An overview of the three paths to traditional publishing.
The Big 5 and their imprints: https://www.9thstreetbooks.com/big-five-publishers-and-imprints/
Writer Beware: https://writerbeware.blog/
Tea and Tales
S1:E5 Traditional Publishing
Look at my curls. Wait, when did I get curls? Oh, I was keeping with the braid. Never mind, I'm fine. Oh, good. It's pretty. Very nice. Oh, thank you. So, we'll, we'll get into this episode with the hair curls. We'll, we curl into the new episode. Let's do this. [Music] Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Tea and Tails. I'm now. And I'm Sarah. We want to give another shout out to the people who have been helping us out so much by liking, sharing, commenting, to Jestine Breshear and Anika Flicken. If I've mispronounced your names, I sorely apologize. But thank you so much for your support and for bumping us up in the algorithms in both Apple and all the platforms that we are out on. What are we talking about today? We are talking about publishing. This is our first of three episodes on publishing. Exciting. I'm very excited about this one, especially since there's so much to know. There is so much to know. And I think we as writers sometimes feel that we are very selfish when we, you know, take the time to work on our craft and to build our craft and to actually, you know, share it with the world. And I would like to share this quote. Some might call the choice to write selfish. In fact, a lot of us writers think that way. We think that if we are taking time to do something that does not make us money, attend our families, or beautify our homes, we are being selfish. And that is a quote from Andy Kumbar writing day in and day out, living a practice of words. I love that quote personally because we want to just enjoy our writing. I love how Andy says, you have to take time for yourself. And if writing is just for you, if it's just for you to relax, that is good enough. Your self care adds enough value. But what if you do want to take the next step? What if you want to make money out of your writing? Well, that could be the rich husband. You got a rich husband that helps a lot of publish for me. No, no, I will get a rich husband who will then buy a publishing company. And then I will be able to publish my novel. Oh, that makes sense. There you go. Yeah, the romance in me, you know, the romantic person in me. It makes up a fantasy. Mm hmm. I see where you are. But, you know, back to reality, please do share how will I be able to do that without that rich husband of mine who lives in my fantasy? There are two well-known ways to do this. Either you do it yourself, also called self publishing or indie publishing, or you find a publisher, which is called traditional publishing. The thing people don't realize is those two are not explanatory of the entire picture. There's a lot of things inside those groups you can do. So we're going to talk about just the traditional publishing side in this episode. While talking about this, in these three episodes, if you want to publish, I want you to be thinking about your projects. Your individual projects might fit into a different place on this spectrum. What you write very much can depend on which path is best for your book. Traditional publishing actually has three different paths you can take, three different ways to traditional publish. The first one is with what we call the Big Five and their imprints. Then there's large publishing houses and small publishing houses. So let's talk about the Big Five and who they are. They're publishing houses. These are people like, let's see, can we name them off the top of our heads? Simon and Schuster. Simon and Schuster, I have one. I have one. Can I get a point for that? It's Penguin. I think Penguin Random House one as well. He's nailed it. Next one. Let's do this. I'm on a roll right now. That's our competition by M when I'm doing 30 seconds or trivia. There's Harper Collins, there's McMillan, there's Penguin, Simon and Schuster. Well, Penguin Random House, I should say the whole name. Simon and Schuster and the Hatchet book group. I actually haven't heard of the last one. Now they're one that's a little less known, but they are the fourth biggest publisher. They're actually bigger than McMillan, which is the one that everybody seems to know about. Oh, wow. Yes. Penguin is the biggest. Penguin Random House is the biggest. I don't know if Penguin House, just because they have a picture of a penguin on them, most probably. That's probably Penguin. Exactly. And Wiggled on over there. And I'm on their distribution list. I get all kinds of stuff from Penguin in my mailbox about books coming out and stuff. Yeah. But they have a bunch of different imprints. You can look it up online to see we're not going to name them all because there's a bunch of them. Names you probably have heard though, but what they do is they'll specify something like you'll have an imprint for just your children's books or just your YA books or your fantasy books. For example, Tor is a well-known fantasy book publisher, but they are actually an imprint of, I believe, a Penguin Random House, but I could be wrong. So I'm going to research that. But each of the imprints will have the thing that they focus on. So you know, all of the editors, all of the book artists that they use, all the people involved specify in that thing, but they're under this big five umbrella, which is great because then you do know that they know what they're talking about. They know what they're doing. When you decide to get an agent and they get to a publisher, and especially if it's one of the five, then that's fantastic. But then at least you know that they know what they're doing. They know how to market you. They know how to publish your novel, and they know what is in at the moment. All you have to focus on is writing what's inside the book. Mm-hmm. Nice. Which to me is a huge bonus. I am not a marketer by heart. I'm not okay. So here's the thing. I'm not a marketer. No, I say that while marketing our podcast, let me rephrase that. I am great at marketing other people. I'm great at telling other people about other people's novels, about other people's songs, about other people's whatever's. I am terrible at marketing myself. So horrible at it. It's not even funny. Because I'm like, do you want to know, never mind, it's okay. You don't have to. It's fine. We'll look about a fly. It's not ending ever well. Or I fortunately do it. And I'm like, read it now. And people are like, I'm not gonna be friends with you anymore. I'm like, it was such a nice book. I didn't know why you didn't like it. That's why I choose to do traditional publishing. Because I know what my weaknesses are. And I do know what my strengths are. Larger publishers and smaller publishers will have different amounts of staffing. So you have to know that publishing house and what staffing they have, what contract they write up with you. That's part of your research when you are researching publishing companies. Look into them and what they what they have available to you if you were to sign with that publisher. And the smaller the house, the less they're going to care whether you have an agent or not, big companies, they can offer so much you want an agent to help you control it. And also agents have been in this industry for some time now. So they also know when publishers are not being completely honest with you or like giving you a not as nice deal or something like that. Agents will help you. They are the middlemen. So they will help you when some publishers want to give you a lesser deal than you actually deserved. And they're going to be like, no, no, no, no, no, sorry person. I think not. And I mean, naturally they do help you with international rights and all those little things I know nothing about. So it's always lovely to have an agent to do those things for you and to talk to those people. I don't even like answering the telephone. Now what you want me to go talk to a publisher, I think not. Thank you very much. It's hard enough for an agent. There are publishers out there, some big publishers who actually will accept a query from an author. A lot of them don't. A lot of the bigger houses will not accept any querying from an author. So if you really want to get your book into their house, you have to have an agent. Others will allow you to, but it is suggested not to to get that agent first because you don't want to burn that bridge. If you queried them and they say no, your agent now cannot re query them. So you do want to be careful about what you decide to do. And if you want a big house, get that agent. If you want a small house, maybe just go to the small houses because they don't want to work with agents. But you do have to be careful that you are looking at an actual small publisher and not what we call a hybrid publisher or a vanity press publisher. Be careful with those publishers because most of the time they just want the money for the resources that they say they're offering. If any publisher is asking for money, they are not a publishing house. They're a vanity press. They are a hybrid press and they are in it to get that money. And sometimes they can be a scam. Some of them aren't, but some of them aren't. Yes, just do your research. There's this lovely account you can follow called Rogers Beware. They will tell you their agents you should avoid, publisher publishing companies you should avoid vanity presses that claim to be publishing companies. And so I think that has always been a great resource to go and look at if you're not certain about a certain publisher or certain place that or agent or whomever, whatever. And also writing communities. Your writer communities is the best thing ever because you have very advanced writers. You have people who just started writing. And so there's such a vast amount of knowledge in those writer groups and the writing communities that you can also get a lot of advice and help from those communities. And people who have made the mistakes already learn from them. Don't make the same mistake. Ask before you do. If it sounds too good, it probably is. If they wrote to you first, it's probably not what it seems. That's not how the industry works. An agent does not cold call you. A publisher does not cold call you. A movie deal does not cold call you because you set a cool line on your Instagram post. Really? Really? That is not how they work. And it gets your hopes up. And then it becomes a trap. Agents and publishers do not get paid until you get paid. When your book sells, they are determined to make that book sell because they want to get paid for all the work they're going to do for you before they even put it on the shelf. Yes. What's their estimate? I'm very adamant about that. I just see people fall into the traps and it's so sad. If anybody is going to share this, they're going to be like, hashtag what's their essay is what I'm vibing with here. Oh, let's read. Anywho, huh? Anywho. You get me saying the weirdest thing sometimes. Let's talk about what they represent because each of these publishing houses do have a different thing that they like to represent. Let's talk about, okay, the Big Five and their imprints, they're going to focus on mainstream appeal books. They are looking for things with merit national wide printing distribution to bookstores and other outlets. So they want to know your book is going to sell. They're not going to take anything super risky. They want to know people want this sort of thing and it will sell. They're looking for people in the nonfiction, a lot of celebrity statuses, brand names, people with big platforms. So if you're a nonfiction writer, you're going to want to build yourself a platform, get out there and become a speaker, be active on your social media. Not so much for the fiction, but definitely nonfiction they are looking for that. Writers of genre fiction, women's fiction, YA fiction, they want to be able to say this book is like X. If you like reading this, you're going to love reading this. That's what they are looking for in the Big Five houses. Also, when you do have a page or an Instagram account, it would be nice to have pictures of ducks and not weird things that people should not be having on their Instagram because believe it or not, people will actually look at that or agents will look at that and they're like, thank you, but no, thank you. Like not bobbing with that right now. So just be vigilant? Yeah, because they want to know that you're a real person, but also not a crazy person. They like personality, give them your personality, but they want to make sure that they're getting into a safe relationship with me. Listen, Sarah, if I just got book novels on personality, I would have been a based son or by now. I know, right? One of the best personalities. And the best personality is two years. No. Oh my gosh. Your large writing houses, though, they're going to be a little bit more relaxed. They will dabble more into the niche special interest appeals. They're looking for university presses sometimes are your large presses where they're looking for literary work or poetry short stories. They want writers of commercial and genre fiction, nonfiction authors of all types, but they don't typically look for the same breadth of visibility as your big five. They want to have those special interests books. I almost want to say they are more inclined to take risks as it is not such high stakes for them. Exactly. And then the small presses just takes it one more step further. They're willing to take a risk on all kinds of new things coming out. They are looking for any type of author and any type of fun fiction that catches their interest. They have to be able to balance taking the risk on something new versus having the staffing and the capital to put that new thing out. The larger the house, the bigger of an advance they're willing to give you. What is it? And how can I get one? What is the thing we're talking about? It is money that they give you upfront when you sign the contract with the publishing house. So let's get this straight. The people who are scamming you want you to pay ahead of time. The people who are not scammers might be willing to pay you before your book gets published, which I have issues with. I would be like, no, thank you. Keep your money until you make that money from my books. And then I will take that money back. Because, okay, here's my question though. If you get an advance for the novels that you are going to be selling, if you don't make the amount of money that they gave you, do you have to give it back? No, it's part of the contract. So I can go buy that Ferrari. Fantastic. If you want to, but you do have to realize you do pay it back in a sense. Because you also have to pay your agent. What that means is for, we'll use small numbers because small numbers are fun. If they give you a hundred dollars advance and then your book goes out, they will take the cost of the book and part of it will be going to the publisher and all the things they have to pay for, going to your agent and all the work that they've done, and then you get another percent. So let's say you get 10% and your book sells for $10. That means you get $1 per book. So you would have to sell a hundred bucks to make it the dollar. Okay. And that is why I did not do in math. Well, in math. A large publishing house might offer a smaller advance, then a big five publishing house. And depending on who you are and who your book is depends on how big of an advance they're willing to give you. And the small houses tend to not do any advances at all because they have a lot less resources. That is traditional publishing in a nutshell. I think that will keep some listeners busy for the next week until our next episode. And if none of that sounds good to you, don't worry. There's another half to publishing. There's another half and we'll get to it. It's not over yet. It's not over yet. So we like to keep it short and simple here, but if you have any resources you'd like to drop on this topic on traditional publishing, maybe you are a traditionally published author and you'd like to just share your journey, drop those things in the comments and let us know your perspective. Absolutely. 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