If the Hat Fits, Part II

How to support your publishing house's efforts to support you.

Last week, I wrote a newsletter about the importance of understanding the behind-the-scenes of the querying and submission process. If you know what your literary agent is doing on your behalf, then you can helpfully anticipate what they’re about to need next, and get a head start on it.

If the Hat Fits, Part I

The TL;DR operative metaphor being: publishing any book is a heavy lift. Cooperate, pitch in, and make yourself less of a burden for your publishing partners.

This week we’re going to pick back up with the book trajectory and imagine that you and your agent have just sold your novel to a publishing house. You’re going to be working with an editor, plus a publicity and marketing team, and in the shadows beyond them lurk cover designers, sales reps, production managers…

We’re asking the same question as before: how can you help smooth the path to publication? Whatever you do to make life easier for your publishing team will also help your book succeed. In an ideal world, you would not need to follow any of this advice, because the well-oiled machine of publishing would take care of everything for you. But publishing is not well-oiled, and barely a machine. The more knowledge you have, the more empowered you’ll feel in a process that otherwise proceeds in maddening fits and starts.

For writers currently at the querying stage, it can be hard to look past that first, much-discussed hurdle of getting an agent.¹ But agents are already looking ahead to all the steps that follow—and part of what’s informing their decision of whether to take you on as client is how well they think you’ll be able to carry out those steps. It helps if you know what the steps are. (Plus, you can get a head start on a lot of the below steps before you even have a book deal.)

As always, please do chime in with questions or rants in the comments below if any of these newsletters so compel you. Off we go:

Stage Two: The Editor Hat

Editors work at publishing houses, and their main job, though they somehow end up with a million side jobs too, is to acquire and edit books. Once a book is fully edited, the editor helps shepherd it through production, keeping an eye on deadlines, preparing metadata and marketing materials, and proofreading just about everything.

The part of this process that is clearest and most visible to authors is the editing part. The editor usually starts by sending the author a long editorial letter with any substantial/developmental feedback; sometimes this is paired with a phone call. If the book is already in solid structural shape, the editor may proceed directly to line edits: tracked changes in a word document with comments and suggestions to clean up and super-hone the prose.

The editorial process should be pretty self-explanatory. Your editor will point out problems and suggest possible solutions. You may not like all the solutions they propose, and that’s fine—as long as you still solve the problems. “Let’s just keep this as is” is not a solution. “Let’s keep this as is but move this other scene forward instead, to address the foreshadowing problem you pointed out” is a solution. Go above and beyond; treat the edits as a springboard, not a checklist.

You and your editor will pass the manuscript back and forth until your editor deems it ready for copyediting. Once you make it to copyediting, you’re officially on the ramp to publication.

A lot of things are going to happen now, and they happen in a slightly different order at a slightly different speed, depending on the publishing house. So rather than try to walk you month by month through the timeline of your publication onramp, I’m going to give a sense of the general things you can expect to happen, and the ways you can contribute at each stage.

Copyedits, proofreads, cold reads, legal reads, sensitivity reads, 1P, 4P, et cetera

The book that you’ve just finished editing is now going to get edited a billion more times. Luckily, most of this won’t require much work from you. Your editor will coordinate with a copyeditor, who will ask you to address style queries, inconsistencies, fact-checking issues, and points of confusion. Once you’re done with the copyedits, the book will get proofread, and then there might be a cold reader (someone who has never read the book, reading over with a fresh eye), and maybe a legal or sensitivity read if the book requires it.² You’ll weigh in on these final changes, and then the book will get passed to a designer for “proofs,” where the manuscript starts to look less like a word document and more like a nice typeset book. Then: more proofreads.

My recommendation here: do not phone it in on the proofreads. Yes, professionals are doing this work for you, but typos still slip through—how many times have you caught a typo in a published book? Trust your publishing team to do due diligence, but do some extra diligence of your own too. They will be so impressed with you if you catch an obscure missing comma that no one else spotted.

Always remember that however much your agent and editor love the book, you will always be the one who cares the most. The best outlet for that care is close attention to everything you’re asked to do. There’s no such thing as too many proofreaders in the kitchen.

At the very end of the editing process, after a million passes through the proof pages (1P, 2P, 3P, 4P), your editor will have a digital proof that can be shared for marketing and blurb purposes—and that will eventually become the printed ARC, and then the printed book.

Frontmatter and backmatter

Depending on your book, different frontmatter and backmatter may be needed, and you’ll provide it early in the editorial process.

Frontmatter might include: a table of contents; a dedication; an epigraph³; an author’s note or foreword; a disclaimer on the copyright page; and even possibly a map, timeline, family tree, or other supplement, if it makes sense for the book.

Backmatter might include: an author bio; end notes; acknowledgements; an index; a bibliography; and any other notes on sources or photo credits.

Interior stuff might include: additional epigraphs; footnotes; and photos or artwork, which can become a whole nightmare process if you need to license the images, so do your best to find images that are (1) free, (2), high-resolution, and (3) really easy to trace and attribute correctly.

Your editor will let you know if they’re expecting you to provide anything out of the ordinary for front- and backmatter. Otherwise, try to have all the normal stuff (acknowledgements, author bio, dedication, epigraph) ready in advance, so that you don’t inadvertently hold up the editorial process when you suddenly need to figure out whom to thank and how profusely to thank them.

Cover design

Covers are a big deal. You know it, the marketing and sales teams know it, your friends and family know it. Covers are, as a result, very often a point of contention. It’s common for agents to have to intervene here, to express their client’s unhappiness about a cover design without communicating the full extent of their client’s meltdown over the phone that morning.

Okay, so where do covers come from? Big publishing houses employ in-house cover designers; smaller publishers hire professional freelancers. Cover design is a specific skill; you will not be able to convince your publisher that your friend who’s a really good artist should design the cover.

You will have input on the cover (most agents will contractually guarantee this for you), but your input might come late in the process. Some publishing houses will kick off the cover design with a meeting and/or questionnaire, but more often the process goes something like this:

Your editor will send your manuscript to the designer along with notes. These notes will range in specificity, and you probably won’t see them. They might say something like, “We’re thinking warm colors—can’t wait to see what you come up with!” or they might include a detailed list of symbolic objects in the book and ways they might be worked into the cover. Designers are usually given a lot of latitude to come up with something—it’s not like your editor is providing font suggestions.

The designer will send back a whole batch of possible covers. Sometimes the designer will send several radically different designs; sometimes they’ll send a bunch of color variations on the same design. Your editor will discuss these designs with the rest of the team, especially marketing/publicity/sales, and they’ll reach a consensus about which designs are best. If no one likes the proffered designs, your editor will provide constructive notes to the designer, who will come up with another batch of designs. This process might repeat twice, but there’s a limit to how many times a designer can be politely asked to generate new covers, so eventually the publishing house will settle on whichever design is the best of the lot.

Your editor will send you the top one to three options. By the time these cover designs reach you, they have already been argued about and voted upon by your publishing team, so their anticipation of your reaction is already a little bit charged. They’re not going to send you anything they don’t like, so if you really hate something, let your agent know and find a way to express it delicately—don’t just dash off an email. It’s not too late, yet, to change course and ask the designer to give it another go… but keep in mind that this may have already happened behind the scenes without your knowledge. You never want to settle for a cover you don’t like, but sometimes you will have to settle for something sub-optimal in order to maintain good relationships with your publishing team. If you do hate the cover, you’ll want your feedback to be extremely concrete and actionable. Don’t ask for anything unless you’re confident that you want it (“Ooh, actually, the blue looks bad after all. Can we go back to the orange?”).

Your editor will pass your feedback on to the designer, and the designer will make adjustments within reason. Important to note that if the designer has already spent a lot of time tweaking the typeface and title placement to your liking, they are going to be seriously annoyed if you then decide you want them to scratch the whole thing and go back to the drawing board. Their annoyance isn’t your problem, but it is your editor’s problem, and now you’re on the road to becoming one of those “difficult” clients. Pick your battles and word your emails very carefully and kindly.

The designer will provide a new and improved cover. We’re getting to the point where the cover will be settled on soon, regardless of how personally overjoyed you feel about it. If there are small things that would be easy to fix and would majorly affect how you feel about the cover, ask for those to be addressed. If the cover is still way off the mark, consult with your agent about how to deal with it. Concrete, actionable feedback is always the move. Try to know what you want before you ask for it.

Final changes will be made to the cover. The cover is locked in at this point—this is just the finicky stuff. No matter how contentious the design process, try to express total enthusiasm when the cover is finalized. Trust that your publishing team knows what they’re doing—this is the cover that they think will sell your book. Selling your book and getting people to read it is still what you’re after.

The cover is announced. Share it everywhere online, and bury any lingering ambivalence. This is your book now! If you still can’t bring yourself to love the cover, remember there’s always the paperback version.

Your input might be solicited pretty late in this whole process. If you want to get ahead of the cover-design engine, or if you know you’re bound to have strong feelings on the cover, here are some useful-but-not-pushy things you can do in advance:

Find covers you really like. Go into bookstores and write down the names of covers that catch your eye (preferably in your genre). See what patterns you can find in the covers you tend to like. Also check out the covers of your publisher’s recent releases—pick out a few that you like best.

Make lists. What are some symbolically weighty objects that come up in your book? Any particularly striking images or metaphors? Scenes? Settings? You don’t need to form these into full cover ideas—just a list of images to bounce off will be helpful.

Figure out what you want the cover to communicate. Is your book on the edge between two genres, and you want to push it over to one side? Do you want it to subtly call back to other covers? Do you want it to be beautiful, shocking, ugly, provocative? Do you want the cover to help correct some misapprehension you fear readers will have about the book?

Gather all these insights into an email and send them to your editor. Do this in a very low-key, no-pressure way. “Hey, I know we’ll probably start to think about cover design soon. This is a little early, but I thought I’d send these thoughts your way as a jumping-off point. Let me know if there’s anything else I can provide that would be useful on the cover front.” The designer might ignore everything you suggested. And you might end up grateful that they did. But at least this way, your editor will have a sense of what you’re expecting, and might be less surprised by your reaction, positive or negative, to the cover design that comes out.

ARCs and blurbs

Advance Reading Copies are cheaply printed paperbacks of your book that can be sent to blurbers, reviewers, influencers, bookstores, libraries, book clubs, and to anyone else that might promote your book. The front of the ARC is the final cover design; the back usually has a description of the book, a short author bio, and a marketing plan. The first page of the ARC is a personal letter from your editor, expressing their excitement about publishing the book.

The marketing and publicity team at your publishing house will handle sending the ARCs out to most of the above list, but your editor is responsible for blurbs. These are the steps your editor will follow to gather blurbs:

1. Come up with a list of influential people who might be prevailed upon to blurb the book. These people include:

   1. writers you know

   2. writers your publishing team knows

   3. writers your agent knows

   4. other famous/well-connected people known by those three parties

   5. writers that don’t know anything about you but whose books are similar to yours and who might enjoy your book

   6. miscellaneous people connected with the topic of your book

2. Send a gracious email to these potential blurbers, asking if they’d please consider blurbing the book, requesting a mailing address, and giving a deadline for blurbs.

3. Mail the ARCs to whoever says yes, along with a printed letter hyping up the book and thanking the blurber profusely for reading.

4. Remind people after the blurb deadline has passed that the blurb deadline has passed; are they still planning to blurb?

Your editor will often be the one to send these emails, but not always—it usually makes sense for whoever knows the potential blurber best to reach out directly. Your editor will handle mailing out the ARCs. Then you just have to wait and hope for good responses. The ARCs don’t have to go out all in one batch—if you think last-minute of someone who would be a great bet for a blurb, let your editor know.

Start thinking about blurbs as early as possible. It is literally never too soon to have blurbs. Some agents will send a manuscript on submission with a few blurbs at the top of their pitch letter. And if you get a blurb in before it’s time to print ARCs (e.g. if you know a writer well enough that they won’t mind reading a digital copy), your publisher will put it on the front or back cover of the ARC.

Brainstorm absolutely everyone in the world that might provide a good blurb for your book, including the long shots and the low-hanging fruit. Then cull the list to the names that make the most sense, and send it to your editor. They won’t do anything with the list until the ARCs are printed and ready to send, but, as stated above, it’s really good to have done this thinking in advance. (You may also find that when it’s actually time to think of people who might blurb, your mind goes absolutely blank. Do this thinking early, when you’re in a good mood about the book!)

Jacket copy and jacket design

The jacket is the wraparound dust jacket you see on hardcovers. It features the cover itself, the description of your book, your author bio, your author photo, and the all-important blurbs. You won’t be involved much in the jacket design process, though your editor will hopefully run it by you before it’s sent off to print.

You will, however, be invited to look over the “copy”—the description of your book that will appear on the inside flap of the hardcover, the back of the paperback, and online. You might recognize some of this language from your agent’s pitch letter (and even your own query letter).

I personally feel that jacket copy is its own beast, and should be totally distinct from the language an agent uses to pitch the book. But time runs short, and sometimes the original pitch letter starts to look less like inspiration and more like a solid first draft, and so often your editor ends up sending you a Frankensteined jacket copy with bits from the query and pitch sewn in there.

You want to respect your publishing team’s authority in deciding what the selling points of the book are. But the jacket copy is going to have a direct effect on you in two ways. (1) It will determine whether readers flipping through your book in the bookstore feel optimistic enough to spring for the purchase. (2) It will live in readers’ minds as a promise of the book’s potential, and if your book disappoints that promise (maybe just because the jacket copy emphasizes minor aspects of the book and fails to capture the actual thrust of the story), readers will leave you aggravated Goodreads reviews.

Scrutinize your jacket copy really, really closely. Even if a certain sentence worked in your agent’s pitch, it may not be the right line to hook a reader—and after the whole editorial process, it may not even be true anymore. Test the jacket copy on friends who haven’t read your book and see if it gives them an accurate sense of what the book contains. Suggest revisions to the copy, or rewrite the whole thing from scratch if you’re skilled at that kind of writing. Of course you don’t want to be pushy—but if you write a new version of the jacket copy that is better than the old version, your publishing team will be grateful.⁴

As for the rest of the jacket—look it over as closely as you can. If you can afford to print it out in color, full-size, at your local print shop, do that. It’s a bad feeling to open up a carton of books and cringe at some aspect of the design. But it’s even worse if you previously glanced over and okayed that aspect of the design. Just because everyone else is proofreading doesn’t exempt you from proofreading. Again, at the end of the day, you care the most about how this book comes out.

Okay, so the jacket is done, copies have been ordered from the printer, and now your editor’s job is to keep track of the reviews that come in and liaise between you and the rest of the publishing team. Let’s discard your crumpled editor hat and swing over to our friends in marketing and publicity.

Stage Three: The Marketing/Publicity Hat

Marketing and publicity are two sides of the same coin, the coin being the effort to get readers to buy your book. The difference between marketing and publicity is explained more thoroughly here, but the shorthand way to understand it is: publicity is free advertising; marketing is paid.

Publicity generally encompasses your appearances in the media. Interviews, reviews and mentions and listicles of your book, book tour events, and anything you publish in the lead-up to and aftermath of publication, including essays, short stories, interviews of other writers, and reviews of other writers’ books. Publicity is about getting your name out there as much as possible. (“Oh yeah, I’ve been seeing that book everywhere…”)

Marketing includes paid advertisements that your publisher puts out, giveaways, influencer mailings, discounts, pre-order incentives. But it also includes social media efforts, newsletters, and your author website. Marketing is about getting people to actually buy the book.

For the purposes of this article, we’re going to collapse them into one unified effort. Here are some of the things your marketing and publicity team is getting up to in the year leading up to publication:

• Contacting review outlets to get them to review your book.

• Sending ARCs to independent bookstores to encourage them to order copies and recommend you for Indie Next.

• Contacting editors at various publications to see if they’d be interested in you providing an essay, op ed, short story, or even a recommended reading list or a written interview.

• Contacting podcasts and interview shows to get you a slot on their shows.

• Organizing giveaways in exchange for pre-publication reader reviews.

• Posting about you on social media.

• Creating graphics and bonus content to be shared on social media around the pub date.

• Sending ARCs to book clubs and award committees.

• Organizing your book tour.

• Contacting publications to place a first serial or an excerpt from your book.

Your involvement with the marketing and publicity team will likely begin with some sort of questionnaire, where you list everyone you’ve ever been in touch with and every town or publication that is remotely likely to care about your new book. At some point, the M&P team will ask you if you have any ideas for essays you could write for various publications. They will also definitely encourage you to post more often on social media, to update your website, to share whatever graphics and content they provide, and to send out a newsletter blast when your book is available for pre-order.

You, as a solitary author, probably do not have the reach and contacts of a M&P department. However, M&P lives by the rule that all press is good press, and they will be delighted with every minor blog review and small-town book club appearance you manage to finagle. Here are some ways to kick off the M&P process on your end:

Get some really nice, professional author photos. Ask a friend who’s a real photographer, or pay someone—the expense will be worth it. Eventually this photo will end up printed on the jacket of your book. Don’t let it be a selfie.

Make an author website. Non-negotiable; you should have done this already. Squarespace is probably at the best intersection of User-Friendly and Cheap. It’s worth paying for your own domain; yourname.makeyourfreewebsiteshere.web is not going to feel professional. (Speaking of, make sure your email address is likewise professional.)

Pitch and submit like a maniac. If you have short stories you’ve been sitting on, submit them! If you have ideas for essays, reporting, literary criticism, or book reviews you might want to write, pitch them! The more of these you place, the more of these you’ll be able to place—everyone will start wanting you once it seems like other publications want you. And, of course, this will make it way easier for your M&P team to successfully pitch you to the high-echelon outlets that you might not be able to get into on your own.

Call in all possible favors. What you really need is for your friends, family, and acquaintances to (1) pre-order your book and (2) leave a positive review. And then, ideally, to (3) press-gang their friends and family and acquaintances into doing the same. You can make this happen through individual emails and texts, through social media, through a newsletter, whatever makes your skin crawl the least. But keep in mind: people will not know you have a book coming out unless you tell them.

Befriend librarians and booksellers. Once you have ARCs, you can hand-deliver them to local bookstores and introduce yourself. Of course this is painful and embarrassing, but so is writing a book. All you have to do is humanize yourself, so that when your local indie bookstore owner is deciding what to order, they see your name on the New Releases list and think: I remember them, they seemed relatively nice and normal.

Reach out to other writers and see if you can organize double-duty events. If you find a writer who’s publishing around the same time as you, in around the same genre, see if they’d be willing to help put together an “in conversation event” where you promote each other’s books.

Ask your M&P team what else you can do. I promise you they will have ideas. They will probably have too many ideas. Choose the things you can do sustainably and with integrity—don’t engage in any promotions that make you hate yourself. You wrote this book because you believed that you had something you could give to people. Remember what that gift is—the gift is what you’re promoting, not yourself.

Some authors pay for a freelance publicist to assist (or redouble, or supplant) the efforts of their publisher. No knock against freelance publicists, but this is probably not necessary. It’s also insanely expensive. A freelance publicist is going to tell you the same thing everyone is going to tell you: pitch everything everywhere, and see what sticks.

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At some point I might pick this thread back up and talk about sub rights: film/tv rights, audiobook rights, foreign rights. In the meantime, the big takeaway, which you can apply to every step of the publishing process, is: none of this is beyond you.

You can learn to do well the things that a good agent does well, a good editor, a good publicist. Hopefully you won’t need to build these skills, because you’ll have a great publishing team behind you that takes care of it all, right on time and with aplomb. But if you’re not getting the support you expected, you can be your own support, as long as you have the time and energy and curiosity. Try to imagine what’s going on behind the closed doors of your empty inbox, and provide your publishing team with everything they need (and more) to do a great job. That way, if you have a good publishing team, they will love you—and if you have a hit-or-miss publishing team, they will succeed despite themselves.

Next week’s newsletter turns to novel-writing. Specifically, I’ll be making a gloves-off no-holds-barred argument on when and how much to solicit feedback on your novel-in-progress.

Please leave any questions in the comments, or reach out to me. Thanks for reading!

1. I’m working on a post that goes into the “how to get an agent” question in more detail—should come out in mid-August.

2. If you suspect that your book needs a legal read or a sensitivity read, but your publisher seems ambivalent about this, it’s okay to push for this or to coordinate one yourself. If your book ends up on blast for being somehow problematic, you’ll be the one people blame (even if they’re a little upset with the publisher too). So if your publisher is hesitant to spring for a legal/sensitivity read (both of which cost money), consider at least asking a knowledgeable third party to read the book through that lens.

3. If you want to use a quote from another book for an epigraph, or god forbid song lyrics, you’re going to need to clear permissions. Acquiring reprint permission can be weirdly expensive, so choose your epigraph carefully (or skip).

4. Always offer these things gently. “I took a stab at writing a new version of the jacket copy that emphasizes X. I also made a few changes to the existing copy to bring out X more. I’m not sure which came out better, so happy to go with whichever version you prefer!”