They don't tell you that the public-relations person assigned to your book will be working with a celebrity author and will have no time for you.'' His face turned tomato red.Īlong with keeping secret the plans and money for advertising, promotion (including author tours) and marketing, the here-today, gone-tomorrow editor is a major concern for authors. They don't tell you that the editor who acquired the book, who believes in it, has one foot out the door and that your book is going to be handed off to an editor who doesn't care about it. He rushed out 10,000 more, but by then the moment was lost, and the book dropped off the list.''Īnother writer had this litany of distempers: ''They don't tell you how much they are spending on promotion and advertising, don't tell you how many copies have been sold, although they send out so-called statements. That writer had this experience: ''I called my publisher with one book and told him it had made the best-seller list, and he said, 'That can't be.' He hadn't printed nearly enough copies. Writers' complaints are innumerable, and not entirely unfounded, but start with the general principle, as one best-selling nonfiction author said, that ''publishers try to keep writers out of the publishing process - they don't even want you to see covers - and they decide before the book is published whether it's going to be successful or not.'' That means not only how much money is going to be spent on advertising and promotion, but the number of first-print copies as well. For obvious reasons, anonymity was the trade-off. Are these authors simply paranoid, unhinged by the monastic nature of the creative process? And if they are, does that mean they are wrong?Īnyway, I shall lay out some authors' complaints and also some things that indeed publishers don't tell their writers. It's an old worry of writers, frequently mentioned by many of them, that their publishers don't tell them everything there is to know about the publishing of their work.
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