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Good morning, everyone!

Welcome back to our Spotlight On interview series, where we uncover the day-to-day work of agents, what they’re looking for in submission packs, their thoughts on the publishing industry and much, much more. If you're new to the series, don't worry! All our Spotlight On interviews can be found right here on Townhouse: #JWSpotlightOnInterview.

This week, we're speaking with Philippa Sitters, who has recently founded her own agency after ten years spent at David Godwin Associates. Her clients include Margarita Montimore (Oona Out of Order, published 2020), Ashley Hickson-Lovence (The 392, published 2020), Kate Brook (Not Exactly What I Had in Mind, published 2022) and Connor Hutchinson (Dead Lucky, coming 2025).

You can follow Philippa at @PhilippaSitters for updates on her work, or view her agency profile here. Read highlights from our interview with Philippa below and view the full interview on her AgentMatch profile…

Hi Philippa, thanks for speaking with us today!

What brought you to agenting?

Back in 2011 I moved to London to do a Publishing MA at Kingston University, where one of the most important parts of the course was to do at least one month of work experience in the industry. I happened to attend a lecture that was put on for the Creative Writing students where we heard from a literary agent. Her talk was all about finding an agent, but afterwards I gave her my business card in the hopes I could spend some time at her agency, PFD. I spent the whole month of January interning there, and they must have seen some agenting spirit in me, because I was then in and out of the office during the rest of my Masters, covering the role of assistant to the CEO, while the person in that role was building her list. If she had a meeting, I’d be in to cover. It was a busy and fun environment, and I knew I didn’t have the patience to sit and edit for hours – most people on my course were keen to edit – so agenting was an ideal option.

Why did you decide to open your own agency and how have you found that experience?

It’s very early days right now, but it’s been a great experience. The outpouring of support from within the industry has been overwhelming and I’m proud to say I’ve already sold five books. Long may that continue! I decided to set up PSA because I love having autonomy, being in charge of my own time, while being free to champion brilliant people.

What does the day in the life of an agent look like for you?

The nature of the job means no one day looks the same, and that’s part of the appeal. Each day will involve fielding emails between clients, publishers, co-agents and all sorts of other people keen to work with my clients, such as broadcasters, book festivals and journalists. Perhaps I’ll spend some time researching. I could be looking for new clients or finding out more about commissioning editors who might like to see something I’m working on. Many days I’ll try and meet editors in person, or catch up with author clients. I also spend time editing manuscripts or book proposals. Occasionally the day will be capped off at a book launch, those are always fun. You can only really plan to try your best to do something on any given day as you never know what’s waiting around the corner. A huge part of agenting is resolving issues between parties, and these can pop up from nowhere.

In your opinion, what makes a good author-agent relationship?

As with any relationship; honesty, kindness and mutual respect. That sounds a bit sappy but putting yourself out there as an author is an intensely stressful thing to do, even if you’re the most laid-back kind of person. I often see this relationship as that of professional friends. We chat about anything and know a lot about each other, because when you’re dealing with projects that are so personal it’s important to get to build mutual trust.

What’s at the top of your wishlist in fiction?

Something with an incredible hook. I don’t think it really even matters what genre, it could be literary, commercial, book club, crime or thriller, romance or historical, if the hook is there, I’m in. Among my bestselling authors is Margarita Montimore, whose debut followed a woman who lived her life quite literally in the wrong order. Once you hear that, you want to know so much more, and yet it’s a simple line. However, if we’re going to be fussier I want richly drawn family stories, tales of friendship and revenge, wide open landscapes and vivid cities bursting with life. Books that pull you in and which you don’t want to leave, where the characters are fully drawn and in turn don’t leave you.

What about non-fiction?

Fascinating and enlightening books from experts, whether that’s a book that examines a new take on history, a deep dive into a certain aspect of science or something much more personal. I love a gorgeously-written memoir or a book that could change the world for the better.

Is there anything you would prefer not to receive?

I’m not the right agent for high fantasy, sci-fi that’s at the more complicated end (other worlds for example), nor children’s books and poetry. I handle the latter two on behalf of clients who write for adult audiences but only if I already represent them.  

When you’re reading a query letter, what are some things you like and dislike seeing?

It’s not essential, but I do love to hear from someone who’s clearly looked at my list or knows who I am. A submission that’s professional and friendly and provides all the information I’m after: short pitch, genre, blurb, comparative titles and biography. It’s a shame if any of this is missing. Things that really put me off are submissions that cc every agent in the industry, beg you to represent them, are sarcastic or rude (“Not that you’ll bother to read this but I’m sending you my submission.”). You wouldn’t believe how often that happens.

Some agents love synopses, others don’t. What do you think of them, and what do you like/dislike seeing in them?

I enjoy a synopsis. I read it third, after I’ve read the cover letter and sample writing. If I’ve really enjoyed what I’ve read I want to then have a rough idea of how the plot will unfold and whether I think it could work. Then I’ll request the full manuscript. So the synopsis isn’t something I need to tell a really thorough story, but gives me a good idea of how the book will be structured and whether it’s likely to pull me in.

Is there anything an author can do in the first few pages of their manuscript that will really grab your attention? Anything you don’t enjoy as much?

Naturally this is quite subjective. Every book is different and there are a million ways to start a book, so it’s probably easier to flag habits I notice. Lots of books begin with descriptions of the weather, and funnily enough, descriptions of their character’s eyes. It wouldn’t make me stop reading, but it’s something I’ve noticed over the years.

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned during your time as an agent?

I think I’ve become increasingly better at handling rejection, steelier perhaps. When you start out and you’re pouring all your energy into certain projects only for them to be passed up by publishers, you feel the hurt, but as time goes on you realise there are myriad reasons an editor might pass something up, which aren’t personal at all. It’s imparting this steeliness to your authors that’s the tricky part.

Any last pieces of advice for querying authors?

I would encourage you to find a community to share your experiences with, with whom you can swap writing, share your highs and lows with. It can feel like a lonely road, and it’s a process that everyone handles differently, but authors I know who have found a writing group really appreciate the support network, and the opportunity to share their writing with likeminded people rather than asking family and friends for their honest opinion, which must be scary. Also, keep writing and keep trying if it’s what makes you happy.

Check out Philippa's AgentMatch profile for the full interview.

If you’re struggling with your query letter and synopsis, do check out our free resources on our website. We have lots of info to help you on your way. Or, better still, if you’re a Premium Member, our lovely Writers Support team will be happy to offer you a free query letter review once per year of membership! Finally, we have plenty of fantastic agents offering Agent One-to-One Sessions in October and November – book your session now to hear their feedback on your submission pack.

Over the last couple of weeks, we thought about how to sell books the traditional way - print books sold through physical bookstores. The short summary: you try to amass retail footprint (via your publisher’s sales team) then create a real density of awareness once you have it. The lethal catch: if you don’t capture that footprint in the first place, there’s essentially nothing that can be done to achieve sales thereafter. 

Today, we turn from a world of tweed, pipe tobacco and hardbacks… to bits, bytes and algorithms. 

This email (and the ones that follow) are of particular relevance to anyone self-publishing their books, but I think they’re ALL of relevance anyway. No ambitious author should be without a mailing list under their own control. And the other tools we’re talking about are so basic to modern digital selling that you can’t afford to ignore them. And, to be blunt, plenty of trad publishing companies who ought to know better are still poor at digital selling. You won’t be able to understand or modify those failures unless you understand the territory. So: listen up. 

The big question today is: 

How, in theory, do you achieve huge sales via Amazon? 

Yes, I know that other online bookstores exist. But they’re so small in comparison with Amazon that they barely count. Kindle Unlimited alone is about equal in size to all other non-Amazon e-stores combined. So, I’m going to focus on Amazon. That’s where the sales are. 

And… the answer to our big question is easy. It’s: 

1. Achieve strong, steady traffic to your book’s Amazon page; and
2. Ensure you have strong conversions once readers get there. 

I’m not going to talk about Part 2 of that very much. In a nutshell, you need a blisteringly good book cover. You need a strong blurb. You need to accumulate some reviews. You need a sensible price (which means a low one. My Fiona series is self-published in the US. The first book in the series normally sells at $0.99. The other books sell at $4.99.) And – have I ever mentioned this? – everything of course needs to be perfectly in line with your insanely strong elevator pitch. You all know what a strong Amazon page looks like, because you’re familiar with it as readers. Create that. 

So let’s turn instead to Part 1 of the question: an altogether harder and more thought-provoking question. How do you drive traffic to your Amazon page? 

The biggest source of traffic 

Before we start to answer it, I want to call your attention to the phrase “strong, steady traffic”. What does that mean exactly? Also: who cares? If you had, say, 10,000 visitors to your book page, why would you especially care if they all came at half-past two on Saturday, or trickled out over a week, or trickled out over two months? If, let’s say, one in ten of those visitors ends up buying a book, that’s 1,000 book sales whichever way you count it, right? 

But no: that’s not right. That arithmetic is totally wrong. 

Because the biggest source of traffic to your Amazon page will be… tiny drumroll… Amazon. 

Amazon’s websites have more book-buying traffic than anyone else, by far. Amazon knows exactly who amongst their horde of buyers is likely to buy your book. Further, Amazon has any number of ways to advance or drop the visibility of different pages. For example, a really popular book page might feature on: 

• An overall bestseller list.
• A sub- or sub-sub-bestseller list. (You can sit at the top of multiple lists.) 
• A “customers also bought” selection attached to books by other writers in your genre.
• The home page for certain users. (So, if you’ve bought a lot of romantic comedies from Amazon recently, you may find that your Amazon home screen fills with various other rom-coms for you to consider.) 
• A hot new releases list.
• Emails to selected users (i.e., readers in the same genre.) 
• Search pages, where the search term is in some way relevant to your book. This could even be for another author’s name. So if I enter “Gillian Flynn” as a search term, Amazon will first display some books by GF and then start to suggest books that it thinks GF-type readers are likely to enjoy. 
• And so on... 

So, the best way to get traffic to your book’s Amazon page is to get Amazon itself to boost your page’s visibility. Essentially, you want to make sure that Amazon’s algorithms and robots to decide that what they most want to do is feed traffic to your book page. 

But how?

Strong and steady 

To answer that question, you need to know two things. 

The first is that Amazon’s bestseller lists are extremely sensitive to short-term movements. A classic bestseller list – the NY Times list, for example – reflects the total volume of weekly sales, and is updated once each week. Amazon’s list, by contrast, updates every hour. What’s more, the sales you’ve made in the last 24 hours account 50% of your total ranking. The sales you make in the preceding 24 hours account for the next 25%. The prior day for 12.5%, and so on. 

That means Amazon is electrically sensitive to quite small movements, in a way that the NYT list is not. 

That said, Amazon’s little robots know that a one-off spike doesn’t mean too much – it could be an email blast that gets a flurry of sales and nothing more before or after. 

So, the Indie Author Hive Mind (which is exceptionally smart, by the way) says: 

• Work to secure sales over 4 days, not 1. 
• A little longer than 4 days is probably better – say 5-7 – but that does depend on how much marketing oomph you can bring. 
• Ideally, you’d have a gently sloping increase in sales over the period – so aim for something like 100 / 110 / 120 / 130 in terms of sales progression. (I mean these as indicative units, not specific book sales. A brand-new indie author would be doing very well indeed to shift 400+ books over four days.) 
• If your sales tools are still in their infancy (i.e., no mailing list, smallish ad budget), then do what you can. I’d suggest that getting some sales on Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, and Day 4 would be a reasonable aim, with anything splashy you can manage coming on Day 4. 

You’ll note that this advice will NOT maximise your peak bestseller rank. If you wanted to do that, you wouldn’t just try to get your sales compacted into a single day. You’d ideally try to have them squashed into a single hour. And yes, you’d have the pleasure and satisfaction of a salesrank you can boast about to your dental hygienist. But you won’t get as many sales overall as if you follow the plan here. And sales matter more. 

What happens next? 

So let’s say you follow the plan, and achieve that gently sloping uptick in sales over 4-7 days. What then? You’ll have exhausted your mailing list. Your ad budget will be empty. What next? 

Well, what next is – Amazon. 

If you do this right, at about the four-day point, you’ll see a sudden surge in sales as Amazon takes over the marketing. Its tiny little underpaid, non-union bots are essentially saying, “OK, author-human, we’re convinced that this book of yours is worth marketing, so we’re going to start marketing it ourselves. We’re going to sift through the MILLIONS of readers who come daily to our website, and we’re going to show your book to the ones most likely to buy it.” 

That sounds exhilarating – and it is. But the exhilaration (and the sales) won’t last forever. New books come onto the market, new sales surges are manufactured, those underpaid little bots are fickle – FICKLE, you hear me? – and they will start flashing their glossy metallic ankles at other books and other authors instead. 

So, over a period of about 30 days, you’ll see sales tail off to a base level… then probably dwindle further as time goes by. 

You’ll do better in that 30-day period (and maybe extend it a little) if your Amazon page is all seven shades of fantastic: Amazon will prefer to send readers to a page that ends up in sales. You’ll also do better if readers read and enjoy and finish your book. (How does Amazon know if you finish your book? Because it collects data from a gazillion Kindles.) But nothing lasts forever. Your sales surge won’t. 

The arithmetic of sales 

Earlier in this email, I said: 

“If you had, say, 10,000 visitors to your book page, why would you especially care if they all came at half-past two on Saturday, or trickled out over a week, or trickled out over two months? If, let’s say, one in ten of those visitors ends up buying a book, that’s 1,000 book sales whichever way you count it, right?” 

You can now understand why that logic is flawed. 

If you trickled those sales out over two months, your popularity on Amazon would almost certainly never rise to a point where you tickled Amazon’s bots enough to get them involved. So your expected sales would indeed be 1,000 books, or something similar. 

If you took the one-off surge approach, I think that Amazon would respond, just not in a very powerful or sustained way. But still. Books sold? More than 1,000 anyway. 

And if you took the slow and steady over 4-7 days approach? You’d easily generate enough sales to get a really good blast of love from Amazon and you’d see lovely, organic sales for week, after week, after week. That’s where you’ll really make the money. That’s also why smart indie authors are perfectly happy if their Week 1 ad campaign makes exactly zero profit. It doesn’t have to make a profit in week 1. It has to make a profit in the somewhat longer term. The approach outlined in this email tells you how to go about doing that. 

“Now look, you blithering idiot, you gibbering phytoplankton, you lumpen mass of curdled whey – why won’t you answer the ONE QUESTION that I really want you to answer?” 

I expect that most of you will be thinking along these lines – or a politer version anyway. Because of course, it’s all very well setting out the theory of how to apportion your traffic to Amazon, but how do you secure that traffic in the first place? 

I’ll answer that question in some detail next week, with deep dives into a couple of further areas after that, but suffice to say that there are lots of things that don’t work: 

• Twitter / X
• Instagram 
• Blogging 
• Blog tours 
• Organic Facebook traffic (probably) 
• Boosted Facebook posts 
• Amazon ads 
• Traditional publicity, of the sort that Big Publishing uses. 

Some items on this list might be surprising: how could Amazon ads not increase sales on Amazon, for example? The answer is that Amazon ads may increase sales in a low-level, evergreen-type way. They are not well adapted to the kind of surge marketing I’m talking about here. I also think that Amazon ads tend to work better as a phase two option: that is, once you have already generated some good book sales through other sources. 

Or again: how could trad publicity not work, since it works perfectly well for trad publishers? And yes, of course it does: but they have a huge physical retail footprint. Trad publicity is pretty much hopeless for generating digital sales on demand. The two worlds – physical bookstores and all things Amazonian – are largely separate in terms of sales approach. 

So I’m only going to focus on three tools, but they’re all important: 

• Promo sites 
• Facebook ads 
• Author mailing lists. 

That’s it. That’s what lies ahead. 

If you’re trad published, then knowing about promo sites is valuable, in that publishers should – these days – think of them when it comes to boosting your ebook. Author mailing lists are critical for everybody. And Facebook ads? Well, it will be essentially impossible to profit from them if you’re trad published. But indie authors will rely on them heavily – and I do think that trad authors just need to know what their publishers could be doing, and in many cases ought to be doing. You can’t even have the conversations, if you don’t understand the territory.

*

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Selling Strategies

An unusual task this week. Simply: 

• Do you have experience of a selling strategy that really didn't work for you? 
• Do you have experience of one that really did? 

You might be talking about something that your publishers conceived and executed for you. You might be talking about something that you did yourself. Either way, let's hear about it. When you're ready, post yours here.

And? 

Yes: writing books is hard. Selling them is harder. But let's also not forget that loads and loads of books do get written and sold, and authors make money and find readers. Just this week, for instance, our very own Becca Day has published her latest thriller, The Woman In The Cabin, to rapturous reviews. 

So, this is a hard task, but not an impossible one. Avanti! 

Til soon,

Harry

Last week, I talked about how print-led publishing is essentially dominated by the battle to secure retail space. 

If your book gets a really good level of retail space, it stands an excellent chance of selling well. If not, your book is mostly likely to sell badly, irrespective of its basic quality. 

I ended that Depressing, Pointless and Nihilistic email by promising you that this week I would offer you some Very Sound Advice. 

And yes: I will. But be warned. That advice is akin to finding running shoes for the portly gentleman at the start of his race. It’s akin to massaging his quads and calling his attention to a trip hazard en route. His odds will improve, for sure… but the race is still a crapshoot. The basic shape of the game remains unaltered. All you can do is boost your odds. 

So that’s coming up, but first: 

I got a LOT of replies from you guys last week, and quite a lot of you seemed to think I was saying that trad publishing is basically broken and that self-publishing is a better option. 

To be clear, I am not saying that. Trad publishing has its challenges. Self-publishing does, too – they're just different challenges. And, either way, a ton of books get sold all the time. Authors are taken on by agents, their books are bought by publishers, they’re sold to retailers, who sell on to readers. Despite the huge torrent of new media, books remain absolutely central to culture. And of course, you can earn a lot of money even if your book doesn’t sell: that’s what advances are for. 

So, trad publishing is great and full of opportunity. But it’s also difficult and full of challenges. 

Here’s what you need to do. 

Write a good book 

The quality of your book ought to matter, and it does matter. 

Ideally, the major retail buyers would read all the books offered to them by publishers, and pick the ones that were the very, very best. That doesn’t happen. Too many books, too few buyers. 

But quality still matters. Your publishers are sophisticated readers and will know the difference between a book that feels genuinely special and one that feels just fine. They’ll put more work into the first one than the second. That will affect every conversation between your publishers and the wider world. It can generate some startling, immediate, significant wins. 

For example: when my Fiona Griffiths series was launched in the UK, hardback sales weren’t great. They weren’t awful, but certainly mediocre. 

In the normal course of things, hardback sales are the best predictor of paperback ones… except that my publisher (Orion, part of Hachette) had an in-house book group. A reading group, in other words: a bunch of friends getting together to talk about a shared reading experience. That group read my book and loved it. That enthusiasm spilled over to UK’s biggest bookseller who ended up putting the paperback into their biggest monthly promotion, thereby sharply changing the book’s (and series’) sales trajectory. 

So: write a good book. That’s the only part you have real control over, so do it right. 

If you need or want help, then of course we offer a ton of ways to provide that. Two easy options are: 

1. Our Good To Great course, which is specifically there to help competent writers become dazzling writers – the sort that agents have to take on. The course is free to Premium Members, but everyone gets to have a free first lesson. 

2. Manuscript assessment. This is still the gold standard way to improve a novel, and our editors are very, very good. If I’d recommend any one thing, it would be this. 

Make nice 

Back in the day, I was published by HarperCollins and my editorial team also handled a major bestselling author, whom we’ll just call Jack. (The author in question? Rich. Litigious.) HarperCollins knew this author would earn them money, but he was horrible. Just a nasty human. So yes, they put together a pitch for this chap’s next book. Yes, they tried to win it. But – they were also kind of happy when they failed. 

Publishers will work harder for people they like. So make nice – and, really, that’s just a way of saying BE nice. It makes a difference. 

Be professional 

For the same reason, it helps to be professional. Delivering on time, working well with edits, responding fast to emails – all of that. Those things help your editor do his or her job, so being professional is basically just a way of making nice, in a way that is directly helpful. It all makes a difference. 

Be strategic 

If you’re lucky, you’ll get the chance to meet bloggers, and retail buyers, and booksellers, and other industry types. 

Those meetings really matter. 

Yes, there are often other authors floating around at those events and authors are generally more delightful souls than, erm, almost anyone, and so it’s tempting to curl up in a knot of drunken writers and ignore everyone else – but don’t. 

Be strategic. Booksellers and bloggers and other influencers matter, so seek them out, and be interesting and make nice. And retail buyers really, really matter so seek them out and make super-nice. 

And if that sounds too calculated – well, hell, I should probably add that you should be authentic too. Don’t just lie and flatter. Be yourself, just a polished up version of yourself. Make nice with the people who matter, then get hammered with your cronies. 

(Oh yes, and crime writers are WAY the most interesting authors, so you should probably write crime, not something smelly like lit fic or YA. And even when crime writers aren’t the most interesting, they have way the highest capacity for booze.) 

Care about your cover 

Your book cover matters – intensely. 

It’s something I’ve often not got right in my career. I don’t mean that I’ve chosen a poor cover, because I’ve never exactly got to choose. I’ve got to comment. (And, by the way, a publisher may be contractually obliged to consult with you about your cover, which sounds nice. Just be aware that their legal obligation would be entirely satisfied by the following exchange: Publisher: “What do you think of your new book cover?” You: “I hate it in every possible way.” Publisher: “Thank you for your opinion.”) 

But – even without having a contractual right of veto, it’s a rare editor who doesn’t basically want to make his or her author roughly happy. 

So: 

1. Before you see your draft cover, have a damn good idea of what the other books in this space look like. Yours can’t look worse. You want it to look better. 

2. When you do see your cover, be as honest as possible with yourself about your feelings. That’s harder to do than it sounds! 

3. Discard completely all feelings that have to do with the way the book, or the cover looks in your head. It doesn’t matter if the cover seems to refer to an incident or feature that’s not in the book. The key questions are: Does it convey genre? Does it convey mood? Is it arresting and just generally brilliant? That’s what matters. 

4. Tell your editor what you think. If you want changes, say so. If you want a total rethink, say so – and in those terms. Be direct. Do not be too people-pleasey.  

5. Beware: if you think the cover’s wrong, your publishers is likely to “nice” you into submission. If your editor says, “Oh, I’m sure once you see the cover with the raised lettering and the foil effects, you’ll be absolutely blown away,” what they mean is, “Give us a chance to let a few more weeks pass, and then it’ll be too late to make changes anyway.” 

6. For that reason, make sure you get a reasonably early sight of your cover. If it arrives with you too late, you may be stuck with it. 

A bad cover will kill your book. A great cover could propel it into the stratosphere. Do not accept compromise – and throw your toys out of the pram if you have to. This is almost the only area where toy-throwing makes sense.  

And when you are considering cover – or blurb – or marketing in general, then always remember: 

The pitch, the pitch, the pitch! 

Publishing is a machine. It makes its profits by employing good people, working them too hard, and paying them too little. It can seem like a privilege to work for a good, big publisher, but by heck they’ll take their pound of flesh (or 454g, for our EU readers.) 

The result is that books don’t always get the level of thought and attention they deserve. And in particular, your cover designer hasn’t read your book, didn’t commission your book, and has little more than a page or two of notes from your editor in terms of design brief. 

The result can easily be a lazily “me-too” cover, or one that simply doesn’t evoke the mood and tone of your book. 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. You are most likely to get stellar sales if: 

1. You have a brilliant concept – an elevator pitch; and 

2. Everything lines up perfectly behind that concept: the text, the title, the blurb, the cover, and every line of marketing yadda. 

Your job, as author, is to be the scent-following, rat-shaking terrier that ensures the fidelity of everything to your pitch. If your title and blurb promise one kind of experience, and the book cover promises another, that book will not persuade readers to walk it over to the till. 

You need a great concept. 

And everything – everything – needs to line up behind it. 

Honestly? Nowadays, I’d be blunt about it. I’d offer my own cover design brief to an editor. I’d suggest my own blurb. I’d say what I thought our pitch was and what tone we needed to strike. 

If you do that right, you won’t even come across as an asshole. Offer your material humbly and accept advice when it’s wise. Most of the time, an editor will actually be grateful: you’re making their life easier. That’s a positive blessing. But if they say you’re wrong about something, you also need to accept that you don’t know everything.  

FEEDBACK FRIDAY:  

Well, I’ve yammered away about the pitch – again – in this email, so let’s have another pitching challenge. 

If you haven’t watched the free first lesson of Good To Great, then do please do just that. And, in any event, please: 

• Give me the pitch for your novel in a maximum of 20 words, and preferably fewer. If you’re stuck, try the “Premise + Conflict” recipe to see if that unsticks you like slippery egg on Teflon. 

• Also, present your pitch as an extremely short list of ingredients “Teen romance + werewolf”, “Orphan + wizard school”. You have 3-8 words for this. 

For extra pepperoni on your pizza, then please also show me how everything is going to line up behind that concept: 

• What’s your title? And how does that line up with your pitch? 

• What kind of cover would work? You need to advertise genre and you need to advertise pitch. Don’t get too specific: just offer a sketch of a possible cover brief. 

What we’re trying to do here is make sure that your pitch flows right through to the places where your book is first going to touch the reader: on a bookstore table or on an Amazon search page. 

When you're ready, post yours here.

NEXT WEEK 

We turn to the beast that is Amazon and all things digital. 

Til soon 

Harry 

Good morning, everyone, and welcome back to Spotlight On!

We're back with a brand-new series of interviews with literary agents. Stay tuned to learn more about the day-to-day work of agents, what they're looking for in submission packs, their thoughts on the publishing industry and much, much more. All our Spotlight On interviews can be found right here on Townhouse: #JWSpotlightOnInterview.

This week, we're speaking to Sheyla Knigge from New York-based agency High Line Literary Collective. Sheyla began her career in publishing working under agent Victoria Marini in 2021 and has since started building her own client list, which includes Kalie Cassidy (In the Veins of the Drowning, July 2025) and Maggie Rapier (Soulgazer, July 2025).

You can follow Sheyla at @sheylaknigge for updates on her work, or view her agency profile here. She is also participating in our Agent One-to-One service this month, so don’t miss out on a chance to hear from her! Read highlights from our interview with Sheyla below and view the full interview on her AgentMatch profile…

Hi Sheyla, thanks for speaking with us today!

What does the day in the life of an agent look like for you?

It's different for everyone, but for me, it looks like a lot of emails and reading. My email inbox is specifically for any correspondence with my colleagues and editors, and my clients also use it to send me links to their documents so I can make notes. I'm a very editorial agent, so I’ll read through their work and make comments. I have clients on the West Coast, the East Coast and then I have clients with editors in the UK, so I'm working across a bunch of different time zones!

What’s your favourite thing about being an agent?

I think my favourite part of being an agent has got to be the difference in the projects. It's like I tell my clients: we can all use similar tropes or similar themes in our stories, but there are certain stories that only they can tell. I really love finding the intricacies of their work in the differences between them.

A great example is the two romantasies I have coming out next summer: In the Veins of the Drowning by Kalie Cassidy and Maggie Rapier’s Soulgazer. Both of them are seafaring stories, and they're very magical and mythological. They're very different to me, but close enough in themes that I would love to have them in conversation with one another. So it's little things like that that keep me on my toes. I like to find the tiny things I loved from previous books in my clients’ stories and help bring them to life in a new way.

As an editorially minded agent, how do you approach feedback?

Typically, when I make an offer, I ask the author which way they prefer to get feedback, because I want to be very cognisant that every author works differently. I have some clients who prefer to send me a document and have me put all of my notes in at once and then send it back with an editorial letter. Some prefer to talk about edits on a phone call or face to face. I have other clients who send me their writing bit by bit, so we work on each section separately and then clean it up and make sure it’s cohesive at the end. It depends on what helps them the most!

I like to tell my authors that no matter what edits or commentary I might have, I want the story to remain as close as possible to the story they wanted to tell. Authors get a lot of feedback from agents, editors and beta readers, but my goal is to make sure the result feels authentic to the original story and is something the author is excited to put out into the world.

In your opinion, what makes a good author-agent relationship?

I think transparency is really important. I think a lot of people go into this relationship with the idea that they work for their agent or their agent works for them, but I don't really have that mindset. I think that this is a very collaborative working relationship and at the end of the day, we're just two creatives who love books and want the story to be the best possible thing it can be. It can be helpful to think about how much you want to share with your agent, so that they can be helpful and be a good advocate for you if you ever need to push back a deadline or something like that. It’s true that you don’t have to be friends with your agent, but I think that in any good working relationship, you have to be at least a little bit vulnerable in what you’re willing to share so that the other person knows what you need from them.

What’s at the top of your wishlist in fiction?

As my career has continued, I've become more of a mood reader — so when it starts to get cosy and cold, I want to read something spooky or scary. Right now, I would really, truly love something about the four horsemen of the apocalypse, something inspired by Sleepy Hollow, or anything about murderous cheerleaders or murderous teens in small towns.

I'm also loving witchy stories right now, but I've got a couple of them already so I'm trying not to ask for too many. I think that sometimes, when authors see books that agents have sold, they might think: “Oh, I have something like that, they'll love mine.” And we might! But the thing is, we don't want to cannibalise our own list and we have to think about what’s best for the authors that we already work with.

Beyond the spooky stories, I'm always really interested in magical stories that transport me to a different place. It’s very rare that I will take on something that is that set in the modern day, so any contemporary stories would have to wow me and show me something that I haven't seen done before or that I haven't seen in a while.

Are there any genres you would prefer not to receive?

In non-fiction, I’m not a great fit for memoirs. I’m also not a war buff or a history book in general.

In fiction, I’m not hugely excited by dystopian stories or sci-fi. I loved them when I was in middle school, and if I can see them developing into some hugely influential part of the culture the way that The Hunger Games did, then maybe — but otherwise, I’m probably not the right agent for those genres.

When you’re reading a query letter, what are some things you like and dislike seeing?

When I read query letters, I always think about whether I would want to pick up the book in a bookstore. Does the pitch have the same feel as the back cover of a book in the sense that it makes me want to read those opening pages? I’ve had friends who have published their books and tell me that the blurb on the back cover is word for word what they wrote in their query, so I love to see query letters that capture that feeling. If the query isn’t drawing me in, I’ll usually go to the opening pages to see whether there’s a disconnect between them, which can happen because query letters are really hard to write.

In terms of things I don’t like to see in queries... Publishing is in a sort of transitional phase right now where we're seeing fewer and fewer series being bought. There are books that I’ve sold which I would love to be a series, but it’s not up to me. So, when authors tell me in their query letter that this is the first in a trilogy or a nine-book series, I really wish they were pitching just one book with series or spin-off potential. I want to be the best advocate for my authors but I can't guarantee I can sell one book, let alone nine, so knowing that someone has written an entire series does make me more hesitate to take their work on.

Some agents love synopses, others don’t. What do you think of them, and are there any things you look for in a synopsis?

As someone who doesn’t like writing synopses myself, I don't typically ask for them unless there’s a really short deadline for reading a submission and I just need to see the CliffsNotes version of the story. Sometimes I do need to ask my authors to send through a synopsis because the editor wants to see one — but personally, I’ll ask for a playlist before I ask for a synopsis.

To give some advice, though, synopses should represent the structure of the story, beat for beat. Say your book contained four acts; what are the key components of each of those acts and how can you translate them onto a page to give the reader a sense of what’s happening in the story?

Is there anything an author can do in the first few pages of their manuscript that will really grab your attention? Anything you don’t enjoy as much?

I love a chunky book with a lot of words, so I want pretty prose — maybe what most people would call purple prose. I just really gravitate towards that sort of writing. I like to be drawn into the story, and I love to be surprised. I might read a query letter and have an idea of what the story will be, but then open the first few pages and realise I had no idea what was coming. One of my favourite books (and favourite series) is Stalking Jack the Ripper and those opening pages left me gasping for air and needing to read more. That’s the sort of thing that makes me fall head over heels for a book, and if I’m not head over heels for it, I’m not the best advocate for it.

Any last pieces of advice for authors?

It’s very easy to get caught up in rejections, but every no is going to lead you to that eventual yes. It's not that your story or your writing isn't good, it's that it’s just not a fit for that agent, and that's okay. Your next story might be a better fit for that agent, or there might be another agent that your current one is the perfect fit for. Think of it sort of like speed-dating — it’s there and gone in a minute. This is the last time that your story is truly yours and no one else’s, so take that time and bask in it!

Secondly, writing full time can be a very lonely business, so finding community is important. Look for other authors who have similar interests and are open to talking about writing and the publishing industry. I was listening to a podcast recently which said that a good chunk of debut authors don’t continue past that first year because it’s just so overwhelming and intense. It’s true that you can talk to your agent or your editor about the industry, but it’s the camaraderie between authors who are going through the process together that’s really going to help you find longevity in this.

Check out Sheyla's AgentMatch profile for the full interview.

If you’re struggling with your query letter and synopsis, do check out our free resources on our website. We have lots of info to help you on your way. Or, better still, if you’re a Premium Member, our lovely Writers Support team will be happy to offer you a free query letter review once per year of membership! Finally, we have plenty of fantastic agents offering Agent One-to-One Sessions in October and November – book your session now to hear their feedback on your submission pack.

Last week, I talked about how selling print books is a very different proposition from selling ebooks. Print books can’t change their covers, can’t radically lower their price, can’t link to the internet, and are sold (by publishers) to huge corporations not direct to consumers.

So how do publishers sell books?

Well, there are two ways to look at it. There’s the way that publishers will talk about (at length) if you ask them at a festival or elsewhere. Then there’s the way that actually illuminates what happens.

How publishers sell books (publisher version)

Let’s honour publishers first by talking about bookselling the way that they do. Selling a print book, these days, is more complicated – more multi-channelled – than it has ever been. So publishers will think about:

• Social media activity, including relatively novel channels like BookTok.
• Some digital advertising (maybe).
• Book reviews via notable bloggers in whatever your genre space is
• Book reviews via mainstream media
• Other media opportunities, from local radio to national press or even (rarely) TV
• Requesting puffs and review quotes from authors and other influencers
• Sending out proof copies to all and sundry
• Festival appearances
• Industry get-togethers that give you a chance to meet bloggers, reviewers, etc
• Industry get-togethers that give you a chance to meet retail buyers
• Industry get-togethers that give you a chance to meet booksellers
• Book signings (less frequent now than they used to be, thank the Lord. Turnouts at these things seldom helped an author’s ego.)
• Book giveaways, however handled
• Price promotions, especially with supermarkets
• Purchasing “book of the week” type slots with chain booksellers
• Inclusion in the publisher’s seasonal catalogue

That’s not even a comprehensive list – and it includes categories (eg: ‘social media activity’) which in itself comprises a whole bewildering and inventive range of initiatives.

That said, what publishers actually do for any particular book tends to be a very small subset of what they could potentially do.

Let’s say that you have a really capable agent from a heavy-hitting literary agency in London or New York. Let’s also say your Really Capable Agent has sold to a highly credible imprint at a major publisher. The publisher concerned has a fancy office building at some glamorous address. They have a billion dollars plus in global revenues and make a very healthy profit on those sales. Let’s also say that your book deal wasn’t even marginal. It wasn’t one of those $10,000 / £5,000 advances that basically say, “Look, we’re not that excited by this, but we’ll give it a shot …”

So, you’re all set, right? You just need to stand back and let this mighty machine do its perfectly polished work?

What actually happens

Well – maybe.

Sometimes, yes, an author will find it pans out, all as they’ve dreamed it. It’s as though they’ve gone to sleep in some frozen landscape, then woken up on a geyser, tossed higher than seemed possible. “Hey, sorry, Oprah, I’m on Jimmy Fallon that night, could we maybe reschedule?”

But mostly – it’s not like that.

Mostly, you have these weird conversations with whichever Glossy Marketing Person your publisher allocates you.

YOU: “Cover reveal on Twitter, OK.”

GMP: “Yeah, it’s called X now.”

“And, uh, the book’s in a catalogue?”

“Yes, we’ve really revamped the way we address indie bookshops, so there are going to be a LOT of eyes on this.”

“And proof copies? When you took me on, you were going to print up some book proofs with a fancy cover …?”

“Well, yes. I mean, we’ve gone the PDF route, in fact, because so many people find PDFs easier to handle.”

“And Festival appearances? We spoke about that too …”

“Yes, we’re really getting your name out there.”

“But nothing booked?”

“Well, we haven’t yet heard back from the Little Piddle Lit Fest team. They were very  enthusiastic at one point.”

“Book reviews?”

“We can send out another email, but it can be positively unhelpful to chase too much.”

“Adverts? I mean, are you taking any positive steps to get this book in front of readers?”

[Glossy Marketing Person does the nervous laughter compulsory when an author mentions a strategy that costs actual money.]

“We really feel that organic reach works better on digital.”

It’s perfectly possible – no, likely – that your marketing conversation goes something like that. And you watch on as this huge machine, this reliable creator of bestselling books and authors, appears to do virtually nothing to support your book.

Sure enough, what looked likely to happen, does happen.

Not many retailers buy your book, and those that do don’t buy it at huge scale. Sure enough, you make some sales, because it would be weird if literally no one bought it, but the sales seem very low.

Nobody from your publisher ever calls you up and says, “Hey, you do know that your career is completely ****ed, don’t you?”, but by the time you get to the latter stages of your two-book deal, the mood music has altered so unmistakeably, you get the message anyway. You always quite fancied pig-farming / floristry / exotic dance as a way to make a living, so you start retraining as one of those good things instead.

You are about to be a former author, except that – like American presidents – you always get to call yourself an author, even if it’s been years since you ran a country / wrote a book.

How publishers sell books (the reality)

What publishers say about selling books is all, 100%, completely true.

But they mostly don’t add a crucial little rider, and everything that truly matters is in that rider.

Your book will get a huge and impressive density of marketing effort if retailers agree to stock your book in significant volumes. If retailers don’t agree stock your book in bulk, we will offer you the absolute minimum of support – and yes, we are well aware that this lack of support will be terminal.

They are extremely unlikely to tell you this directly. They are not likely to volunteer what level of orders they are looking for. They are not likely to tell you if you have / have not met this level.

Publishers are, in the end, profit-seeking companies. Their basic sales model (for print) is as follows:

1. Buy 12 books from debut authors.
2. Do a reasonable (if cost-conscious) job of book production – covers, editing, all that.
3. Present those 12 books to retailers. (That’s why “Inclusion in the publisher’s seasonal catalogue” is the most important element in the list I gave you earlier, even though it seems like the most boring and least impactful element there.)
4. Retailers are getting bombarded by loads of catalogues from loads of imprints from loads of publishers. Even the biggest stores don’t have shelf space for everything. Most stores are small not big. And supermarkets – which sell huge volumes of books – sell very few individual titles. The result is that most debut novels don’t get many orders. That’s just how it is.
5. Publishers then triage, ruthlessly.
6. If a book gets a heavy level of advance orders from a good number of retailers, the marketing artillery will come out in force. The advance orders from supermarkets are most likely to come if the publisher offers significant price discounts, but supermarkets know that they can and will secure those discounts if they back them up with orders. All this is potentially geyser territory; where you wake up on a glorious fountain of sales: your book, in a lot of stores, backed by hefty price promotions.
7. If a book does not get a heavy level of advance orders (and it probably won’t), publishers will, in their smilingly deceptive way, let your book (and your career) die.
8. The publisher then moves onto the next batch of 12 debut authors. You move on to pig-farming / floristry / exotic dance.

All this is perfectly logical.

Retailers can’t possibly stock all the books they’re offered. If a publisher runs an expensive marketing campaign aimed at generating sales in bookstores, that campaign is bound to fail – badly – if your book is invisible in the places where people buy books.

The result is that, if your book doesn’t get ordered in significant volumes, your publisher will simply throttle any marketing effort. They’ll do just enough to stop you being shouty and screamy, but they know perfectly well that the little they do won’t meaningfully shift books.

In effect, modern publisher bookselling is akin to twelve fat men running for the same revolving door. It’s not really an athletic competition. It’s more of a random scramble. But in the end, only one fat man can pop first through that door – and the bliss of Selling Heaven – and eleven portly gentlemen will be sitting all a-tumble on the skiddy granite outside, wondering what happened.

What happened, my friend, is that you just got published.

Pipes and tweed

Now, I should say that all this is very much the pipe and tweed version of things – what happens with a very print-led publishing process. There are, for sure, imprints at big publishers that are either digitally-led or reasonably adept at pivoting between the two. But since the pipe-n-tweed imprints are always the most prestigious, and the ones most likely to create the kind of bestsellers you’ve always dreamed of writing, this model is still profoundly influential.

If you’re startled by my cynicism, I should say that I’m hardly alone. I had a conversation a year or two back with someone who used to run one of the most prestigious imprints in British publishing. I gave him my 12-fat-men analogy, and he essentially agreed. He said that one of the reasons he left publishing was precisely because he felt it had become too much of a lottery, with books elevated by happenstance more than quality.

(And all this, by the way, explains lot about your experience as a reader. Let’s say you read about the new bestseller by Q. It has fancy reviews from X and Y and Z, and it’s selling a LOT of books. So you buy the book and read it, hoping to learn something about how to write … and you think, huh? I mean, books don’t get to be super-big bestsellers unless they genuinely have something special. And you don’t even get to be an ordinary-level bestseller unless you bring a basic competence. But dazzle? Bestselling debut fiction should be dazzling, and it often isn’t. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows it. This email explains the reason why.)

So what to do?

This email would be Depressing, Pointless and Nihilistic unless it ended with some words of advice on how to win that 12-fat-men-and-a-revolving-door race. And …?

Well, I don’t know.

And this email is too long.

And these emails are ALWAYS too long.

But, that being said, I do nevertheless have some Very Sound Advice to offer.

But you’ll have to wait till next week to get it.

Tell me what you think

As we go further with this series of emails, I’d love to know what you think. What’s useful? What isn’t? What do you want to know more about? Just hit reply, and let me know.

I got a lot of replies last time, so do keep your thoughts coming. I read everything and reply to nearly everything.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Build Your Book Month - Plotting

It’s Build Your Book Month and we’re plotting away.

Sophie’s workshop last week - “Start your book with a bang” was free to all and and generated a LOT of interest. So the assignment this week is:

1. Watch Sophie being amazing here (that link will take you to the Masterclass area of Premium Membership. Not a member? We've made the replay free to watch here too.)
2. Upload your opening page (max 300 words)
3. Give us some comments (after your opening) about how you decided on what you wrote.

Post yours here. 

(I’m asking for comments because personally I don’t really start my books with a bang. My most tedious ever opening paragraph? That’s easy. It was the one word: “Rain.” Although, more broadly, that opening was probably beaten out by my very next book which opened with two characters, including my protagonist, discussing a new pair of jeans:

I say, ‘Great. Really nice.’ I’m not sure what to say.

‘My jeans. They’re new.’

‘Oh.’

Any time, Becca Day and her team want a BYB workshop on “How to craft a tedious opening”, I’m their man.)

I’m off to open things in a boring way – books, beer bottles, supermarkets. I’ll see you next week.

Til soon

Harry

This is the first in a season of emails on how to sell a book. Today’s email will cover the shape of the industry as it is today. Further emails will cover things like traditional sales techniques, Amazon’s algorithm, Facebook ads, Amazon ads, mailing lists, non-fiction, and other topics.

What’s the point, mate – I mean, honestly?

There’ll be a large group of you for whom this kind of information may seem redundant. Those folk may be inclined to think, roughly:

“Look here, you Cheerless Charlie, I haven’t even finished my book, and I don’t know if it’s any good, and certainly don’t know if any literary agent will be keen to take me on. And all that mailing list and Amazon ad stuff? Isn’t that something that publishers are meant to take care of? I have zero interest in self-publishing a book and a couple of emails won’t change that.”

Well, yes, I hear you.

And yes: selling a book may seem a distant dream, and the information that follows may feel theoretical. But that’s not the right way to look at it. You are, all of you, seeking to create and sell a product to an industry – or, for indie authors, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that you’re looking to create a product that you’ll sell direct to consumers via some well-established industry structures.

And to do that, yes, you need to write a good book. You’ll know me well enough by now to know that I’m a craft-first kind of guy. I’m all about hard-writing and easy-marketing, not the other way round.

But understanding the industry always helps. Always.

Sometimes, it helps in very direct ways. If you sell your book to a publisher, and you’re at some industry event supported by that publisher, you’ll know who performs what role – and who you ought to be out charming. Good knowledge about the industry will change the way you think about Twitter/X. It’ll change the way you think about your book cover. It’ll change the way you present yourself as an author.

But more than that, I think you grow up in less definable ways. All fiction projects start out in a kind of dream. A story pops into your head and you think, wouldn’t it be fun to write this down? That’s perfectly fine – it’s how I started, too – but your aim has to be to become a truly professional author. Yes, you will always need to satisfy your own creative spirit (what a waste it would be if we didn’t do that), but you’d be plain dumb to think that your creative spirit doesn’t need to work hand-in-hand with an industry.

What’s more, for all the mwah-mwah-darling nature of the (very pleasant) publishing industry, it is at its heart as ruthless about income and profits as any other.

So:

You need to remain creative, but you also need to build a product for a shamelessly profit-seeking industry. These emails will tell you how books get sold and that in turn will tell you a lot about how agents, editors, publicists and everyone else thinks. Get to grips with these emails and your odds of success go up. Got that? Good. Allons-y!

The doom loop that wasn’t

For a few years, it seemed credible to argue that the traditional books industry could simply collapse. Bricks-and-mortar booksellers were near-bankrupt. E-books were booming. Print-runs were getting shorter. It seemed possible that shorter print runs would drive up print prices, which would force the collapse of Barnes and Noble (US) and Waterstones (UK), and that in turn would create a doom loop for the rest of the regular bookselling industry.

That didn’t happen. A couple of big book chains went bust (bye-bye, Borders), but the flagship chains recovered their spirits, their profitability, and their charm.

Meantime, e-books (and audio book) did in fact turn out to be the Next Big Thing – a vast new way of reading and marketing and selling books – but that new thing has added to, not replaced, what was there before.

The invisible publisher

The publishing industry, as it exists today, divides into two (messily defined) chunks.

One chunk is ‘traditional’ publishing. The company names are essentially the same as they always were. The imprints are often the same, too. The firms they sell to are largely the same. The products they sell have shifted – but only a bit.

Thus, a modern trad publisher might sell roughly 70% of its books in print form, roughly 20% as ebooks, and roughly 10% as audiobooks. If you look at value, not volume, then ebooks drop back to more like 10% and that chunk gets added onto print instead.

So, for most modern publishers, ebooks are and have long been secondary. It’s true that ebooks play a bigger role in adult genre fiction, but that means they play a correspondingly smaller role in kids’ books and adult non-fiction.

This summary – 70 print / 20 ebook / 10 audio – is often presented as though it were true of the books market as a whole, but it’s not.

Talk to indie authors, and you’ll find they barely think about print at all. My own self-published books sell at least 95% of their copies in digital form – ebook and audio. I really only sell in print because it’s easy to do so, and because it’s nice for readers who prefer lovely, lovely paper.

Virtually all self-published authors are like me: we sell digital products. Our print sales are little more than decorative. Yet because mainstream media has long, deep connections with trad publishers and essentially no connection at all with indies, the self-published part of the industry is essentially invisible – perpetually forgotten, perpetually surprising to those from trad publishers.

But, collectively, these indies are hardly negligible. The self-pub industry is at least as large as Penguin Random House and probably larger. If you add in the digital-first publishers – who are quasi-traditional in that they are selective, but still very ebook dominated – then the ebook-dominant publishers are collectively way bigger than PRH.

And yet – still invisible.

Selling in print and selling in bytes

Now all this matters to you because selling print books is radically different from selling ebooks.

Take ebooks first:

1. If early sales data says that your cover isn’t working quite right, you can change the cover instantly. Or the blurb. Or both. Aside from the new design itself, it’s not even costly to make the switch.
2. If you want to tweak the price, you can. Want to drop a book from $9.99 to $0.99 or even $0.00? You can do so, easily and instantly.
3. Supposing you want a reader to visit a website, with an ebook you just offer an ordinary, regular link and say, “Tap here.” Done.
4. One more thing: ebooks are sold (almost exclusively) via Amazon and Apple, two of the world’s largest companies. Those companies don’t hand-curate their bookstores. They just sell everything, no matter how good or bad. So that means you, the author, aren’t really selling your book to Amazon for them to on-sell. You are selling via Amazon direct to the consumer.

So that’s ebooks: instantly flexible, price-adjustable, online-linked, direct to consumer.

None of that stuff is true of print books.

1. Yes, in theory a publisher can change a cover – and often does from hardcover to softcover, or for an anniversary or TV-special edition. But for that process to operate cleanly, the old stock has to be recovered and pulped before the new stock is issued. Consequently, the process is slow, rare and considered.
2. Price tweaking doesn’t really work with print. Because there’s a hard cost (in materials, printing, warehousing, shipping) to get a book to a bookstore, a publisher can’t just chop the price and expect the same margin. So price cutting happens less radically (“3-for-2”, say, not $9.99 to $0.99) and less frequently.
3. Visiting a website direct from a print book? Good luck with that.
4. And, finally, print books aren’t sold to consumers. Not really. Print books are sold to retailers – often huge companies (such as supermarkets) for whom books are all but irrelevant.

Why this matters

This matters to you because print sales techniques are utterly different from digital sales techniques. You need to know how the whole print selling process works, because you may end up working with a big publisher and you need to know what you can influence and what really matters.

But you also need to understand, in depth, how the ebook selling process works, because if you have a trad publisher, they may well cock it up. (Though they’re less hopeless than they used to be.) And if you don’t end up with a trad publisher, your alternative will be selling digitally in one form or another, so you need to know all that side of things, too.

As we go further with this series of emails, I’d love to know what you think. What’s useful? What isn’t? What do you want to know more about? Comment below to let me know.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Publishing and selling Q&A

Simple one this week. Just tell me what your publishing / selling plans are, and what questions you have.

Premium Members only, please. If you’re not a PM, then this could be the time to Do The Right Thing…

I’ll give as many responses as I sanely can.

Post your plans and questions here.