What is it like to write for a big Publisher?

I wrote two books for Packt Publishing, one of 400 pages and one of 250 pages. I then worked for them as an Acquisitions Editor too, guiding other authors through the process of writing and publishing non-fiction works. While it may not be typical for all publishers, this will give you a flavor, as they all generally work along similar lines.

If you are a subject matter expert with an online footprint you may have been contacted by someone doing an author search already. Some people get annoyed at being singled out as a potential book author. Don’t. It’s an opportunity that may never come around again. At the very least, be flattered that your profile is good enough that they found you. At best, reply that you’re interested, and ask what kind of book they had in mind.

If you have a book idea you want to pitch, you usually find details of how to apply via the publisher’s website. This application gets emailed around to all Acquisitions Editors, and they get to take their pick if interested.

Once you or your book pitch are deemed of interest, you will eventually be put in touch with a Commissioning or Acquisitions Editor who will help refine your book idea, and send you a document to fill in which guides you on how to write a proposal and TOC (table of contents). They will get this reviewed internally and get back to you with some suggested changes.

Sometimes you will be up against other candidates. You won’t necessarily be told about this. Packt exists to sell books that fulfil a market need, so they won’t let you slow down their plans. If you don’t write the book, they’ll find someone else to do it - guaranteed. If all goes well, and you’re communicating in a timely and professional manner, you’ll get the email that will go something like this:

Dear [your name]

Your book proposal has been approved for publication. Congratulations!

I can offer you an advance on royalties of ___, paid in installments throughout the writing process. Royalties will be __% on all revenues.

As an author I think that’s an exciting email to get, and as an Acquisitions Editor who got to send maybe a hundred of them for various Publishers, each time I wrote it it was a thrill. I hand typed each and every one, even though the format is pretty much the same each time. I guess I did that because I felt personally connected to each author I contracted.

At this point you’ll get a contract to look at. This is a standard contract, without your specific details filled in yet, for you to look it over and check you’re happy. As an author I was very, very picky about this. I asked a lot of questions. Yet I have to say that no matter how much you ask for changes, there’s only so much your Acquisitions Editor can do. Publishing Contracts hold together as a whole document, with each clause carefully balancing out others. As an AE I have on several occasions had to tell a would-be author that the clause they were trying to get me to change was written for their benefit, and if we removed it they would be left with a worse deal.

Basically the contract signs over all rights to your work to the publisher, and it is at this stage that you really have to make peace (or not) with the idea that you will never be getting your work back once you have signed it over to the Publisher. This is the same with any Publisher. As a first time author the moment you sign the contract is bitter-sweet.

As well as the TOC and the contract, you have to agree to a set of deadlines, which for what I call a “normal” book of 12 chapters, 250 pages, should be 10-20 days. One of the best things about Packt is that they hold you to this. Think about it. How motivated a person are you? If you have 12 deadlines, you’re much more likely to pull it out of the bag for each one, than if you had one big deadline at the end. And to have a task-master constantly on your back to get you to hit the deadlines can’t be a bad thing either. There was only one person I mentioned by name in the acknowledgements section of my first book:

Special thanks to Poorvi for keeping me on schedule

The writing will now begin in earnest. You write the first chapter, probably going into great detail about the invention of the internet, and submit it. You’ll probably write in Word, and use the template provided. You’ll get feedback, either now or later. Essentially an editor will cut your waffle, keep you to the subject in hand, keep you to the word-count required, and if you’re lucky, give you some tips. The skill of your editor will vary greatly.

Once you’ve done a few chapters, you may start getting reviewer comments. These are what will really ensure the quality of your book. In computer science, an editor can only do so much. A reviewer is someone who knows the technology as well as you do, and will comment on the technical and readability of your writing. Pay attention to it, and think twice before discarding their advice. On the other hand, remember they know nothing about Publishing, so take some of what they say with a pinch of salt.

Once you submit your full manuscript, have rewritten it to reviewer comments, and it’s been accepted, you’ll feel elated… but not for long. The pain is about to begin. If you have family that you love, maybe you should send them to the in-laws for a week or so…

Packt has a large office in Mumbai. This is the engine of the company. It is staffed almost entirely by degree educated, English speaking young Indian people. For this structure to work, the setup is highly automated. There are targets for everything - and everyone tries to hit them, irrespective of what that does to your book. From now on, you’re thrown into a machine and you better go along with it or it will chew you up. It won’t stop for anything or anyone.

You will probably get an email that goes like this.

Dear [your name]

I am ___ and I am taking your book through production. The final proofs of chapters 1, 2, and 3 are attached. Please check them and let me know if you have any comments. We are publishing on [date three days from now] and we need any changes back by tomorrow.

You open up the “final proofs” and take a read through. What you do next will define whether your book makes you proud, or whether it gets so many 1* on Amazon that you become a pariah to your friends and colleagues. So please listen up.

There will be terrible errors.

You may think that the book now looks worse than when you submitted it.

You will feel like writing a desperate email, or ringing them, or hiring an editor, or crying.

But this is just how it is in publishing, where there are not enough hours in the day.

1. What you do now is calmly ring work and take some time off
2. Have the discussion with your family that the time you told them about has arrived. Either you or they should go for a few days.
3. Go to the store and buy some supplies. Note the weather, feel the air, savour the event.
4. Calmly open the first chapter and using a PDF program, note all the places where you want changes. Use strikeout, replace, insert, and so on. Where you need to explain that an image “shouldn’t be that way up”, use a Comment feature.
5. Save that chapter in a REV1 folder, then send it in. Start on the next chapter.
6. When a revised version of chapter 1 arrives, open it and go to step 4.
7. There may be as many as three iterations on any given chapter, and each time the changes will get smaller. You are now the editor.

And that’s it. A few weeks may pass. You will go back to your life. You will vow never ever to do that again. If you didn’t follow my advice in no2 you may be having family problems, or at the least trying to make amends.

Then one day a box arrives. You take it into your office and close the door, or you drive out to a car park and sit with it on the passenger seat. You open the box and look at the books with your name on them. You pull one out and leaf through it. It’s not bad. Your memory is of thinking the whole thing was a disaster, but now what you have in front of you is actually quite good. It’s actually… well… book-like.

Because, well, when all’s said and done, publishers are run by people who know how to make books. While you probably thought the whole thing was shambolic towards the end, you now realise that someone created a pretty decent index without you knowing, and all the pages look kind of laid out correctly, with page numbers and chapter headers, and the right fonts, and chunky chapter titles, and it’s got a barcode, and the cover looks right. And there’s a lot of it between the covers. You realise there’s no way you could have created this by yourself.

So that’s a glimpse into what it’s like to work with a publisher. As you can see it’s hard work,and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. If you want it, you will have to earn your badge of “published author”.