some beauty to that too, right? I mean, it's a part of your life that you went through and maybe crystallised some piece of what you were going through at that time in that work. So I hope at least someday the anger turns to acceptance and there's some form of, I don't know, therapy or catharsis there. But I am interested now. Sorry, I could go into my own breakdowns that happened along the way.
[00:31:16.070] - Sunyi
Feel free.
[00:31:17.340] - Scott
I think we've hit some of them. I feel like half the podcast has just been me treating our guests as therapists. But I am interested how you feel now that you've made some radical life changes. And for context, I'm in a very privileged position where my wife has a career as well and now she's both making all the money for our family and doing most of the work with a second child. So she's a real trooper. And I am a very fortunate son of a bitch. Not literally. My mother is wonderful. But yeah, I do wonder how you're doing now that you've made some radical life changes and you don't have to juggle quite so many things other than the financial pressure of having quit your job, do you feel better about your writing? Is that burnout? Can you feel it melting? Or do you feel like it's something that's going to take more time and more effort to get through?
[00:32:46.040] - Premee
Yeah, I feel better, for sure. I think my first feeling upon quitting my job actually was just immense relief. Like this sense that maybe now I could focus on healing and getting better. And then there were like three ish weeks there that was just like a blur. I can barely remember what I was doing after that final day. I mean I know. Crying, laundry, trying to clean the house, remembering how to excuse me, sorry, there's a excuse me. We probably edit that out. It's fine. My dog cat interrupts.
[00:33:33.760] - Scott
We like interruptions.
[00:33:34.830] - Premee
He's extremely interested in going in like the four inches of space between my mic and myself and he's not going to fit. Yeah, I feel better. I feel relieved. It was touch and go there for a while, though, because I was like, my brain isn't working anymore. And that was just a very unpleasantly, almost sickening feeling when you realised that. I was like, I can't think clearly, I can't remember, I can't focus. I mean, I have severe ADHD, so I couldn't focus anyway, but I wasn't even focusing up to my usual poor standard. I couldn't answer emails, I couldn't review contracts, people would ask me questions in interviews and I'd be like, I don't remember the name of my book, I don't remember my name, I don't know who you are.
[00:34:24.680] - Scott
How did you get into my book?
[00:34:28.520] - Premee
It's a lot better now, though. And I knew the point at which things were turning, which was a couple of weeks ago particularly, I got an idea for a story and just kind of sat there like, oh, I'm excited about this. Oh my God, wait a minute. I'm excited about a piece of writing. What do I do now? And the answer was, if I want, I can sit down and write the story. I've also been shuffling stuff off my plate like crazy because I sat down and listed all the stuff that I was supposed to be doing and there were 81 things, and some of those were one time things like Complete Grant Report, alberta Alberta foundation Foundation for the Arts. But that's like 15 or 20 hours of work, so that's just like a single item. And then some of them are ongoing things like Update web page. And I stared at it for like 20 minutes. Oh my God, how was I trying to do all this and work 40 to 60 hours a week and commute and again, occasionally shower or eat food? So I started trying to X things off that list that kind of weren't serving me anymore.
[00:35:41.820] - Premee
And. A big one of those was one that I'm still kind of bitter about, which is like book promotion because I'm with exclusively small presses up until one of my books is coming out next year. And small presses don't have the resources to promote your books. But for some of them, it almost felt kind of I don't know. Again, I have to use the word insulting. Like, oh, not even a tweet on launch day? Like, you guys weren't going to say anything? They're like, no, your books are secret.
[00:36:11.540] - Sunyi
Just between you and them.
[00:36:13.000] - Premee
Secrets. We publish your book, but we're not going to tell anyone we published your book. Your book is the side chick. And my agents and I actually emailed them and they seemed shocked. They're like, do you want some graphics or something? I guess we can take a couple of hours and do that. And by that point, it was almost like the afternoon. And they didn't promote it either. Afterwards, they didn't say anything about it. It won an award. They didn't say anything about it. Occasionally they would retweet something that I had tweeted, but when they were promoting other people's books that were coming out like big splash on launch day, I was just sitting there like, so the feeling is that I have to do something, otherwise no one will know the book exists. And the feeling is not really compatible with Healing burnout. All I can do basically now is I do promo when I feel like it now and then once a week. Otherwise I have to teach myself to stop caring that my publishers are not saying anything about the book. That's just how it's going to have to be. So pushing all that off my plate also freed up a couple of hours.
[00:37:18.230] - Premee
But yeah, I can write again. I feel excited to write again. I'm feeling a lot less guilt about turning down things I genuinely don't want to do.
[00:37:29.560] - Scott
Awesome.
[00:37:30.580] - Premee
I'm feeling a lot less of that impulse to kind of beat yourself up and be like, oh, I should have gone on that guy's blog or whatever with a guest post because he has thousands of readers. And now I'm like, no, that's like 7 hours of my life I wouldn't get back to write this enormous essay for him. No, I'm not doing it. And I'm not good at saying no.
[00:37:55.020] - Sunyi
In some ways, I think it's hardest for small press authors because we say online and we say on the podcast that kind of self promo doesn't move the needle for Trad, and it does and it doesn't. It will get sales, but then our royalties are so low that it's not really often worth the time. Whereas like a self pub author, if they're aggressively promoting their book and they get 200 sales out of that, they're getting a much bigger chunk of money than we are from a couple of hundred sales. But you've got the same royalties that we do, like, a big five book will do, but less kind of publisher resources at your disposal.
[00:38:37.880] - Premee
Yeah. I think for my case, though, it was time that I felt I had to spend, because yeah, the choices literally were, if I don't say anything, guess what? They're not saying anything either. Literally, no one will know that this book has been published. My parents don't know this book has been published. I don't want them to read any of my stuff anyway, but my closest friends would not know that this book is in the world because the Pub is not saying anything. And again, for those guys, they're heavily promoting their other books, so they actually don't have an excuse. So I just am mad at them. But for the really, really small guys, like, look at Neon Hemlock. They published one of my novellas that ended up winning the Nebula Award. It won the World Fantasy Award. Neon Hemlock is one guy. His name is Dave. This is a micro press. It's like a person Dave resources to go out there and bang the drum to tell people to buy this book. All the promo for that book had to be completely organic, and 90% of it had to be me because Dave is trying to run a press.
[00:39:46.850] - Premee
Dave actually is the press.
[00:39:48.510] - Sunyi
Is Dave happy that it won the award?
[00:39:51.040] - Premee
Oh, he was so excited. Oh, my God.
[00:39:52.800] - Sunyi
Bless him.
[00:39:54.080] - Premee
He and I were actually chatting, like, in Twitter DMs during the Nebula's ceremony, and I was talking about the novella that I assumed would win. So I was like, oh, hang on, the category is coming up. And then they announced me, and I was actually eating dinner at the time and assumed I wouldn't win, so I had to quickly find my speech and open it up and run my tongue across my teeth. And I had bacon in my teeth during my Nebula's Word award speech because I assumed that the novella was not going to win. So that was a nice shock. And then as soon as it was all over, which was like, two minutes later, I get back to Twitter, and David's like, you won. What's happening? I'm so excited.
[00:40:36.360] - Sunyi
Did it help sales? Is that cynical to ask? Like, do the awards help sales and and platform and
[00:40:43.570] - Premee
No. No. Doesn't help future no, no, I've we've got numbers now.
[00:40:47.910] - Scott
Crazy.
[00:40:48.550] - Premee
Yeah, yeah, it's because, you know, that was that was last year, and now it's 2023, and no, not really. It doesn't move the needle, like you said. And again, with future advances and stuff coming up, people are like, oh, wow, you've won, like, three pretty major awards, and you've been up for basically all the other ones, like the Locus Award and the British Fantasy Award and the Crawford Award and how's $8, $8. It's also the case where it's like, I talked about quitting my job. I have also been talking a lot about quitting publishing because why stay in something that's not going to pay you to stay? Why not leave and go do something that will pay you. 
[00:41:35.030] - Sunyi
So, you've run a patreon? I mean, have you ever considered just leaving Trad, going full patreon, full kickstarter, full self pub, stuff like that? Being totally thought about it.
[00:41:48.010] - Premee
Yeah, I've thought about self pub particularly because I do have friends that self pub. So I can kind of draw on their experience and their network and presumably they won't steer me wrong. And I also, with my agent's permission, self pubbed and Novella novella just online in 2018 because I kind of wanted to see what the process looked like and how hard it was. And the really funny thing, of course, was that that one sold like Gangbustersgangbusters, that Novella novella sold thousands and thousands of copies and actually funded my overseas trip to Dublin in 2019 to do Worldcon and let me stay there for like three weeks. Cool that Novella novella has made more money than supposedly trade books. That's really but yeah, I have thought about self pub as an alternative. It's just I know I'm so bad at many of the things that self pub requires that I would have to be paying people to do all those things and that's kind of an upfront cost that I can't really afford. So I would want to soft self pub if I thought I could do it properly. Again, that Novellanovella, back in 2018, I wrote it as a vanity project.
[00:43:04.510] - Premee
I made my own cover. I just threw it up there and people loved it. And I was like, don't take this the wrong way, but literally, what is wrong with you?
[00:43:17.520] - Sunyi
It's a sound so bad. But I went through this whole period when Book Eaters came out before it came out, when the arcs are going out and it's starting to get reviews. And every time it got a nice review, I would think like, there was a part of me that just wanted to grab people by the shoulders and say, what is wrong with you? Do you not have any fucking taste? And I don't know, you have this weird relationship with your own work. I'm kind of over that now. I try not to say that too often because I don't want to be disrespectful to the people that like the book and have put time into it that's not reflective of I like my relationship to my work.
[00:43:55.680] - Premee
What the hell does taste mean though, because I don't know. I have read a lot of books. I read constantly and 90% of books that I've read from the past 10-15 years I'll start and just hook huck across the room. Well, metaphorically, because they're borrowed generally. But I have thrown my phone across the room because I was like, this is so terrible. How did this get like a $750,000 advance? And people are like, oh, we love it. I'm like, well, none of you all have any taste.
[00:44:27.240] - Sunyi
Is it weird that books, stories like that always give me hope? Because when I find a book that's like wildly popular and it sells millions and I hate every single word in it, and I think, well, that must mean that there's enough different readers out there to support a wide variety of texts.
[00:44:41.700] - Premee
That's the lesson that I take from that. I'm like, people do have money and they do want to spend it on books. And the fact that they want to spend it on terrible James Patterson ghost written books is none of my business. They're not going to buy my books. I'm not writing the kind of books they want. Yeah, other people will buy my books, and by will, I mean actually will not, looking at sales.
[00:45:08.980] - Premee
The good thing, though, is I don't know if this is the case so much in the UK. I don't think it's very often the case in Canada, in the US. But in Canada we have a fairly robust grant system.
[00:45:20.310] - Scott
Oh, cool.
[00:45:21.430] - Premee
So we have people that cannot starve to death as writers because we apply for grants at like, the provincial or federal level. I just got one that's probably going to be able to cover my bills for six months at the municipal level from the Edmonton Arts Council.
[00:45:37.430] - Scott
That's awesome.
[00:45:37.910] - Premee
And I'm super, super excited about that. The money just hit my account yesterday, which was great because I was starting to get a little sweaty again. In the interest of full transparency, because that's what this podcast is about, is 25K, which in theory covers your bills for a year because their subsistence payment is two K a month. That is about two thirds of what I need to cover just my basic bills, like mortgage and insurance and electricity and stuff. But still, I'm like the pressure that is off me is immense. Now I actually have to write the book I applied with, but still, it's like getting in advance. And now this book will be in the world and possibly it will sell. And guess what? It's probably going to get like a five k advance. So I'm getting more money from the city to write this book, like, to support me, an artist, than I would from actually selling the book.
[00:46:30.990] - Scott
Yeah. And I hope people listening are fully understanding what we're hearing, right? That we have a very talented, passionate writer who has won multiple awards. I mean, I am so far removed from the award discussion that I don't even know how they happen. I hear Sun Yi and people talking about, oh, it's this award now. And I'm like, okay, whatever. It's not going to be me, so whatever. But you're also turning out multiple books per year. You ran yourself to burnout and to the point of needing to quit your full time job because you were turning books in on time and multiple books on time. You're signing new deals. In my opinion, from what it sounds like you're doing everything you should be doing, can be doing and more in the industry, and yet it's not an industry or that reliably provides for people to even just cover basic necessities, even doing all of the right things. It's disheartening. But yeah, that's what this podcast is for, right, is trying to show the truth of what most people in this industry go through. Because I think a lot of people who come up against these hardships just kind of fade away and go figure out what else to do with their life.
[00:48:08.160] - Scott
But going back to your discussion of deadlines and things, I do think that's very interesting. And I think I wish at least that readers in particular and even other writers understood a little bit more of the context around those deadlines. I frankly do not understand why people take publishing deadlines so seriously when there's so little money behind most of them and so little performance on the part of a publisher. I went through something good question. What's that?
[00:48:47.740] - Premee
That is a good question. Yeah, for my first novel, and I know this is related to schedules, but it did feel personal because I didn't know anything about how long edits took back then. But yeah, it was about 110,000 word novel, and it took 13 months to get edits back. And the edits were extremely minimal. There were like two paragraphs, so the edit letter was two paragraphs pasted into an email and then a handful of comments on the document itself. I think I turned it around in like, two days and sent it back. And I was like, I'm gritting my teeth here. I'm like, did that have to take 13 months? But I know there's a lot of scheduling happening behind the scenes. I know there are slots and the slots are basically inflexible, and that if somebody misses their slot by two weeks for doing what they're supposed to be doing, then that screws up the fall release or something like that the following year. But yeah, again, part of me is just like, well, you know what? For like an $1800 advance, do I have to knock myself out doing this? I'm still going to, but I'm going to hate myself for it.
[00:50:02.640] - Premee
Actually, that's what I enjoy about this one, is I only have to sell about I think I did the math on that. Who's the author? Hannah. Yeah. Who did that? When will you earn out Calculator? So I ran that through that. So with the $1500 advance, I have to sell between 250 and 270, either paperback or e copies to earn out my advance. I might earn out on this one.
[00:50:30.300] - Scott
Yeah. And I mean, sales in publishing really do have to happen at a certain scale to even approach being a source of livable income. And that's why I just simply do not understand how this industry continues to operate when they're both handing out such paltry amounts of money, delaying that money not just from advances, but from royalties by six to twelve months, however long it takes to actually account for sales and returns and all that kind of thing. And then acting like there's some code of professionalism that's expected primarily on the side of the authors. They just don't pay for that professionalism. But I commend you for meeting all your deadlines. Not to say that's a bad thing, I just really get frustrated, especially when I see other authors talking about how, oh, well, they deserve what's coming to them. They didn't meet their deadlines or whatever, but it's like, fuck that. Nothing good ever came to somebody because they met a deadline in this industry anyway. The people who get preferential treatment are going to get it whether they hit a deadline or not.
[00:51:55.420] - Premee
Yeah, that's exactly it.
[00:51:56.890] - Sunyi
There's just two things I'd add to that, I guess, very quickly. One is that I remember in my writing mom's group on Facebook, someone, this lady was expressing shock. She's like, oh, this famous author that I follow said that she hit the bestseller list, but she doesn't earn enough to live. How can that be? And I was like, Because that means she sold like 10,000 copies once. And to live off that money, you need, what, 50,000 sales a year? So you're getting like 50K a year in the US. And that's before tax and agent fees and all that. So selling 50K copies a year is a shitload of copies. Most people don't sell a fifth of that for a book in a book's lifetime. Right. The average book sells 10,000 copies in its lifetime, supposedly. And obviously that number comes with caveats. But the amount of books you have to sell to actually make a living is kind of staggering when you really break it down. And what was the other thing? Oh, yeah, the other side of it is when you're talking about why do people feel they need to meet it, I think there's a sense that you're so easily forgotten in publishing, because pretty much the only time a publisher pays attention to a book is when it's debuting kind of the months before and after.
[00:53:09.030] - Sunyi
And I think even for lead titles, that's true. And to some extent it's more stark because you get a load of attention in kind of the months before and after, and then it goes quiet. And it's more like the way it is for midlist all year round. Sorry. No, but it does go quiet. So you don't see your publisher, you don't see a publicist. It can be years or months before you actually have contact with someone in the industry other than your agent. If you're handing books in, then you're actually interacting. It feels like you kind of are on the treadmill, whether you want to be or not. It feels like stuff is happening.
[00:53:49.580] - Premee
Well, I think also a lot of it, too, is just carryover from being, she said, checking her vocabulary, from being a normal person with a normal job for most of her life. That was the other thing I think I was semi expecting, but also semi thinking. It was a joke in publishing. And I think I tweeted about this the other day. Like if I start a job at a factory, because I've been hired to be a teapot engineer, and there are five other teapot engineers, and we're all producing teapots that are pretty much the same, and people want to buy these teapots. There's no reason that one of us should get $750,000 and one of us should get a slap in the face, and one of us should get fired, and one of us should get $5,000. Like, in theory, we're all making teapot engineer wages, and we're all turning in our teapots, and the company is selling our teapots. It's just bizarre to me that publishing kind of doesn't work that way, especially when I see these garbage books coming out that got these major deals, and I'm like, obviously it's not a garbage book.
[00:54:54.310] - Premee
Lots of people like it. And even though this debut author has no track record or whatever, the editor saw something in it that they want to throw their weight behind. I am not an editor, and I didn't see it. So they know better than I do what's a good book and what's a bad book. I'm clearly writing bad books. This person who is making the big advance is clearly writing a good book, and I just don't have any taste because I happen to think that he wrote garbage. It does a number on you.
[00:55:29.900] - Sunyi
That part to me is wild. The whole, like, the fact that as a debut of not having a track record is beneficial. The first time someone explained this to me, I think it might have been Pete McLean, where someone, you know, they're basically saying, you're in better standing as a debut with no sales track record than you are as a midlister with an established track record. Because when you have established sales, whether it's your fault or not, you're a known quantity that plugs into the equation. When you're a debut, you could be anything. But that's kind of backwards. It's a backwards logic. Like, yeah, you could be anything. You could be completely crap as well. And they don't know. They're just going to try and see. And how much they try and how well they try is what's changing and out of our control.
[00:56:14.060] - Scott
Yeah, I think the thing that most frustrated me wasn't even the meritocratic nature or what appears to be meritocratic on the surface. It was that each of those books or each of those teapots isn't getting the same shot, and it's not remotely the same path for any given book. Right, yeah. That was the most surprising which is also bizarre.
[00:56:48.330] - Premee
Yeah. And this is a running thing with my friends. Some of them are sort of pre publication, I guess you'd say, like they're still querying or whatever, but they're like, if the publisher is publishing the book, do they not want to sell the book and make money selling their product? It's just bizarre that you would spend all that time and money hiring a cover artist and formatters and proofreaders and copy editors and printing the actual book and making sure it's distributed into bookstores and then not tell anybody.
[00:57:16.370] - Scott
Yeah.
[00:57:17.340] - Premee
Like, why invest anything in that case? And the answer that I've got back from people makes it sound even more insane. I mean, again, I've worked for a lot of industries. None of them have worked like publishing. And they're like, they are hoping that the ones they throw money at will make money and the ones they don't throw money at will be some kind of secret hit. But again, don't you want to recoup your initial investment like, you've paid in advance and you've printed this book and you've hired all these people? Why not at least let people know it's out there and make a handful of sales?
[00:57:53.820] - Sunyi
Someone told me, and I don't know if it's true, that the publishers can effectively write off books which are losses from their tax. So when you're a corporation, as long as some of your books are raking in profit, then the others are just completely written off like tax losses. And if that's true, then if that's.
[00:58:12.180] - Premee
True, then it makes it less a gamble.
[00:58:15.600] - Scott
Yeah, I think it has less to do with tax implications because, I mean, as a business, you want to make a profit no matter what. I think it has more to do with and sunyi, I know we've discussed this before. I think it has more to do with publishing having stacked margins so far in their favour that they really don't have to do a lot to break even. And as long as they're breaking even on a book, it doesn't really matter. Right. And nobody's going to really get in trouble for it. And I think it's incredible, especially the bigger publishers, I think it's incredibly easy for them to break even on a book that they didn't put much money into in terms of an author advance and probably didn't put all that much money into in terms of a cover and design and that kind of thing. Especially if they had an in house team work for a couple of days to turn out a map and illustrations, whatever they've included. It's just not that hard. If they ship it out to stores like they do for all of their books, chances are they're going to break even or make a little bit of money.
[00:59:30.130] - Scott
And if something happens and it breaks out, then great, but where that great.
[00:59:36.880] - Premee
They also didn't pay for that. It just happened organically. Like Bigolas Dickolas.
[00:59:41.780] - Scott
Like Bigolas Dickolas, that's right. But I mean, they've created what all businesses want and that is a win win situation for them in which they sign on a whole bunch of us and they put money into some and they have to make that money back. And so they try really hard and they don't put that much money into others. And by virtue of just the distribution system and the brand that they've created, they're nearly guaranteed to make back at least their initial investment and probably make some slim profit on it. So, I mean, it doesn't make sense because you would think they'd want to if they took the time to sign on a book and work on it and put years of development into it, which is typical in the publishing industry, that they'd want to maximise the gains and a sane business would do that. Right, but it's also very safe for them. And think about any corporate situation, right? Like if there's no consequence and there's no benefit to having something you worked on out earn, especially if out earning isn't going to even come close to the scale of books that have been signed with major marketing and sales pushes.
[01:00:59.640] - Scott
So if my book had way outperformed my advance, I still probably wouldn't have reached anywhere near what a true lead would have done. And my editor, the teams that worked on it, they have no incentive to do that. If that had happened with my book, it would have been a, oh, I get cool, I guess situation and nobody benefit. Yeah, nobody who actually influences those things happening benefits from it and nobody has any consequences if my book tanks other than me, I have consequences.
[01:01:36.120] - Sunyi
And your agent.
[01:01:37.250] - Scott
And my agent, yeah, sure, yeah, but.
[01:01:40.970] - Premee
Running big with me too. I'm like, I'm glad my agent has some bigger names than me so he can pay his rent because I sure am not helping.
[01:01:47.420] - Scott
Yeah.
[01:01:49.860] - Premee
But yeah, I mean, the whole discussion just makes me think, why should someone like me then stay in publishing? Yeah, like, why not just quit? I'm not going to get any support, I'm not making any money, I'm clearly no good. So, well, I probably should just leave Spike and find a real job and go back to writing for myself.
[01:02:08.010] - Scott
Well, so that takes me to my question. That popped to mind when you're talking about having friends in the writing world who are up and coming and seeking first deals. Because SUNY and I are friends mostly through SUNY, with some up and coming folk who are either signing their first deals, have just signed, or still looking for agents, et cetera. What do you tell them when you talk to them about their plans for entering the industry, et cetera, what's your advice? And especially given that whole why should I keep going, why should I keep going.
[01:02:49.070] - Premee
Well, no, I think it's a different set of situations, though, right? Because before they have signed that deal or before they've got representation or before they've sold the book or whatever, they're the way I was. They are an unknown quantity. Like, this friend could be the one that gets that $750,000 deal. Sorry, do you mind? There's a crow and it's like, literally right outside my window. I don't know if the mic is picking it up, but it's like, Let me in!
[01:03:15.460] - Scott
I can't hear it. No, hey, crows are fun.
[01:03:22.900] - Premee
Yeah, we can edit all that out. Yeah. I would tell them, Follow your heart, because it is a crapshoot. You're buying a lottery ticket. I was in the business for a while there because I was like, well, as long as people want to keep offering me book deals, then I'm still getting a lottery ticket. And then we'll see how much the advances on this, or we'll see what kind of support I get on this, or we'll see what I get. We'll see what I get. We'll see what I get. And now I'm like, I think I might be done playing the lottery because I'm spending more sanity and time and self worth on the tickets than the tickets are paying back. But for these friends, maybe that won't be the case. And I can't tell them, and I don't know, I'm not an editor, I'm not an acquisitions committee, so I do tell them, manage your expectations. I don't expect your path to look like mine, but I don't expect your path to look like anyone else's either, because everyone's path is extremely individual. And also listen to the Publishing Rodeo podcast. That's very important for managing expectations.
[01:04:28.830] - Premee
And again, my last job was in environmental policy. Managing expectations was all I did.
[01:04:35.820] - Sunyi
I try never to give people advice, I think, these days, about what they should do, and especially when you get riders like, oh, which path should I take? And it's like, I'm not going to tell you that. I can just tell you what to expect from this one. And you've got to make that decision yourself. It sounds really harsh, but I joined a mentoring programme last year and I ended up rejecting, just immediately, all the people who said they weren't sure what path they wanted. And that's not because there's anything wrong with being unsure. It's because I feel like, to me, I would feel unethical almost taking the time to convince someone, yes, you should go trad. And then they go through it and it just like the machine breaks their spirit. And then I would feel horrible the rest of my life. Whereas the people who are ready, like, I'm determined to do it, whether it's a good idea or not, then I'm like okay, well.
[01:05:18.290] - Premee
Right, I'm not going to change your mind anyway. Yeah, well, to me, too, I'm like, I don't give advice as a rule. I finished. This last batch of SIFWA mentoring, I had two mentees and I'm like, the first thing I'm going to tell you is I am not going to give you publishing advice. I can tell you what my publishing experience has been like so far. Like, I can go through that step by step if you want, but that is just mine. I can talk about writing advice or craft advice. Publishing advice is different. Those are two different things. Apples and oranges.
[01:05:50.520] - Scott
I'm still just dumb enough to give situational advice, but I always make sure to tell them that it is just one idiot's opinion and it obviously did not serve me well.
[01:06:09.240] - Premee
I always say, please don't sue me, I'm a writer. I don't have any money anyway.
[01:06:13.410] - Scott
That's right. This is not advice. This is just Scott saying things. Yeah, but like you both said, it certainly depends on somebody's goals, right? Like, if you just want to see your book on a Barnes and Noble shelf and that's like a bucket list thing for you and something you need to see to be happy, signing most any trade publishing deal is probably going to do what you want whether you make money from it or not. But for people who are getting into publishing with the intent of making an actual living and they don't have some other source of income like retirement or pension or what have you, they are a real life person who has to make real life dollars or whatever your currency is to eat and have a house. I honestly have landed at these days. Find a true lead deal or seriously consider what else you're going to do to make money, because I don't think your journey in publishing is going to be as awesome, at least probabilistically. From a probabilistic standpoint, your journey in publishing is not going to be great. It's not just a lottery ticket. I use that terminology often as well.
[01:07:40.340] - Scott
It's like you're signing up to work on the railroad with the hope that you're going somewhere with a gold mine at the end. And there are very few gold mines at the end of railroads.
[01:07:50.920] - Premee
Sorry, you might be on one of the other railroads. (laughter)
[01:07:57.340] - Scott
Anyway, that's my not advice for this episode.
[01:08:01.740] - Sunyi
A lot of the money that comes from that allows you to survive as a full time writer comes from things which are kind of peripheral to your main book. So like foreign deals or film deals if you get them, or just even things like opportunities, the fact that your publisher will pay for you to go places, the fact that literary festivals will pay you and stuff like that. And those things are just often closed off to people who aren't lead titles.
[01:08:25.940] - Premee
And also to self publishers too. Yes. And actually, yeah, that's very exciting happening to me for basically the second time in my life. So in June, the publishers translators of two of my novellas decided to release it in a single volume, which was great because that meant I had to come up with another title, which is my nemesis. I hate titles, but they invited me to Barcelona for a week to go to this conference in Catalan. And I was like, I don't speak Catalan or Spanish. And they're like, we will look after you. When I got the email, I was like, oh, this sounds amazing. I would love to come. Unfortunately, I can't afford to go. And they're like, we'll pay for it. I was like, oh, sorry. That changes everything. But also to me, that's not expected. That's basically never happened before. None of my publishers have offered to send me anywhere or come visit the offices or whatever in New York or anything like that. We're just like filthy Canadian kind of stay where you are. And also we're not paying you enough to care. So if you were one of the big names, we would invite you, but you just stay there and eat maple syrup or whatever it is you people do.
[01:09:43.350] - Premee
I don't know.
[01:09:47.920] - Sunyi
Yeah, it's funny because the big titles don't even need it as much. Like, I bet you Neil Gaiman never pays his own cab fair, right? But he could, he’s a multimillionaire. Just saying. We need like a poor writers transport fund or something.
[01:10:02.360] - Premee
Yeah, we need something like that. Oh, thanks for inviting me to this con. I now cannot afford to Uber back from the con to my hotel. 
[01:10:13.740] - Sunyi
Sorry. Go on, Scott. I kept cutting you off.
[01:10:14.680] - Scott
Oh, you're you're totally fine. My point was only that assuming you're going to get nothing is a very safe assumption. So this last week, my agent sent me a video of Petrick. I don't remember Petrick's last name, but the review guy. Yeah, he was reviewing Tad Williams series. And Tad's a client of Matt's, of my agents. And Patrick has reviewed Tad and has reviewed Brian Lee Durfy, who's also an agent sibling of mine. He was like, hey, this guy seems pretty stoked about Tad and Brian's work. I think he might like yours too. Are you on his radar at all? And I was like, well, buckle up for story time, because didn't get arcs right. We've gone over that. But I got a box of author copies, like most people did the week or two or whatever before launch, after those actual copies had been made. And Tor told me they had them. I asked the Tor publicist if they could send a copy to Petrick because he had been reviewing I think he reviewed Richard Swan's book around that time because he and I debuted it around the same time. And I had seen him review Brian's book in the previous months or years.
[01:11:49.990] - Scott
And so Tor said no, they didn't want to ship it to him because I think he's in Thailand or somewhere like that. And I still don't have a foreign deal. I don't even have UK distribution, a real UK deal at this point. So they're like, oh, no, we're not going to do that. And so I sent a book to Patrick and he was very gracious about it and showed it in a book hall thing. But I had to explain to my agent that, no, Tor didn't send a book to Petrick, but I did. And so, yes, he has it and it's now up to him whether he reviews it ever. But, yeah, assume if you're not a true lead from a publisher, you can pretty safely assume that nothing is what you'll get.
[01:12:48.520] - Premee
I think it's the visibility of it, too. Like, you're watching the reviewers review other books from your same publisher or that came out around the same time or seemed to be roughly equivalent to your book, and then you're like, oh, they're really not, though. Or like, oh, the publisher sent a gigantic box of chocolates and a bouquet of roses to this author, and I got silence, dead silence. Oh, you know, happy launch day. And you can't say anything. Yeah, because by that point it's too late and your launch day has passed and you can't even be like, well, you know, if the publisher wanted to send me something, they would have. They clearly don't. There's only certain people they want to send these fancy things to, so you just have to sit there and fume and then turn in the next book.
[01:13:40.200] - Sunyi
My editor sent me chocolates for the Lammy nomination. I was just like, oh, my God.
[01:13:44.750] - Premee
I've never gotten anything for any award nomination or win from a publisher or my agent or my agency or an.
[01:13:52.080] - Sunyi
Bargaining power, like, for next deal. Can you beat them with the award stick?
[01:13:57.820] - Premee
You'd hope so. But yeah, I've actually got a novella coming out with Tor.com in 2024, which I actually have to do edits before I leave for overseas in case I die in Spain or something from the heat. And people keep warning me, I haven't actually checked the weather. And, yeah, we'll see if I get anything from that or if it's just going to come out and people will be like, secret, secret book. You have to contact the fairies to know what this book is. Okay, well, we'll see. Because again, that was and I know it's a novella, but that was also after all the award wins and that was still not breaking five figures. That was still less than ten k, which is fine, but at this point, I'm like, this is all I deserve. I am writing books that are worth about five k. I mean, the numbers bear up, so that's the kind of books I'm writing.
[01:15:00.320] - Sunyi
It's so hard not to internalise advance size.
[01:15:03.630] - Premee
I have internalised it.
[01:15:06.820] - Scott
Is hard, super hard.
[01:15:09.540] - Sunyi
Yeah, we tell people not to.
[01:15:11.720] - Scott
I tell my friends not I mean, the other side of that coin, right, is Sunny's point that she made earlier, and I don't even know who the guest is. But the guest that we're apparently having on that has some pretty solid data around marketing spend, sales spend, because there are direct sales efforts behind the scenes right. That nobody ever talks about and how those correlate to performance, right. And that it's really not necessarily any sort of quality metric or even although, I mean, that plays a part, right. Like, we have to say that up front is that quality plays a part, style plays a part, the style and the type of story you release at any given time and what's happening in the world, all that kind of thing. Luck plays a part. But marketing and sales are highly correlated with outcomes in this industry because there really is so much that can happen for a book behind the scenes that they just don't tell you because it's so much easier just to say some books don't work, right? But most of them that get the push do work. And so what's that about? I actually put together a spreadsheet that will never see the light of day of a whole bunch of books that were either debuts or close to being debuts.
[01:16:45.950] - Scott
That came out around the same time mine did, because I watched my goodreads score drop and was very sad about it. And sad that my numbers weren't going up and that I presumed my sales would suck. And compared to SUNY's, they did suck, but it turned out they were somewhat decent compared to what I had worried they would be. But anyway, I put together this sheet and just did a very simple linear regression to see how Goodreads score was correlated with the number of Goodreads ratings and reviews. And it's almost not correlated at all, right? There are books that are doing huge numbers that have very similar ratings and this goes for both Goodreads and Amazon and Audible ratings as far as I've looked into it, right? Like, my data set is only 50 ish books, so not a huge data set, but especially in such a random industry, big enough to give some idea of whether there's a significant correlation and there's just not.
[01:17:59.820] - Premee
I never look at my Goodreads numbers. I signed up for Goodreads because a friend told me to so that someone wouldn't squat on my name and pretend to be me. And I was like, Why would that happen? I'm a nobody. But I signed up for it anyway and I just never look 
[01:18:16.100] - Sunyi
I looked obsessively and regretted it. I know you're still obsessive Scott. But I've always been really good with negative feedback and negative reviews and just shrugged it off like the first short story I ever published, the first review that first short story got was a one star from this guy. And it just like it started with I see this person felt the need to write in present tense and I was like, oh, boy, right? I'm inured to it. But actually, the sheer quantity of reading so many negative reviews did wear me down, which I didn't expect, but I became less resilient to it rather than more. Just because so many oh, my.
[01:18:56.160] - Premee
Like an allergic reaction or something.
[01:18:57.920] - Sunyi
Yeah, like toxin.
[01:18:59.770] - Premee
Yeah. I think from being in you know, from spending so many years in science, I didn't really notice. And I think that's one other benefit of coming into publishing from spending decades working and doing something else. If somebody gives my book one star, at this point, I'm just like, oh, I'm sorry your taste is so bad, and I just move on with my day. Nothing affects me anymore. Science hammered all that out of me years and years and years ago.
[01:19:28.760] - Scott
Yeah. In my case, I want there to be logic. I want there to be a pattern. And so Goodreads, unfortunately, and whatever other ratings sources are the only source of data I have, even though I know it is absolute shit data. It's the only thing I can look at. So I have a compulsive need to find the answer even when there isn't one.
[01:19:58.740] - Premee
Yeah. I figure those aren't for me. Those are for readers. What's useful for me is not coming from Randosrandos. It's coming from editors.
[01:20:08.380] - Sunyi
Almost all one and two star reviews are very personal and very vitriolic. And I think a lot of the ones that I've read because I used to review a lot on Goodreads and be a bit for reviewer and stuff, very rarely do you read one and two star reviews. You're like, this is useful.
[01:20:25.500] - Premee
Yeah, I think that's something useful to parse, too, from reviews is what's useful and what's not useful. I've never seen anything useful from a bad review. Like, people just aren't trying.
[01:20:36.540] - Sunyi
Oh, yeah. I was going to ask at the start because I know you were kind of listening to the podcast and there were things in it that are making you scream, and I was just wondering.
[01:20:45.370] - Premee
If there's anything in particular. The one in the last episode, specifically. I think so. I haven't listened to all of them. I was up to episode what was it, nine or something? Launch day. Yeah. I have kind of a tough time with podcasts generally because I have a slight audio processing disorder. Yeah. And I try to get around it. I can usually listen for a couple of minutes at a time, but this one I actually had to pause and like, screech and then go back. Because it was when you guys worked out the correlation between the advance and the sales, and you're like, yeah, if you get ten times more advanced, then you literally not metaphorically get ten times the sales. And I'm like, oh, I'm fine. I've heard this before. And then all of a sudden, the screaming started. It was like a spontaneous ejection of something from my body. Like I was possessed.
[01:21:41.390] - Scott
It is weird how cleanly that turned out, right?
[01:21:45.860] - Premee
I wasn't expecting the math to work out like that because my highest advance so far is not even broken. Five figures. So this, I guess, explains why I'm not selling any books, which is fine, but just hearing the math on the show, I was like, oh, I'm a scientist. I would like to hear how this works out. That was wrong. Yeah, I did not like that at all.
[01:22:11.020] - Scott
There do seem to be instances of people getting a certain advance and outperforming on that advance or vice versa. But with Sunyi and I, it worked out pretty neatly, unfortunately for me.
[01:22:31.280] - Premee
Yeah.
[01:22:31.870] - Sunyi
I think I'm out of material, and we've kept you an hour and a half, but yeah. Thank you so much for coming on.
[01:22:37.080] - Premee
Thank you so much for the invite. I feel like I may have vented some inappropriate things here. Please edit out all the parts where I'm like, I'm dying, I'm going to quit publishing, and I hate everybody.
[01:22:47.080] - Scott
That's a lot of parts.
[01:22:52.520] - Premee
Just leave in, like, the first five minutes and we should be okay. You guys can just vamp for the rest.
[01:22:59.900] - Sunyi
Well, when I get around to editing it, I'll send it to you. It's fine. It's not as bleak as the bonus episode one I did while Scott was away, which was me and RR Virdi and Wayne. That was so bleak. Holy shit.
[01:23:12.760] - Scott
I'm so sad I missed that.
[01:23:15.280] - Sunyi
I was like, hey, guys, how do you cope with mental health? And they are basically like drugs, alcohol, and lifting weight. Magic mushrooms is a big part of that recorded chat.
[01:23:27.400] - Premee
People joke about why so many writers are alcoholics, and everyone's like, oh, ha ha, that's a stereotype. And I'm like it's not.
[01:23:33.700] - Scott
It's not.
[01:23:34.180] - Premee
Yeah, we're all takes the edge off just.
[01:23:40.140] - Sunyi
And it does that.