From manuscript to published book: Part 1

 If writers think getting a literary agent's eyes on our manuscripts is tough, wait till you hear how many eyes the agent has to get to sell that precious opus. A bunch, according to Amy Collins of the Talcott Notch Agency, speaking at the DFW Writers Conference. (Which, yes, was last fall, but there was so much to cover I'm still digesting it all.)

Amy Collins herself knows the publishing industry from multiple perspectives -- as agent as well as a book buyer, sales director for a non-fiction publisher, and founder and president of one of the largest book sales and marketing companies in the United States. Oh, and she's also a USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling author. 

Here's the trail Collins laid out for her audience:

• Author -- wants to convince the agent they can make her lots of money
• Agent -- wants to convince her boss -- the acquisitions editor -- that this book will make lots of money
• Acquisitions editor -- wants an amazing book to take to editorial director of their publishing house
• Editorial director -- wants an amazing book that will make lots of money to take to the house's Pub Board
• Pub Board -- wants positive answers from teams for sales, marketing, production, distribution & art (at least!) before approving that amazing manuscript (which will make lots of money!).

Image by PollyDot from Pixabay

Of this chain, Collins noted, the Pub Board is the most important but least known link. Its members spend a lot of time thinking about money (strange how that word occurs so many times!). Because 20 percent of all traditionally published books actually lose money for a publisher, Pub Boards are always looking for something to take up the slack.

To that end, the Pub Board will ask questions from the most obvious -- have books like this sold well recently -- to the mundane -- how many of these books will fit in a shipping carton. This last consideration goes to a question writers often ask about the importance of page counts. Books need relatively standard sizes to fit in shipping cartons. Which is one of the prosaic reasons shorter than usual books, such as novellas, as well as much longer than usual tomes can be tough sells in traditional publishing.

Only when the Pub Board has received affirmative answers from all the remaining teams does the author's amazing manuscript get OK'd for printing and sales and distribution to bookstores. (Who also want money to keep the lights on!)

The point of Collins' talk was that every link in the publishing chain is effectively doing the work of the next higher link.

"My job (as agent) is to keep my relations with my (acquisitions) editor happy," Collins said.

And that acquisitions editor's job, effectively, is to keep the editorial director happy. And so on, up the line. Each worker bee's job is to do the work of the next higher been in the chain of command.

Knowing all this, what can we writers do to help boost our manuscript up the levels? The answer lies in our superpower tool -- the query letter. I've heard a lot, from a lot of sources, about what needs to be covered in a query letter. But what exactly does that entail? And why? 

Amy Collins had an answer for that, coming in Part 2, The Query Toolbox Homework

(And, in case you've wondered, the DFW Writers Conference is scheduled to return October 7-8 of this year!)