PUBLISHING FROM A TO Z
Acknowledgments
Who do you want to thank for helping your book come into existence? Your agent and editors, surely, but who else? Your partner? Your parents? Your writing group? Your Great-Aunt Hilda who said you’d never amount to anything? Write it all down in your acknowledgments page, which is turned in nearer to the end of the publishing process.
Advance
When people in publishing talk about the financial side of book contracts – a “six-figure book deal,” for example – it’s easy to think that this means a payment for the book itself: A publisher has agreed to pay six figures for the right to publish a book, we assume. But what this really means is that the publisher has agreed to pay a six-figure . It’s a payment made to the author, but it’s not usually paid all at once, and it certainly comes with strings attached. Put more bluntly, an advance is a bet: A publisher determines the advance sum based on how much it’s betting a manuscript will earn. So if a publisher offers a six-figure advance, it’s predicting it will sell a massive number of copies – and, understandably, it’ll put a lot of marketing muscle and money into ensuring that prediction comes true. But here’s the catch: That sum the publisher pays you up front is called an “advance” because it’s an . (See “Royalties” later in this glossary for more details on royalty payments.) You won’t earn
