There Are All Sorts Of Ways To Fail

When I worked as a full-time editor I was frequently amazed by the submissions that I received. I worked for a book packager which specialised in highly-illustrated esoteric non-fiction: we packaged books about retreat, meditation, religion and myth on behalf of publishers who didn't have the time or the in-house expertise available to produce the books themselves. And yet every day I received proposals for books which simply didn't match our very specific requirements. Among the many submissions I received were illustrated children's books, car maintenance manuals, fiction of all kinds, memoir, graphic novels and pet-care manuals. My favourite was a children’s story which, judging from the illustrations appeared to be about trolls but I couldn't be sure: it was written in Dutch, with no translation provided.

I received a query letter hand-written on scented, fairy-printed paper, with a sprinkling of loose glitter which fell into my coffee as I opened it; and an entire manuscript which must have been a third or fourth carbon copy (remember those?) judging by its feintness and blurring (that one was made even more memorable by the absence of any spaces, punctuation or paragraph breaks, so the entire text was one great big run-on word). Then there was the hand-written manuscript which arrived with a cover letter urging me not to destroy it, as it was the writer’s only copy—but no postage or return address was provided for its return; and one writer sent me a banana, surrounded in layers of bubble-wrap and encased in a cardboard tube.

All of the writers responsible for those ridiculous submissions must have thought they had a chance of publication with us, or they wouldn’t have bothered to send their work in: but because of the nature of book packaging it was very unlikely that we would ever be able to commission their books, even if those books had come close to our requirements. As a result, the writers concerned wasted everyone’s time and money by making a submission that had no hope of getting accepted.

Because the writers failed on so many basic levels, they failed to get published regardless of the quality of the work that they submitted. If they had only researched their market more carefully before submitting they could have saved themselves time, money and disappointment: and instead could have sent their work somewhere it had at least a chance of being considered for publication.

Series and Sequels

Series and sequels are popular, particularly in genre fiction: some series are so popular that their publishers commission book-packagers to produce several new titles a year, using ghost-writers who write to other people’s outlines and plots.

Among the many advantages of writing a series of books is that each subsequent book has an established readership before it even reaches the bookshop shelves, and then goes on to build on the success of the previous title. Consequently, many writers who are new to the game plan to write a series of their own.

I would always advise them against it.

By all means, write that first book. But make sure that it is complete as it stands, and don’t even consider starting work on the sequel until you have sold the first book. Because if the first book of the series doesn’t sell, you’ve got very little hope of selling the second.

How Book Packaging Works

A book packager is a for-hire, out-of-house, publishers’ editing and production service. That means that packagers commission, edit, design and produce books on behalf of publishers—books which then appear with the publisher’s name on the spine, and with little or no reference to the packager. Packagers usually sell their services directly to, and only to, publishers, not writers or agents.

Packagers usually work in a very specific niche market, in which they have expertise and experience. By using a packager, publishers can bring out specialist books without hiring the specialist staff they require, and without investing the time that such books demand. Typical packaged projects include those long series of books for children and young adults, which are usually written by teams of ghost-writers; and beautiful, highly-illustrated, coffee-table books.

When I edited for a packager, it worked like this.

First, we’d have an idea for a book. We’d do a little looking around to see if there were any conflicting books available, and if we knew any writers who could write the book. Then we’d put together a synopsis and commission a few speculative illustrated spreads, and our sales team would show them to all the appropriate publishers that we knew of, in both America and the UK.

We did not sell every book that we proposed.

Once a book was bought by a publisher, our in-house editors would find and contract a writer, a designer, and a picture researcher to produce the book in accordance with the synopsis we’d produced, and the wishes of the publisher we had sold it to. We'd edit the text, and supervise the design and picture research, and as each stage was completed off it would all go to be approved by the publisher's own in-house editorial team. Once we had final approval on the complete project we’d send it to our production team for printing and delivery to the publisher’s warehouse.

The publisher’s only job in all of this was to approve the various stages of the book, deal with the publicity and marketing, and to sell the book into bookshops. They got a nice new book to add to their catalogue at minimum investment but at a slightly reduced income; we got our books out there at reduced risk to us, but usually without any acknowledgement that we’d ever been involved.