I sent my newest manuscript off to the offices of my agent in New York. Now I’ve been told it’s sitting with my publisher at Soho Press who is happy to get it.
The new book is called BIG BREATH IN. I wanted to write an extraordinary but realistic female heroine, so I wrote this stand alone story using Jan Straley’s history as the back story for the heroine. It’s a crime story intercut with sections out lining the natural history of sperm whales. It sounds crazy I know. but it works. If my publisher agrees, it should take about a year to get the book out into stores.
Why take so long? I know some of you are impatient but there are a lot of moves that have to be made from reading a manuscript to holding a book in your hand. I thought today I would tell you about some of these moves just so you know that what is happening while you are waiting for the next book.
First there are the business things. My agent will negotiate a contract with the publisher. They will work out the advance against future earnings I will get, and a whole list of eventualities that cover all the ancillary rights, foreign, film, reproduction in various electronic formats. This won’t take that long, I’m not an undiscovered genius or anything, so I mostly take what I can get.
Then there is the editing and getting the words into shape. This can take some time because of my lack of natural writing skills. After several months, if we have signed a contract I will get an editorial letter from my editor. She will give me her assessment of the story and make suggestions about substantial changes I should make. I usually follow through with each of my editors suggestion. For the most part New York editors are very experienced and professional. They know what they want to be published by their company and they work with the writer to make it attractive to readers. Readers often ask me about this part of the process. How much control of the story do I give over to my editor? I first published a book in 1992 and in that time I’ve learned that nothing good comes from fighting with your editor. The smartest thing to do is stay calm and try my best to give them what they want, just because they are intelligent and well read and certainly know more about what readers want than I do. I know what I want but what I want and what a reader wants are, sadly not always the same thing.
Then there comes book design and cover art while my editor and I are going back and forth with the smaller details of editing. Readers also ask me about how much input I have with the covers. Here too there are legions of professional designers and cover artists in New York. The editors ask for my input at the start and at the very end, but they make the final decision. Again, they know best. I only have been in one substantial argument, once when designers wanted to put a polar bear on the cover of one of my books. The designers and the editor loved it, but I pointed out that there were no polar bears anywhere near the story I had written, the editor was incredulous that I would be concerned about the “color of the bear”. Here I put my foot down…it wasn’t the color I objected to but the fact that the bear was from an entirely different region of the world than I had written about and anyone could see (I argued) that getting the specific details about place were very important to me. Of my fifteen books or so, this was the only disagreement I ever had about a cover.
There are decisions about when to release the book, and what to do to get the book noticed. These decisions are taken seriously, and I have some suggestions to make. Here things have changed a lot in the years I have been publishing. Every writer I’ve ever met complains about marketing of their books. Although I once had a drink with Elmore Leonard and I didn’t hear him say one negative thing about his publisher or their choices. Since I have long admired his writing I’ve taken him as my model when talking about marketing. If you do complain, only complain to your agent and see if she will get the most she can for your benefit. Once the decisions have been made work your hardest to help the people who are helping you.
Here is another thing you might not know about publishing. There are a lot of women in the management ranks of publishing. Ownership and the real centers of corporate power I imagine are still controlled by the men who run the four or five companies which run the publishing business. But among the managing editors, agents, slush pile readers, designers, publicists, marketing experts there are a lot of women. Luckily, I like working with women so I think it is all a good thing. I don’t really know the numbers across the board of women in publishing but from my experience, it’s got to be high. But in the end I’m not sure it matters. The people I’ve met in New York publishing , men, women and others are all professional and that means they want you to earn money and all the praise that matters.
So the process to publish a book takes about a year. It can be done more quickly in the cases of timely books. Non fiction books tied to politics can be rushed out in time for an election or to line up with another predictable event that is on the horizon. But Crime stories come out on a well planned seasonal schedule. So that there is a natural rhythm to it. Summer books, Christmas books, winter books all have their reason for being there.
After I mailed my book out last week. What do I do now? I can’t just wait around. This weekend I reread my last Cecil Book and took notes on where Cecil was when I left him at the end of SO FAR AND GOOD, because I promised a woman in a bookstore in Seattle that my next book would be the book where Cecil gets out of jail.
Don’t think your comments have no impact on me. Really, a lot of the decisions I make about my books come directly from readers requests. I’m not exactly inundated with requests so the ones I get are important to me.
So, I’m off and running on the next Cecil book. I’ve chosen my title and making my lists of characters and deciding what needs to happen. I hope you all are in favor of that.
Here is the first clue from the newest Cecil Book in process: A haiku from Issa, translated by Gary Snyder.
This dewdrop world
is but a dewdrop world;
and yet….
Here is a poem I wrote this week while thinking about Gary Snyder.