The biggest surprises you'll encounter on your book publishing journey

While I'm vacationing in Alaska with my children this week, please enjoy this revised and updated post from 2020.

Hi, everyone! I am on a family roadtrip through Alaska this week and therefore posting a rerun.¹ I originally published this back in 2020, before all but about 100 of you subscribed to “Glow”—hopefully it’s new to most of you. Even if it’s not, I rewrote a lot of it just now, because ha ha perfectionism! It never leaves you alone!

Provided a grizzly bear has not eaten me, I’ll be back with new posts for paid subscribers next week. Hope you’re all out there having a toothsome August.

ASL

*

Twenty years ago, I heard a drunk man give a toast that a. still haunts me and b. contains some applicable wisdom for book publishing.

The man was toasting his goddaughter at her 21st birthday party. “Life—is like—life is like a bubble in a glass of champagne,” he said, looking back and forth from the birthday girl to the sloshing metaphor in his hand. “It starts at the bottom, and it keeps going up, up, up, up, up, it just keeps going up, and then—and then it—well, I guess it just pops.”

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

What he was trying to say, I think, is this: so long as we are encapsulated in our cute little bubble bodies, none of us should expect to feel any kind of permanent satisfaction in life. There is no final vista for the living—no big culmination. At the top, there awaits only our dissolution back into the open air from which we came.

My friend’s godfather was right, if, uh, a little dark. And boy does life in book publishing ever offer ample evidence of how right he was.

In case you haven’t picked up on the general theme of my publishing wisdom yet, it’s that I believe publishing a book offers a kind of masterclass for the soul. It’s a rare nobody’s-gonna-die opportunity to grapple with the most embarrassing, frustrating, horrible, meaningful, and important universals of the human experience.

Book publishing is a nonstop in-your-face tutorial re: what is and isn’t important in life. It lobs one hard spiritual lesson after another at all of us. All the time. Forever.

We all have a choice in how to respond: a. learn, becoming deeper and more self-actualized as time goes on; or b. curl into a shell of denial, shame, and blame so thick that before long, we are never able to uncurl ourselves again. I recommend option A!!

It’s in that spirit that I offer the list of Common Book Publishing Surprises below. These aren’t just surprises, really; they’re hard spiritual lessons.

If you learn from them, you’ll become a better writer and more resilient person. If you run from them, you’ll become bitter and scream-y and likely lose out on some career opportunities that otherwise might have opened themselves to you in time.

You’ll notice that there is an ur-surprise underneath all of these micro-surprises, which is this one:

You’re never going to feel like you’ve made it—in publishing or anywhere.

This is because you’re a human being living a mortal life— a champagne bubble, as it were. You’re just going to keep going up, up, up, up…and then *pop.* :)

Plleeeeeeassse don’t come into this industry looking for Champagne Bubble Sanctuary (aka immortality and/or a permanent refuge from psychic pain). It ain’t here. It’s literally nowhere. Expect no final Big Break to occur within your lifetime, except, you know, when your body literally breaks open because you’re decomposing.

You’re never going to to make it. You’re never going to outrun pain or bother or mess or your own death. Womp womp.

Here’s what that truth looks like at various points in the publishing pipeline:

Looking for a Book Deal

If an editor spontaneously emails you asking about the possibility of working with you on a book, it’s probably not going to work out, no matter how excited the editor seems.

When an editor at a major publishing house writes you an email—have you ever thought about writing a book? Do you want to work exclusively with me for a bit to see if we can figure something out?—it’s incredibly flattering. It’s also good sign that you are ripe for a book deal. What it isn’t, however, is a sign that this particular editor will be the one to get you there.

“Ever thought about a book?” emails are a dime a dozen. They generally come from editors with personal ambitions or needs: to develop their list; to acquire more; to get in on the financial ground floor with a talented newcomer; to publish a book on a certain subject. Read: they’re contacting you for reasons beneficial to them.

An editor can send an email at any time, but they can’t acquire projects anywhere near as easily. They can only acquire books with the approval of their colleagues, usually after getting team reads and presenting the idea at their weekly ed board meeting. When they send you that initial email, they’ve probably done none of this.

As a result, relationships that start with a “have you ever thought about writing a book?” email are wont to devolve into moving-goalpost situations. What typically ends up happening is a lather, rinse, repeat of submitted pages, requested editorial changes (“ed board thinks we need more x”), and no deal, on and on until one of the parties gives up and says “never mind” (or ghosts).

This is not always true. Over the course of my career, I’ve watched a couple of great deals come out of a relationship that started as a cold email from an editor.

It’s just mostly true. Deals that result from cold emails tend to happen (and happen well) only when the author is already EXTREMELY and OBVIOUSLY qualified to publish a book and the editor is ready and willing to offer at a level commensurate with what that author would have gotten from a competitive auction.

Otherwise, it’s much better to go out widely with a project—and not show it to any editor until you’re ready to show it to many.

The above also applies to editors who flirt with you on social media.

I’m mostly talking about professional flirtation here: the editor who hearts your “wrote a thing” posts, congratulates you on your new job, watches all of your Instagram stories and hits the clap hands on your self-promo, etc. etc. This all gives your odds of landing a book deal with that editor a boost of precisely 0.0%.

Editors do this a lot—some of them more than others. And it annoys the crap out of me every time I have to tell an ambitious young author who is excited by this: no, this is just something that guy does. (And then he passes on the formal submission, like, always.)

By all means, tell your agent if you’ve noticed you have a publishing lurker. We will be able to tell you whose intense social media interest is truly out of character for them and whose isn’t.

Even when the editor’s interest turns out to be genuine, book deals are like Bumble: You generally arrive at the best ones by making the first move yourself.

Post Book Deal/Pre-Pub

After you get a book deal, you’re going to go back to your baseline level of self esteem/mental health pretty quickly.

Please familiarize yourself with the concept of “arrival fallacy” posthaste if you haven’t already. A great place to start is with this New York Times article by A.C. Shilton.

Baseline human happiness comes from a combination of genetics, upbringing, strong and safe personal relationships, and not being poor. The only way a book deal could conceivably improve it for you is by giving you 1. the money to pay for basic necessities for a while or 2. the means and opportunity to forge healthy new social/family relationships and extricate yourself from toxic ones.

Do not expect a book deal to improve your baseline happiness in any other way. Long-term happiness does not come from praise and admiration. Long-term happiness does not come from praise and admiration. Long-term happiness does not come from praise and admiration. How many times do you think I need to repeat this before either of us listens?

You are responsible for securing all copyright permissions for your book. They’re probably going to cost you significant money as well as admin time.

If you’re like me, you’ve been posting righteous Broken Social Scene lyrics on your profile since the dawn of AIM. You are likely unused to having to pause and think, “uh oh, I’d have to purchase permission to use these lyrics as an epigraph, wouldn’t I.”

Well, darling, to paraphrase “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl:” park that quote, drop that phone, sleep on the impulse, and dream about original rewrites that get you around the need to license copyrighted material from Emily Haines et al. Because getting permissions takes a lot of admin time and can cost a lot of money.

Permissions are a complicated legal topic that I don’t want to go into in too much depth here, but yadda yadda “fair use” applies way waaaaaay less than most people think in commercial work. Ask your agent or publisher about this before going in whole-hog on copyrighted material. And only quote/include illustrations and cartoons that are VITAL to your point and for which you are prepared to pay anywhere from hundreds to many thousands of dollars.

Your “delivery and acceptance” payment might come many months or more after you anticipate it.

This isn’t a Deep Psychotherapeutic Point, it’s just a common misunderstanding: the second payment on your contract is not due the second you hit “send” on your manuscript.

It is due if the publisher accepts the manuscript: after all substantive edits are complete and permissions are cleared and also perhaps a legal read, depending on the book and publisher.

There a chance—very, very unlikely, but still—that the payment won’t be made at all, if there’s a serious disconnect between what you deliver (or don’t deliver) and what you are under contract to deliver.

Your D&A is at the mercy of several factors, from your editor’s timing in returning an editorial memo to your timing in responding to those edits. It might not come for many months postdelivery. Maybe even a year. Please try your best to budget accordingly.

Post-Pub

Most of your friends and family aren’t going to buy your book.

“Who Will Buy Your Book,” the classic Millions piece by Tom McAllister, offers a good explainer of why. See also Business for Bohemians, a book I adore, which explains why you can’t rely on your friends and family to become your “regulars.”

The crux is this: asking someone to buy your book or your DoTerra or anything just because they love you is OK. Remember, however, that it’s a favor on par with asking them to help you move houses. Emotionally healthy people have just a handful of people—if that—from whom it is fair to expect that kind of loyalty and to whom they give that loyalty in kind.

Your book-buying audience should consist entirely of people who actually see value for themselves in what you have to say. It is entirely your responsibility to create that value for them and almost entirely your responsibility to make sure they know it’s there. It’s not your friends’ or family’s job to keep you afloat, although of course it’s always nice for your closest people to support you.

You’re probably not going to get a book tour from your publisher.

It’s largely a math thing. Think about how much plane tickets and hotel rooms cost. Think about how much your book costs. Think about how many people typically show up to these events and how many actually buy books at the venue. Multiply. Is this even a break-even proposition?

It might be! You might be the sort of author who has 100+ money-waving, screaming fans in every venue, which is about the number that would justify plane/train+hotel travel. And of course I get that there are lots of unquantifiable reasons for you and/or your publisher wanting you to go on tour: galvanizing your fan base, establishing long-term bookseller relations, hearing what’s clicking about your message.

That said, publishers aren’t being demonic to be skeptical with the vast majority of authors. Tours are just titanically expensive relative to their ROI. So if one is important to you, start thinking now about how you’re going to finance it.

Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time, getting an email from a random Hollywood producer is meaningless, even within the already-low odds of film/TV production.

It’s hard to get film/TV adaptations made. It’s easier to get them optioned—i.e., to get someone to pay money for the exclusive, temporary right to try and get a film/TV adaptation up and running. But the path to a solid option that will *maybe* lead to adaptation doesn’t usually begin with an email from a producer.

There are exceptions to this. At any given time, there are a handful of producers in Hollywood getting quality stuff made with active, working partners in finance, distribution, etc. But just a handful. Your agent or film-TV coagent can advise on who those people are.

Literary agents like me typically get several emails a day from producers asking about rights availability, often forwarded from excited clients. Unless these producers have excellent, deep, current track records, however, they’re more likely to inhibit than effect a quality adaptation deal.

The Good News

Now that I’ve spent most of this letter shitting on your dreams, I want to end by assuring you that at least some of this shit is fertilizer. NO, REALLY. Life is messy and gross, but if you get your dreams in right relationship to that unavoidable messy grossness, beautiful things will grow.

In this industry, the fleeting moments of joy are real—and they’re spectacular.

When you get the call from your agent that you have a book deal; when you hit “send” on your finished manuscript; when you open the box of your finished book for the first time: try and find a joy surpassing these. The joy is fleeting, but my God, is it beautiful.

Joy is an evanescent emotion—you know, like how a pawpaw is an evanescent fruit. It doesn’t last long before it starts to taste like garbage. It’s impossible to box up and ship nationwide for on-demand consumption. But that doesn’t make it, like, an inferior fruit. That’s just the nature of joy. And pawpaws.

Books do matter.

Your work might save someone’s life.

Your life will eventually have a final, resolved meaning. Even though you won’t be around to see it, it’s worth working to make that meaning into something you’re proud of.

When your champagne bubble pops, it’ll release something into the air forever. What will it be?

I encourage all of my clients to think about their careers through the lens of their own obituary. What do you hope people will write about your legacy in the world, the effect you had on people you didn’t know?

Whatever your answer is to that question, it should be the north star of your entire life. Write toward it. Publish toward it. Love toward it. Volunteer toward it. Eat and exercise and live toward it.

You don’t have much time. The biggest surprise of all is coming for you, and soon—and by the time it gets here, it is well within your power to have changed the world just by living.

The gift of a human life isn’t to feel comfortable or secure or resolved within a lifetime; it’s to evolve and fuel the world’s evolution, simply by being you.

detail from yet another Hieronymus Bosch painting

1. NB if you’re thinking about robbing me: WE HAVE HOUSESITTERS.