The space between selling your first novel, and publication day, is long and exhausting. For me, the gap was about 18 months. I’ve written this article throughout the process, while the experience is fresh. It is fair to say this period has been by turns exciting, surreal, stressful, and frustrating. It may be that you are reading this because you’re a new writer and wondering what will happen, it might be you’re a civilian and are curious about how the traditional book publishing world works. The short answer is: really, really slow, interspersed with bouts of furious haste. Or, to use a quote often applied to poker: “Hours of boredom followed by moments of pure terror.” Replace ‘hours’ with ‘weeks and months’ and you have the traditional publishing industry.
The long answer is:
Final Edits
There are three main stages of editing: structural, copyedits, and the proof read.
The structural edits are big picture. The editor might say: I’m not sure the novel earns this payoff. Or: this character doesn’t feel sufficiently fleshed out. Or (in a science fiction novel): this technology is a bit vague. It’s the big picture stuff around character, plot, voice, and setting. My structural edits were relatively light, compared to the experiences I’ve heard of other writers (nonetheless, these edit involved at least a month of all-consuming work). The changes were along the lines of the three I’ve mentioned above. They only amounted to a few thousand words, but in my view improved the novel.
The author, of course, has the right to say no to these suggestions. In fact, they should say no, at least some of the time. I resisted about 25% of them, and my agent and my editor tell me this is healthy. My experience with the editing process was positive, and it was always made clear to me that the final call was mine*.
The copyedits involving another editor coming in, and one who has a sharp fucking eye. They pick up any punctuation or grammar problems (shamefully, I used the American spelling of words in a few spots), and continuity problems. These were minor for me, as well, although I did have a problem early on with the protagonist going to three different places in Hanoi, in a time period of minus two hours. That is, the main character ended their walk two hours before they began it. Your final novel will, in all likelihood, be a palimpsest, where multiple drafts and rearranging have messed with your timelines. You shift one scene and the ripple effect runs right through the book. Inevitably some of the required adjustments in other part of the book are missed.
The copyeditor will sometimes suggest ways to improve or change a sentence, and the author, again, can say yay or nay.
The proof read picks up those final little problems. The copyeditor does this last read, but the author can do it as well, if they wish (I insisted). Again, the problems here should only be very small: repeated words, missing words, or punctuation. Somehow I picked up around a dozen of these (after ten drafts and at least twenty full reads, still these little fuckers were there to be found).
I had to rewrite two pages in the proofing stage, because we couldn’t get the rights to reprint song lyrics. A key scene in the book revolved around Flame Trees by Cold Chisel. I was frustrated, to say the least, when this happened. But in the end, the new scene was probably better. Song lyrics are tough, and expensive, to get, by the way. Far more difficult than poetry or excerpts from another book. Think twice about using lyrics; if you want to avoid disappointment, anyhow.
I’ve heard widely varying stories about how much time writers are given for all of the above. For the structural edits I had three months. I’ve been told of writers being given two weeks for major edits. This is after waiting several months for the feedback. Yikes. I was lucky, on this count.
For the copyedits I had almost no time at all, because we wanted to give advance readers plenty of opportunity to read and provide us a quote (more on that later). I did these in forty-eight hours. I was exhausted afterwards. The proof read took me several days. I was pretty shattered after that, as well.
Advance Reading Copies (ARCs) and Cover Quotes
This bit fucking sucks. Unless you’re the biggest writer in the universe, no-one is going to do this for you. Yes, the publisher will help, ask a few of its writers, contact a couple of big names. They’ll send out physical copies and e-copies. They’ll help. But as a rule (again, this is what I’m told by experienced people in the industry), you got to hustle the majority of those quotes yourself.
In my case, we ended up with 8 praise-quotes for the novel (of approx. 20 attempts), and all 8 of those were the ones I had organised. I’m glad I did it, but fuck me I did not enjoy the process. Why?
Because, funnily enough, you got to put yourself out there. You have to approach someone far more successful and well-known and say: hey, you don’t really know me, but could I place this massive imposition on your time?
You should go to these authors with plenty of time up your sleeve. By that I mean: two weeks is not enough. I smashed myself getting the copyedits done in two days, in order to give potential readers six weeks. A couple of months would have been better.
You’ll probably have to follow up, as well, when the date approaches. A polite reminder about the deadline (polite, and only one. Don’t harass them. If an author is not answering you, they either ran out of time or did not like it. Move on). I asked a couple of local writers I knew, plus several from abroad who had read my collection, Neon Leviathan, and said positive things about it publicly. Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, for example, praised my collection on Twitter completely unprompted. I in turn asked him to read the novel, and he gave me a great quote (in part: “Brutal, brooding, brilliant . . . an angry vision of violence wrapped around a complex meditation of memory, trauma and hegemony. This is cyberpunk with soul.”). In fact, it was a brilliant quote, and the relief I felt at reading it was immense.
Gathering the 8 made my begging bowl humiliation worthwhile, but still. Glad that part is over.
NetGalley
This is apparently standard now, in particular among the the traditional publishers. I’m unconvinced. Basically, the book goes up early, and potential reviewers can request an advance copy for free. Who can be a potential reviewer? There are meant to be requirements and standards, but to me they look pretty thin.
My uninformed opinion is this: NetGalley is probably a general good for most novels. I did wonder, however, whether a cyberpunk novel set in Vietnam should be very selective on who gets a free copy. One of the very first reviews a received was a 1-star, saying “I don’t like cyberpunk.” (See: this is what I really don’t understand. My publisher paid NetGalley the privilege of giving my book away for free to someone who, in turn, gave it a 1-star review. I don’t see the benefit).
You are told to ignore Goodreads, and you are told correctly. Maybe one day, I will be able to resist the urge. But today is not that day. I think you need to be emotionally resilient and mentally
tough to be a writer. We are sensitive souls, to be sure – sensitivity to others and the capacity for empathy are useful qualities for a writer to have.
I consider myself pretty resilient. More than most. Not the least of which is because I was an aid worker for a decade. It’s a tough profession that very quickly chews up and spits out anyone lacking a degree of psychological toughness. But I tell you what: it’s not much fun spending five years on a book, and having someone read 10% of it and tell the world how shit it is on Goodreads, before it is even released.
Caveat: I’m probably feeling a little raw about the NetGalley experience. Other writers tell me it has worked for them. While I personally am unconvinced by the service, it is clearly seen as a benefit more broadly in the industry.
Reviewers
While the author should leave the overall marketing strategy to the professionals, you should still ask questions and make suggestions. If you have a list of reviewers, like I did, who may have enjoyed your short fiction or other works, then give the publisher that list. Ultimately, while you are not the marketing expert, you are the expert on your book. You should know it better than anyone else. Give the publisher as much information as is possible to help them sell your novel. Thus, through this list, and through hustle of my own, I organised a range of reviews from websites that specialise in science fiction and Fantasy, and even a couple of the rare hard-core cyberpunk sites. This, for the most part, was successful.
The publisher, in turn, sent the book to the major industry reviewers and newspaper critics. So, for example, I received positive reviews in Publisher’s Weekly and The Times of London. This is one of the areas where traditional publishing retains its importance: through long-held connections to the different parts of the literary establishment.
Pre-orders
Author Helen Cullen has a comprehensive article in the The Irish Times that explains the important of the pre-order. In short, they create the ever-elusive word of mouth. A buzz among readers, and a buzz among distributors. This depends, of course, whether you are pre-ordering online, or walking into a physical bookstore and doing it there. Both are good. The former helps the mysterious algorithm, pushing the book into the eyeline of more and more readers. For bookstores, it puts you on the radar of the booksellers, and that can only be a good thing. They have a million new titles to choose from each year, and having enthusiastic customers come in and request a particular novel can only help them in the selection process.
My author quotes came in way in advance of the actual publication date. Over two months before. As to why the publisher required them so early, I don’t quite know, but I was given a deadline and that was that. Every novel is apparently different, with my agent telling me he’d seen author quotes come in as close as two weeks before publication (if you’re wondering: yes, if the quotes come in after the deadline, they can of course still be used. But only in online marketing, not on the physical copy of the book itself. I’m old-school, love and grew up on the physical version, and so wanted to get as much into that as possible).
Anyway, the point is I used them as part of my pre-order push:
Self-promotion
Ironically, for a science fiction writer I am, to put it mildly, a tecno-sceptic (perhaps this is why I write cyberpunk). I hate social media. However, all those many years ago when I was told to establish a social media ‘author platform’, I did it, and it has held me in good stead. I have an author page on Facebook, I have this website, and I have a Twitter account. Like it or not (and I do not) the ‘platform’ helped.
I suspect I’m like most people in this regard, insofar as I don’t slavishly follow my favourite authors and film-makers in the media, knowing everything they do and when they do it. Like most, it’s
the publicity (“oh – Kazuo Ishiguro is doing an interview for a new book” or “Paul Schrader has a new film out”) that encourages me to go and read or watch. Likewise, if a lesser-known writer or artist I follow on social media has a new work out, well, I want to know about it.
I say all this because I know many of you hate self-promotion. I want to be big enough one day that I’ll never have to ask for a blurb, self-promote, or require a social media platform. That’s the dream. The reality is I’ll always have to do these fucking things, and when it comes to promotion, it’s part of the game.
As long as you don’t bombard people (I tend to mute authors who only talk about, and promote themselves), you’ve got to let the world know when you have something out. Especially a debut novel. I mean, fuck: if you don’t do it, who else will?
Influencers. The publishing company will inevitably ask you the dreaded question: who do you know? My answer was, pretty much: no one. Sadly, who you know in publishing does matter. Of course it matters if you are mates with a famous writer, influential critic, or went to the right schools with the right connections. Of course it matters if you travel in the same circles as the literary elite. If you’re worried that the Brahmin class are getting more and better opportunities than you, then don’t worry: of course they are. It’s the same shit, all over, in every industry and every country.
So if you do have inside connections, by all means use them. That’s the way the world works.
If you don’t, then all you can do is take the advice of Steve Martin: “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” Simplistic? Maybe. But what the fuck else can you do?
Interviews. I know the favourite topic of any author is meant to be themselves, but it doesn’t take me long at all to get tired of hearing my
own voice. However, this does allow readers to engage with you and your ideas, it does allow you to give writing advice to those who are interested, and does give you – hopefully – some space to engage with a reader (the interviewer, who has also read and enjoyed your book) who is excited about your work. This can only be a good thing.
Publication Day
My publication day was split between Australia and the Rest of the World (Jan 18 and Feb 8). This was caused by the inevitable ‘supply chain’ problem suffered by so many new releases during the pandemic. My agent told me this split almost never happens. I can see why – it’s annoying, and makes cohesive marketing more difficult.
Then it got worse. Amazon – being Amazon – decided to release Audible and Kindle versions in some geographic locations on the 19th and then the 20th (amazing, really, that this corporation has the power to arbitrarily do this). Thus, technically, I had four publication days. This won’t happen to you, don’t worry. I simply treated the Feb 8 date as release day, and worked all my promotional activities on social media around that.
I tried to keep my powder dry before then – not haranguing my followers too much. I let them know it was coming, of course, put up the occasional author quote in order to drive pre-orders – but the few days before, and the day itself was where I really focussed my efforts.
And now, about a week past publication, well it’s in the hands of the algorithms, and in the voices of readers. As I said earlier, word of mouth still matters very much in publishing, in fact, it matters more than ever. It matters because the marketplace has never been more fragmented, and gaining traction and an audience in that market is bloody hard. When I say word of mouth, I of course mean Amazon
reviews, and Goodreads reviews, and praise on social media. But I also mean, quite literally, telling someone else in person. I was just at a local bookseller today, coincidentally, signing copies of my book (I will digress here and note that this is one of the really fucking cool aspects of getting your debut out there. As is seeing it on the shelves at bookstores, having complete strangers praise your work on social media, getting positive reviews in newspapers. It is a massive relief to finally have that novel published, surreal to actually see it out there, and rewarding to actually feel like a ‘real’ writer after all of this effort). Anyway, as I was saying, the bookseller said that word of mouth was absolutely critical, in particular in science fiction and fantasy, which tended to get short shrift in marketing budgets in Australia and elsewhere. So, if you have recently read a book that you loved – by god tell people about it. Authors – especially newer authors – need this in order to sustain their career, and therefore write the next book.
Conclusion
I’m not writing this as a how-to, because I really don’t know how (especially when it comes to self-promotion). Rather, this is more to give you a sense of what to expect. I will, however, reiterate a couple of points: you know your novel better than anyone. You will know the type of readers it will attract, which means you should have a sense of the type of reviewers that will respond with enthusiasm.
Always be professional and courteous with editors, listen to what they have to say, but be willing to stand by your words (25% of the time, anyway). Ask questions. Of your agent, of the publisher.
The traditional publishing industry is opaque and weird, with deadlines that don’t make a lot of sense, and urgencies that are not readily explained.
Get the word out there. Give your novel the opportunity to be read. If you receive nine positive reviews and one nasty, accentuate the positive. Do I do this? No. Fuck no.
And after all this is done: keep writing. Day in, day out. There is both a liberating freedom and terrifying vertigo in choosing this profession: you are the master of your words, your schedule, the hours you throw into the next work, and the hours you procrastinate. Every story choice, every character arc, every word chosen, is your own. Whether it ever appears on the page is ultimately down to you. Whether this is your first book of twenty, or the last you ever write – this, too, is in your hands.
Oh, and one more thing. Celebrate publication day. You’ve earned it.