Publishing diary

Part two: the book deal.

Julia Raeside, laughing in a shed. (Photo: Alexis Dubus)

It’s already getting a bit hazy now - see, this is why it’s important to write it down - but my agent set to work selling my book at the end of 2023. She didn’t want to waste time waiting for the industry to go on its Christmas holidays and come back again. She wanted to strike while everyone felt enthusiastic and energised about the book.

Publishing seems to exist in the small pockets of time between holidays (which are long), international book fairs (which are spaced across the year) and ‘summer hours’ which are the shortened weeks between spring and autumn which mean people are in the office less and often not at all on a Friday.

You might as well hurl a manuscript out into the void whenever you’re ready. There doesn’t really seem to be a ‘right time’. And so, two weeks before Christmas, out it went to a whole raft of editors at publishing houses around the UK.

Which ones? No idea. And this is the first of many times I thought ‘oh, my agent gets me’. I didn’t ask where it was going, so she didn’t tell me. Some agents share a spreadsheet with you, constantly updating you on who is reading, who has read, who said no and what they said.

I didn’t know this was a thing, but if I had known, I think I would have asked to be kept out of the loop. Although there is an incredible feeling of powerlessness when your book is out *on submission, I don’t necessarily think that is always made better by knowing every single thing that’s going on.

*I now know this bit was called being ‘on submission’. Your book is for sale and being pitched to editors on your behalf.

It felt good going into the Christmas break knowing some people might have taken the book home with them or at least had it ready to read in January. This belief may have been misplaced, but again, ignorance felt like bliss to me. The process had begun.

I was told that not a lot would happen for a few weeks and enjoyed Christmas with my family, still high on the ‘I got an agent’ fumes.

But the enemy of hope is nothing happening at all. In the long, miserable stages of waiting to get your book seen by publishers, your brain has way too much room to concoct fantasy doom scenarios.

Little did I know that an editor liking my book was only the first stage of this hell-on-earth process. At the big houses (there are five absolute whoppers and most editors who look at your book in the first round will be at imprints belonging to those big five), the editor who thinks your book has publishing potential then has to take it to an acquisitions meeting where they have to convince a bunch of other people the book is worth buying.

As with dating, only one person really has to fancy you, but, unlike dating, their entire family has to fancy you too.

In its almost endless uncertainties, getting published is also like buying a house. I felt there was little point in knowing who did and didn’t like the book because good news of a keen editor could quickly be followed by its subsequent failure at acquisitions.

Some authors absolutely can’t live in limbo knowing the book is out there and they do ask for regular updates on rejections. My agent would have done this in a heartbeat if I’d asked. I just preferred not to know.

When a few weeks had passed with no news, my clever agent sensed some impatience from my end and sent a little round-up of anything nice an editor had said when they’d rejected the book.

This may sound like thin gruel but actually it really helped me just to get a sense of whether they were rejecting on the grounds of it being absolute garbage or not. It was still a thought at the back of my brain: what if it’s garbage?

In mid-January, my agent mentioned that an independent publisher (not affiliated with one of the big five) had made some inquiries about the book. She wasn’t sure if they were interested in buying it, but they were asking questions. She managed my expectations and said it wouldn’t necessarily lead to an offer.

I went back to twiddling my thumbs. If I try to piece together the timeline of what happened next now, ten months later, I struggle to. But some more pleasant rejections arrived, some editors were still reading, some already had something too similar in theme or setting. And so on and so on.

First thing on a Monday morning, I saw a WhatsApp from my agent asking me to call her. I was weirdly un-thrilled. I think I’d become so inured to good news, assuming it wouldn’t stay good for long, that I was almost physically unable to get excited about anything to do with the book. Like I’d wrapped myself in loft insulation and couldn’t feel anything at all.

The indie had made an offer. We should talk to them.

We had a zoom meeting with the now officially interested indie publisher and my agent let the other parties yet to rule themselves out know that we were considering an offer.

After that Zoom call, it stopped mattering that some people hadn’t got back to us yet. Remember this is still relatively soon after going out on submission. I’d joined a Facebook group of other ‘on sub’ authors, all exchanging encouragement and reassurance as the long weeks and months spun out ahead with no news and much talk of publishing as a whole being on a go-slow.

Some spoke of ‘dying on submission’ and I almost couldn’t bear to look up what that meant. But I made myself. It meant those authors had gone through the querying trenches, the rejections and disappointments, and then finally found an agent who loved their book and then…nothing. No one had bitten. No editor wanted it so it was declared ‘dead’. I shut my laptop after I read that. I’d been so vaguely and naively optimistic that I hadn’t even considered that my book might be mortal.

Once we’d met my now publishers on the Zoom call, it was a no brainer. Just as my agents had been when I first met them, they were enthusiastic, seemed to get the book straight away and knew exactly what to do with it.

They’re small compared to the big lads and said they could be nimble about a publishing slot, shuffling things around to ensure my book was out only a year from the deal signing. This is, I’m told, pretty quick compared to some.

Rather than going through layers of editors and acquisitions, they had a first reader who then passed on the book as a potential signing to the publisher. Once they’d declared an interest, I think they were already at the stage of being able to offer once we answered any concerns they had.

I peeled away some of the loft insulation and released one hand to allow myself a small woo. This was it. The thing I’d hoped would happen was happening.

I signed a book deal. I sent the contract back. I felt the same as before, but now a small, immovable dot on the horizon appeared in the shape of future publication. Not theoretical. Actual.

It took a while to sink in. There was no big moment of release that almost five years (on and off) of work had come to fruition. But lots of little moments have combined to make me believe a book with my name on it really will be out in the world in February. And that I’ll be proud of it.

It isn’t a solid object yet. But this will be a three-dimensional chunk of matter in a few weeks time. I imagine how it will feel in my hands, sniffing the pages (because everyone sniffs the pages), peering under the jacket to finger the *wibalin. I am going to hold it for a while and gaze dumbly at it like I did when I had a baby.

*This is apparently the tight cloth binding around the hardback, you know, underneath the loose paper cover. You can choose a fancy colour to go with the design if you’re lucky.

I first opened a laptop to start this story in spring of 2019. Just being “a writer” doesn’t automatically predispose you to fiction. I always wrote about other people’s things; thoughts, opinions, responding to something that already existed.

Nothing I had done before (apart from short stories at school) had ever started from a blank page in a vacuum. The novel is intimidating as a form. Dorothy Parker never published a novel. I thought they were something other people wrote and that I would never write one myself.

I felt like this about having children too. I think I’ve felt like this about a lot of things and maybe that isn’t the best way to think about life in general. After all, I tell my kid not to limit themselves, to do things that they enjoy, to try new things.

Anyway, in a relatively pain-free three months, a book deal happened. That’s three months from an agent taking it on to selling it. For some authors it, it takes longer. For others, it happens in hours in a flurry of bids from multiple publishers. An auction sounds exciting, huge numbers flying, gavels banging.

But maybe also terrifying because then your book has to live up to all of that. There’s my ‘wind your neck in’ upbringing again. I need to stop doing that.

For the first time, I’ve pulled an idea out of my head, onto a page and into a thing that other people actually want to buy. (I mean, some people have said they’d like to.)

Next time: other people read the book.