A tale of two authors

A cheaty email this week, because I’m stealing most of the content.

Here’s a (lightly edited) email from – well, we’ll call him the Earl of Pembrokeshire, a gentleman widely known for the splendour of his moustaches:

Way back in 2019 I was excited finally to acquire a literary agent who set about trying to find a publisher for my second novel (the first having been self-published through Matador who were very easy to deal with).

Like many authors I thirsted for a conventional publication deal, but though working diligently – and getting great feedback but ultimately rejections from Doubleday and Harper Collins amongst others – my agent eventually had to inform me that he’d pretty much exhausted his list and we were at the crossroads. In the end, at my agent’s suggestion, I tried a hybrid publisher who seemed to tick most of the boxes. The price was surprisingly reasonable and their vetting process and author list suggested they were reputable and only in the market for quality stuff. They read the novel (which had already been edited by one of your own editors) and ‘made an offer’ based on my receiving 100% of royalties until I’d recovered my outlay, then 70/30. So now we have the paperback already listed and the ebook to follow soon. Simples?

Not really. The publisher’s marketing is third-rate and outdated (worse still, they honestly seem to believe they’re at the cutting edge of marketing). As an author I naturally want to do as much as I possibly can to boost sales of the novel and in the several weeks between the manuscript going to the printers and the novel being listed on Amazon I immersed myself in JW’s huge resources and in David Gaughran’s courses, spending most of almost every day for three weeks reading and listening to everything I could absorb.

Then I found that I had lost control of my own book because of the intransigence – and at times sheer rudeness – of the publisher. Even as I write this I’m pushing to get the publisher to give me direct access to his two distributors so I can get them to replace the book description (which the publisher has taken directly from the back cover) with the one I’ve drawn up using JW’s template which appeared in a recent article, and also to allow me to drill down into Amazon’s sub-genres and insert relevant SEOs/keywords per JW and Dave Gaughran. I may eventually get this access but it will only be through persistence and a whole lot of anxiety dealing with a belligerent publisher.

The publisher insists he has done a great job and that the book is up there on Amazon and the paperback has been well printed. What more could I ask? However, I cannot overcome the feeling that all they’ve done really is introduce me to a firm of typesetters and cover designers, organized a print of the paperback and then put the listing into the hands of two distributors.

All of this I’ve paid for and I still don’t have a conventional deal, plus I am committed to paying out 30% of my earnings on future sales and I am having to fight to use the marketing skills I’ve diligently put together. In short, why on earth didn’t I do this myself? …

I realise this kind of story might not be new to you but it’s a salutary lesson and my experience with this project might add something to the debate. I have never at any time been anything but totally honourable with the publisher and have cooperated with everything he’s asked of me but I’m left feeling I’ve made a massive mistake.

And here is an email from – a rascal known as Thorvald the Merciless, widely known for the magnificence and ferocity of his orange beard. He writes:

I just wanted to send you a quick note to let you know how much of an impact Jericho Writers has had on my journey as an author. 

I used the Manuscript Assessment service back in January 2021, and the brilliant Lesley McDowell provided a candid review of my first novel. Needless to say, my efforts at that time were raw (a gentle way of saying the book was a bit rubbish) and needed a lot of work, but Lesley’s advice on story structure and the other key elements of writing craft were amazing. My eyes were opened, and I was able to kick that first manuscript into shape.  

I self-published that book, Viking Blood and Blade, in September 2021 and it has become a best seller in numerous Amazon Categories and I have been awarded Kindle All Star awards in each of the last 3 months. I have released three further novels since that initial release, and all have done well. 

My first traditionally published book, Warrior and Protector, is due to be published by Boldwood Books in October this year. I signed a four-book deal with Boldwood this summer. I have also been lucky enough to sell foreign publishing rights to my self-published series in the Czech Language

Both writers did what they were meant to do. Get rigorous editorial advice, preferably from Jericho Writers? Yes. Take that advice seriously? Yes. In the case of the Earl of Pembrokeshire, there was even some real dalliance with Doubleday and HarperCollins, which indicates that the book essentially was in the zone of publishable. (Which is all you need. Self-publishers need to hit that mark, but not go beyond it. Often enough, indie authors have a better sense for their market than publishers do – and the data proves it.)

One writer went with a hybrid publishing solution and ended up feeling sore, out of control, and with weak sales. The other said, the hell with it, I’m going to get stuck in myself – and, by the way, did an extremely good job of it. If you check out those Vikings books on Amazon, you can see how well presented and sold they are. I’ll bet anything you like that the sales machine behind those book pages – the website, the mailing list and all that – are equally strong.

Ambitious writers who go with hybrid publishing solutions usually end up feeling like the Earl of Pembrokeshire.

Not always: there are some exceptions, albeit not many.

And not all authors are ambitious. If you’re writing a family memoir, then a managed-publishing solution may well be a terrific way to generate a nicely printed, nicely designed book.

But still. Most ambitious authors who choose a hybrid solution do usually end up feeling sore, even if just a little.

The inverse is not quite true of Thorvald the Merciless.

Plenty of people try the self-publishing route and find they don’t shift any books. As a matter of fact, the large majority of self-pub authors don’t sell a significant volume of books.

That’s not surprising, because to succeed at self-pub (with a few exceptions, as always), you need:

• To be able to write well
• To write several books
• To master the various disciplines of self-pub (cover design, copy-writing, website set up, mailing list set up, paid advertising, etc)
• To actually execute on those disciplines in a steady, committed way

But if you have those four arrows in your quiver, you pretty much will succeed. The scale of that success will be highly defined by your niche, your audience, your competition and so forth. What counts as success for Viking historicals may look very different if (as I expect you do) you write mostly Swamp Monster Erotica.

And look: this email contrasts two route to publication – hybrid and self-pub – and, on the whole, I very much prefer the latter. But I should add that I don’t see traditional publication as being the highest and best solution for all authors. It isn’t. It goes wrong a lot. There are great outcomes in trad publishing and really disappointing ones too.

I think, for most authors, the best publishing options are either trad publishing (with publishers large or small) or Thorvald-style self-pub. Everything else, honestly, feels like a compromise … though, to be clear, compromises are sometimes the right solution. (That little non-commercial family memoir? Get it nicely printed. Don’t worry about sales. Let someone else do the legwork.)

That’s it from me.

The Earl of Pembrokeshire is currently in Bond Street purchasing the right kind of scented wax for the tips of those moustaches.

Thorvald the Merciless has just made landfall in Strathclyde – but what he’s doing there, I can’t possibly tell you. But blood will be shed …