Demystifying Book Deals: A Nobody's Guide to Publishing

What I Learned Landing a Book Deal as a First Time Author

Welcome to Outsmart the Learning Curve. Instead of an excerpt from my upcoming book, for the next two weeks I’m sharing insights into the complicated world of book publishing. If you’re an aspiring author, these posts will be worth a read (even some of my author friends didn’t know a few details I describe below and in Part II). And if you don’t have aspirations to write a book, consider it a fascinating case study of how a legacy business evolved (kicking and screaming).

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How Does a Nobody Like Me Get a Book Deal?

Celebrities like Britney Spears, Michelle Obama, and Matthew McConaughey command multi-million dollar advances to write their books. Of course, these people are outliers in many ways.

Book covers: 'The Woman in Me' by Britney Spears, 'Becoming' by Michelle Obama, 'Greenlights' by Matthew McConaughey. Images courtesy of respective publishers.

Erik Hoel’s clever analysis makes the case that there are approximately the same number of self-made billionaires in the US as there are non-celebrity authors who make a humble living. By Hoel’s calculations there are about 585 non-celebrity self-supporting authors versus 515 self-made billionaires.

To be fair, that 585 number doesn’t consider those who self-publish. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s a simplified primer on today’s complex book publishing landscape.

Traditional Publishing

Not long ago, there was essentially one way to get a book published if you weren’t famous, or “have a platform” as they say in the publishing industry. With exceptions, the general order of operations for regular people is:

1. Pour your soul into a manuscript which often takes years. It’s possible to go to step 2 with an idea or a chapter, but without a “platform” your chances aren’t great.

2. Query agents. This means sending your manuscript to as many as 100 agents who seemingly aren’t great communicators. Many have adopted a "NO RESPONSE MEANS NO" policy…nice.

3. If you’re lucky enough to get a deal in step 2, your agent pitches your manuscript to publishers. Of course, this can take months and still may end with no takers.

4. If your agent finds a publisher willing to do a deal, you get to sign the rights and control of your book away in exchange for an advance that’s likely far less than Britney Spears’s. Your chances of earning out your pittance of an advance (making additional income beyond the advance) is very low. Your mileage may vary.

To be fair, traditional publishers by and large do an excellent job with the blocking and tackling of editing, layout, cover design, and printing. Plus, there’s the benefit of filtering out non-celebrity shlock, though perhaps at the cost of missing some diamonds in the rough.

Marketing

While good at editing, layout and printing, traditional publishers are famous for being terrible marketers. This possibly relates to them not caring much about missing diamonds in the rough. That is, publishers are unlikely to do a great job marketing that diamond in the rough so it could gain traction.

In a fascinating recap of publicly available testimony from the Penguin/Simon & Schuster antitrust case, traditional publisher executives admitted that their primary marketing expense consists of advances to celebrities that range from $250K to millions. Whereas the rest of their marketing expenditures on these same books are an order of magnitude less. In one case, a publisher spent $1.2M on an advance to an author but only invested $62K to market that book. In another, a publisher paid a $450K advance but spent only $36K on marketing.

Why this lopsided ratio? Because traditional publishers focus on either people like Britney, Michelle, and Matthew, who can market their own books by, say, posing topless on the book cover, or franchise authors like James Patterson, Tom Clancy, or Colleen Hoover, who bring their own audience.

Self-Publishing

With the introduction of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) in 2007, self-publishing quickly overtook traditional publishing in terms of new books produced per year.

Using self-publishing services like KDP, anyone with an idea and an ability to operate a word-processor can publish a book. And they do…at a rate of over 2M new books every year! As an added incentive, the author has full control and gets to keep 60 - 70% of the net revenue versus the traditional publisher earn-out royalties of just 10 - 15%.

Publishing Models Compared

Without the agent/publisher filter, however, the quality of self-published books varies greatly, and it’s not just the writing. All the specialized work of editing, layout, cover design, and printing must be handled either DIY or via freelancers. The DIY folks often end up with typo-ridden books that aren’t very readable and have ineffective covers.

And the cost of hiring professional freelancers in each of these disciplines adds up. My estimated cost to self-publish using middle-of-the-road estimates for vendor pricing came out to nearly $26K, approximately the cost of a new Honda Civic.

Rough cost estimate to self-publish

Vanity Publishing

Hiring freelancers to edit and design critical aspects of a book has several disadvantages as compared to the traditional publisher route. First, just finding and vetting individuals for each task is a big job. Second, the quality of these freelancers may differ significantly, and new authors are not in the best position to determine freelancer skill levels. Last, coordinating it all so that the timing works and last minute changes flow through the entire cascade of activities takes serious project management chops.

The heaviness of this self-publishing activity gave rise to “vanity publishers” who do the work of the publisher but do not filter for writing quality. Vanity publishers (who generally don’t like to be called vanity publishers) handle everything from editing to putting the final manuscript on the various self-publishing platforms. They make money from authors who pay for these services, but generally don’t make anything on book sales. So they don’t care much if the book sells.

These mismatched objectives between author and vanity publisher have led to a pretty scammy business that swindles money from unsuspecting authors and often produces low quality books.

Hybrid Publishing

Hybrid publishing emerged as a response to the limitations of the traditional publishing model and the challenges of the DIY/vanity self-publishing model. A few of the key hybrid publisher criteria as described by their own organization, the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA), include to:

• Vet submissions—I’ve heard of hybrid publishers accepting as few as 10% of submitted transcripts and as many as 40%.

• Ensure editorial, design, and production quality.

• Pay authors a higher-than-standard royalty. Author royalties range from 50% to 85% net of printing and distribution costs (remember Amazon gets their 30% - 40% off the list price).

So unlike vanity publishers, hybrid publishers have “skin in the game” given that part of their compensation is a royalty on every book sold. Many in the r/selfpublish Reddit community see paying anyone calling themselves a “publisher” as a non-starter. I see it as a positive—hybrid publishers want to do everything in their power to make sure the book sells.

My Journey

As you might have guessed, I didn’t even try to get an agent and go the traditional route. Instead, I submitted the Outsmart the Learning Curve manuscript to nine publishers and was lucky enough to receive six hybrid publishing offers! Yay me!

Perhaps more interesting, with these offers came contracts, pricing sheets, and more. So I suddenly had an inside scoop on the world of hybrid publisher services, costs, and royalties.

In Part II, I’ll break down all the numbers. You’ll learn how widely these offers varied, how there’s some level of vanity publisher scamminess even with IBPA approved publishers, and why they all essentially said, “If you’re writing this book to make money, you’ll likely be disappointed.”