Guest Post Part 2: 5 (More) Things I Learned After My Book Was Under Contract (With Real $$ Talk)
AND - THE MOMENT YOU'VE BEEN WAITING FOR - 2024 WRITING RETREATS!
Hi everyone,
I’m not going to lie—it feels like fall is really taking its sweet time to find its way to Brooklyn. My big kids still have 14 days left of summer break, and my little has 18 days, which feels a little bit like an eternity. We’ve been to all of the parks, spun all of the spins, eaten all of the ice cream, watched all of the episodes of “Work It Out Wombats.” All of my encounters with other parents this week have involved glassy eyes and mutterings about the inadequacies of childcare in this country. Your friends on east coast are all struggling, y’all.
But that’s not why we’re here. This week, Lauren Lassabe Shepherd is back with the second post in her fabulous two-part series about publishing her book. She has some fascinating inside baseball knowledge to share about what happens after you sign your contract with a publisher (and she talks money!). You can check out her post from last week about what she learned from turning her dissertation into a Kirkus-starred book. But first, some announcements.
2024 Writing Retreats! And Other Ways to write Together.
Writing Retreats! The fabulous Mirya Holman of MHAWS and I are hosting another MEE Centered Writing Retreat!! That’s right! You can come write with us January 2-6, 2024 in the Texas Hill Country, one of my favorite places in all the world. All the goal setting. All the writing sessions. All the snacks. All the firepits and stargazing. The details are all here and the application is here, and I’m happy to answer any questions. (Bonus: we are planning our next summer writing retreat in Mexico City and the application has information about that as well!)
Pop-Up Writing Challenge! The semester is starting! We still have writing to do! Make room for the writing during a free August pop-up writing challenge, August 28-September 1. Commit to writing for 5 days, write every day, set goals in a dedicated Slack channel where we cheer each other on, reward yourself for your hard work. There are two dedicated co-working sessions each day to help folks in different time zones, and you can also schedule your own. Register here! Tell your friends! It’s free!
Writing Circles! I mentioned last week that I’m booked for coaching and book editing through the beginning of next year. That said, there is one way we can still work together this fall: through Writers’ Circles! I’m hosting two circles: Mondays from 12-130 eastern, and Tuesdays from 12-130 eastern, and we’ll do a group co-writing session from 11-2 on Fridays. There are still a few seats available in both, and I’d love for you to join us (and we can work out a package with individual coaching/editing). More information is here, and the application form is here. Also, you can use the application form to indicate that you’re interested in participating for spring!
5 Things I Learned After Signing My Contract
Greetings, writers!
This is the second part of a two-part guest post by yours truly, Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, first-time author and rube extraordinaire who nevertheless published her revised dissertation with a top university press. The theme of both of my posts is control—how much you have (and want!) on the front end of the publication process, and how much you’ll have to let go of on the back end (a good thing!).
You can read Part I about things I learned along the way to getting the manuscript under contract. In this post I’ll discuss all the things that may surprise you about the process once you’ve signed your own contract.
1) The author is typically responsible for the book index. Commit to memory that this is an industry standard in academic publishing. [Kelly here—this is true! And it’s a tricky enough job that I don’t offer it, so I regularly refer clients to indexers!] No matter how you approach the index, it will require a considerable investment of either time or money. The cheapest way would have been for me to attempt to do this highly technical job on my own without the necessary professional software.
Since I am a realistic person with a fair sense of my own limitations, I opted to trust a professional. I shopped around based on recommendations of colleagues (aka Twitter mutuals whose own books I greatly admire). After a few quotes, I hired an indexer who was excellent and whose pricing was reasonable.
Let’s talk money: I paid just under $2 per word of the total manuscript. You can do your own calculations here, but expect to pay $1,500 to $3,000 for an experienced indexer to tackle a 100,000-word manuscript. This isn’t a sum of money many people (especially newly minted PhDs) have on hand, so let my own shock about this save you from that feeling later. This was a huge expense, but not one I regret. I’ll do it again for the next book.
2) The author has input, but not final say, over the title and cover design. And thank goodness. Trust that the experts who work at the press will guide you towards better titles and cover designs than those you may have imagined.
In my case, I proposed the subtitle Conservative Forces in American Higher Education in the Era of the New Left, 1967-1970. The better angels at UNC gently steered me towards a new and much better subtitle: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America. While I still had a technical nitpick about the word “America,” I ultimately was not able to strike it. The title is still much better (sellable) than the original.
On the other hand, the art department was very open to my suggestions for the cover. Did I want one or more images? A graphic? Text? I got to call the shots here. The designers took the image I requested and ran with it. Those artistic masterminds polished a fifty-year-old black and white photo with some minor but extremely creative edits, and all parties were pleased with the outcome. What do you think?
Have you noticed the 70s are apparently “back” when it comes to book covers? I’m seeing retro designs everywhere now.
3) The author has no say over the book price. Although I could offer some input into the title and cover decisions, I had no control over the final sale price. Of course, it’s in the author’s best interest for their book to be priced as affordably as possible, but factors like images, word count, and the topic are hard parameters that make books more expensive to produce.
This can be heartbreaking for the scholar who really wants to publish her deeply researched and important legal and cultural history of fourteenth century Malaysian girlhood. Her press and her scholarly peers will understand just how valuable this work is for all sorts of good reasons. So, too, will the editor who enthusiastically offers her a contract. But because the book won’t have a general audience ,the book may retail for upwards of $60 (even upwards of $100) and only be available in hardcover.
Awkwardly, a random person on Twitter got mad at me over this:
The hardcover price isn’t a mistake. That’s the price usually reserved for libraries, while the press determines the paperback price with an individual reader (buyer) in mind.
4) The author finds the blurb-ers and advance reviewers. It was up to me to determine who I wanted to blurb the book, and who I wanted to request to review it in advance. Before now, I hadn’t thought much about would write the blurbs, and I assumed that book reviews worked in the way that I was familiar with as a grad student—that any reviewer could simply reach out to the press for a review copy and then pitch their review to a relevant academic journal.
But before then, the author can actually request certain authorities in the field write blurbs and/or advance reviews. Also, the reviewers and the blurbers will be different people. This is also something to think strategically about. Depending on how small your field is, it may be unavoidable that someone you’ve worked with during the research and writing process blurbs your book.
In my case, it was important to me to have blurbs from recognizable names in both educational history and political history since I was writing to both audiences. I also had not established a name for myself among the political history folks, so having some well recognized authorities in that field endorse my research was helpful for translating my credibility to their colleagues.
5) The author is the book’s salesperson. I have a fantastic publicist and marketing team. They’ve been integral to getting reviews of my book in major national outlets, in setting me up with podcast interviews and Zoom events, and in advertising the book to librarians and academic audiences far and wide. They have vast professional networks that I don’t. Truly, they’re the best.
It’s still mostly my job to sell my book, though. Okay, let me be less cringy about that: it’s still my professional responsibility to share what I know to as many interested audiences as I can. This means speaking to others in my field at conferences, on social media, over podcasts, and even through public opinion pieces. I give away my condensed arguments for free in those spaces, and those who want the long version will buy the book. This isn’t so that we as academic authors can make money (more on that in a second), but because it’s our professional duty to our field and the public.
Now, let’s talk money. Expect that you will not make a lot of money on your academic book, even through a trade press. My contract—which I’ve been told is generous by a third party who consults on academic book contracts—states that I’ll receive between six-percent and ten-percent royalties on all paperback copies sold. The percentage is based on the number of books sold over 15,000 copies.
At a six-percent royalty, I can expect that every copy of my $29.99 paperback will earn me a cool $1.80 (rounded up). Now let’s pretend I sell over 15,000 copies (I won’t), bumping me into the ten-percent royalty bracket. The most money I’ll make per book after the sale of the 15,001st copy is $2.99. If I’m lucky, I’ll make enough to fund the cost of the indexer for book two!
So reader, thanks for following along through this two part guest post. I’ll keep an eye out in the comments section for your feedback or questions. Would love to hear from you!If you want to keep in touch, you can find me on my website and across social media at @llassabe. And if you’re interested in the book, which came out August 22, you can find it here. It’s about the long history of right-wing attacks on US higher education. The narrative is set in the late 1960s around conservative backlash to the peace and Black Power movements. Kirkus gave it a Starred Review!
Another big thanks to Kelly, whose thoughtful comments shaped my thinking and writing throughout the book.
Thanks for reading!
Lauren