This morning, I got the opportunity to have a conversation with Abby Muller, an editor at Algonquin Publishing. One of the first things she said to me that really stood out is that publishing is the intersection of art and commodity. Basically, she explained to me that publishers want well-written books, but they also want to be able to sell them because they do need to make a profit. In particular, small companies like Algonquin need to make money off of every book they sell because they only publish about 20-24 books a year, whereas the “Big 4” can take more risks. We also talked about the publication time line, starting with authors getting an agent through querying. The agent then sends manuscripts to editors and uses “comps”, which are essentially comparisons to other existing books. For example, if you’ve ever heard someone recommend a novel to you as “x popular book meets y popular movie” to give you an idea of what it’s about, that’s a comp. These are taken heavily into consideration when publishers are choosing whether or not to take a book. After they have made an offer on a book (the highest thing at stake is advances, which are offering the author to pay them up front a certain amount, but then they will not get additional royalties until prices have reached that amount again. If the advance is $10,000, an author will get that money up front, but if their book doesn’t sell that much, they still get to keep the money), the editor will edit with an editorial letter, similar to the reader’s report I wrote and the author will revise. After this first revision, the editor does line by line edits and this process goes back and forth until they decide the book is ready. The manuscript then goes to copy editors who do typesetting and production. At this time, marketing begins contacting booksellers and publicity reaches out to radios, book reviewers and other public figures to advertise. She shared a saying with me- “marketing gets the book into the stores, publicity gets it out”. Since this process is extensive, it typically takes around a year. We also had a conversation about the reader’s report I wrote and she gave me some good advice on writing summaries in the future- you only need to include enough information that the reader will be able to follow critiques without having seen the manuscript. Overall, this was an extremely informative and interesting meeting, so I’m glad got the chance to talk with Ms. Muller.
