Who’s your buyer?

This week, I want to talk about who’s buying your book. I don’t mean your eventual reader. I mean your publisher. It’s easy to assume your book will follow a particular sales pathway, when it really really won’t – and if it doesn’t fit the pathway you have in mind, you may end up failing no matter what the quality of your actual book.

That issue is easily corrected by simply understanding enough of the industry to know which bit of it you should be aiming at.

We’ll get to that in a second, but I also wanted to quote an email following last week’s Feedback Friday. The author – Katharine “the Cat” Kalypso, a Caucasian bear-wrestler – wrote to tell me:

Somehow, writing the pitch for my novel has really sharpened my understanding of the story trajectory and highlighted where a couple of subplots were detracting from the tension … I have written two post-it notes for my computer screen to ensure I cut the weakening waffle this time around: ‘complete clarity’ and ‘concision’.

Yes! That’s it. Writing a pitch should sharpen your understanding of the story trajectory. Not just that but, as we’ll see, it should float everywhere over the novel itself. That’s why I get driven nuts by pitches that offer cutesy little slogans for the book. “Romance, revenge – and a threat to the kingdom.” That kind of thing. Slogans like that might or might not be a good shout-line for a book once it’s packaged up with a strong cover and strong blurb and all the rest of it. But they’re not going to help you one tiny bit in checking whether your novel is built on the right lines. They’re also not going to tell you whether or not your story idea has the bite and snap necessary to compete on the bookshelves.

My favoured sort of pitches – aka, Really Rubbish Pitches™ – will help you with both those things. “Orphan + wizard school” would have been a terrible slogan and an impossible shout-line. But it would have told JK Rowling exactly what her book had to be about and ensured that the book would be insanely marketable when finished.

Anyway. I’m not going to get into that more now. Do please take a look at the Feedback Friday challenge this week though. It’s the last in our trilogy on pitches and (for me) the most exciting and important one.

Who’s your buyer?

Right.

Forget about pitching. Let’s think about selling.

Literary agent + Big 5 type auction

Many of you will simply think, “I’ll write the book, then hope to get an agent. If I get an agent, they can find me a publisher. If I can’t get an agent, then my book just isn’t good enough to sell and I will make my money wrestling bears in the Caucasus instead.”

And, OK, for lots of books and lots of authors, that’s a perfectly practical way to think. Indeed, it’s roughly how you ought to think, if you don’t want to self-publish and you are writing:

• Mainstream commercial fiction
• Bookclub fiction
• Mainstream literary fiction
• Mainstream non-fiction

Obviously, I’ve used the word ‘mainstream’ a lot there. What I mean is anything which could plausibly sit on the front tables of a decent bookshop. That’s what Big 5 publishers are aiming to publish. Literary agents will effectively only take you on if they think there’s a hope of a Big 5 sale. A decent book auction, of course, may be won by a major independent – a Kensington, a Faber, a Bloomsbury, for example – and any sane agent is completely happy with that outcome. But it’s the possibility of a Big 5 sale which pushes advances up. If an agent considers that there is effectively no hope of a Big 5 sale, any likely advance level is lower and perhaps very low indeed. Under those circumstances, an agent is unlikely to offer representation.

OK. This is a good model. It’s the model that – apart from my forays into self-pub – I’ve always followed.

But you need to bear in mind that publishers are still essentially focused on print. Yes, Amazon will in every case be their biggest buyer. Yes, audiobooks are huge and all publishers recognise this. And of course, no print-led publisher neglects the need to offer e-books too.

But still. For the biggest publishers, the dominant format is print – and that makes a difference. For example, a digital-first publisher will happily change a cover overnight if they feel it could help. A print-led publisher can’t have an e-book with one cover and a print book with another, so the cover you start with is the one that you’re stuck with. So books that are likely to have a largely digital readership may well benefit from a publisher focused on that exact niche.

Some writers may therefore prefer to target our next category:

Digital-first, with or without an agent

Digital-first houses are going to be very strong at selling:

• Genre romance
• Genre crime
• Genre anything

There’s not a clear distinction between the way I’m using ‘genre’ here and the way I’m using ‘mainstream’ earlier. My own crime novels are both ‘genre’ and ‘mainstream’. But very roughly, the more you bring something distinctive as a writer (in terms of writing, characterisation, and so on), the more likely you are to be considered mainstream. The more your books could be felt interchangeable with other books of the same genre (police procedurals, say), the more e-book friendly you are likely to be.

The classic illustration here is romance. Big publishers still handle romance, but these days the market is dominated by self-publishers and digital-firsters. The reason? Romance readers read A LOT. They aren’t going to pay $12.99 for a paperback when they could pay $3.99 for an e-book, so they read digitally for preference. Naturally enough, if the market is basically an e-book market, then publishers with a laser-like focus on that market are likely to do better.

The lesson for you? You need to figure out if your readers are likely to be heavily e-book driven. If they are, a Big 5 house is probably not going to bid for your book – and probably wouldn’t sell you very well if they did.

Oh yes, and just to be clear, all digital-first houses will take direct submissions. So an agent is great if you have one; inessential if you don’t.

Tiny print-led specialist, with or without an agent

That still leaves a fringe of other publishers with an intense, specialist focus. The publishers that get the most attention here are the slew of tiny publishers that often achieve astonishing success when it comes to getting literary books shortlisted for, or winning, the major prizes. But there are also small publishers that do well with (for example) mental health, or engineering, or military history.

If you get published by one of those guys, you may get very little money indeed. Plenty of them will either offer no advance at all or a purely notional, “thank you for choosing us” one. But who cares? If you’re Eimear McBride (author of A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing published by the tiny-but-excellent Galley Beggar Press) you probably don’t care that your first advance was small. Prize success and fame and (later) a book deal from Faber were probably ample compensations.

If your book is hyper-literary or hyper-specialist in some other dimension, then your natural next step is probably to find a publishing soul mate. An agent (working essentially for free and because they like your book) might be a companion in your search, if your book is literary. If your book is not a literary one, then you don’t need and probably wouldn’t benefit from an agent.

Or … do it yourself

As you know, I’m a big fan of self-publishing. That won’t work (probably) for literary fiction and is much more powerful if you’re writing a series. But lit fic apart, there aren’t many fields where self-pub can’t work for you. You can make loads of money, bond with huge numbers of readers and determine everything about the way your books are published. I’m not going to talk about all that here, because this email is long enough already, but don’t dismiss self-pub. It’s a wonderful way to publish.

Feedback Friday

Assignment for this week: Last week on pitches – and again, we’re shaking things up. This week, I want:

• Book title
• Short pitch only (12 words or less). I’m happy with just a list of ingredients if you want: ghosts + trains + Victorian curses, that kind of thing. And NO SLOGANS, no abstractions, no mysteries. I want nothing that would look good on the front of your book. Got that? Good. I’ll scream if you haven’t.
• 3 x 100-word max chunks from pages 1, 100, and 200 from your manuscript. What I want to see is whether your short pitch floats over and inhabits every page of your book. So I want you to go to (for example) page 100 in your manuscript and find anything – a word, a line, a bit of dialogue, some description, which alludes in some way, even obliquely, to your short pitch. If you haven’t got as far as page 200, then you can do page 1, 50 and 100, for example. And if your page 100 is unsuitable for some reason, then just dig out something from page 99 or 101. I just want to see that your short pitch floats right through your text.

That’s the assignment – and oh my goodness, it’s a good one. I did it with my own book here and pretty much yelped with excitement when I realised how completely my short pitch lived through the pages of my book. I never intended that outcome. I just wrote the best book I could … and ended up with that outcome.

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That’s it from me. Jobs for today: have a swim, mow the lawn, grow a beard, eat a plum.

Til soon.

Harry