How We Work Together
10 Jun 2014
In the second in a daily series novelist and historian Nicholas Best writes of how he works with the agency.
Only bad authors are completely certain of their talent. Good ones know that they misfire occasionally, especially if they’re trying something different. The first of many publishing obstacles is to get your new idea or manuscript past Andrew. If you can do that, you can be reasonably sure that he will manage to sell it somewhere in the end.
The next task is to draft a business proposal in sales and marketing language. It’s the bit I hate the most. My first publisher was a wonderful old boy who had published George Orwell in his youth. He had no time for sales and marketing proposals. He acted on instinct and hunch. I have never had a better publisher.
Nowadays, unfortunately, corporate executives need to cover their backs. If a book flops, it has to be everyone’s fault, not just theirs. That means a business proposal carefully crafted under Andrew’s guidance, something that the suits can circulate and discuss at acquisition meetings before arriving at a committee decision. Hunch and instinct no longer count for much, which is why there have been no George Orwells recently.
If the corporates go for it, you need Andrew to negotiate the terms, unless you know what percentage to ask for in a back-end split. All too often, they won’t go for it because they can’t see enough profit to cover their overheads. In that case, you can go round them now and publish on Amazon instead. A greatly reduced price online means that you can shift a lot more ‘demand-weighted units’ (Amazon-speak for books) at a much higher royalty.
I have recently reissued several of my out-of-print books on Amazon with Andrew’s help. I have been in the Amazon Top 100 for both fiction and non-fiction. My novella Point Lenana, too short to be published conventionally, was Kindle Singles’ No 1 fiction promotion at the end of May. None of that would have happened if I had been trying to do it without an agent.
