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okay so if you guys are in the chat let us know and if you are a student in my class or not let us know you non students are perfectly welcome since we put this up for everyone lots of behind the scenes technical interesting things we need to give a few minutes for all of the students to make their way to this link it's been so much fun to figure out technology right atom minefields yes that goes wrong yes yes great so we'll just give a minute or two for my students to all get the

link from Isaac to make sure that they know where we are and then we'll launch into it Sam and you've sent that linked Isaac and he's sending it to the students great okay it's being spread around so everybody's getting it all right we will we will go ahead and start I should have my phone so I know what time it is sorry I'm going off scam camera for a second so I keep track of this only seven minutes late not too bad alright let's begin we are going to be doing the publishing lecture today we're

going to do two of these next week we will cover indie publishing and this week we are going to be focusing mostly on traditional publishing this is going to be a bit of a firehose lecture I apologize for that I'm going to throw a lot of information at you but the good thing is it's up on YouTube so you can watch it again later if if some of this is too much for you the way I'm gonna format this lecture is I'm going to step you through how a book is created and explain all the

different kind of behind-the-scenes people who are involved in it we should talk we'll be talking about agents we'll be talking about marketing yourself to publishers and that sort of thing so lots of whiteboard this week so let's start with the publisher so the publisher on a book is usually somebody who has started what we call or is running what we call an imprint back in the day 6070 years ago these were all independent publishers they would start up a business usually named after themselves and they would be acquiring books and publishing these days almost all

of these are owned by 5 the big five publishers though there are some very large book companies that are not part of that for instance scholastic is not part of the Big Five and they are very large publisher but generally everything is under a big one the big publishers and a lot of these imprints are mini little shall we say cities in the publishing Empire so in a big company like McMillan which is one of my publishers there is an imprint called tor books which was founded by Tom Doherty back in the late 70s early

80s was run as a separate independent publisher for a while and then acquired by Macmillan in the 90s Tom Doherty is still the publisher of that imprint at tor a publisher is primarily a business person and they have several people underneath them that you probably should know about they have what's called an editorial director they have editors and they have acquisitions editors and there's also sometimes VPS or you know assistant publishers different types of names so what is this doing basically your publishers job is to handle the business side of things and the editors job

is to handle editorial the editors job is to acquire books for the publisher to publish now what you should understand is that these roles are often held by not held by separate individuals depending on the company for instance at tour for many years Tom Doherty was also the editorial director Harriet mcdougal was the editorial director at first she retired it became Robert Jordans editor only and his wife and Tom Doherty basically became the editorial director an editorial directors job is to oversee the editors to make sure that they are doing their jobs basically middle management

in charge of editors an editor's job is to work with an author in ways we'll explain later to take the book to make it better to perfect it and kind of be basically a project manager sorry barely read that editors kind of like a project manager their job is to oversee each project which is a book and an acquisitions editor is somebody who reads through what we call the slush pile slush pile is all of the submissions that have been sent in to the publisher the people who want their books to be published and the

acquisitions editor reads to them and finds books that they want to publish now at tour for example and a lot of companies these are not two separate jobs much of the time indeed a lot of times the editor is the acquisitions editor or the editor has an assistant whose job is to help them with all of their work and will also act as a partial acquisitions editor for them and that the assistant will not be acquiring themselves they'll just be looking for promising manuscripts to give to the editor that the editor might want to my

editor at tor Moshe fader was the assistant to another editor for many years helped him with acquiring books and with editing them and then eventually was told you are allowed to now acquire for yourself and then motion went out and started to look for authors to acquire for himself and moved up into being an editor so this is just useful to know about the publishers you're submitting to to know which imprint has who is their publisher at Random House which publishes my team books we have a basically editorial director slash publisher all wrapped up in

one who is not the head publisher but is in charge of a small group of editors her name is Beverly and she doesn't acquire she just manages these editors normally the people in this position are going to do much less acquisitions in fact they may not do any once in a blue moon a friend of Tom's would want to publish a book and Tom would would read it himself and be like you know what I really like this if it's tour he would then assign it to one of his editors and say you become the

editor on this project I don't believe that Beverly over it at Random House Delacorte is the imprint there that I published with does any acquisition herself she just oversees everyone else once in a while an editorial director will have their own line of books they're publishing while they're overseeing everyone else and that fact that was the case with Harriet at tour before she retired from that position so it's useful to know because this will influence who you're sending your books to who you are targeting and who you want to buy them for instance at tour

approaching Tom Doherty directly is probably not going to work for you like I said once in a while one of his friends or someone he knows or some some contact you will make him say you know what I'm gonna acquire this book but most of the time at tour you're gonna be looking for directly at the editors and trying to pitch your books to them how do you do that well this takes us into kind of Phase two this over here we'll talk about how books get to these people and they come through to general

format our avenues one is agents and one is direct over the years that was a really weird way to write direct print over the years publishing has moved less direct and more agented this has been a continual trend that began decades ago and is still a continuing trend that more and more publishers are saying on their submission guidelines that they do not take on agented submissions the big shift in this as I understand happened really in the 80s and 90s where agents started to shoulder more of the burden of reading slush and picking out the

gems and sending those directly to the editors this is how most books I would say these days are sold traditionally is that an author picks up an agent the agent then takes it to all the editors in town pitches the book to them picks and gets offers back goes back to the author and says here's our offers what do you want to do in these sorts of things direct still happens I sold direct I sold a Elantra to tour books in 2003 through a submission directly to an editor that I had met at a convention

that was Moshe instead of having an agent I was submitting to agents at the same time but I sold directly now one of the questions that arises a lot regarding this is should I be hunting an agent should I be going direct as I said direct is actually getting harder and harder to do most agents will say to you and most editors probably as well will say your best bet is the hunt an agent first don't submit the book to editors directly the reason they say this is because if an agent picks up a book

then finds out you've actually submitted it to every editor already and they've rejected it that agent will feel like this book has already gone through the town and is therefore soiled good I don't know it's like they can't sell this book that's the fear that they have I will tell you a contrasting opinion of that I think that that opinion is wise and valid there is an argument for sending directly to editors I might be survivorship biasing this one because it worked for me but my argue to myself was always I might as well double

the number of places I can send books to and if it turns out that an agent picks up a book that I've already sent out a bunch well then they will have better avenues for selling that and get the get the editors to take another look at it or I will just give them a new book because I write quickly enough that if they feel like this book has already seen the town well then if they're willing to pick up one of my books there's a decent chance because I write so much they will like

the other ones as well in fact an agent is not looking for a book they're looking for an author agents generally want to represent an author during the early part of their career and then reap benefits later in fact this whole industry for most of its life has been focused on this idea the idea that a new author is a money-losing proposition in most cases for a publisher a brand new author takes time to launch a brand new authors first books are generally not going to sell a ton of copies and it's over time with

that author establishing a fan base that becomes then that author becoming popular that is what they are looking for so in general through the course of the history that's what they wanted and I'm a good example of that Elantra sold fine it did just fine but it wasn't probably even paying the bills for tour in the long run but Mistborn the whole trilogy ended up selling better and then the way of Kings ended up doing even better and suddenly I am one of their best-selling authors in fact I think I might be tour's best-selling author

and because of this now those books are extremely profitable for tour when early they lost money on me so in ideal world everyone is looking for authors to build up over time the unfortunate about this is over the years this has become less of a theme and it's become more bestseller driven what do I mean by bestseller driven so for a long for for most of entertainment let's just say this and most of entertainment the the pieces of media that do highly successful business pay for all the risks you take on ones that don't sell

as well and then you will have something in the middle called the mid list in books a midlist book is a book that makes money for the publisher pays for itself but doesn't make so much that it's really funding anything else these are successful books by career authors who have a dedicated fan base but not a huge one these people were very important to publishing for many many many years because them an aggregate would be as much money to the publisher as their few headliners of which they'd only have a couple and so keep maintaining

a really strong mid list was a very important part of the business however some things have happened one is in the publishing and indie publishing has began to bite in out that mid list quite a bit take big chunks out of it because generally if you're a mid list author it is more profitable for you to independently published than it is to publish with a publisher this is because all of if you have a small consistent fan base that is not growing but is also not shrinking then and they are willing to buy every book

you put out you don't need marketing budgets you don't need huge marketing campaigns you can directly target that audience yourself and you can sell to them and you will make a much better cut of the money doing that and because of that a bunch of people who would be miss Lister's are now indie publishing because of that publishing has said well we need to focus more on the hits we need more hits the other thing that happened that caused this is some consolidation in the book industry when a lot of the small bookstores folded and

the large conglomerate change took over which was a big process happening through the 80s and 90s into the 2000s what happened is a lot of niche bookstores that were very good sellers for midlist vanished for instance there would be bookstores in the past Tom dougherty tells the story of it's not even a bookstore it's like the corner store the truck stop let's say he often used this one so the truck stop exists and in that truck stop there are a bunch of truckers come through who really like westerns and Tom dougherty could publish a few

midlist Western books and he could get those into those truck stops and his bulk of his audience was these truckers who would buy them well during the 90s what happened is books started to consolidate into only the big bookstores and the truck stops stopped being able to sell as many books because people were going to Barnes and Nobles and things and what was happening is that some of these niche markets were drying up the distributor's where it wasn't worth their money to go to all these little chains anymore and put these books in because it

was just so much overhead to hire all those um those people that even though there was an audience for those books those books were no longer profitable or as profitable as sending them all to the big corner bookstore which then was going to be more hit driven plus a lot of your markets started getting picked up by places like Costco and things like this where you weren't selling niche books you were selling very hit driven books someone going to Costco is looking for the nude and buck they are not looking for the new niche western

book that a lot of truckers might like but there's a small enough segment that is just not profitable I could go into this for hours trust me I'm just giving you a summary I'm getting some details wrong on this but the end result was the publishers feeling they needed to be more hit driven and so they started to focus on let's buy a book see if it explodes big if it doesn't explode big we drop that author and put another author in that slot because the book that has come out yet has that chance of

being really huge very rare chance but it has a chance once an author is a known quantity there's this sense that a midlist urn will remain a mid lister and that there are some upper echelons or like cut those mid Lister's let's look for more hits this is fallacious you may be saying wait a minute do men Lister's never become bestsellers George our Martin was a quintessential mid lister all through the 70s and 80s and became the biggest epic fantasy writer in the business in the 90s and the 2000s great example of someone who had

a long career with some dedicated fans and then wrote a book that just connected with everybody and it spread from those fans like wildfire to the rest of the world so I think you know personally in the long run this old method is still better for writers readers and authors but that is not necessarily how some executives think about it so be warned hit driven is kind of a thing now let's go back to this sort of thing and let's talk a little bit about agents for you and then we'll talk about direct publishing yourself

and this is going to answer some of your questions that are popping up so what is an agent agents are people who let's say in Hollywood agents have this kind of reputation where you know maybe this whole slimy meanness reputation and things in New York book agents generally have a very good reputation I rarely hear authors speak ill of their agent and if they do it's a raishin ship that's on the rocks and the author generally leaves that agent and goes to someone else agents tend to be very good at being their authors advocate in

the business and so I really like my agent I think highly of him I think highly of agents in general I will give you the counter argument to agents in a minute here but let's talk about what agents do so an agent's a pro you know what let's let's do direct for a minute it'll explain better if I talk about direct so to publish direct sorry for that lane change here to publish direct with a publisher for many years and still viable what you would do is you would take a full and completed novel you're

not selling on proposal in fiction nonfiction you can often sell in proposal and nonfiction let's say you are a person who has lived their life as a Ana specialist career you are you are a rock star or you are somebody who knows a ton about weight loss or things like this you can rely on your credentials and an outline to say what I'm gonna write in a how-to book on this you can sell them proposal does not happen in publishing by new authors an established author can sell an proposal and usually will you won't yet

you need a completed novel alright so you take your completed novel and you will then start sending it out via a query letter so stage number one is query uue rry I think a query is a one-page synopsis of your book usually the format follows this sort of you know paragraph about the book little paragraph about yourself and talking about at the end asking that they review the book and ask if they're interested I am terrible at queries so I'm going to refer you to lots of resources online about how to write a good query

google it there are people who are way better at it than I am I was always terrible at queries I still don't really think that I'm good at queries when I asked my agent what made a good query he basically said credentials basic premise some sort of hook few rhetorical questions meaning stay away from the what would happen in a world he doesn't like those that's personal to him but just kind of the the premise in short this is a heist novel about a group of thieves who want to rob the Dark Lord of the

world after the prophecy prophesied hero failed to bring the Dark Lord down there's your your kind of hope sentence for Mistborn a little about myself would fall out / do you have credentials if you publish short stories or things like this and then following a little bit longer sort of summary about the book hitting only maybe one or two key elements that make it really interesting potentially some comps saying if I were trying this right now I'd say it has a feel a little bit like Scott Lynch's series don't say it's Harry Potter meet Lord

of the Ring actually do like a real comp and then get out but I'm gonna refer you to other people to explain to you how to write a good query usually you will send the query then those queries that you send out a small small percentage of the editors will write back and ask for sample chapters and all the years I was doing this I got one response to a query asking for sample chapters out of dozens of petanque upon dozens that I sent out that was to Joshua my the person who eventually became my

agent he didn't pick me up before I sold my books somewhere else but he did pick me up after if they liked the sample chapters they at when they were impressed a full manuscript alright they will then read the full manuscript and if they like it they will then make and offer this is the way the process is supposed to go I don't know how often it actually goes like this you'd have to ask an editor how often I did remember reading an editor once saying out of every hundred queries they got they asked for

sample chapters on about ten out of every ten sample chapters they asked on a full manuscript about one and an about of every ten full manuscripts they got they made an offer on one that seemed like a pretty too even a number a percentage slipped down to be real but there's at least one look at it now this might seem soul-crushing to you it certainly did to me when I was trying to break in because the odds of getting through all of this seemed really low there are a few things that improve your odds particularly

once you get to this stage most people who want to publish books do not know what they're doing most people are have not actually written a lot they have written one novel they may not have even finished it despite submitting it they have not watched lectures on this and most people their books can get dismissed very quickly based on the sample chapters queries I don't know I hate queries if you can't tell but it seems like the same way one of the the ostensibly the reasons for query is that the agents will take all the

books that are written by people who seem professional that was not my my experience but that's what they say your mileage may value may vary but my one of my goals was always to skip the query stage after sending all those queries on you know books I knew were pretty good in fact launchers was included in that and getting no no answers I started this figure can't I somehow jump to the sample chapter stage because once they rejected me on sample chapters at least they're rejecting me on my prose and my storytelling not on my

ability to write a summary and a good business letter the way that I went about this is by trying to meet the editors directly going to conventions listening to them at conferences trying to read what they write online about books and things like this and trying to ask them directly hey I've got a book that I think would really match you would you be willing to take a look at it and almost every time that I asked someone in person they said yeah send me sample chapters which skipped this step for me again your mileage

may value I don't know how many editors these days this was 20 years ago that I was doing this how many others these days are willing to look at on a submissions at all I still know that if you go to concurrences that a lot of times editors at conferences will ask for sample chapters by the way this is also the process by which you get an agent the same sort of query sample chapters full manuscript offer is is almost exactly the same process for picking up an agent and agents go to conferences and conventions

as well so how do you meet these people well one of the methods is this conference method this conference method is that by the way I will split conventions and conferences into two part into two things when I say a convention I mean something like world fantasy convention world horror convention world con these are fan-run conventions that are not professionally focused world fantasy tends to be the most professionally focused of those but basically they're not for profit they're gatherings of authors who and agents and editors who get together to talk about the business and about

writing or in the case of world con to talk about who's the best Star Trek captain and editors happen to be there and they are working and you can hear them on panels and you can to them conferences are different this is like locally we have one called writers for young readers conferences tend to be you pay a larger ticket price to get in an editor or an agent often is a guest brought in there are pitch sessions with them professional offers are often your part of what you're paying for is critiques from professional authors

and a lot of writers conferences fall into this category these are ways to network both with authors around your writing skill level or professional level and to meet editors and agents it's still very hard it is very difficult and it is still a little soul-crushing I understand that but this is a method you can use you can also follow these editors and agents on Twitter or on Facebook or things like this see what they're saying you can at least put into your query letters some personalized information I would recommend if you're going this this route

imagine two different query letters right so we imagine query letter from author a and co-author a says dear acquisitions editor I would like you to read my book such-and-such it's really great here is why thank you for your consideration perfectly professional well-written query letter imagine you get another query letter that says dear put in the actual name of the editor say dear Moshe fader I am a big fan of Brandon Sanderson's work and I know you are his editor I've been following the other authors you've released lately including this one this one and think your

editorial eye is very sharp and indeed I feel like the writing that I write matches what you might enjoy because I like for instance very intricate magic systems that are easy to understand and a focus on characters interaction with their setting here is my book such and such and such I hope that you will give it consideration that second query letter if written well is going to probably get a better chance of response than the first one this requires you to do your research you have to know who the editors are at the publisher and

if they're acquiring or not you have to know which authors they are editing and what books particularly by new authors that they've released recently you have to do a lot of legwork finding out all this stuff because it's not easy to find generally you're looking at acknowledgments pages of authors books you are googling online you're sometimes asking the author who their editor is that sort of stuff and whether they would recommend them in my case you probably do not want to submit to motion mosha takes very very few books he is a consulting editor at

tor I can't remember the last time he picked up a new author in these most recent years he's mostly been editing me so you would want to find someone at tor who is probably newer and who is who is acquiring a lot that said moshe is a fantastic editor if by some luck you do end up with moshe he he is a really really good editor so you have to do all this work and it is a ton of work we talk about you know people having a little black book of you know all these

these these people of that they are interested in dating and all their phone numbers and information you need a little black book that says here's the publisher of this imprint here is the are the editors at this imprint who are acquiring here are books they've released in the last couple of years that they acquired bright new authors and read those books and start to get a sense for it that sounds like a lot of work one of the readings that agents do now going back over here the pros of agents what they're gonna do is

they do all that legwork they're one of their primary jobs is to know in person all of the different editors at all of the different publishers and the books that they have released recently and things they've said about what they're looking for by the way never ask an editor what they're looking for quick tip ask them what they bought recently if you ask what they're looking for they won't want to pigeonhole themselves because they wouldn't want to exclude a book that they don't know they're looking for yet that is really fantastic so they all hate

that question but if you say what's the most recent book that you acquired by a brand new author and why did you acquire it much better question to ask an editor gets them talking about what made them pick up this book and and that sort of thing and granted you don't always want to send an editor the exact thing they've just acquired because they just acquired that so they won't need another book just like that but it can be really handy to get a feel for what the the editor likes editorially alright so agents do

all that legwork they're going to lunch with these editors they are meeting them at you know cocktail parties they are keeping lists of who's bought what recently all that stuff an agent is also a negotiator when you get that offer from a publisher the agent is an expert in contracts specifically publishing contracts they will know what's what should be in a contract and I should put in here contracts they will know what you can argue for and what you can't argue for as a new author or at least how hard it is to argue for

things you can ask for anything anything you can argue for what you're likely to get they'll know they will know your worth as an author because they will know you know edit our publishers need books if this is all like why this is so hard understand you have something they want even though you're a brand-new author they need books to publish they can't rely on Brandon Sanderson forever because Brandon Sanderson is eventually not going to have books for them anymore hopefully not for many many years but they know this they need what you have so

you have innate value to the publisher and the agents will know how to exploit that value to its fullest extent to negotiate for the best deal they also can offer editorial an agent a good agent often knows how to help an author make a book work better for the UM for the editors and can do kind of a first editorial pass to fix things that might turn editors off at the beginning and help them want to pick up the book so with all of these things why would you not want an agent well let's talk

about the cons not conventions but cons of having agents number one is they take 15% they take 15% of the two off the top of every contract in fact the way that most of the business is done the the publisher sends money to the agent who takes 15% out and sends the rest to you now this can be a slight advantage in consolidation of ioin of your money for instance at the end of the year I get from my agent a summary of everything we've gotten and basically a 1099 from them saying here is all

the money that we have paid to you in one easy form for taxes but this can also be a con sum once in a while doesn't happen often once in a while an agent is and it has happened that authors have been not paying attention to what their actual in money in was and agents were taking more than they should again very rare but there are some people who don't like agents say if you do get an agent make the money be split at the publisher and not in the agent the publisher sends 15% of

the agent and 85% to you full disclosure I do not do this it sounds like a huge hassle for the publisher and I do trust my agent but this is a legitimate concern about agents and one reason that people do not like agents another reason that people don't like agents is they do not want editorial as agents have become more and more the slush pile that publishers are are that people are submitting to and that they are then sending on to editors sometimes there is this conflict of interests where the agent feels like they don't

want to submit anything but the best work they can find so that those editors will always be trusting to this agent only submits the most high quality work and therefore the agent you know goes to the top of the slush pile because of this agents will sometimes run of authors through many revisions on a book looking to get it editorially just as the agent wants it and on some people and I think this is a very legitimate concern who don't like agents will say that's not the agents job the agent job is to sell the

book the agents job is not to be the editor of the book and if an agent is holding a book back from submitting it because they want it to be something it's not then that's dangerous because what if the agents opinion is wrong they have it revised all this other direction and the editors would have liked it better if it just would have been submitted some people say just submit the book don't go editorial you're gonna have to decide for yourself if you go traditionally traditionally published how much editorial you want from an agent and

how much you're willing to take from an agent some agents for instance will not pick up an author until they've gone through a rounds of revision with every author to see if the author is willing to revise and is good at it some authors that's just not what they look for in an agent so be aware of that and there is this sometimes other conflicts of interests for instance let's say an agent could spend an extra couple of weeks negotiating on your contract and bring it up from getting ten thousand dollars in advance to say

20 thousand dollars and that agent looks at that and says my 15% on an hourly basis of the amount of work I would have to do to get this from 10,000 to 20,000 dollars is just not worth that hourly rate I should just tell the author to take the 10 grand whereas for you 10 grand to 20 grand as an advance could be the dividing line between you being able to go full-time at this or not so sometimes there's this conflict of interest with agents and good agents will acknowledge this and we'll kind of have

a blanket our job is to get the best deal for our author regardless of how much time it takes as long as the author wants to keep pushing because otherwise we run into conflict of interest levels and this is why I based a lot of what I think a good agent does on what Joshua does Joshua is willing to spend months negotiating a contract for $500 for foreign rights on a book because it's kind of a matter of principle that he doesn't violate that he is always looking for the best deal for the author because

to not be looking for the best deal the author leads you down this path of of madness so pretty legitimate gripes that people don't like about agents a lot of indie published people do not use agents at all if they do use agents they use them for another Cobb bonus than agent tab which is overseas overseas sales are very hard for you to sell on your own most indie authors I know do not sell overseas and in translation usually that is the age job the agent will take your book and we'll have deals with a

lot of agents in other countries and they these agents in other countries will be already have a deal that anything the US agent picks up the agents say in France is going to accept as a client and try to sell in France this can be really good money particularly new as a new author one of the advantages we have in writing in the English language is that English language entertainment is generally entertainment leader worldwide just like French wine or you know German or Japanese cars have a reputation English language entertainment has a reputation for being

very high quality and we benefit from that in that a lot of our books are able to be sold in many different countries for some times small deals but an aggregate make quite a bit of money for us this isn't to say that other countries don't have really vibrant and great local publishing enterprises of their own a lot of them do but this is an advantage we have plus the English language market is just so big that starting English language and going to smaller markets generally makes a lot of sense because if you are for

instance or writing first language and you're writing in a language where there just aren't a lot of book sales then your advances will be so small that you can't live on it but if your English language and then picking up extra money from other sales I it can be it can work much better so regardless your agents one of their jobs will be to sell these books overseas and even before my first book came out Joshua had three deals for me overseas before the book was published and this is just a thing that agents tend

to be very good at because it also makes a lot of sense for them to have their authors all around the world so let's go ahead and talk about some of the questions that we have here regarding agents and up until this point all right so and then we will dig into what happens when a book actually gets an offer on it okay so when do you give up on finding agent only when you decide that you want to go indie published as long as you want to be traditionally published you should be looking at

getting an agent if you have these problems that would be another reason to not get an agent you should not give up on an agent because of rejections you should give up on an agent because you legitimately have problems with these sorts of things and don't think you want to use an agent it is still possible very hard but still possible to do and there are some indie authors who use an agent only for overseas contracts or things like that or you have decided to indie publish which we'll talk about next week there is a

good argument for being what we call a hybrid author which is an author who's open to both avenues and I will talk about being a hybrid author next week as well all right so should agents be approached with complete books yes we already kind of covered that one what can a mid lister expect salary wise so a mid lister in general is someone that I would consider who is earning a part-time living at their money at their writing for instance they are making you know 10 to 20 grand all the way up to somebody who's

making seventy to a hundred grand that's still midlist your money this is hard to talk about and give you an expectation for because your earnings will be directly tied to how many books you sell right and what is what counts as a mid lister how many books count as a mid listener this really depends on a lot of factors and I'll try to dig into this in in a few minutes okay when is a manga ship good enough to submit to an agent first second third I would recommend third draft is where you start this

is going to be very individual to you but I recommend finish the book put it aside come back to it in six months do a solid revision of it get a bunch of early readers do a third draft incorporating what comments you think that they make that is good and then start submitting it as you practice revision you may get better at doing drafts in the future and as it's out for submission you may want to so listen another group of readers they can help you revise that book and make it better but there's no

one answer but there's there's a quick one for you how hard is it to get a publisher to pick up a book after it's been indie published it really depends at that point on your success as an indie author well it's been a while so ask some editors directly but for a while been managing to sell 10 to 20,000 copies on your own was where the publishers started to sit up and take notice um it depends on the price point to write if your book is being read mostly as part of the Kindle whatever it

is the where you pay a monthly fee and it can read as many of the the books that are in that in that group that you want that's not going to be as interesting if you're selling your book it want at 99 cents and you sell twenty thousand that's different than if you sell your book at 399 and you sell twenty thousand I don't have the hard numbers for you I would ask around on this to people who've done it see one of the problems you have with me is it's now been 20 years since

I broke in and so my information though I try to keep very up-to-date it's just not going to be as good as people who are selling right now and breaking in right now or who are in depending right now in fact I'm going to hopefully hopefully you guys are watching Jenn and Becky are going to give me their notes on indie publishing these are two indie published authors who are in the class right now and they were gonna teach you next week the indie published lesson but because of this whole happening to go from houses

and things like that and Quarantine I'm going to still teach it I do know a decent amount about it and hopefully they will be sending me their notes through that I can use to kind of understand how it's going right now but yeah is there a magazine website we can follow that would have this type of publishing industry information there are a bunch of different places again I'm not the best at tracking this anymore for a long time the absolute right forums called the absolute right water cooler was the place to go to find out

about publishers and who the editors were and things like that I don't know if it's still up and running there are lots of resources for queries online that people talk about there Publishers Weekly often will list deals people make but you have to belong to their subscription service to see those deals so really this is something that also is gonna vary widely depending on your genre I'll try to give you a rundown either this week or next week of all of the big five publishers in sci-fi fantasy but you can then start to use as

a guide for going out and finding these things but I don't even know all the others at or anymore because editors do tend to change and towards gone through some big revolutions lately and so I barely know the names of anybody at any of the publishers because now these days that's what my agents job was back in 2000 when I was trying to break in on you there all of their names and I had them all written down I just don't keep track of that anymore it's it's too much work to do when I don't

have to do it if that makes sense I apologize for that do agents editors often get feedback or a reason for declining a book or is it radio silence so that's a great question generally it's radio silence if you get rejected on query and half or more of the time if you're ejected on sample chapters some of the time you will get feedback on sabda chapters will say this is why we rejected it every time I had a full manuscript get rejected I got full I got feedback explaining why if they are taking the effort

to go through a full manuscript and read through it they generally are giving you feedback so it depends once you start getting personalized feedback it's a really good sign that you're getting close about a year before I broke in I started getting a lot of personalized feedback on my rejection letters there was a very good sign to me granted most of these were things that skipped the Quarian stage but yeah all right what are some warning signs we'll end with this one on this QA part that you should look out for with agents it's a

really good question because there while there are certain kind of professional groups that collect agents that agents can belong to bad agents belong to the to these group professional organizations and good agents there are some that don't belong so the professional organizations are not a one-to-one correlation on a good age what you should be looking out for is this agent if you're going with this agent they should work at an agency that has sold books by new authors recently that you can find in bookstores okay the big danger that you're looking out for is someone

who calls themself an agent and then is soliciting all of these things and then is funneling your books toward what we call vanity presses vanity presses are this segment of the book publishing industry that exists to charge you money to publish your books this is different from indie publishing and any publishing you're in control and you may pay for an editor you may pay for a for a cover in fact you should do both of those things and that is legit that's what you should be doing a lot of these kind of vanity presses they'll

act like they're a traditional publisher some bad agents will exist simply to funnel people into them they'll say good news we've accepted your book all we need is $5,000 in order to publish your book these are people you should run away from full speed an agent who sends to any of these places is not a legitimate agent or at least as it is a legitimate agent with huge ethical problems going on and these publishers are not people that can do what you want them to do there are a very very small number of people that

Vandy presses actually serve legitimately in my opinion and this is someone who has a book that they want to publish so they have lots of copies of it to give to their friends and family but who is not looking to make a career out of publishing there is a small chance that also a celebrity who does their book and wants to sell it like like let's say you were a rock star and you want to have a book for sale at your at your concerts to sell with like your CDs and things like that Vande

publisher probably is a decent option for you but in most of these cases indie publishing the book on your own can be done print on demand so you can order as many copies as you want to sell yourself there'll be a very high price point you won't make a lot of money off of those print copies but the e-book copies you will be able to make money off of there's no reason to go with a vanity press from the majority of people you should just instant investigate indie publishing which again you will have to pay

for but you do not need one of these vanity publishers and so stay far away if you want to read more on them there is a website that for a long time was maintained don't know if it is anymore called writer beware which was maintained by SIF WA the science fiction writers Association America where they would list a lot of things about why vanity presses were just not recommended a lot of them have have died off in the era of indie publishing there's still a bunch of them around but a lot of them have died

off another warning sign is an agent who is asking for eternal revisions on your things without actually sending them out an agent who says you put your book out on submission but isn't willing to actually sit tell you the names of the editors they submitted to which imprints they're at and is not willing to send you the rejection letters that's a warning sign they should be willing to do all of this stuff an agent who asked for a lot of money up front bad the only thing an agent should ever charge you for is like

sometimes postage right and even then my agent never charges any money he will take things out of what he sells like if he sends a bunch of books overseas it's part of our contract that he can charge the postage of that to me and that comes out of money that I've earned it's never more than a couple of hundred bucks a pay period and it's just like really minuscule and again I'm never paying any money it's coming out of other things so watch out for agents that are asking for money watch out for agents that

are asking for reading fees watch out for agents who are too aren't who aren't publishing books right who up they don't publish but you know I mean who aren't selling books to legitimate publishers that you can find in the bookstore here's the bottom line if this publisher or person you want to work with if you can't go to Barnes & Noble and find their books on the Shelf not orderable but on the Shelf you don't need them you can do indie publishing and you can do everything that those people would do for you on your

own and you probably should if you can go and find a book by a new they're picked up in the last couple of years on the shelves at Barnes & Noble already they're not have to be ordered in then chances are good that's the legitimate publisher slash agent if they represented that all right okay who how much time do we have left about 15 minutes all right so we are going to break down what happens when a book gets acquired all right and I'm gonna go fast through this part because we only have 15 minutes

left because we got a bit of a late start show the book gets acquired this is great what happens is first there's an offer and this is usually of an advance an advance from a publisher is money up front that is a loan against the money that book is going to earn for you over time it is a loan that does not need to be paid back if the book does not earn enough money it is a loan that needs to be paid back if you do not deliver the book or something like that happens

all right an advance will be offered usually advances for first-time authors are around 10k they range between 5 and 20 okay but last time I saw one of the polls that said what did you get on your first book it was around 10k so this is $10,000 up front it's a even a little bit worse than that because usually this 10k is split between half on signing and half on publication which means that you're going to get 5 K of that when you sign that contract once in a while it's 1/3 on signing 1/3 on

turn in and acceptance of the book and 1/3 on publication sometimes it's even split by paperback so there's a fourth one 1/4 on publication of hardcover 1/4 on paper publishing a paper bag I think that's where mine are now because my advances have gotten so astronomically huge that the publisher wants to space them out as far as possibly possible how I do advances get um they can go all the way from here up to ten million um is about what you see that like the highest that you're saying for anyone except for the really big

kind of rule breaking authors like the your JK Rowling's and stuff like that so it's anywhere in there how do they know what to offer on a book if it's by a new author well this is where as my agent puts it imaginary numbers come in not the actual mathematical sense but what will happen is the editor will go to the publisher and say I really like this book I think it's really good for our line we should publish it and the publisher sometimes working with the marketing director and other people depends on the on

the the publisher the imprint will get back and say alright how much do you think it can make and the editor will say I put this sheet together it's called a P&L profit and loss sheet that assumes this book does as well as this other book that we published by a new author that's kind of similar and based on those imaginary numbers that we've made up I think we can offer $20,000 on this book and the publisher will be like great that's your negotiation negotiating that's like your high end you can start negotiations below if

they're demanding more than that you need to come back and renegotiate with us sometimes that imaginary number will be like we've hit the zeitgeist we can offer up to a hundred day on this right or whatever they they just kind of decide now how they know partially about this is if the book has been up for what we call a bidding war this is if the agent gets a book that they think is really hot like wow this is fantastic this is by a new author everyone's gonna want this they will send it out to

all the publishers and instead of what normally happens when you submit you submit to the a off publisher they have they take like six months to a year to review it and get back to you it's this really miserable wait it was 18 months I waited for launchers to come back to me instead the agent will say we're taking offers in two weeks we we expect this to sell really fast and suddenly everyone goes crazy like wow this agent has a fantastic book they all go read it the agents supply agents try to keep a

good reputation because an agent have a good reputation for books in the past can't get away with this as easily they all read the book and let's say they all like it then they all get back and they start making their offers and then the agent goes back to them and says well these people offered 100k and that's you know we don't you know you've got to have to beat that and so this other they'll can't basically play them all off of each other and eventually arrive at a high number now there's some interesting things

about advances you should know because they are money that you are going to be paying back out of your royalties it means that if your book sells the same number of copies that that a famous authors book sells you will generally make about the same amount of money as that famous author you'll make it on the back end instead of on the front end and these numbers do change slightly but a lot of publishing contract language is this has been the same for years and basically the percentages are around the same for everyone it's just

how many books do you sell and so because of that you you are kind of insulated against this sort of if your book takes off you haven't just sold it for $10,000 if your book takes off and sells a million copies you're gonna make five million bucks on that book regardless if you are brand new author or not at least if you have an industry-standard contract which all the big publishers should be offering as boilerplate you should be making a certain percentage which I don't think we have time to talk about this week but we'll

try to get in next week but one of the things to know what about advances the more money the publisher is paid upfront the more likely they are to be like man we need to push this book because we spent 200 grand on the advance for this and if we only sell 10,000 copies we're not gonna make our money back so we better give it a huge marketing campaign so generally the bigger your advance the better within reason there is one reason the sometimes it's bad to have a big advance and that is if you

can magic two books one of which both of these books are gonna sell 50,000 copies one of these books they paid a $10,000 advance on and it sold 50,000 copies and so off of that the author's earning around 150 grand maybe 200 grand depending on paperback stuff like that whatever but you know fifty thousand in hardcover would be around usually three to four bucks a book this other book they paid two million dollars for it sells $50,000 $50,000 call assay here's where it seems like everyone is settling that this book is worth pushing them higher

than this may not be a good idea because they all have instincts about what it'll sell it's all made-up instincts no one knows for sure what you'll sell but there is that little caveat that I know Joshua likes it when I put in there to mention why sometimes pushing the the advance astronomically high may not be a great idea but regardless this book has advanced has been made your agent negotiates generally you want to have a contract where you're selling more than one book you don't generally want to sell a dozen books because you want

to be able to renegotiate but you also want them committed to trying to grow you as an author so for instance they offer it on launchers they offer ten thousand dollars for one book Joshua you know they offered $5,000 for a book Joshua got them argued up to twenty thousand dollars for two books so 10,000 per book for two different books and said let's go with this he feels like he could have taken it other places and got higher he still thinks that but since I'd already off I wanted to be a tour and I'd

send it to tour already and I'm like I think we should be a tour I took a slightly lower advance than Joshua thought we probably could have gotten if we would have played the field a little bit more so the book has been negotiated all the terms get negotiated we'll talk about contracts next week and at that point you start working directly with the editor if it's not the acquisitions editor it's generally it's going to be the person who ended up negotiating for the book the most sometimes it's not sometimes gets handed off to a

different editor either way this is the person that you're going to have a great relationship with hopefully this is the person who's the project manager for your book their job is to find out from you know talk with you about how to make the book better they always want to make a better version of the book you want to write remember that they bought your book they're not going to try to push to be something it's not okay they'll want to help you make it a better version of itself people ask do editors ask for

things to be added only if they think it's going to make a better version of the book that you are trying to write they will make suggestions so always your job to make the changes and to decide if you want them or not at the end of the day you can always pay back the advance and cancel the contract if it doesn't end up working on that happens very rarely most of the time you work with the editor you give you you try the things they suggest some of the things they suggest you really like

some you don't you come to a kind of consensus at the end of the book is now ready the editor meantime has been working with the art director to come up with a with a cover your cover is a movie poster for your book it is not an illustration of your book right so the art directors job is to come up with a cover that will get the right audience to pick up your book not to be detail accurate to what's in the book keep that in mind editor handles that they will show you sketches

they usually will not let you have too much influence over the cover as a new author sometimes they will most of the time they won't at that point then they take it out and give it to their sales force the sales force takes it around and sells it to all the on the markets all the bookstores and says you should buy that carry this number of copies it's a really important cool book that we're releasing they come up with negotiations and deals and things like that about releasing the book into the stores and then they

do publicity which is money they put into the authors tour and things like that and they do marketing which is money they put into convincing the book sellers to push the book and at that point your book gets released will do more questions about this on in two weeks because next week we'll do another publishing lecture and then we'll do a lot of your questions so students make sure you fill out the form make sure you write questions I didn't get to in that form and I'll try to get to it in two weeks next

week we'll do indie publishing and contracts all right sorry about the fire hose guys sorry about the late start but keep going keep riding we'll see you again next week