The Author's Guide to Traditional Publishing: Navigating the Publishing Landscape

By Harrington Leigh

For Authors

So, you've been offered a book contract, or are considering going down the traditional publishing route. Congratulations! It's a bit of minefield, but this book will help you navigate the traditional publishing landscape, with chapters on:

~ The stages of acquisition

(how the book-commissionin

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Author
• Release date: Apr 11, 2024
• ISBN: 9781738553204

Harrington Leigh

Harrington Leigh is a typical New York fiction editor, now living in the UK. Over the last couple decades he's worked with publishers of all sizes, from micro-presses to the Big 5. He's worked on numerous New York Times and USA Today bestsellers, and has seen one of his books turned into a high profile TV series, which he was very excited about. He's even come that close to winning an award.He really, really wishes this book had been available when he started out working in publishing.

Book preview

The Author’s Guide to Traditional Publishing

THE AUTHOR’S GUIDE TO TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING

Navigating the Publishing Landscape

HARRINGTON LEIGH

Copyright © 2024 by Harrington Leigh

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBNs:

Ebook: 978-1-7385532-0-4

Hardcover: 978-1-7385532-2-8

Trade paperback: 978-1-7385532-1-1

www.theauthorsguide.com

Contents

Introduction

1. What do we mean by traditional publishing?

2. The stages of acquisition

3. The departments that work on your book

4. So, you’ve been offered a contract

5. Working with your editor and agent

6. Sub-Rights

7. Epigraphs

8. Advances

9. Marketing and Publicity

10. The physical book

11. On and after publication

12. Summary

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Glossary

www.theauthorsguide.com

Introduction

Who is this book for?

There are tens of thousands of articles scattered across the internet that cover all facets of publishing, but there are few authoritative guides that describe traditional publishing in detail. This book is intended to outline what a traditional publisher can—and should—do to support an author once the publisher has bought or commissioned their book/s. While this guide is written from the perspective of publishing a piece of novel-length fiction, most of it will be relevant to other forms of book publishing, though there will be aspects of other forms of publishing that may be missing from this volume (for example, the role of the artist in illustrated children’s books.)

There are four groups of people who should find this book useful and/or interesting:

1) The writer at or near the start of their career.

It is this group for whom this book has been primarily written. Publishers (and, to a slightly lesser extent, agents) are sometimes not great at explaining each step of the publishing journey to their authors. Indeed, it might be argued that not every step of the process is relevant to the author, whose job it is to write and edit their book to the best of their ability, but publishing is a business that includes authors as its most important element, and it’s never a bad idea to know as much about your business as you can.

2) The more experienced writer.

It is likely that even seasoned writing professionals will find something in this book that’s new to them.

3) New and aspiring editors and anyone else interested in pursuing publishing as a career.

There are numerous pathways into the publishing industry, and this book can serve as a useful guide for those seeking a career in books and for those already in the early stages of their careers, who may be interested in how each department fits together across each stage of the publishing process. I wish there had been something like this available when I was starting on my publishing journey.

4) Anyone else who may be curious about the innermost workings of a publishing house.

You’re very welcome too. Grab us both a cup of tea and dive in. I’ll probably spill a little of mine.

Who is this book not for?

While some of the contents of this book will be relevant to authors publishing with micro-presses, the reader will get minimal useful information within these pages. There are many fine micro-presses, but their internal structures are usually such that one person might take the role of several entire departments that are found in a traditional publisher. Indeed, some are run by one person, who oversees everything from start to finish. As such, their processes are often quite different.

This book is also not suitable for authors who have chosen to self-publish, as the author has, in that scenario, chosen to take on the work undertaken by most—if not all—departments in a traditional publishing house. Self-publishing is the right move for many (indeed, the book you hold in your hands is self-published, and initially went through a Kickstarter campaign) but that’s not what we’re here to discuss today.

Terms

The terms used in this book are used throughout the industry, and if you are selling to one of the Big Five publishers (Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan), then you can be sure that pretty much everything herein is relevant. Smaller publishers and self-publishing paths often have different terms and different ways of doing business, and we will touch on those occasionally.

So, settle back with your beverage of choice and maybe grab a pencil. There may well be a test.

1

What do we mean by traditional publishing?

For the purposes of this book, a traditional publisher means a company that pays you a monetary advance in exchange for a license to publish a book that you’ve written in one or more formats, and who sells copies of that book through bookstores, both online and in physical stores (though there are some traditional publishers who focus exclusively on ebooks, and who will therefore not produce physical books to sell.) When you read the term publish, this amounts to more than printing a copy of your book and making it available as an ebook. Publishing includes those very important steps but should always include: marketing, publicity and sales.

Marketing and Publicity

The publicity department promotes you and your work.

The marketing department advertises you and your work.

There’s a fair bit of crossover, and the marketing and publicity teams work closely together, but a good (very basic, and only true in an extremely general sense) is that marketing spends money to promote your book (e.g., online ads, social media campaigns, swag), and publicity spends time in finding opportunities for them and you to talk about your book (e.g., signing tours, online interviews, getting early copies to reviewers).

Sales

The sales department sells your book into bookstores (both online and offline). Many sources estimate that between 500,000 and a million books are published each year. Bookstores are unable to stock that number, so they rely on sales reps to tell them about the books in their catalog and why the stores should consider stocking them. Smaller publishers usually don’t have sales teams, which is why you rarely see chain stores stock their titles.

There is an old maxim that states that “Money should flow to the author.” If you’ve been asked to contribute financially to the publication of your book, you’re not working with a traditional publisher. Your book should make you money, not cost you money. Beware of anyone who asks you to pay toward the costs of publication.

2

The stages of acquisition

(or: how the publisher buys your book)

What follows is the process used by a typical imprint within a typical publishing house. (An imprint is a department within a larger publisher that specializes in publishing a particular genre.) Some details vary from imprint to imprint, but these