Robert Mackwood at Word Vancouver: A literary agent’s take on publishing today

Photo by William Arthur Fine Stationery.
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Today I was at a Word Vancouver talk by Robert Mackwood: A Literary Agent’s Take on Publishing Today, presented by the Canadian Authors Association. Robert Mackwood is the director and principal agent at Seventh Avenue Literary Agency. He works with non-fiction books.

Literary agents in Canada

There are only about twenty agents in Canada: five in Vancouver, one in Halifax, and the rest in Toronto. New York City probably has about 150.

Dealing with a literary agent

Robert gets about thirty to forty queries per week (about the same as ten years ago). He can see quite quickly whether he thinks the project is something he can sell. He charges 15%, and of course, only gets paid when he makes a deal. Most agents don’t have a lot of clients. He tries to keep his client list to under forty.

Write, don’t call.

What about the proposal? He didn’t get into too much detail about the format and nuts and bolts of the proposal. Just put together a short description of your project and yourself. Describe what you’ve done so far to promote your writing, and include the trail of yeses: writing contests, magazine articles, previous publications, and any other time someone said yes to your writing. What he doesn’t really like to hear: “I can finish the manuscript in three weeks.” “We’re going to make so much money on this!” “Oprah’s going to love this!” and, worst of all, “I’ve decided I’d like to be a writer!”

Should you self-publish?

Deciding on the best publishing route is too big a topic to go into here, but here are a few points:

Advantages to self-publishing	Advantages of conventional publishing
You keep all the profits	No up-front expenditures
You have total control	The publisher does the marketing
It’s fast	You get the credibility of the publisher’s brand
	You benefit from the publisher’s professional expertise

If you self-publish, you have to be the publisher. Don’t rush, and make sure you get a good editor, designer, and printer. Robert estimated that you’ll have to spend at least a couple of thousand dollars to make a book that you’ll be proud of.

An important point is that a self-published book that gets decent sales and some good reviews may be picked up and re-published by a conventional publisher.

The Publishing Business: From P-books to E-books by Kelvin Smith

Looking for an overview of the publishing industry? This book is written for the student preparing for a career in publishing. It provides a comprehensive overview, including the main areas of publishing (trade fiction, scientific and technical, educational, etc.), the tasks and jobs involved, and the process of how a publisher acquires material, produces a book, and sells the book. There’s plenty of attention to the economics, marketing, and branding of publishing, balanced with awareness of ethical issues.

The Publishing Business was released last August, and the case studies and discussion of recent developments in e-book rights and marketing are up to date. My favourite thing: the book is a big, attractive softcover with lots of colour pictures and visual interest. I recommend the book to anyone who’s considering working in publishing or simply wants to know more about how books are made.

I got this book as a door prize at an EAC-BC meeting. Iva Cheung, who kindly donated the book, has written a more comprehensive review.

What’s a reasonable e-book price?

One of the most interesting parts of The Publishing Business is a breakdown of publishing costs, which begins to clear up something I’ve been wondering about: loss leaders aside, why are the prices of e-books so close to the prices of paper books? Shouldn’t e-book buyers benefit from the savings in printing and shipping that this medium brings?

Sure. But printing and shipping are a smaller part of publishing costs than I thought. An e-book doesn’t incur the cost of printing, warehousing, distribution, and unsold stock, but it still needs to be written, edited, designed, laid out, and marketed. Even electronic distribution costs money.

According to The Publishing Business (page 63), the publisher’s costs break down approximately as follows:

• marketing, warehousing, distribution, and unsold stock: 30%;
• author’s royalty: 10%;
• production (editing, design, and printing): 20%; and
• other overhead (salaries, office, etc.): 30%.

Now consider that retailers typically keep about 45% of the cover price.* Given the possible savings in warehousing, distribution, unsold stock, and printing, I would guess that something like 20% of the cover price could be saved in e-book production.

That’s not a big difference. The $2.99 e-book may work when it comes after a higher-priced run that pays the bills, but if e-books are to be the dominant medium, they have to cost more than three dollars, or something’s got to give.

* E-book retailers may only take about 30%, but typically the author royalty is higher for e-books (The Publishing Business, page 36).

Reviewed from my own copy of the book.

Banned Books Week

I forgot it was Banned Books Week! Banned Books Week raises awareness of banned or challenged books and to persecution of authors.

Freedom to Read has a page on Censorship in Canada with a searchable list of banned and challenged books and magazines.

Most books that are challenged remain available; a challenge just means that someone made an effort to get a library or school to withdraw a book. However, some books and magazines are successfully made unavailable when they are seized at the border. Little Sister’s book shop in Vancouver has been fighting legal battles for years over censorship of books that describe gay and BDSM sexuality.

Read more

Banned Books Week on the American Library Association website.

Excerpt from Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie’s memoir about living in hiding after he was threatened with death for writing The Satanic Verses.

Red Pencil in the Woods highlights

Last week I was at Red Pencil in the Woods in Seattle (Kenmore), put on by the Northwest Independent Editors Guild. It was a great event: the cost was very reasonable, the Bastyr University campus was beautiful, and the program was well choosen and presented. I will definitely look out for the next one.

Conference highlights

Carol Saller: “Finding Our Way: Writing and Editing in the New Publishing Landscape”

This was the keynote speech by Carol Saller, the Subversive Copy Editor and senior manuscript editor at the University of Chicago Press. She referred to a report from the Association of American Publishers using BookStats that seemed to show that revenues for print overall were increasing. She also went through an overview of the different kinds of publishing available:

• Conventional: publisher pays production costs, writer gets percentage of the net revenue. A large number of copies of the book are printed together.
• Print on demand (POD): a printing technique that makes it practical to print small batches of books.
• Self-publishing: the author handles the whole production process. See CreateSpace, which provides a collection of online tools, both free and paid, to set up a book.
• Subsidy publishing: the author and publisher split the cost of production and the author gets a higher percentage of the royalties than in a conventional publishing system.

E-book panel

A panel on e-books that discussed some of the advantages of e-books (authors can continue to sell books that would otherwise not be kept in print) and some of the technical challenges of the formats. Not all e-book publishers eat their own dog food.

How to write an effective book proposal by Jennifer Worick and Kerry Colburn

See how to write an effective book proposal for a summary of this presentation.

Carol Saller on subversive copy editing

The last session of the day was Carol Saller again, talking about her philosophy for harmonious copy editing: carefulness, transparency, flexibility.

• Carefulness: Before you change something, make sure that it should be changed. An example of lack of carefulness would be meticulously changing every single instance of a misspelling that turns out to be a special term commonly used in the field. To make sure you do no harm, use Google to search for terms that look odd, and if you see an error repeated consistently, query it.
• Transparency: Show your changes. Explain to the author ahead of time what changes they can expect, and if you’re using a word processor, track your changes. Explaining your changes, showing them, and making it easy to roll them back builds trust with the author.
• Flexibility: This is the subversive part. Some styles are really pretty arbitrary (for instance, whether you put a comma between the author and date in a citation). If an author wants to do something that is against the house style but isn’t actually going to hurt readability, maybe it’s OK.

Other notes about the conference

• Kyra Freestar’s conference notes at The Editor’s POV. Includes some follow-up and notes on the keynote speech about the future of publishing and the panel on e-books.

What to put into a book proposal from Jennifer Worick and Kerry Colburn

At Red Pencil in the Woods last weekend I heard a great talk on how to write an effective book proposal from Jennifer Worick and Kerry Colburn of The Business of Books. Some of the key points were:

Why do you need to write a proposal?

A book proposal is like a business plan. It tells the publisher:

• What your idea is
• Why this idea is interesting and marketable
• Why you are the right person to write this book
• How the book can be marketed

Even if you are going to self-publish, the proposal helps you to focus your concept and find your readers.

The key parts of a proposal

Jen and Kerry recommend that you set out these main points. You can tailor the format for each publisher or agent’s specifications.

1. Introduction: Explain and sell the general concept. Some good ways to begin are with a startling statement or statistic (75% of Americans . . .) or a question (What would you do if . . .).
2. About the book: State the genre or category, e.g., where it will be shelved in the bookstore, and the format (hardcover, trade paperback, mass market paperback), dimensions, price range, etc.
3. Competing titles: Get to know the section of the bookstore where your book will be shelved. Name four or five books in the same category and explain how your book is similar and where it is different. Focus on books that have been published in the last ten years, and any “category-killers.”
4. About the author: What’s your connection to the material? What makes you easy to work with and marketable? Mention interesting achievements, past careers, and skills.
5. Marketing: Present clippings and logs for any promotion you did for earlier books. Mention any events, seasonal tie-ins, or regional and historical connections that can be used to promote the book. Describe any social media platform that you can use to promote the book with giveaways, contests, etc.
6. Outline: Show that you know what the structure of the book will be.
7. Sample text: Depends what the publisher or agent requests, but usually the introduction and one chapter.
8. Extra materials: Include material that supports your proposal. It might be clippings to illustrate trends that you described, more information about you, and even audio and video clips that show you giving interviews or doing demos from the book.

More information on writing proposals and query letters

• Dos and don’ts for submitting stories from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America FAQ for Beginning Writers
• “On Agents & Queries” by Meg Waite Clayton. Possibly the most important piece of information in the article: “My queries can go through 20 drafts.”