How do I fill in the Proposal?

(To find specific information, you can - a) type the words you want to find into the Search box, which will then show all the sections in the User Manual where those words appear, or b) press the buttons "Control" and "f" (or, if you have a Mac “Command/Apple” and “f”) on your keyboard. This opens a text box in the top right of your screen. Type in the word you want, and it will highlight the appearances of that word or phrase in this section of the User Manual.) 

INTRODUCTION

In our database, each title has half a dozen pages storing information which is constantly updated - readers' reports, book details, log history, production schedule, monthly sales, rights, marketing activities, etc, all visible to you.

Each of the hundred sections has an explanatory help icon. Each help icon has a few sentences of copy, with a link to a more detailed explanation. We often refer to relevant bits of this in the few dozen notifications that go out during the course of a title's production and sales, and on the author help forums.

This is the full text of those explanations. It is work in progress, regularly changed and updated, in response to author suggestions and the changing market.
 

THE PROPOSAL

To submit a proposal, go to the website of the relevant imprint, click on "Author Inquiry", fill in the inquiry form, and click on "Submit inquiry" at the bottom. You should get a response in a matter of days, either a "decline" or a Proposal Form which asks for a little more detail. 

If you are happy with our overall approach and terms, then enter what you can into the Proposal Form. Do add the draft manuscript (or however much you have completed) as a File Upload. Then click on the "Submit Proposal" button.

(Working through an agent: If you are an agent working on behalf of an author then there are a couple of issues to address. The system works by identifying the author to his/her work, so we need an author name and an author email address. As agent, you will be part of the “Publishing Team”, registered as an agent, and will receive selected notifications on publishing date and royalty payments. If your author is only willing to work through you for all the editorial, production and marketing needs of this title, we need to know this at proposal stage. Your email adress should then be provided instead of the author’s).

The publisher then notifies readers for their comments. Readers bring different perspectives. They may disagree with one another, you may disagree with all of them, but the publisher makes the final decision. You may think the decision is wrong, we do not always get it right. It is our best guess, based on our collective experience with hundreds of books. We usually get back with a decline or a contract offer within a couple of weeks of the proposal being submitted.

If we go ahead with a contract, you can change the information here at any time after that.

Notes

• The information you provide here is likely, in edited format, to travel through to a number of other databases, those used by bookshops, Amazon, etc. These only accept 'ASC117' characters, not 'extended ASCII2' or 'non-English character sets. Please only use the italics etc. that are given in the notes below in the format required. Avoid ampersands, quotation marks, hyphens etc - they will turn into gibberish.
• Keep the information to copy that you would be happy to see circulated. Private notes, comments etc. - we do edit later, but depending on the schedule some of this information will feed through to other databases if we do not catch it in time.
• If the proposal is for an anthology, there is more info on this if you scroll down within Preparing the Manuscript in the User manual.

Please do not copy and paste information into these fields. It needs typing in from scratch. Copying/pasting results in font changes, odd colors etc which feed through later to the finished information in the website, and look strange.

There are several reasons we ask for this to be filled in:

• We can then give fast, collective decisions. If you have an agent, they might make the "why you (the publisher) should publish this book" argument for you. Or in a big company, the editor will do it. It rarely takes less than three months to get from first approach to contract, six months is more usual. We will just make a quick decision on the information given here.
• The manuscript on its own is rarely enough. Books do not sell themselves. We need to know something about you, your place in the market, your contacts. Media industries call it your "platform". Most authors looking for publishers, particularly in North America, send this sort of information as a matter of course, with their initial query.
• The information here provides the basis for the Advance Information/Sales sheet/tipsheet (in the UK they are referred to as AI sheets, in the US as tipsheets), also the advertising copy, press release etc.
• Thinking about the market for the book and how to find it can help shape the eventual manuscript. For instance, is it going to be relevant to readers in the USA and UK and Australia, or just one of those markets? Will tweaking the references make it more relevant elsewhere?

We can not fill in the information on this page for you. We add and edit, but you have the clearest idea of the contents, and who you are trying to reach. If you need more help in filling it in, invest in The Insider’s Guide to Getting Your Book Published by Rachel Stock, that makes many of the same points in more detail. Again, there are dozens of other books on the subject, easily found on the internet. For a humorous look at how not to approach the business of writing and getting published, try http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9fc-crEFDw&feature=player_embedded. There's a quick summary at How to write a bestseller.

WHY DO ALL THESE BOXES MATTER?

Filling in these boxes should help us focus on the three things a buyer wants to know;

• Who is the target market?
• How is the book different from others on the shelves?
• How will the market hear about the book?

All the information here, presented in a detailed, professional manner, is necessary to just get it to “first base,” when a bookshop buyer is willing to consider buying a copy (on sale or return).

Retail buyers do not see or read the book. They are presented with the AI/Sales sheet, three to six months before publication (after that, it's too late for their buying schedule). Their first question is

• "how many copies has the author sold before?" It takes them a few seconds to look that upon Nielsen Bookscan (tracks all trade sales) and their own database of sales. They will use that figure to judge how many to order for which shops. If there are no prior sales, it is harder. Why should they replace a book where they know the sales track record with one they do not? So then it is
• "what do other people say about the book?" (credible endorsements). If those are good, then it is
• "when people see the book in the shop, will they have heard of the author? What is happening on the local marketing?"

If we do not have credible answers for those questions, in time, it will be available, but it will not be stocked. If it is stocked, the book is likely to be returned in a few weeks if it has not sold enough.

OK, this may all seem a bit simplistic, commercial, crude. And that runs throughout the system here - not all books can be categorized by market or even subject easily, or even by fiction or non-fiction. Many succeed not through the shops initially but by word of mouth over the internet. We're aware of all that, just trying to cover the bases. Have a look at Estimated sales - in the User Manual - How many do I expect my title to sell? , and there's a Note on selling to shops in the Appendices to PART ONE.

HOW MUCH OF THE PROPOSAL DO I NEED TO FILL IN?

We do not need to get all this word perfect now, and we edit the information when the text and cover files are finished. But the better you can get it, the easier it is for us to tune it for the market, and please bear in mind that we need relevant information for North America and Europe.

IF I FILL THE PROPOSAL IN, WILL YOU PUBLISH THE BOOK?

This is not yet a commitment to publishing. It’s simply a means of speeding up the decision-making process.

There is nothing legally binding on either side until contracts are accepted. We publish around half of the authors we send this information to. If you have been asked to complete this proposal, we're taking it seriously, giving it time. 

IF I DO NOT WANT TO FILL THIS IN, CAN YOU RECOMMEND OTHER PUBLISHERS?

If this business does not sound as if its for you, or if we turn the proposal down, we can’t help by recommending other publishers.

You have a wide choice; there are several hundred significant publishers in the English language world, 70,000 registered with the main databases, and the number who might publish the occasional book runs to a quarter of a million. The simplest way is to trawl the internet for other possibilities. The best sources are Literary Marketplace in North America, www.literarymarketplace.com, and The Writers and Artists Yearbook in the UK, buy online at www.acblack.com. And try the information sheet Getting Published from the Book Trust, www.booktrust.org.uk. There are dozens of other directories, books and online sources. www.bookmarket.com provides a useful summary of “how to get published”-type websites. There’s a useful list of agents on www.writers-free-reference.com/agents/index.html. 

For where we fit into the industry, there's an infographic perpared in 2104 by The Independent Publishing Magazine, if you click here.

For an explanation of pubishing language when dealing with authors, see Little white lies.

"At any one time there could be a million manuscripts floating around London agencies. Only one or two thousand new fiction titles are published every year" (by the major publishers); Editor-in-chief of The Bookseller.

WHY CAN'T I TALK TO YOU?

You may well have been in touch with the imprint publisher, but our "default" position is to run the business without the one-to-one relationship that publishers traditionally provide. Instead we provide information throughout the website, point you to the relevant bits at the right time, use automatic email notifications (over fifty of them) for different stages, that get sent through to the editors/designers/marketing/PR people scattered around North America/Europe (most of them authors who have come up through the system, it's something of a "collective"), and have the author forum for queries.

There are disadvantages, but they are outweighed by the benefits;

For us;

• We can spend more time on the sales and marketing, rather than repeating the answers to the dozens or hundreds of queries that usually crop up on most titles, on anything from "what subject category should be the book be" to "how can I get books to New Zealand".
• We can publish more good titles, and good titles support each other in the market.
• We can keep our costs down, and put more into the books.
• We can publish good titles that do not look commercial enough for other publishers.
• We can keep investing every month in the crucial new fields of social networking and internet marketing. 

For you;

• Publishing inquiries are typically dealt within three days rather than the three months publishing average.
• You get feedback from several people rather than one.
• Contracts are usually issued within a week or two of the Proposal rather than negotiated over another three months.
• Publication is usually six months from the manuscript being submitted (three months for editing and design to produce finished files, and three months to circulate the information around trade databases so that it's available to buy when published) rather than the publishing average usual of twenty.
• Prices are at trade levels rather than academic. 
• Royalties are competitive on print books and three or four times the usual on ebooks.
• On ebooks you can choose your own price.
• Distribution and sales is international rather than national.
• Monthly sales are available for you to see, along with the marketing.
• Access to the database gives a range of contacts if you want to follow up leads.
• You can join in author discussions and help forums.
• We give as much as we can on the royalties, and on ebooks it's 50%.

It's not really an "us" and "you" stand-off though, most of the people working here began as authors, and have migrated to editing, PR etc. It may all seem a bit odd, but ten years ago so was buying books over the internet....

​IMPRINT

If you are keen on one imprint and only want your manuscript to be published in that imprint, there is a box you can tick to that effect on the submission page, on the website.

If you have not ticked that box, we may move your proposal to another imprint if in the publisher's opinion it would fit better there. 

STATUS

The "status" of your proposal changes as it moves through the system. It begins as a "Query". About half of queries are "Declined". If the publisher is interested in moving it forwards, it is changed to "proposal". "Declined 2" - the proposal didn't make it through to the next stage of reader reports."Declined 3" is where it is declined after the reader reports. "Issued contract" - on the basis of the reader reports, the publisher has offered a contract. "No contract" is where the author has declined the contract offer. If you accept the contract, then by ticking on the accept button the status is changed to "Contract received", the publisher and team are notified, and the editorial manager will move it to "In production". Though the actual editing and design will not start till you have loaded the finished manuscript to the Production page, more on that to follow.  

From loading the manuscript to the Production page, through editing, design and proofing to finished files, usually takes two to three months, and then we set a publication date for three months ahead of that, to allow time for the information to filter through the thousands of databases around the world to show the book as being available. Though the book is usually available for your own purposes within a month or so of finished files.