June 27, 2004

"BYOQ" - Bring Your Own Questions

Find out how to find a publisher, and also how to self publish. Publishing is a complicated business and there is a lot to both these topics. He is, among other things, a veteran literary agent, and will explain what makes a good submission, how to select target publishers and how to follow up; he'll also address the role of the agent, and, given a successful submission, how to negotiate an author-publisher contract. On self-publishing, Simon will outline all the steps from Go to Whoa, ending with distribution, publicity and sales. Once this ground has been covered, then the meeting will be thrown open to Q&A, and it is anticipated that most of the meeting will taken up with this.

Publishing 101
"No publisher knows if a book is going to succeed," Simon Warwick-Smith told the June meeting of CWC Marin. But as a writer, the Australian-born Warwick-Smith, a publishing consultant based in Sonoma, cautioned, "You have to understand the publishing industry, or you may end up its victim." Devoting most of his time to answering an unending stream of questions, Warwick-Smith covered a wide swath of publishing ground, including:

• The pros and cons of a major publisher: a cash advance and the sales machinery, but getting to print can take two years and the average advance is only $2,000
• Working with an agent: an author’s success is a function of the agreement you make at the start; i.e., will your agent say who's been contacted on your behalf and the response; can you fire him if he doesn't work hard enough for you?
• What publishers buy: fiction is hardest, how-to easiest
• The paperback price that sells most: $14.95
• Book publicity:"Sell the author and the author sells the book...what do you say when you're interviewed for half an hour? How do you stand out?" He suggested winning valuable air time by mining available databases of the 4,000 radio talk shows, but cautioned: "Expect a 10 percent response rate, and some do not accept self-published works."

  Warwick-Smith himself has helped many to self-publish, and it was this growing trend that drew most of the questions. He agreed the do-it-yourself stigma is getting ever smaller, but the book trade is still "very prejudiced against print-on-demand. A press run of one or two thousand shows commitment." The major distributor for self-published works, he said, is Biblio—not Ingram, the dominant wholesaler. Even so, Biblio's sales force doesn't take a self-published work seriously "until sales are in the $100,000 to $200,000 range. They just push the hottest titles." That's why it's so critical you expend as much—or more—energy marketing your self-published work as you did writing it.