[00:00:01.690] - Sunyi Hi, I'm Sunyi Dean. [00:00:03.670] - Scott And I'm Scott Drakeford. [00:00:05.830] - 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 that subsequently each of our careers went in very different directions. [00:00:21.890] - Scott That pattern repeats itself throughout the industry over and over. Why do some books succeed while others seem to be dead on arrival? [00:00:30.570] - Sunyi In this podcast, we aim to answer those questions and many more, along with how to build and maintain an author career. [00:00:38.410] - 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. [00:01:01.250] - Sunyi Welcome to this week's publishing rodeo. And this week we have with us Julia V, a fellow tour author who will be debuting this year actually, with her co author Ken is it Bebelle? How do I say his name? Yeah. And Julia, in her day job, is kind of on the lawyering side of things, so we were going to talk to her a lot about some really interesting topics to me anyway, like contracts and unions and how they affect us as authors, and some things that Julia has done herself as a debut looking into her own contract. I don't know if you'd like to do your own introduction and talk about your books a bit and your journey, if that's okay. [00:01:41.890] - Julia Sure. As you noted, by day I'm a trial lawyer in Silicon Valley, and at night I like to write fantasy fiction. So I have a co author, Ken Bebelle. And the funny thing about our story is we started writing together when we were 13. Now we are like decrepit Gen Xers, right? But we had a long hiatus where we pursued our day jobs and raised our children and we started writing together again in 2017. So we came from the indie side, and very unexpectedly, in early 2020, we started a novel. That when we pitched it, everyone was like, you need to query this. My mentor, Jonathan Maybury, was like, have you queried this? You need to query this. And Ken and I didn't know how to do that. So we were like, spending a lot of time on query shark and trying to learn how to write a query letter. And I listened to Henry Leen and he's like, you should query eight to ten agents a week to reduce burnout. But end of the day, we queried a total of six agents and had an offer of representation within three months, went on submission and sold a book to Tor on a preempt for six figures for a trilogy within two weeks. [00:03:01.710] - Julia It wasn't exactly Richard Swan, but it was very unexpected for us and we know we were really lucky. [00:03:07.650] - Scott You've invoked the name of Richard. Haha. [00:03:11.230] - Julia Sorry. Is that why you have that look on your face? [00:03:13.390] - Scott I'm a sore a little bit haha. No, that sounds like a fantastic surprise, especially when you got into writing and co writing sounds like, without expectations to go into trade publishing, traditional publishing, I had a somewhat similar path in terms of the agent process, finding an agent. I really honed in on a few that I liked, and I actually did one at a time and ended up getting the first. But was there any hesitation on the part of the agent or the publishers that you then submitted to in terms of you being a duo? And how did that work? I guess I'm interested in that. [00:04:04.060] - Julia There was not any of that. I mean, I think our agent asked us, would you like to have one pen name? Kind of like The Expanse guys, right? James Corey. But in the end, we just kept our pen names because we had been doing it that way and we were happy to keep going. The contract looked a little different from Tour, but that was because we formed an LLC and so it already was going to look different. [00:04:31.190] - Scott Got it. So you have in, like, your articles of incorporation or whatever, how you're splitting any proceeds and responsibilities. I suppose. [00:04:42.890] - Julia There'S two of us, and so it's 50 / 50 for the two of us. And Tor treats the entity as the licence or and they call you the proprietor. [00:04:53.510] - Scott Yes. [00:04:54.590] - Sunyi So, I mean, with the kind of legal background, when you first got the contract from Tor, how did you find that whole process? Because there's often that long gap where you get the offer and it comes in and then you're sometimes oftentimes working on the book before a contract is even signed. [00:05:10.850] - Julia I found it utterly foreign. My agent, Lori, bless her, was like, warning me, right? She goes, okay, just so you know, publishing contracts are like their own beast. I don't want you to get alarmed when you see this thing, but it does seem very different from the normal course of conduct you may be used to. The preempt came in in February. We didn't get the contract till July. We'd already finished drafting Book Two at that point in the trilogy. But at least our Zero Draught or whatever. But I think startled me is a it's like a 40 page contract. And your counterpart at the publisher is not an attorney, right? So they have contracts people. But I don't think the contracts folks are actually IP or entertainment or contracts lawyers. So I found that sort of interesting. Our agency was very helpful in Navigating, sort of these are the things that they had dealt with before and with specifically this publisher. But the contract looked different in 2020. We're in the middle of lockdown, right? But it looked different in 2021 from even the contracts that we know our friends signed in 2020. So I do think internally they're constantly tweaking their provisions to adjust whatever rights it is that they are looking to licence from Creatives. [00:06:40.740] - Scott Do you feel comfortable telling us what some of those differences you noticed from 2020 to 2021 were? [00:06:46.740] - Julia Can't speak to the people who shared with me about their contract, but I have become the person where a lot of people share their contracts with me and I'll talk to them about what their provisions mean. So for our contract, Ken and I don't have any hesitations talking about it. It's a three book deal and it was 50,000 per book and it was joint accounting. And it was funny because the first advice we got from every single person we talked to was try to get rid of joint accounting. And it was the one thing our editor said, I'm really sorry, I can't budge on this one thing. So that was, I think, kind of eye opening for us. Additionally, the non compete provision was, in my view, particularly draconian. I think it's drafted in such a way that it's really for like, a nonfiction situation. Right. Let's say you're the senator of some state and you sell your autobiography to Publisher A. Obviously, you don't want to walk down the street to publisher B and sell your autobiographical story again. Right. That would be directly competing. But I feel like in the world of fiction, the non compete is an artefact that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. [00:08:03.360] - Julia I mean, reader behaviour is to really buy an entire backlist and buy anything, multiple versions, even special editions of a book they already own. So the concept that you would be cannibalising your own sales as a fiction author seems strange to me. And I'm not even getting into the enforceability issue. Right, I know. I listened to your episode with Robin and I really admire her. But I think, first of all, these contracts are where the publisher is housed. [00:08:35.840] - Scott Right? [00:08:36.070] - Julia So it's New York law. I'm in California and I'm agreeing to submit to New York jurisdiction when I sign this contract. [00:08:43.850] - Scott Right. [00:08:44.360] - Julia But even in New York, I'm not licenced there. But non competes in New York still have some elements they have to meet. [00:08:53.870] - Sunyi Right. [00:08:55.770] - Julia Let's imagine you're a competitor in District A, right? And you want to enforce like an employee, a key personnel member is leaving and you want to prevent them from opening a shop across the street or down the block. [00:09:09.670] - Scott Right. [00:09:10.030] - Julia So geographical limits are actually a factor in enforceability of non competes. We don't have any of that in the author space. Right. So instead your agent will try to limit it in terms of like, that it's substantially in the same genre. Right. As opposed to limiting you from writing everywhere. But when I first got this contract, it literally limited me from writing anything else, including my legal work. [00:09:39.640] - Sunyi Right. [00:09:39.930] - Julia Like, if you write white papers or if you're a scientist, it was just really broad, overly so. Most of the work before signing this contract was focused on the non compete provision for us. [00:09:53.870] - Sunyi So I'm just going to quickly say, obviously we're not giving people legal advice on the podcast, but I am glad you brought up the non compete because we hear so much conflicting advice from it and I know the Sullivan's position on it and I totally see where they're coming from. What drives me mad is some other industry professionals will say, no, non competes are definitely enforceable and you shouldn't test the publisher on this. And it's like, okay, but the publishers then turn around and say, well, we never enforce it, so you don't need to worry about it, so you can sign it. So it's like, do you enforce it or do you not? And does it have teeth or does it not? And everyone says a different thing and if we don't enforce it, why do we have it and if it doesn't? [00:10:31.780] - Julia Yeah, I had that exact same work with them where they said, well, I've never seen the publisher enforce this. And I said, well, that doesn't make me feel any better. It's like, I just want to know what I'm agreeing to. Right. And I don't think anyone should hide the ball. I think it should be really clear between the parties what we think is competitive work. And so what I asked for was I said, well, here's a list of the things I'm working on. Do you think any of these would be a problem under this provision? And so I just wanted to have that transparency with my editor and that was, I thought, productive for us because then they could say, oh, this looks like it might be, this isn't, this is fine, and I could get it. [00:11:15.400] - Sunyi You modified your contract yourself or you submitted things? [00:11:22.250] - Julia A lot. I red lined that provision with what I wanted and then they came back with their kind of proposals and we worked to hammer out a final product. [00:11:32.290] - Scott Amazing. [00:11:32.670] - Julia I mean, a contract is supposed to be negotiated in good faith between two parties. It's hard because I think the level of sophistication between a creative and a big New York City publisher is obviously different, right, or could be very different. I think that if this were even more complicated, I would have hired an entertainment attorney or an IP lawyer to help me because I'm not a copyright lawyer, I just ask questions. [00:12:00.070] - Sunyi Right? [00:12:00.390] - Julia Like, how does this provision work and what is it intended to do? Can I get things excluded that I don't like? And can I ask for more things that I want us to be aware that I might be doing? Chris Rush often says that authors don't plan for their success, right. Which means that they might not think in the future. What else would I do that might be limited by this contract? So that was the view I went in with. [00:12:28.750] - Sunyi What did your agent help with that? Because agents typically do a lot of the contract negotiation. I rely on my agent because I can't read contracts right. So Tor sent me this 40 page thing, and I think by page five, I was just, like, in over my head and not really doing, not really understanding. I think there were a couple of things I had to ask Naomi specifically about that sounded scary as hell and were actually very mundane. But the rest of it, I was just like, I don't know how to read this. As a layperson, yeah. [00:12:58.460] - Julia Even as an attorney, where there were things I did not understand, like export rights or secondary rights versus prime rights. But for the heavy lifting, the agency did do the first pass right, and they did say, these are the things we've been able to get in before. So by the time I got the contract, there were things in bold, which I think is the agency pre negotiated stuff. I asked the head of the contracts committee at SFWA if that had any role, like if any of these are model provisions. And he said that he did not believe so. So I believe they're agency provisions. If you see them in bold on. [00:13:39.530] - Sunyi Your oh, can I just stop you there? To ask about SFWA. So that's the Science Fiction Writers Association. Do you do a lot with them? Do you interact them a lot when you're kind of as an author looking at contracts, other situations? [00:13:52.530] - Julia I joined them a couple of years ago, and then this year, I volunteered for the contracts committee, so I actually didn't know how to get more involved with Sifu. So being a member of the contracts committee has been very helpful and eye opening as to what members do use the contracts committee for. And they often do send questions through the contracts committee. And I think there's also a discord where people can reach out. So a lot of times I think we want there to be some sort of standardisation, right? So you have this sort of deep seated need to want these things to be consistent. But at least for me, and I'm just a party of one, our situation was totally custom. And I really get the impression as I talk to many authors, that each contract is uniquely different for them. So in mine, I asked for things like the right to do short fiction in my world, to have that excluded as non competitive. I asked for the right to read things out loud because I didn't want to be stepping on anyone's toes for audio rights. I had a lot of questions because I couldn't assume these contracts were specific. [00:15:13.190] - Julia Now, I know everyone's talking about AI right now, but at the time I was signing this, NFTs were very new. And I told my agent, I said, this thing does not expressly call out NFTs, but I could see the publisher making a play later to say that that's included in the multimedia definition. [00:15:34.810] - Sunyi Scott, did you look into your contract at all? Because you're a lot savvier than me at anything business. [00:15:40.510] - Scott I've actually been, as we've been talking, I've been looking at my non compete section because I remembered a few things but wanted to brush up before I said anything stupid. Well, even more stupid than it might otherwise be. So, yeah, I'm fortunate in that my agent seems to have inserted a whole lot of language and it might be an agency standard or something that my agent just puts in standard. But, yeah, there's a lot of language thrown in specifically into the competitive works paragraph in my contract that's actually somewhat contradictory to what the original contract says. So it's almost impossible to decipher whether I can or can't do any particular thing other than yeah, it basically just says, like, even sequels, prequels are not deemed competing works. So, yeah, it's confusing because it's not clear and I think that's the case for a lot of authors and I didn't know anything about any publisher and in our case, Tours contracts department. But Julia, you saying that they don't have actual IP lawyers in that department. [00:17:11.050] - Julia Makes well, no, just from the front line back and forth, the individual who I was communicating with did not appear to be an attorney. That's not to say they don't have attorneys in there or that they don't work with external counsel. I just found that this preliminary round, I found it interesting that the negotiating was happening between the editor and the contract department and me and my agent. And I think, like you said, it's pretty apparent that there's some ambiguous and contradictory language in these provisions. So they start with something that might be more boilerplate on their end and then as each agency starts advocating for their client, then you start to see this additional new language and ours. By the time we were finished, it was in bold and underlined and a bracket was next to it that said not a precedent. And I asked our agent, what did that mean? Because I didn't understand that part. And she said, it means that they don't assume that the next client from the same agency gets to keep that thing. [00:18:21.790] - Sunyi Bookends does a tonne, they have really tight boilerplates. So when I got the contract, I think Bookends had a first crack at it, similar to Julia, and then they sent it to me and unlike Julia to do anything further with it, but they just had loads of sections where they'd like, crossed out stuff and then added in tonnes of paragraphs of their own. And I was grateful because it is a long contract. [00:18:40.790] - Julia right? I mean, I think most authors are looking at trying to understand how am I going to get paid, right? Like, how many instalments, what does it take to earn out. And then for me personally, I was very interested in what would be deemed a competing work. And then how does the option work at the end? Right. I just wanted to know that it didn't limit my ability to write other things. [00:19:07.500] - Sunyi Yeah, mine is really specific, actually. It looks like Bookends did put in stuff where I'm allowed to write prequels or sequels or spin offs, but with discussion. But I can't begin work on a book project that interfere with completing this contract, which is really interesting. I think that was the one that I brought up with my agent because it was like, basically they don't want me to work on a sequel in it. Like not even work on it until this contract is really unusual. Anyway, I don't know how much about that I can keep in this, but yeah, because looking at this trust is now mine. [00:19:48.260] - Scott Mine has the same term, which is interesting because it's bolded, which I took to mean it was my agent or agency that threw that in there. But it says, author will not begin work on any project that will interfere with the completion of the work in accordance with the terms of this agreement. So it's got that, but it's also got the whole other paragraph that says, does not prohibit the author from writing and authorising the publication, distribution and sale of other fiction works with the same or different characters. Like what? [00:20:21.590] - Sunyi Yeah, that's what's confusing me. It's like I can't work on any other project that interferes with this, but I can have sequels, prequels or spin off of the same characters and ideas, but I can't write something in the same market. [00:20:33.080] - Scott You can't start it. So if it had already been started, then you're fine. You can continue writing anything that had already been started, but no new start. And it is just a little bit nonsensical. But it's unfortunate that there isn't more of an effort to make, especially the non compete section, more cohesive and agree with itself. Right. Because it causes a lot of authors stress. You know, in our discord, there's been a lot of stress thrown around about, can I do this other thing while I'm waiting for my publisher to get back to me with edits? And I want to do this other thing, but I feel like I can't because I'm locked down by this non compete. So yeah, I would certainly encourage people signing contracts to do what you did, Julia, and take that section seriously in terms of Redlining asking for it to actually make sense and be consistent with itself. [00:21:39.710] - Julia I didn't know that it made sense after we were done, but I would say that for me, the discussion with my editor was really fruitful because you have to remember, when people go into their careers, they love what they're doing and they love books. Right. So it's weird to suddenly be on opposite ends of the table advocating against each other. The common goal should be, hey, we should make it so that you get to write stuff you love and we get to read and publish stuff that we love. Right? [00:22:10.360] - Scott Totally. [00:22:10.870] - Julia I think with that, it should reduce the anxiety of the creative right. Because the creators should be able to write whatever the issue is publishing. Right. You can work on whatever it is that I think makes sense for you timing wise, right? Like capacity wise. But I think the real question is, like, who gets to publish this? [00:22:31.940] - Scott Yeah. And I mean, it makes sense from their end too, right. Like, they just want to make sure as best they can that they're going to get the product that they're paying for within a certain time frame. And that is extremely reasonable. Where I think maybe it makes sense for authors to look at protecting themselves also is in the event that the publisher is the cause, that, you know, timelines are are moved out and books are delayed. Because I don't think my contract has anything about that. I don't know of any authors that have any provisions for whether it's compensation or voiding of any other parts of the contract if the publisher pushes dates out right. [00:23:18.880] - Julia Especially if you're getting paid on those milestones right. And they're pushing the milestones out, you don't control that as the author. [00:23:25.260] - Sunyi I think a lot of people do find it difficult to when you've been querying a long time or you've been on submission a long time or submission more than once, you do see agents and publishers having that power. And when offers come in, like when you get a first get an agent and that table flips so quickly and suddenly you're the person in power and the agent is kind of working for you. And that takes time to get used to. A lot of people are really timid with their agents when they first get one. And I think that happens to an even larger extent that most people are coming into publishing going, oh my God, an editor is speaking to me. And they can't kind of it's really hard to get in the mindset of like, no, this is a business and I'm now an equal partner, or should be kind of thing equal partner in this relationship. But I would encourage authors to overcome that if they can, because you've got to start treating it like a business, because the business will certainly treat you like it's a business. [00:24:24.290] - Julia The common goal is like, hey, let's make the best product we can make and get that into a reader's hands. Then you can feel like, hey, we're a team. Because I think the problem is if you aren't able to have communication with the editor or God forbid, your own agent is ghosting you, then that's scary, right? That feels like, hey, we're not in it together. [00:24:46.090] - Sunyi Yeah. So much of publishing is done on handshake, like at agents used to be. You didn't sign a contract as a handshake agreement. A lot of publishing stuff still works that way. I suspect that if I wanted to write something and I was worried about the non compete side, I would just have a conversation with my editor and say, is this okay? Because that's how publishing does things. But if your editor relationship isn't so good or so strong or for whatever reason, you don't have an editor, maybe they left or something like that, then you can't do that. Then that's when, I guess, the contract protects you. Did you have a sense for what you could change? Like how much of the contract was negotiable and how much wasn't and what you could ask for? Or did you just try, well, we. [00:25:27.670] - Julia Got the first signal right away when we said, hey, can we get rid of basket accounting? That was like the number one thing for the agent. And that was the first thing where the editor was like, I'm really sorry, I cannot budge on this. This is coming down from the top, was the sense I got. Which is why I said I've never obviously worked in publishing, but I understand that internally they have to clear a lot of hurdles before they can acquire a book. So they aren't the sole decision maker. [00:25:59.160] - Sunyi Right. [00:25:59.410] - Julia Your editor? They might be the tastemaker in the sense that they love this thing and advocate for it with a number of people, but they're like money people and meetings. Like they have to do all this work before they can say yes. [00:26:12.980] - Sunyi So do you think that if we had some kind of standardised approach to it in the form of a union or guild, that people roll in, that would be better? I know unions aren't necessarily kind of your specialty area, but there's been a lot of discussion around it on social media, and I guess I was interested in your thoughts on how that can prove things, but also why we don't have unions if you felt like going over that. Because some people just won't know why we don't have one. Sure. [00:26:38.770] - Julia Obviously I'm not a labour lawyer, but I did do a little bit of homework and ask around. And in the US, we have antitrust laws like the Sherman Act and we have a National Labour Relations Board, so that governs whether or not you can have collective bargaining. And so right now it's on our mind so much because the WGA is on strike and we're hearing what's going on for them. And I think as authors, we're all pulling for them. We want there to be more fairness right, and how they are compensated. But when you look at them, when you look at the WGA, it looks very different than how we are organised, because we are not organised at all. In fact, that would be like a violation of the antitrust laws. So I started digging around, like, how can we, as freelance novelists, mimic or benefit from what it is that these folks at WGA are doing? So the first is that there is an Author's Guild and the Author's Guild wants to make us exempt, right. So they are, I think, going to be lobbying for a statutory provision that allows us to do what WGA does, right. [00:28:00.320] - Julia So that a guild could advocate for you and they're in with without breaking the law. So I wasn't aware of it until I joined the Author's Guild and until I talked to Michael Copoviaco at Tiffua and he had a liaison at Author's Guild and I started looking into their objectives. Right. They have a lot of lawyers and they, I think, are about what kind of things can move the needle short of a lawsuit or proposing a change to the law. And I think they've concluded maybe that's the best use of their advocacy. Right. We think about it. I think a little differently. I know that Sepua had, like, the Disney Must Pay movement where they were able to gain some momentum that might be beneficial to the authors who had not been paid. Right. For me, when I study WGA, the first question I have is why do they get health care right here in the US? We don't have that. So I was very curious about that. And apparently it's part of their minimum basic agreement. I think it's called the Minimum Basic Agreement because they have a collective bargaining agreement. It almost looks like an employer employee relationship, much more. [00:29:21.320] - Sunyi Right. [00:29:21.570] - Julia There's minimum hours that someone can work that entitles them to health care. We don't have that as novelists. [00:29:27.900] - Scott Right. [00:29:28.340] - Julia Most of us are like me, where I'm still working a day job, and then this is something that is fitting in around the margins. And so there aren't minimum hours for us and we aren't exempt. So the first thing I did was join the Author Skills, right? Because I thought, well, if my dues go to help pay for their lawyers to lobby to make it possible that we could have collected bargaining, that is money well spent, in my view. [00:29:59.310] - Sunyi Basic level question why can TV writers be in the WGA? Like, are they not freelance? Are they employed and we're not? [00:30:07.000] - Julia There's that minimum basic agreement. Right. Which kind of governs how their contracts work. Right. So they're signatories. So they're dealing with imagine that they have X thousand members on WGA West and WGA East, right. There's one contract, though, with this Amtpt, right? The alliance of motion pictures. So what they do is they agree in the contract who gets what and how people get paid and what the minimums are. We don't have anything like that. Right. Everything on our end is very organic. If McMillan had 995 books come out in their spring catalogue, then I have to imagine they had 995 contracts with 995. Authors, which is kind of horrifying if you think about it. Right. [00:31:00.610] - Sunyi But I mean, can we have something like that? Because effectively what's going on to the Writers Guild Association is like, these companies are saying, we need 50 writers for this TV show. Send them the way you would send 50 builders like their labour as a force. But publishers can't exactly say to agencies, okay, we need 40 fantasy writers this season, just send some. I don't even know if it's possible for us to function like that. [00:31:34.880] - Julia Yeah, I think that when Authors Guild says, hey, let's see if we can even have collective bargaining, they're testing the waters to see if they can act like the WGA and go to the Big Five and say, these provisions need to be here, we need you to sign off. We should have one collective bargaining agreement. And that's the minimum. Because I think it also relies on some very key personnel. [00:32:04.670] - Sunyi Right. [00:32:04.950] - Julia Like, you need to have more leverage. So if you're somebody who has an eight figure contract with publishing, you probably have much more bargaining power at the beginning. [00:32:16.950] - Scott Right. [00:32:17.360] - Julia That's the other thing that's interesting about these contracts, is WGA, DGA and SAGAFTRA, all their renewals were this year. [00:32:28.190] - Scott Right. [00:32:28.580] - Julia So their contracts expire, which means new negotiation needs to happen in order to renew these contracts. I'm very interested to see how this goes moving forward. I do think we are weaker for being decentralised. So that's just my personal observation. Like I said, I'm not a labour lawyer. I look at it now as like a creative, like, hey, how could we get these minimum provisions enforced? [00:32:55.390] - Sunyi Even I need to look into it in the UK side because we have a group called Society of Authors, and I don't really know how that works in terms of guilds and unions, but I do know that they're sometimes effective. So the Society of Authors, for example, was able to I believe it was them. It might have been Author skill I'm so sorry if I've got this wrong. Pressure Amazon into changing the returns, the ebook returns, so that people can't read a whole ebook, return it and get a refund. So that was supposed to change and that was due to them lobbying as a group. [00:33:27.880] - Julia Yeah. I mean, I think the author's field has something like 13,000 members, which isn't huge, but it's still a lot of people. Right. That's a lot of dues. [00:33:37.370] - Scott Right. [00:33:37.670] - Julia So if those dues are going towards advocacy or lobbying to advance causes for creatives, that's probably helpful. [00:33:47.440] - Sunyi Yeah, it feels like we really don't have a lot of power. [00:33:52.970] - Julia Yeah. I know that Twitter can be a scary place, but I think Authors Guild had announced a bunch of things about AI provisions, and we necessarily all share the same opinions. I think the big question I had when I read those is, well, who am I to demand these things of the publisher as it was, everything was a compromise to arrive at the contract that we did arrive at. Right. So I was trying to picture in my mind, like, well, how would this negotiation goes, right? You get your contract from whoever and then you say to them, well, I want these model provisions in here from Authors Guild and they could say no. So then where are you? [00:34:38.090] - Scott Right. [00:34:39.210] - Sunyi Do you feel that being indie gave you a stronger, I guess, a different attitude towards negotiation? Because I think sometimes when we've talked about it in the past, I think if the terms were really bad, you would walk away and be okay with it. Possibly. And that that's a different mindset. Whereas a lot of us who are who are sort of trad, only we're kind of looking at it like, no, don't take my deal away from me. [00:35:03.650] - Julia Yeah. So Ken and I had the luxury of having a day job, right? So this deal wasn't to put food on our table. We were already financially secure, which I think that's fairly critical from a leverage perspective, right, to feel like you could walk away. As indies, we were used to rolling up our sleeves and doing our own things anyway. And we had already bought three covers. It was just that when I said, hey, this is Asian female John Wick with dragon Magic, people were like, you should pitch that, right? There's like a broader market for that. And so that was for us a moment where we had to say, okay, under what circumstances would we walk away? Or under what circumstances would we say yes? And I said to Ken, well, I'm only going to say yes if I feel like everyone loves this project, okay? I'm not going to say yes if I felt like a tepid response to this project. Right? But when the preempt came in, they gave us like a three page, shingle spaced marketing plan. And I said to Ken, I know none of this is enforceable and I know they don't have to do any of this, but to me it signal that they were really excited about this project and they will champion it. [00:36:22.890] - Julia Similarly, when we met with our agent, I felt like she had the energy and enthusiasm to carry us forward for a whole career, not just for one project. So those things, I would say yes. Being an indie was helpful because I'm not afraid of the work. Like, I'm happy to work hard and I had the money to back it because it's expensive. [00:36:46.300] - Sunyi It is. [00:36:47.200] - Julia I think that's one thing that you and I have talked about before. But as an indie, you're paying for editing, you're paying for covers, you're paying for ads, you're running a small business. [00:36:57.120] - Sunyi I will admit I get a little frustrated when folks told me, no, it doesn't take any money to indepublish it's. Like, maybe in the 90s, but it does kind of take it now, if you want to see a sales return, realistically, I think there's so much competition. [00:37:09.950] - Julia And it's just visibility is going to remain the challenge for all of us. Right. You make the best product you can, you write the best book that you can, but you still have to get it in front of a reader, the right reader. [00:37:23.330] - Scott Right. [00:37:24.020] - Sunyi So what are some red flags that would have had you walking away from it? Aside from the lack of, I guess, contractual flags, aside from lack of enthusiasm? [00:37:32.900] - Julia I kind of hate to say this, but realistically, if they didn't offer us enough money, I would have been like, this isn't worth it. [00:37:38.690] - Sunyi No, that's fine. Don't hate to say. [00:37:40.960] - Scott I was going to ask if you had, like, a minimum in mind. I wish I had going in, but I was one of those that was just like, I don't need the money. I'm just happy to have a chance in the industry. Did you have a better sense for what kind of minimums you needed to see in terms of money? [00:38:00.560] - Julia I found out after the preamp came in that internally at the agency, they had kind of thought that this book was like a 25K book, right. So it was like three books, 25K each. Seventy five k. And that if they could get the publisher to pay 35K for three books, it would fall into the six figure category. So that was sort of the wish list from my agent, right. Like, hey, maybe we can do this. [00:38:30.560] - Sunyi Scott's face. It's weird to think about agents putting a value like that, isn't it? [00:38:36.100] - Julia Yeah. [00:38:36.390] - Scott What made your agency feel that way? Were there certain themes or what made them feel like they could put a number to what they wanted to get for it? [00:38:49.840] - Julia I don't know, but I saw so before going out on submission, they gave us a spreadsheet where they said, these are the editors and these are the publishers that we're going to talk to, and these folks are specialty folks, and these folks are a different kind of distribution. And so they kind of had groupings of where they felt the publishers were and how they paid. Right. So you could end up at a boutique where they might give your book a lot of love and care and attention, but maybe they wouldn't give you a big advance, but you could still have a very positive experience as an author with them. So we had that candid conversation about those types of publishers, and I assume that they're just looking at other deals that they've been doing for their clientele and kind of saying, hey, we think we can get this much for it. Honestly, it seems very mysterious to me. [00:39:47.370] - Sunyi Now. I'm just wondering if my agency did that or that's an interesting question, isn't it? [00:39:51.580] - Julia No, I think they have a very honed instinct. [00:39:56.530] - Scott Right. [00:39:56.900] - Julia They've read so many books, and they've read so many opening chapters and they read so many full manuscripts. [00:40:04.700] - Scott Right. [00:40:04.930] - Julia I think for us, our agent told us that during her reading period she had 864 queries and she asked for five full manuscripts and we were the only offer of representation for that reading period. So I don't know what it is they're looking for that I think they really do have intuition based on a lot of experience. [00:40:28.890] - Sunyi Well, I remember when we went out on sub, it was a very different submission strategy. I think Naomi felt like they had something because Anchor, we kind of went out in smaller rounds, but Book Eaters was like a big shotgun blast and I think I got the impression that was them trying to trigger an auction by getting everyone all on the same page at once. But then in that shotgun blaster, some smaller pubs, it was almost like, here, let's try for that auction, and then hedge our bets with some mid size and small prices in there as well. [00:41:00.980] - Julia The auction is the goal, right. They don't assume that you're going to get a preamp. They are hoping though, that you're going. [00:41:06.900] - Scott To get multiple offers and going back to your agent or agency having a target, if that was a function of looking at who they thought might be a good fit on the editor side and who would be most likely to make an offer and their knowledge over time of what kinds of offers those editors and those publishing houses were making. That totally makes sense. It is interesting though, and I feel like I learned a lot way too late, but understanding now what kinds of contracts other people are getting. And obviously we've had this whole podcast that goes into this in depth, but what that means, man, I really wish there were a better process for aligning authors with agents with publishers and really evaluating whether a manuscript that they were taking out to market fit the same expectations for each of those tiers. Because I feel like a lot of the heartache that happens in this industry is because of misaligned expectations and everything that follows after that. [00:42:19.960] - Julia That, I think, is a very good point. I think one of the pieces of advice I got from John to May very early on when querying was he said, oh, you should get a subscription to publishers marketplace. You should look at what people are acquiring. And I found out that that is something agents do all the time, that agents really are studying what publishers are acquiring. And it's weird they have that code of like a nice deal or a major deal or a significant deal. But those are dollars, right? It's a dollar range. So they are trying to gauge like this type of book gets a deal for this dollar range. [00:43:02.990] - Scott If there's any advice there, it might be that when you're in the querying stage and looking at getting an agent to represent your work. That's probably the stage where I would start having that conversation of I expect this to be a x dollar type book or it's not worth my time. Right. And I don't know that that's industry standard to have those kinds of conversations that early. But Julia, it sounds like at least your agent had some idea pretty early on of what they felt your book could do and you did better than they thought, which is fantastic, but at least you had some conversations and there was thought around it ahead of time. [00:43:45.370] - Julia Yeah. If I could wish for anything, it's that conversations about money not be weird. I feel like they should just be any other kind of discussion. Right. Like, what kind of money are we talking about? Should be a fair question. Especially because writing money is paid out in these really stretched out milestones. So just like normal people have to make budgets, right? So it makes sense to get an understanding of what is the type of range of money I can look for. And oftentimes people are like me in their day job and they can't really quit their job. And that could even push out their publishing deadlines because you see very successful authors with New York Times bestselling and award winning novels have to say, okay, well, I'm still working. It's taking me longer to deliver book two or three, or in some cases, I guess some countries have these wonderful grants to help make it possible to keep writing and finish your work on time for your publisher. [00:44:56.190] - Sunyi Yeah, if you're in the UK, I'll just throw out to any listeners that we have a pretty robust grant system. It's not as good as it was before Brexit, but it's still there. And I think there are two tiers to it. One tier goes up to ten k, I think one tier goes up to then there's like lottery grants up to don't know how hard they are to get. I've never succeeded in getting one. And to be honest, it takes so long to apply for that. At this stage, I think I'm actually better off working on the novel. Yeah, there's that. Weirdness, isn't it? I think I'm probably going to miss the deadline that I need to hit for my book to come out in 2024 by about three weeks, just because I've not been able to get it that done sooner, and for the editing to come back and stuff. And that means from one to three weeks, my book will end up being in 2025. The next one just my guess. [00:45:44.270] - Julia It's such a long lead up. I would say that coming from Indie is almost shocking how much longer it takes to deliver a book. But the book itself is such a premium product that that was really a pleasure to discover. Right. Meaning if Ken and I finish a book and get it edited and get it uploaded, that's something that can happen within three months, whereas for this contract was signed in 2021 and Ebony Gate comes out July of 2023. And so that's a pretty long lead up, right? Two and a half years since it was written. [00:46:21.770] - Scott Very long, yeah. [00:46:23.770] - Sunyi I was going to ask briefly, obviously, if you've done indie books before you've got a sense of what sales, good sales and bad sales are for you. As an indie, did you ever have a conversation with an agent or editor about what good sales or bad sales looks like in Trad? [00:46:38.380] - Julia No. In fact, I've been learning that from your podcast. The lack of data right, is really frustrating. And so, like discovering adelwise or just sort of talking to other authors and trying to understand what is normal, what is good. I would say the one thing our editor said to us was that often before the hardcover of Book Two releases, they will release the paperback of Book One and they see a nice uptick of sales and people entering the series at that time. So I suppose that that's fairly well known, right? It wasn't actual numbers, but that was probably the most sales oriented part of. [00:47:21.410] - Sunyi The discussion I ever had with my editor just today. Part of what I was thinking of it just today, an agent sibling was telling me a figure they'd heard from an agent is that kind of for our genre? 50k sales in the first year is really, really good. Like freaking amazing. That's what publishers are kind of happy with, I assume Big Five. And if you get like 100K in a year, then the book is kind of really taken off. And I don't know if that's just like an agent's opinion, if that's actually true. We do occasionally get industry people who message us with corrections or comments about stuff like that, so maybe one of them will chip in. But it's really hard to get a picture because everyone will just say, oh yeah, we think that's good for that's about in line with what we were expecting. And I feel like there should be a lot more variance in that somehow because something I don't think we've touched on before is like technically we are Sci-Fi and fantasy, right? That's what we focus on. But one of the things I think about a lot is actually Sci-Fi is almost its own genre. [00:48:22.310] - Sunyi Sci-fi gets a lot less sales, a lot lower advances compared to fantasy. It has a lot smaller readership. It's functionally niche aside from a few breakout titles. But yeah, I think for fantasy, apparently 50K sales in a year is brilliant across all formats. I don't know, I can't verify that. [00:48:39.910] - Julia I think it's good to me. So hard to understand too, like in the scale, because the book is so much more expensive, right? Like a hardcover is now like $30. And when you're an indie and you're selling your book for five or $6, it's just a real different sales proposition to the reader. [00:48:59.120] - Scott Yeah, I know. On that subject, Sunny, I know that when my first royalty statement came in, and I still don't have my next one. I don't know if you've had yours, if you've seen yours yet. [00:49:11.230] - Sunyi I've seen my sales figures, but not my royalties. [00:49:15.010] - Scott I haven't seen either lately. I haven't asked, though. But anyway, when my first numbers came in, they obviously weren't as high as I would like, but they were higher than I thought they would be. And my agent was quite pleased. And one of the comments he made was that he and again, without giving too much info, because he doesn't necessarily know that I'm broadcasting things on our podcast, but he had another client with another publisher who had similar numbers, and that publisher was stoked about those numbers for a debut fantasy. At least I think it was fantasy, I can't remember. But with Tor, it was just like, oh yeah, here's your numbers. We were like, Is that good? I don't know. [00:50:02.590] - Sunyi Obviously it has positive they're always like, oh, here's your numbers, it's all great. And it's like, is it great? Or you just like being nice to me because you don't want me to have a breakdown. And it's relative as well, where I'm very aware that the advance is high, so I need higher sales numbers. So to me, the numbers look good, but do they look good to the publisher? I don't know. I hope so. And I think they do because I can't even remember what I've said and what I haven't now. But on the American side, I'll know more when I get a royalty statement. But as far as I know, I got paid a small amount of royalties. I think that means book one earned out, and if so, that means it should be good. But I'm not sure. Have we ever talked about the Mark Lawrence formula on here? People know that. [00:50:50.140] - Julia No, it was his formula because I had been searching for is there a formula? And I had come across various ways you could gauge how an older book had done right versus book. I want you go ahead and talk about Mark Lawrence formula. [00:51:05.870] - Sunyi No, it's fine. So Mark Lawrence is a bit of a mathematical person, which means I'm in awe of him. I'm in awe of anyone who doesn't have to use their fingers to count, like me. It worked out that kind of for debut epic fantasy, you could look at their goodreads rating and multiply it by about seven to get an idea of sales in the first year or something. And then he revised that later on to say that it's probably closer to four to 4.5 depending, because more people are on goodreads now. And I think we kind of were using that informally before we had sales data in our discord group to look at books. But it varies so much. Like some books are overrepresented on Goodreads. [00:51:45.670] - Julia Right. [00:51:45.830] - Sunyi So my book is an example of book that's overrepresented on Goodreads because it was in crates and stuff like that and that readership is very online, they're very on websites, whereas Scott's book is underrepresented on Goodreads. So the formula kind of works, but not really. It sort of works for me, but I'm overrepresented. It doesn't work for Scott because he's underrepresented. [00:52:08.330] - Scott There might be like a threshold that you have to hit for it to even come close. Right. Like once you get to X amount of 5000 reviews or something on Goodreads, then maybe there's some rule that holds. But it seems like before some certain threshold, it doesn't seem the best we. [00:52:25.820] - Sunyi Can say is it works for Mark Lawrence's books. [00:52:28.130] - Scott Yeah, there you go with you that. [00:52:31.070] - Julia Certain populations are more online than others. [00:52:33.460] - Sunyi Right. [00:52:33.730] - Julia So even Goodreads, I think, post their own statistics of what they think their user age groups are. And I think it does kind of like 35 and under. And if you can imagine that there are plenty of people reading but are not online, then yeah, they would not be adding a book on a bookshelf and Goodreads. Right. [00:52:51.750] - Sunyi Amazon is a slightly better metric, I think, but you do get your ratings, give some indication. And there's also the Amazon Author Central, but I don't know what that's like for indies, but for Trad, Amazon Author Central is completely unreliable. I mean, when your book comes out, you can make an account and you can kind of see your book scan sales. But for transparency, my Amazon Author Central says I've got 17K sales right on there and it's like it's nowhere near across both sides of the Atlantic between 1680 somewhere on all formats. Right. So it's not useful as a metric and it's not even like you can multiply it by X number to get your sales figure. It's like for this person it's 40% of the sales and for that person it's 80% of the sales. And it changes every week. And you don't know it's so inaccurate that it's useless. So there's so little data that's actually helpful. [00:53:44.070] - Scott Well, it's really iffy because you just have to take whatever your publisher says are your sales numbers as the truth. There's no real way to check that that I know of. [00:53:54.200] - Sunyi Yeah. And your editors don't necessarily know because it's not their department. [00:53:58.410] - Julia I don't know that they're tracking it. I guess they get an update. I don’t know. I don't know how much they paid attention, frankly. [00:54:05.670] - Sunyi An industry person did say to me privately that they don't really get an update unless you trigger something like a bonus. So they don't necessarily know. I mean, they can look at your sales figures, but that doesn't tell them whether you've earned out, for example, unless they're kind of doing lots of math crunching. [00:54:24.360] - Julia Yeah, and I think that's probably unique to each editor. The thing that they get very focused on, right? Yeah. [00:54:31.480] - Sunyi And if you've got 15 clients, are you going to keep track of all? [00:54:35.230] - Scott Their books that are yeah, and as far as I know, most, or maybe all editors, none of them have a direct incentive like an agent does to keep track of the performance of any given book. Right. They're not paid based on how their books do. It's just a general are you doing a good job or aren't you? Kind of thing. Like most corporate jobs are. Right. [00:55:01.150] - Sunyi Very quickly, can I ask you a bit about co writing? I might have to edit that to slot it in somewhere else. [00:55:07.330] - Scott That was on my list to ask, too. I'm very curious about it. [00:55:10.440] - Sunyi Feel free to explain your process. I know we've talked about it a bit, but just how it works for you and how you actually create a book and revise it and process things like editor notes when they come in. [00:55:20.090] - Julia Yeah. When I wrote a novel solo for NANOWRIMO in 2016, I just use Scrivener. But when I write with Ken, we use Google Docs so that we can write at the same time. And people have always asked us, like, oh, do you write different POVs or different chapters? And the answer is no, we'll write in the same paragraph sometimes. It's crazy. [00:55:43.870] - Scott As you're drafting? [00:55:45.250] - Julia Yes, as we're drafting. We both will log in at the same time after dinner, and then you can just see that we're like our cursor is like where it is on the page. [00:55:54.720] - Sunyi Wow. [00:55:55.330] - Julia It is really unusual, but we have known each other a long time and Ken told me, like, he went to signing with Neil Schusterman and Jared Schusterman, middle grade. [00:56:07.200] - Sunyi Right. [00:56:07.500] - Julia And they both also have co writers, and so apparently they are the same as we are. They also don't have a really clear division of labour. [00:56:15.970] - Sunyi Right. [00:56:16.230] - Julia As they're drafting. They're drafting at the same time. They could also be working on the. [00:56:20.520] - Scott Same that's super cool. [00:56:22.640] - Sunyi I like that the Expanse guys have a really clear division labour, don't they? They've got like the world builder and then the story guy, you know, it makes sense. [00:56:33.310] - Julia I love ideation and I'm kind of like the story structure person. Like, I like the spine of the story and making sure each scene works and turns. Ken is more prosy than I am. So, like, if there is a nice sentence in the book, it's probably Ken's sentence. [00:56:54.000] - Sunyi What happens if you disagree? [00:56:56.230] - Julia It's stuck on rare. It's only happened twice in six years of recent co writing. And so what we did, we had gotten to, I think, a part kind of in the last 25% of the book, and we had disagreed on the final battle scene. So I said, okay, why don't we just pause and write a prequel novella? So we stopped and we just wrote like 20,000 words of backstory. And then when we came back. We had no more disagreement. We were like all on the same page. [00:57:27.230] - Sunyi Wow. [00:57:28.210] - Julia Yeah. [00:57:28.980] - Scott Who won? [00:57:30.830] - Julia I will just say that it went as I anticipated. There are two prequel novellas, so that shows you that sometimes maybe what? When a thing isn't working. And then we couldn't agree it's because we hadn't thought out something early in the character arc. [00:57:53.570] - Scott Hahahahaha. Right. So that's code for Ken needed some time to realise that you were right. [00:58:02.570] - Julia Refer to our Clifton strength as my number one in Clifton strength. And Ken has relator, which is probably the only reason we are able to write together so peacefully, is because relators work well in small groups. Right. But I do like to forecast out where something is going. So that was probably already on the forefront of my mind. [00:58:28.050] - Scott Yeah. [00:58:29.250] - Sunyi When editor letters come in, oh, that's. [00:58:31.900] - Julia So much harder because of the way that the version control has to happen. Right. Because now it's a word doc with comments and red lines. And so I took the first stab at it and I'm pretty sure my editor has never had anyone else give her a pivot table and a pie chart after. But I grouped all the editor comments. I said, well, these are about interiority, these are about plot, these are about timing. So X percent of the comments are geared towards this. So this is what we're going to work on. I guess this is again about me wanting to have data. [00:59:14.740] - Sunyi Right. [00:59:14.990] - Julia So that was one thing that I could do. And Ken and I started using Dropbox so we would just text each other when we were going to be in the document. But we had a folder system, so we didn't work on the Microsoft Word file at the same time. It got even more complicated during the proof process when it was a PDF. And I found that very difficult. I think that was probably the hardest part for me. [00:59:43.050] - Scott That would be hard. I like the general idea of co writing a whole lot, though, because I. [00:59:49.970] - Sunyi I don’t, don’t fucking touch my novel haha. [00:59:52.990] - Scott I mean, I like it on a theoretical level because in theory you have people with very strong strengths who might be good at one thing and they might still be good at the other aspects of writing, but combining powers, captain Planet style is really cool. But yeah, I suspect that what you found in a friend that is a good enough, close enough friend, who shares a talent for writing and interested in the same things. That seems very rare and for a reason. I have a hard time imagining even my closest friends being at that same level of aligning interest, aligning times, will to put in the time, will to put in the effort, et cetera. It's hard to really match all of that up. [01:00:56.380] - Julia And I do think Ken and I got very lucky. Like, I had him take the strengths. [01:00:59.990] - Sunyi Test. [01:01:00.340] - Julia And so we had shared four out of the top ten. So we did have a lot in common, but also we're both turning 50 in a year. And I think as you approach a certain stage in your life, your goals can align very clearly. [01:01:15.340] - Scott Right. [01:01:15.660] - Julia We had done that thing where at least for for me, my parents were like, you can be a doctor, lawyer or engineer. So I felt like I had already had my kind of career that was respectable, and now I was going to do the thing that probably I had always wanted to do. And so I was running out of time was like, my big concern. And co writing is faster and realistically. It's not just twice as fast, it's even faster because you don't have a writer's block. Right. Like, if I stop on a scene, Ken will be like, okay, I'm going to take it this way, and he'll just finish it. Or if he stops on a scene, I'll just keep writing. And he'll say afterwards to me whether or not it comported with his idea where the scene should go. So even if what I write is wrong, in his mind, it helps him get to the finished product faster because he'll be like, no, it's not like that. And then he can delete it and keep writing. [01:02:14.210] - Scott Right. [01:02:14.560] - Julia So it means, like, you don't have long periods of time where you don't know where the story is going or you have to change something. [01:02:21.540] - Scott Yeah, that totally makes sense. It seems like it would be very useful for maintaining momentum. I am curious to know whether you it sounds like you're a data person, whether you track how much of your writing does get edited or deleted, et cetera, as you're going through that co writing process. [01:02:42.290] - Julia No. When we get into what we think is like, the last half of the book, we'll start a spreadsheet just to log our words, like, how many words that we're doing. But we don't track our revisions and we will revise each other continuously. [01:02:56.710] - Scott Right. [01:02:56.970] - Julia Because we'll rewrite the beginning of a scene or the beginning of a book multiple times. And I think we've crossed a million words together cool. Recently. So it's worked. [01:03:08.730] - Scott That's awesome. [01:03:09.400] - Sunyi How do you know when a project is a solo project? Because I was talking a bit to Jen Dawson about this because Jen's also a co writer, but then the book she sold to Tour is a solo book that she's written. [01:03:22.290] - Julia That's funny. I met Emma candon I think they were also co writing their spouse. But what I failed to really think about was the overlap. [01:03:38.940] - Scott Right. [01:03:39.190] - Julia Ken and I are writing fantasy because that's something we both really love and it's contemporary fantasy, and we wanted this Asian element in our contemporary fantasy. But I think a solo project that makes sense is if we didn't share that interest. So Ken loves cyberpunk. I don't really that much cyberpunk. Any that I've read has just been because Ken recommended it, right. So I could see him thinking like, this is the right thing for me, and he can go off and craft his cyberpunk project. For example, if I were to write a legal thriller or a romance, I suspect Ken might not be on board those types of projects. [01:04:21.590] - Sunyi Oh, my God. Have you ever co written a sex scene? Is that possible? [01:04:25.000] - Julia Could you do that? Crazy thing has no sex in it and it has no profanity. And I did that because I have kids that I know are going to read this book. But what I found out was Ken's mom was reading our books, and I was like, oh, thank God. Okay, look his mom in the eye. [01:04:51.930] - Sunyi Do you think you could? Like would you find it weird? Is that is that a personal question asked? Because, like, you're both married to other people and I don't know. [01:05:02.350] - Julia Well, I tried to include one in one variation of the beeline for the love interest, and we ended up cutting it from the book. But I think I wrote it realistically. I don't know how the revisions would have gone because we ended up not going that direction with the romantic interest. Right. [01:05:25.690] - Sunyi Yeah, that's fair. [01:05:29.050] - Julia Yeah. I don't know. I think we once wrote a military Sci-Fi together, and he wrote the steamy scene, not me. So you just start with writers go where they want to go when they're drafting. [01:05:39.760] - Sunyi Right. I guess it's no different to reading a book that your friend has written which has steamy scenes in it, and you're just kind of like it's writing. It's a book. [01:05:52.370] - Scott Hopefully you're just judging them in your mind. It's fine. [01:05:59.810] - Julia Oh, really? [01:06:04.530] - Scott I don't know why I'm trying to censor myself here, but I'll not make too many jokes. [01:06:12.790] - Sunyi Esther's first book had, you know, steamy her epic fantasy, which is probably never going to see. Light Day had steamy scenes in it. It was fine. It's not a big deal. Shaylin desperately doesn't want me to read her romance for that reason. But I think it'd be fine. [01:06:28.650] - Scott I'm going to read that, and I'm going to live tweet it. [01:06:31.150] - Sunyi I think I'm going to read it out loud to my partner. Hear that, Shaylin! [01:06:41.490] - Scott Goodness gracious. (Laughing.) [01:06:45.170] - 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.