Episode 66: Favoritism in Publishing
K
Hello, my beautiful cinnabar moths or any kind of moth you’d like to be. Welcome to the Writers Triangle podcast about publishing and all things books. And today we’re going to answer the burning question, do I have a favorite author? And it’s sort of its double edged? Do I have a favorite author for leisure reading? And do I have a favorite author at the pub? Surprisingly, the one about do I have a favorite author at the pub is the one I get the most. And I think it’s because of the space that authors are in when they’re on submission. And on submission is, once you’ve sent a query letter or your contact, you’ve contacted us the press because you want to publish something with us. Even our authors that have been published or like published in our second and third book with us sometimes wonder if I’m running hot and cold with them. And I think it’s because they expect every conversation to be at the same level as the start of the conversation. And my way of thinking, my way of operating is that to start something requires the most amount of effort and to maintain it, it sort of becomes effortless, and wrote. And I think that when they go from me critiquing their writing to the space, when my TV read this, my TBR list is really long, that type of communication is different based on how busy I am. And I think the authors aren’t aware of the fact that, you know, the five days the week before, where we’re bringing a book to market is really busy. And I’m really hyper focused on that book and that author. And it’s not because the other authors have fallen out of favor, it’s because this from my perspective, this is that authors time that the press is going to be focused on them and making sure we have everything right, dotting our eyes and crossing our T’s so that they have a wonderful launch experience with their book, and they become the priority. And sometimes authors can feel like they’ve fallen by the wayside, or I’m not as interested in them. And that’s not the case at all, they get that same, they don’t know that I do the same thing to other authors when it’s their time to be published. And also with the ezine authors can feel a little bit neglected, I send them when their story is going to come out in the evening, and easiness, our electronic magazine that’s on cinnabar moth literary collections.com. And it’s fabulous. And it always has five stories and a bunch of flash fiction of really great reading. But I like to have stories up to a year in advance. And so you can turn it in a story, and then it’ll be a year before it’s published. And that can feel a little bit lackluster.
K
But we’re really fortunate with the E zine we have a readership between 15 and 25,000 people every month. And that really puts a lot of pressure on us. Plus, we have advertising partners, the E zine is fully sponsored. And we have two sponsorship partners. And that really makes sure that we have to have the magazine out and at a certain quality and being able to guarantee because we now have contractual obligations with those partners about what they’re advertising in and where their advertising is going to go. And so we have to have all of the stories that we can send to them, and with the content notes to make sure that it’s not anything they don’t want to be associated with. And if you want to know who are publishing sponsorship partners aren’t just looking at is advertising in the magazine. That’s another word for advertisers is sponsor or sponsorship partner, or advertising partner. And we have really great deals going and you want to keep those bills going, you want to keep those relationships whole. And that requires that I have books a year in advance or stories anyway a year in advance. And then the books as you know, we tried to get the manuscript a year in advance so that we can have it with the cover and everything, you know, five years in advance so we can send it out. So that can lead to a lot of feast and famine, where there’s a lot of hyper focus and a lot of communication with the individual authors to know communication. And if I’ve given you a time and I said, Hey, if you turn something into me and it’s the week before a book comes out, you’re probably going to give back thank you I’ve put it in my queue and a date that I think I can read it by it’s not because I’m not caring or it’s not because I’m not into you as an author. That’s not the case at all. I’m messaging you back rather than having to wait months and months to tell you when I’ll be able to read it and that’s my to be read list. So in my to be read list. I have short stories that go in the zine I have books that are being published, I have books that are being queried. I have partial reads. And I have full reads. And I also have books that are in development, developmental edit reads. And those are six different types of reads, I have six different types of priority. Every book that goes out in the week that it goes out, it has to be read again. And that’s because all of our distributing partners asked, Did we proofread the final galley of the book. And the final galley of the book is what we submit to the publishers to be printed, and then the electronic file of what the publisher will be printed as sent to us. And also what will go up as the ebook. And we have to read those books, make sure that they have the correctly typesetting and, and all of that and make sure that the layout looks good. And the book looks good. And that requires a lot of attention. And a lot of time from the team. Because I’m not the only person who’s reading books, everybody on the team reads, and everybody on the team gets a say, and we have to I have two different reading teams, I have a reading team that’s reading for the easy, and I have a reading team that’s reading for the press, but I read for both. And that means that I have a super busy reading schedule with I really liked that, and I really enjoy it. But it also means I don’t have time to always be as thoughtful in my communications or as long and like communications or intimate my communications, brevity does not reflect lack of intimacy, it reflects that I trust that you get me and that I trust that we’re in a secure enough place, that I can say, hey, I’m gonna get this on this date, and you’re gonna be okay with that.
K
For me, the priority is what’s coming up next. And so everything has a date attached to it, what is the due date of this piece that I have to turn it into the different places or that I have to sign off on it. And there are so many different dates, every piece of writing has a different date attached to it. So every piece of writing has a different life with me as a reader. And it’s all based on what my partners are saying to me. So I don’t publish what the dates are, or make them public because what a partner is saying to me, may change and I view our printing press as a partner, if they have any sort of days that they’re doing maintenance, and they’re not going to be able to print, we have to keep that in mind. And they don’t give us their yearly print schedule. They say we put in order, they say yes or no that they can print for that order. And sometimes they just send us notifications that they’re going to be down for several days. And we have to manage that. So looking at short, notice that something’s down or they don’t tell us and they get an order that they can’t fill for whatever reason, then that’s an emergency that has to be dealt with, right away. So in top of whatever’s in my reading list, I also have my duties and responsibilities as the owner of the press. And in addition to all of this, I am a full time therapist and I have a thriving therapy practice. So this is my second job. And I am the owner, but I really trust my team to do the majority of the labor. And I do our Twitter and I do do the reading. And that’s a long winded way of saying I don’t have a favorite author that doesn’t write books that the press publishes, I find that I really just don’t have time to read a lot of books that aren’t published by us anymore, or writing that’s not meant to be published by us. Anytime I’m reading something that’s not related to that process. I feel guilty because I feel like I’m neglecting one of our authors. And no, no, I love authors. And I don’t want an author to ever feel neglected. In addition to that, I do read comp titles or what authors I had sometimes send out an email to authors. Because as we’re doing when we as I talked about on the marketing episodes that we have to have comparison titles comp titles, and I will read the comp titles every now and then I have to say I don’t give it a full and careful read unless the book just grabs me and I can’t help myself. Then I will absolutely read the whole book I kind of skim read or speed read. And I do have the ability to speed read but I find that I don’t connect with stories as much when I speed read. So I tend not to speed read the majority of the work that our authors send us. I do speed read the final galley things because it just comes up and you have to be able to get a quick turnaround. Sometimes you have as little as 24 hours to do that. But that requires speed reading and working it into my schedule and reading the code long titles, I do mostly speed read those. And that’s not a careful patient read where I’m interacting and getting involved. I don’t know other speed readers out there, let me know, do you find that when you speed read that you get as much out of the book, as when you give yourself the opportunity to have conversations with the characters, the speed, we still often is like, the only thing you do and to not speed read is painful. I’m always interested in that, because I do have several different modalities of reading. I’m dyslexic.
K
So when I’m doing a development, edit, I tend to read it really slow. And that can be really challenging for authors. And I think, because authors don’t think about the fact that I’m interacting with 100 Different authors at any given time, I think they don’t see that. And on a day that I get 60 emails in the span of 90 minutes, the author’s don’t experience that. So you might be one of 60 people that in the past 90 minutes has emailed me about something that you feel is very urgent. And doing my email, when I’m doing my client hours with my clients, I don’t check my email, I check my therapy email, but I don’t check my cinnabar moth email, unless I have a really light day. And I have maintenance appointments that are different as a therapist than active therapy. So maintenance appointments is just helping people stay on the positive path that they’re on. Where as active therapy is we’re problem solving something that’s heavy that’s going on. And then there’s crisis therapy, when something really heavy, and life changing is going on. And it needs my full attention. My therapy clients come first, always in my life as they should. And I think that’s just the responsible way to be a therapist, in case you have someone’s mental health thing in your hand. And you’re asking them to trust you and depend on you, you have to prioritize them. There are days that I’m able, if I have a cancellation, I always do email during a cancellation, because I’m super focused and in the zone to work, and I don’t know what to do with that energy. And then I can, you know, get some speed reading done or answer emails. And there are some days that between the the four different email addresses I have for the four different things that have going on in my life, I can have several 100 emails and those emails in any given day. Plus the other work that I have to do, because answering emails is a micro portion of my job. So the quality of communication that you received from an agent, or that you receive from your point person at a press, I think that there has to be some awareness that there are a person on the other end of it that you’re communicating with, and that you are one person of many that they’re communicating with about your book. And I understand that when you’re going to publish that your book is all consuming for you. But if your book was all consuming for them, they couldn’t function and they couldn’t service your book in the way that it deserves to be serviced. If you want to feel like you are someone’s favorite, I think looking at professional standards and communicating in a professional way, and making sure you’re not violating any of the boundaries that are hard baked. And that relationship is a really great way to ensure that the relationship is always positive and fulfilling for you. And I think that that is super important for authors to have. I think that having a positive relationship with your agent or press should be the goal for the press, as well as the agent as well as the author. And that takes some back and forth and understanding.
K
And I think being aware that sometimes we’re just busy, we’re not we’re not rude, we’re busy. If we’re brief. If it’s rude and brief, that’s a different thing. But if someone’s messaging you and saying, hey, I’ll I’ll read this by November 30. I’ll read this by the end of the year. That’s really fast. Most agents and most presses have a three month lag time for communication. So if someone in a professional capacity is getting back to you in less than three months on any of your emails, they are home upholding the professional standard practices that are in the industry, I tried to have my turnaround time be two weeks just to touch base, not my reading time, just acknowledgement that I received an email is anywhere between two to three weeks for me. And that again is just because I’m doing so many things at at once as everybody in the publishing industry is because it’s a really complex and challenging, interesting to be a part of and keeping your eye on all of the things you have to keep your eye on Eye on can be challenging, and it requires good focus and attention. And that means that that emails can’t always be the focus of the day, there have to be days that you know, emails can sit and ride. And there also has to be days that you take off and take care of yourself, that you’re not focusing on work, and you’re not focusing on books that you’re just focusing on yourself. Sometimes, an email will slip through the cracks on those days, or if I have a heavy email day, and I have one day a month where I audit my email. What that means is I go back and I look from September 1, like if I’m, if it’s my note, November day, for example, I usually do the two months prior. So I’ll look at September and October and make sure I’ve responded to everything that needs a response. And it is literally just reading, looking at all of the emails and seeing does it have a response arrow. And if it doesn’t have a response arrow, I open it, read it, see if it needs a response. I usually don’t broadcast when that’s how I caught the email. But that may be it. And sometimes those emails can be brief, because I’m trying to get through hundreds and hundreds of emails, and make sure everybody has a response and that everybody is getting the time and attention that they’re craving and wanting from the press and wanting from me as the as the Head of Acquisitions to have with them. And as the point person at the press. So trying to be responsive, but well balanced, can be challenging. And because I do the social media, there are times when I’m not tweeting about every single book, I don’t do all of our social media, I just do our Twitter. And there are times when I do tweet about every single book that we have. And there are other times where I may go several days, or even as many as a couple of weeks, right? Don’t tweet about every single book. And that’s because I want our Twitter and our social media to be interactive and enjoyable for the people who follow us. Nobody wants to follow us to just get spammed about our books, that’s not going to be interesting, that’s not going to be good engagement, people aren’t going to want to talk about that. So there are ebbs and flows to the social media, there are times when I am heavily promoting books. And then other times when I’m building relationships, both have to happen on social media, you can’t just be all advertising, you should be 70% interaction 30% advertising.
K
So I try to make sure that there are both of those and that I am attracting new audience members, and engaging the audience members that we have. And also running the contest and being sure that I can give the time and attention to everything that I’m doing. And everything that the press has going on. It’s all about balance. And if you feel like for me specifically, now, don’t do this with everybody, I’m saying just me I’m only speaking for Casper. And if you feel like their relationship was a little bit off, you can go ahead and send me an email. And I always respond to those and explain to people why my response tone has changed if they feel like it has, and sort of educate them about what I’m doing. And what’s going on, like right now is an extremely busy time for the press. Because there are a lot of reports and forms and taxes that need to be done this time of year. And because that’s billing on like, we don’t have a January book to give us time to take care of taxes. And with our taxes we’re doing every author that we work with, we have to track how much money they’ve made, what country they’re in, what is that country’s paperwork, or what are we required to file and make sure we’re doing everything right by all of our authors so that they’re getting any of the reports that they need to pay their taxes, and that they need to be well informed about how their book is, is performing. And that requires us to go through and look at every single vendors and retailers report to make sure we’re counting the numbers correctly and recounting the numbers correctly. And we have to correlate with what we sent them last year and build on that report to make sure that we’re tracking the numbers correctly. Here’s once the advances is paid back then they start having residuals and that’s when they start getting their profits from the book mean because their profits that they would have gotten have already paid us back for the advance that we gave them. And that’s a little bit more complicated piece of accounting. So making sure we have all of these things and making sure authors are well well cared for. Forgive me sometimes leads to just a really brief email response for something that I feel doesn’t need as long as a response. So I hope it kind of demystified my to be read list and whether or not I have a favorite author. And I hope that if you’re self publishing or doing publishing or traditional publishing has given you some insights to what might be going on with your agent or the person that is your pert point person at the press, or anyone that you’re dealing with during the publication of your book. I hope that was helpful and thank you for hanging out and making it till the end of this video, please be sure to hit that like button and subscribe and turn on your notification bells and thank you all of our beautiful cinnabar moth for listening. And you can be any kind of any kind of moth you’d like to be or even a butterfly but I’m not Mariah Carey I’m not trying to bite her rhyme bye