When BIG book deals fizzle in-house

Why do authors sometimes lose internal support at their publisher before launch day?

This is part three of a three-part series in which I chat with “Andrew,” a marketing-publicity-sales staff member for a Big 5 publisher. Read part one here, and part two here.

Once a book makes it through the acquisitions process and the author receives an offer and a promise of a certain level of marketing and publicity, it’s all gravy, right?

Ha.

I gave Andrew this hypothetical scenario: an author goes to auction and chooses the house that promises lead title status. Six months in, her book’s pub date is bumped seven months, the status is scrapped, and the marketing plan goes through a serious downgrade. (What? No, of course this exact thing didn’t happen to me! I have no idea why it sounds so bitter…)

From the author’s perspective, it feels like the whole thing was bait to get her to sign a contract...but I know it’s not that insidious. So when a book’s support kind of tanks in the house, what’s really going on? 

Here is Andrew’s response.

Definitely not that insidious! No imprint I've worked for has ever signed up a book for nefarious purposes—publishers want to make money, and so if they sign up a book, they think that book has a chance at success. But all sorts of things can change after acquisition, much of it out of control of the author. Biggest on this list: budgets can change. I get an annual budget that's reviewed repeatedly throughout the year. Sometimes I get more money, sometimes I get my budget cut. An editor might acquire a book when budgets are one way and then, by the time the book is ready to publish, have a completely different financial landscape. 

I feel like budgets are a BIG mystery to authors and I do not blame them. For those of us on the ground, they can be a mystery, too. The Big Five are owned by large, international companies, which means that the money never flows from point A to point B in a straightforward way. Publishers might post great profits and those of us at publishers might not see our budgets change at all.

Another possibility, a little more depressing, is that the book might lack internal support. Most acquisitions of a certain level get as many departments as possible involved—marketing, publicity, sales, but the people from those departments who get involved might make a call that their colleagues disagree with down the line. This is something I see most commonly with sales: a book is reviewed by one of the people at the top of the sales chain, it's purchased for a nice advance, and then when the manuscript is circulated to the rest of the reps, they don't bite. They'll still sell it—it's their job, and the contract has been signed!—but if it's the kind of book where you really need a buy-in and word of mouth, you might see plans downshifted. 

And another possibility, similarly depressing, is that the book might lack buyer support. Even if everyone at the publisher is on board, a book might get pitched to a big retailer who just shrugs, or says it's not for them, and they're not going to take a stand on it. If a book can't get out into the marketplace, a publisher might be less inclined to put money into the campaign—if they do a big ad campaign but people can't find the book at B&N, they're not going to sell anything. (A book can work without retailer support, for sure, but it's a LOT harder to pull off.) 

I asked Andrew more about the bumped pub dates specifically because it’s happened to pretty much every book I’ve ever published and that does get frustrating because it literally diminishes an author’s advance. Twenty thousand dollars spread out over twelve months is not the same as twenty thousand dollars spread out over twenty months. 

Some reasons I've seen books shift seasons before:

Printer capacity. Scheduling is extremely wild, especially these days. I'm sure you've read about the printer capacity issues—they're no joke. Even before this, time on a printer was hard to come by, and this is happening at a time when print sales, overall, are UP—so we're talking about less printer space than ever in a market where books are CONSTANTLY in demand. All of the houses are bargaining for space at this one printer and you can imagine who gets the most space: Penguin Random House. You can imagine who gets the second most space: HarperCollins. And from an author's point of view, as crappy as this is, is also a reason to take in the column of going with a bigger publisher, you get that muscle even if you feel like you don’t matter. 

Competitive title. In this case I mean a book published by a different imprint/house that is seen as a direct competitor for whatever reason (and having a similar pitch/topic is most common). A book might be rushed to get out ahead or delayed to give the other one time to (hopefully) fizzle. 

Another book moving into the season that screws up the budget for everyone else. For example: an author with some kind of clout turns in a book early and their agent demands it gets published ASAP and the publisher is unable to talk them out of it so it gets crashed into a season and eats up the budget in such a way that other books are moved so that they can have some budget instead of no budget. (Publishers don't always get what we want, when it comes to scheduling.) 

A capacity issue, either caused by another book or just caused by an overworked staff, ie, a publicist suddenly has too many titles in a month so they move a book to balance her workload, or production gets backed up and a book needs to move out, or an editor gets backed up and a book needs to move out. Changes like this ideally should happen as far in advance as possible, and a lot of this depends on how well your imprint is run, and how on top of shit your editor is. (Have I seen editors lie to authors about "production being backed up" when in fact they dropped the ball? Sure have!) It's bad form to change a pub date too frequently, in my opinion, but I know other houses have a different approach to this. 

It actually IS a better season for the book! Crazy how far down this one is, right? But it does happen: sometimes there's a time-sensitive publicity promotion available, or a time-sensitive store promotion available. Sometimes sales requests it—they'll come to us and say, I know you have this in May but my August is a little light right now and I think you'll get better placement then. 

Morgan Entrekin once said it's harder to publish midlist books now because a book that's going to sell under 10k copies will generate about $125,000, which “isn't enough revenue to crank up the publicity machine." I asked Andrew to explain this to me because shouldn’t the publicity machine get cranked up first? Wouldn’t the midlist be healthier, and wouldn’t that be better for the imprint and the house?

Yes, the midlist has taken a hit in the last ten years. I think there's a lot of reasons for it. A big one (and one I don't think gets addressed nearly enough) is consolidation of publishers. This has been happening steadily for thirty years, even before Random House bought Penguin, and one of the big results is large, consolidated sales forces. You might be published by a relatively small imprint with an intimate staff and you might get great attention from your direct team and then that team has to turn around and sell your book to a sales force that is getting pitched by every other imprint at that company, all of us telling them THIS is the make book, THIS is the breakout title, THIS is the author you need to pay attention to. You're not just competing for marketing dollars—you're competing for attention internally. 

I don't want to denigrate sales—they have incredibly, incredibly hard jobs, and just about everyone I've ever worked with in those departments is a passionate, thoughtful reader. Sales reps are by and large the best readers in the company. But they are truly being asked to do the impossible. 

Hand in hand with this is the changing retail landscape, and the related question of what really makes a book discoverable. Amazon has clearly changed the game on this, and it's a game that publishers have been struggling to keep up with for twenty years. The amount of time, energy, and resources that go into just keeping our books looking good on Amazon is absolutely wild. A brick and mortar store doesn't ask me to come through every day to make sure the correct jacket is on the book and that they've put it in the right section and that the flap copy is readable but Amazon basically does, and more. 

Amazon has also changed the way that book buyers think about browsing and discovery, not to mention creating impossible standards for shipping times and inventory availability, and other retailers have responded either by reducing their shelf space and only trying to sell the top % (particularly evident in the merch channel—Costo/Target/BJs/airports) or by trying to make their own bestsellers, with mixed results (this has been B&N's strategy for the last couple of years). Independent bookstores have been the industry's bright spot for the last few years, but the pandemic presented a huge economic crisis and a very, very uncertain future.

So figure both of those factors shrink the market, haven't we suffered enough? Apparently not! Because we are also contending with a real drop off in viable marketing and publicity options. Publicity is a tale told many times, so I won't get into it too much, but: books coverage has dropped off significantly in the last ten years, which means there are fewer places to pitch, and if those places pass then what? Well, I'd love to say marketing can step in, but consumer-facing marketing that actually sells books is hard to find, but for a different reason. I have more options than ever when it comes to advertising, thanks to the digital ad boom, but the sheer saturation of ads that is necessary to sell a product—ANY product, not just books—is at a budget far beyond that of most publishers. Even my high budget campaigns are NOTHING compared to what most brands would have to market a new product—and I've got a new product every week. 

I imagine that's what Morgan was alluding to when he used the phrase "publicity machine," although I object to his framing of the issue. But this is a thing that differs imprint to imprint. Some publishers will identify their top titles and shove all the budget in that direction. Others will spread it out and then invest more in the ones that succeed. A healthy midlist is easier to have some places than others.

At the end of the day, publishing is a numbers game and each of these Big Five houses has to publish a certain number of titles a year just to stay in the game. Which made me wonder then wouldn't it be in their best interest to support some of those midlist titles a little bit more and not rely so heavily on so few books?

But Andrew said that at some point, especially when you’re looking at it from the top, your business just becomes columns on a spreadsheet. One column is the amount of money this whole company is allowed to spend on advances, another column is the amount of money this whole company is allowed to spend on marketing, one column is how much their backlist is earning, another column is how much the frontlist is earning. You mesh all that stuff together and it doesn't matter where the money comes from.

It doesn’t matter.

That sounds nihilistic. But honestly, I take some comfort from it. Because frankly, over a decade of low-to-low-medium advances, little publicity and marketing support, and constantly bumped pub dates has been difficult for me not to take personally as an author.

But I choose to submit my books to the enormous traditional publishing industry, and when I get an offer and a contract, I choose whether or not to sign it. I could just as easily choose to use my own resources to edit, package, market, and publicize my books and see how they do in the equally enormous self-publishing industry. There are no guarantees of big money and huge sales either way.

It isn’t personal. It’s business. And I hope this peek into how acquisitions really work helps you too, wherever you are on your publishing journey.

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The posts I publish here will remain free. But I have a series called Ask the Editor, which will publish every Friday. The short pitch: Dear Abby for writers.

The longer pitch: paid subscribers ($5/month or $50/year, cancel anytime) will receive a link to a form where they can submit pretty much anything within a two page limit. Things like…

• Queries

• Synopses

• Pages from their novel

• Questions about writing or traditional publishing

• A current problem or situation in their writing journey (ie: trying to decide if an agent is a schmagent, disagreeing with beta feedback, etc)

• A rant about this whole “trying to get published” endeavor to a sympathetic ear

Every Friday, I’ll respond to/critique as many submissions as I can and publish them together in one post. Because they’ll be behind a paywall, there’s some privacy—your query, pages, or rant about that one really horrible rejection won’t be online for editors to discover when they Google you.

That’s it! I hope to see you over there. :)

Michelle