Track Changes: Episode 1
Publishing 101
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE
Sarah Enni: Track changes is brought to you by Scrivener, a writing software created by writers for writers. Scrivener is the GoTo app for writers of all kinds. Scrivener unites everything you need to write, research, and arrange, long documents in a single powerful app. I have used Scrivener to write many books over the last ten years. Its layout is based on an intuitive three-ring binder concept, that allows you to gather your material and navigate between different parts of your manuscript, notes, and references, so easily.
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Sarah Enni: For a lot of writers, there comes this moment where things just kind of click. For Jennifer de Leon, that moment happened at 7:00 AM at a church in Boston.
Jennifer de Leon: I was desperate to take a writing class, but I didn't really know how. And I found one randomly at this church and it met on Saturday mornings, really early.
Sarah Enni: The time wasn't great, but Jen didn't think much of it until the first day, when she walked into the churches meeting room and saw her classmates.
Jennifer de Leon: Everybody at the table was really old. And I was so confused [chuckles], and then a few minutes in I realized it was a senior citizen writing class.
Sarah Enni: By the time she put it together, it was too late.
Jennifer de Leon: But there's no way I could have left. And they were like, "What did you bring to read?" And I brought my journal, and they're like, "Just read something."
Sarah Enni: It was one of those "Oh crap" moments. But Jen proceeded to open her journal.
Jennifer de Leon: So I read this piece, or this journal entry, about hooking up. It was so embarrassing and awkward.
Sarah Enni: But also, kind of life changing.
Jennifer de Leon: Something cracked open that day where I was like, "I don't even care." It was so refreshing to just read something and get feedback and have people's eyes open.
Sarah Enni: Jen was twenty-two-years-old at this point. She loved writing but never saw herself as a writer. This was the first time she had a room's undivided attention.
Jennifer de Leon: It's addictive. You need an audience as a storyteller, and that shows you how hungry I was for one. I went to this 7:00 AM class on a Saturday with senior citizens.
Sarah Enni: That was a huge step for Jen on her journey to identifying herself as a writer. Now, years later, another milestone. Jen is about to release her debut book and face the daunting world of publishing.
I'm Sarah Enni, and this is Track Changes, a special First Draft series covering everything you don't know you don't know about publishing. Over five years the First Draft with Sarah Enni podcast has brought you the stories of hundreds of authors and other professional storytellers. And if you listen to every single interview, you would gather a lot of information about writing and publishing a book. But nowhere have I laid out clearly, and sequentially, how this whole book publishing thing works... until now. That's what Track Changes is for. Think of this series as your comprehensive guide to the traditional book publishing process.:
And to understand that process, we're going to be following Jen, who has come a long way from oversharing with seniors at 7:00 AM. Her debut young adult novel Don't Ask Me Where I'm From, is out May 5th. And as Jen navigates this publishing journey for the first time, we're gonna follow along and learn from her experiences. We'll also be speaking to professionals from all parts of publishing, getting their perspective on how this very unusual and opaque industry works. And sometimes, how it doesn't.
Later in this episode I'll be speaking with Courtney Maum, novelist and author of Before and After the Book Deal: A Writer's Guide to Finishing, Publishing, Promoting and Surviving Your First Book, who is gonna help us lay down some publishing fundamentals. But before we get to that conversation, let's hear a little more about Jen. I'm gonna have her give the quick pitch for her debut book Don't Ask Me Where I'm From.
Jennifer de Leon: It tells a story of fifteen-year-old Liliana Cruz who is a freshman in high school, and she's new to this particular high school. She's in a METCO program, which is basically a desegregation program. And so while she's trying to fit in, she has learned that her father is missing. And she realizes that he's not so much missing, but he has actually been deported. And she had no idea that her parents were even undocumented. So this is a real changing time for her. And a coming of age novel.
Sarah Enni: You've heard of write what you know? Well, Jen and her main character Liliana, they have a lot in common. Jen grew up in Boston, but her parents immigrated from Guatemala.
Jennifer de Leon: I often tell people like, "Yeah, I grew up in the suburbs of Boston, but inside my house it was Guatamala."
Sarah Enni: She says it wasn't just that her family spoke Spanish and English at home.
Jennifer de Leon: The rules were different. Parents were the ultimate authority, whereas outside the doors of home, it was America. You could talk back to adults. You could just do whatever you wanted, basically. It felt like that.
Sarah Enni: Growing up, Jen was often the only person of color in her classes, and it wasn't until she was a freshman in college when she first read a book with a Latina protagonist.
Jennifer de Leon: It was The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. And I went to Connecticut College, which is a small private liberal arts school. And my freshman English course, they assigned that book. And so I'm reading it and it just was like, "Just chop my head off." Like, "I can't even."
Sarah Enni: It was definitely a turning point for the way she experienced stories.
Jennifer de Leon: And so then I started seeking out other writers, women of color and Latino writers. I mean, college in general, just cracks open your brain. But that, in particular, stood out to me.
Sarah Enni: But it really wasn't until after college, until after that morning at the senior citizen writing class, that Jen decided to take writing seriously.
We're gonna keep following Jen over the next few months. Through the release of Don't Ask Me Where I'm From and beyond. If you want to know a lot more about Jen's back story, and trust me, you do. Listen to her interview on First Draft. It's just one episode back in the feed where you found this show, and I'll link to it in the show notes.
Jennifer de Leon: I didn't know much about capital 'P' publishing, and what I thought I knew wasn't so much wrong, as it was just a fraction of what there is to know. So it's the kind of thing where it's like you don't know what you don't know, and then you learn a little bit and you're like, "Wow, I really don't know."
Sarah Enni: Learning just a little more about what we don't know after the break.
I am so thrilled that Track Changes is brought to you by Scrivener. A writing software created by writers for writers. In 2004, after years of dreaming about the ideal software to write his novel and thesis, Keith Blount decided to teach himself to code and create it himself. That was very enterprising of Keith. And once you get into Scrivener and see how powerful it is, and what a broad array of totally customizable tools it includes, you can really tell that someone familiar with the complexities of a novel length project, put their entire heart into creating this software.
For researchers, Scrivener is heaven. Put all your notes in one place. Already have writing and research in other apps? Not a problem. You can import all sorts of files into your Scrivener projects including Word documents and Open Office documents, plain text files, final draft scripts, images, PDFs, movies, sound files, webpages. Then you can set up the Scrivener screen so you're looking at your notes, documents, images, whatever you need right alongside the document itself.
Of course, for those of you looking to get into deep focus, one click is all it takes for Scrivener to go into full screen mode. That means the entire page is full, and you have one long, endlessly scrolling block of text that really allows you to focus, and block out all those pesky distractions on your desktop. That's how I prefer to use Scrivener. And I have found it a great way to just totally lose track of time and get into the book.
You can also set targets for daily word counts and use its dynamic progress tracker to see how far you've come, and how far you have to go. That means Scrivener does math for you, which is brilliant. Licenses for Scrivener for Mac and Windows are sold @literatureandlatte.com for $49 for Mac and $45 for Windows, or together for $80.00. And student discounts are available. And right now, if you go to literatureandlatte.com and use the code First Draft, you'll get a 20% discount on Scrivener for either Mac or Windows. That's literatureandlatte.com and use the code First Draft to get 20% off. So what are you waiting for? Go check it out and start your novel today.
Sarah Enni: What Jen was saying, how the more you learn about publishing, the more you realize how little you know, is so real for me. I think anyone who has published, tried to publish, or even just thought about publishing a book, can agree... this stuff is confusing.
Courtney Maum: Publishing is such a privilege, that we're not really encouraged to voice our doubts too loudly.
Sarah Enni: That's author Courtney Maum.
Courtney Maum: I'm the author of four books. My first three novels were, I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You, Touch, and Costalegre. And my fourth book is a giant guide to the publishing industry called Before and After the Book Deal: A Writer's Guide to Finishing, Publishing, Promoting and Surviving Your First Book.
Sarah Enni: Courtney was inspired to write Before and After the Book Deal because she actually had a great first publishing experience.
Courtney Maum: When my debut book came out, I had so much support from my editor, from my agent. The book actually did well and it had great press, and I still just felt like I was in this opaque muddy jungle where I didn't know where to turn. I felt very confused. And I didn't know who to turn to with my confusion because no one's really sitting you down and walking you through the 101 of book publishing. So again, that's what I wanted this resource to do, was to fill in the gaps of the conversations that aren't being had.
Sarah Enni: Before we get too much further, let's set the scene. Anyone who's listened to First Draft before knows that I love context. I like to start at the very beginning which is, what do we even mean when we say publishing? I want to define two terms, traditional publishing and non-traditional or self-publishing.
Courtney Maum: Okay. So what is traditional publishing? In my opinion, it means that someone else is paying you to publish your book. Maybe not a lot, maybe hardly anything, or maybe quite a lot, but you are not paying to have your book published. So for example, for people who choose to self-publish, they are paying for either an entity, an organization or a platform, to help their book exist in the world.
Sarah Enni: I want to be totally upfront here. Self-publishing is amazing. It means a rich and diverse array of authors have ways of getting their work into the world. But frankly, I don't know anything about it. So we are not gonna cover anything specifically related to self-publishing or non-traditional publishing in this series, because there are tons and tons of other great resources out there from much more knowledgeable sources. Okay. Back to traditional publishing.
Sarah Enni: Publishing happens with publishers. Companies or nonprofits who work to bring books into the world.
Courtney Maum: Now I would say there's three tiers of publishers.
Sarah Enni: First, there's what's known as The Big Five.
Courtney Maum: And that is literally a group of five corporate houses, Penguin Random House, Hachette, Harper Collins, Macmillan, Simon and Schuster. And they have many, many, many different imprints within.
Sarah Enni: Then the next tier are the independent publishers.
Courtney Maum: Like my own publisher, Catapult for this book, or Tin House for my third novel.
Sarah Enni: And lastly, micro-presses.
Courtney Maum: I think that Two Dollar Radio for example, would be a micro-press. Or, Stocking Horse Press. These are places where often you do not need an agent to hopefully get your work accepted there.
Sarah Enni: In traditional book publishing, for a new author, the simplest version goes like this: You write a book. You then find representation with a literary agent. That literary agent submits your book to editors at publishing houses who may be interested in buying it. An editor at a publishing house buys your book. You work with that editor to revise and perfect the manuscript, and then your publisher designs, prints and distributes your book to bookstores. Voila.:
Let's hear that again with a little more detail from Courtney. Again, if you were to have the most straightforward traditional publishing experience, which by the way almost never happens, it would look something like this.
Courtney Maum: What would happen is you write a book. For debut projects, normally you would write the entire book. You query an agent. You get an agent interested. Hopefully, they read your manuscript. And then there's sort of a fork. Either they work with you on developmental edit, or you go right to submission. They send it to either a targeted round of just a handful of editors, or a larger rounds as many as twenty, thirty editors. And the hope is that you have more than one editor interested in your project, because then you can drive the price up. If that happens, usually this is called an auction.
Sarah Enni: Auctions are awesome. Basically it's a bidding war for your book. They're also not the norm. But if you're lucky enough to be in an auction, Courtney says you'll probably have in-person meetings, or phone calls, with all the interested editors.
Courtney Maum: And then, hopefully you get an offer, or multiple offers, from editors and you choose the one that you - well, the considerations are different, right? Either the one you most want to work with, or some people choose the highest bid. And from there you move into more developmental edits with your editor. You'll be chiefly working with your editor in the beginning. And then slowly, as the manuscript reaches its final shape, then you move into copy edits.
Sarah Enni: Copy edits are normally small stuff dealing with narrative continuity, fact checking, spelling errors. Normally there's a round of copy edits and then often, your publisher will print advanced copies of your book. Those are called Advanced Reader Copies or ARCs or Galleys. Why can't we just have one name for them?
Guys, the questions only get more complicated from here. Galleys are not the final version of the book, but they are what gets sent out for press and trade reviews, at places like The School Library Journal, Booklist, The New York Times, et cetera.
Courtney Maum: And then you're off to the races. Your book comes out and that is when you need my book to help you through the existential crisis of having a book published in the world.
Sarah Enni: There's way more to it, of course, which we will get into over the course of this series. And in Before and After the Book Deal, Courtney covers things outside the scope of Track Changes too, like MFA programs and the academic market, submitting to literary magazines, and so much more. I've been reading about and writing toward a traditional publication for ten years. And I read Courtney's book one year after my own debut novel Tell Me Everything came out.
Ah, I wish so hard that her book had been around while I went through this process. It would have saved me so much time and emotional energy. Please, do yourself a favor, and go check out Before and After the Book Deal.
Sarah Enni: Okay, so now we understand what the ideal traditional path to publication looks like. That's it. We're done here. You totally get publishing now, right? [Laughs] Just kidding. In future episodes, we're gonna get way more in depth about finding and working with literary agents, submitting books to editors, negotiating book contracts, and so much more. Stay tuned. I promise many of your questions will be answered.:
But for today, let's get back to the publishers. We know that there are different levels of publishers out there, so what's the big difference between them? How will going with The Big Five make my publishing journey different than if I went with a micro-press?
Courtney Maum: What it really comes down to, in the bluntest terms, is money. You're gonna get a much larger advance at a Big Five than you would at a micro-press. And in fact, a lot of my friends at micro-presses, their advance is just a box of books.
Sarah Enni: But there are some definite benefits to going with independent publishers and micro-presses.
Courtney Maum: They tend to take on fewer projects than these Big Fives. So often you will find a level of attention that is very, very high in quality at these smaller presses. But often that'll be one person, two people, maybe three working incredibly hard on your project. Whereas, when I was with Putnam for example, for my second book, I had two publicists. There was a large team working on the book. The resources are just... it's a completely different world.
Sarah Enni: Most of the time your project will dictate your publishing experience. Different books have different needs.
Courtney Maum: If you have a somewhat experimental book or something that feels a little bit... you have to do some handholding for the reader, maybe it's not the most accessible read, an indie is usually better positioned to speak to the media and the press about that book in a way where they can convince readers to find it. Whereas The Big Fives, they might not necessarily be in a position, or have the time, to walk everyone at the house through the way that the world should welcome a book that has 95 blank pages in the middle of the book, for example.
Sarah Enni: [Chuckles] I love that. And you know, it's so funny, I hadn't made this connection before. But as you're describing it, I am thinking about the choice if you're deciding to go to college. The choice between a large state university versus a small liberal arts college in terms of attention and things like that. And as far as as an author, you're choosing what your comfort level is sometimes.
Courtney Maum: Yeah. No, I think that comfort level is an interesting consideration, yeah.
Sarah Enni: Okay. That was a lot of information. I want to point out one thing. Did you catch Courtney using the term advance? That's really important. In publishing the term advance means the money that you as an author get paid for your book. So why call it an advance instead of big, fat, awesome, moola payday? Well, that is something we're gonna get into in a big way, in a future episode of Track Changes, so stay tuned.
We're just getting started. Like I said, there's so much we'll get to over the course of this series. Money, contracts, agents, editors, print fonts, marketing, and author self-care. But I want to wrap up today's episode with a broader question. Why is publishing so damn opaque anyway? Courtney has a very educated guess.
Courtney Maum: I think the factors that keep publishing opaque are twofold. Number one; it's so hard to get an agent, right? To write something polished enough to get an agent it's very hard to get something published. It's an immense privilege that a lot of people are aiming for. So when you are one of the chosen few that gets it, it's just seen as such incredibly bad behavior to express any negative feelings about it. And everyone on all sides of publishing, they're sort of in the same boat, right?
Editors are... what, are they gonna start speaking negatively about their acquired projects? No. They know that for everything they acquire, there's what, 47 manuscripts that they've turned down? Agents. Ditto. Are they gonna start speaking negatively about editors? Are publicists gonna speak negatively about their author? No. Everyone has to work behind this facade where we're all hashtag grateful to be there, and everything's going great. And hopefully it is. Hopefully everything is going great. But a lot of times... no!
Sarah Enni: Courtney's right and that's what I want Track Changes to provide. Not a place to talk crap about publishing, but a place for people in the industry to speak candidly about it. To share information, to offer up conversations usually had in group chats or Slack channels, or at conferences and in boardrooms. I want to talk frankly about how the publishing world works, and how we can make it work better.
You can follow Courtney Maum @courtneymaum.com, and find Jennifer de Leon @jenniferdeleonauthor.com. You can follow me @SarahEnni on Twitter, Instagram and everywhere. Follow @firstdraftpod on Twitter and Instagram, and head to Firstdraftpod.com/TrackChanges for more information and updates on Track Changes. And check out the First Draft Facebook group to join the discussion.
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Track Changes is produced by me, Sarah Enni and Hayley Hershman. Zan Romanoff is our story editor. The theme music is by Dan Bailey and the logo was designed by Collin Keith.
Stay tuned next time, when we get into agents.
Seth Fishman: In reality, it's the agent that you sign first. It's the agent that you're gonna be with forever, hopefully.
Sarah Enni: Who are they and how do I get one?