What Fiction Writers Are Getting Deals With Publishers?

If you take the figures he quoted - 5 to 8k is not really going to have agents bang down your door. I suppose at 5-8k it at least won't be a turn off, but I'm not sure I'd mention anything less than 10-15k. Sell 100k and sure, they'll be clawing at the windows, but there aren't many of those authors.

The other thing is that most people who find success self-publishing, tend to be not so interested in getting agents regardless. Especially if you're a churner and produce a high volume of novels to sustain your income; a publisher can't help you wiht that.

I tried to watch the video But I had to stop after 47 seconds when he said that publishers are not interested in breaking out first time authors, which is false as plenty debut novels are trade published every year.

I'd like to know the names of writers who have succeeded in landing a big publication contract on the basis of self-publishing and social media promotion.

caw

mrsmig said:

One could argue that both E.L. James (Fifty Shades of Grey, et al) and Andy Weir (The Martian, Artemis) did just that. I can't think of any others.

Click to expand...

James didn't self pub, common myth. She was pubbed by a small coop house first.

mrsmig said:

One could argue that both E.L. James (Fifty Shades of Grey, et al) and Andy Weir (The Martian, Artemis) did just that. I can't think of any others.

Click to expand...

James wasn't self-published, although she did draft and revise her work (originally fanfic) online. 50 Shades was initially published by (IIRC) a small Australian press.

In addition to Weir, there's Amanda Hocking, who eventually (after much success) signed with St. Martin's. I'm sure there are others, but it's not common.

mrsmig said:

One could argue that both E.L. James (Fifty Shades of Grey, et al) and Andy Weir (The Martian, Artemis) did just that. I can't think of any others.

Click to expand...

Don't know about Andy Weir but I believe in the case of E.L. James she was writing fanfic and a publisher found it and thought that it could be repackaged by changing the names and setting, so I don't think she ever really self-published first.

I think that the lack of examples shows that it is not the norm for all debut authors to self-published because trade publishers won't touch them otherwise.

Elle. said:

I think that the lack of examples shows that it is not the norm for all debut authors to self-published because trade publishers won't touch them otherwise.

Click to expand...

It's also worth noting that even the self-pub to trade-pub stories aren't identical. If we fudge a bit and include James, we've got one author who workshoped online and found a small press (James), one who self-pubbed and sold well enough to have that book picked up by a trade publisher (Weir), and one who sold well enough to contract with a trade publisher for future work (Hocking).

I'm sure it's true that if you self-pub a runaway bestseller, a trade publisher will probably be happy to talk to you. But self-published runaway bestsellers are rare. (Heck, trade-published runaway bestsellers are rare.)

lizmonster said:

I'm sure there are others, but it's not common.

Click to expand...

Exactly why I asked.

caw

Leaving aside the fact that the information in the video is farcical ...

Heaps of writers have got contracts with big-fives off the back of social media and self-publishing activity: blogs. Thousands of them. I know loads of people who started blogging with the primary intention of getting a book deal – and they did. The market for that kind of book has definitely slowed, but it was a whole stream of its own for a good while. (Obviously very different from self-pubbing a book that gets picked up, but another perspective.)

My social media/blogging activity was a selling point for my debut novel. My audience isn't huge by any measure, and it wasn't the only or even main reason the book sold, but it was definitely a sweetener.

Shoeless said:

I'm actually quite curious to see how social media and it's value/importance is going to morph in time. Right Twitter is the big thing, and my own agent even went so far as to tell I needed to create a Twitter account after she signed me on last year, because I only really had an account with Google+, which more or less doesn't count. But social media in the form of Twitter and Facebook can't last forever, so it'll be interesting to see what new forms/events eventually overtake social media as we understand and use it right now, and how that will affect future writers in attempting to engage with the audience. I can't imagine authors will still be using Twitter 30 years from now, but at the same time, can't yet even guess at what might replace it.

Click to expand...

I'm suspicious that agents think Twitter is still big because Twitter is still big with agents. Out in the wider world I wouldn't exactly call it flavour of the month. It's haemorrhaging users (like me) because of its user-unfriendliness, amoral management, Nazis and trolls. Thirty years is optimistic, IMO. I'll be surprised if it lasts three more.

Facebook's another matter. It's got a ginormous userbase, and the big dumb corporate inertia to weather its own controversies. I think FB will be more or less there in three decades, though the form might be different.

*wonders if Thomas Pynchon gets pressured to tweet by his agent*

blacbird said:

I'd like to know the names of writers who have succeeded in landing a big publication contract on the basis of self-publishing and social media promotion.

caw

Click to expand...

In addition to the ones already mentioned, Lisa Genova (Still Alice), Hugh Howey, and Anna Todd—oh, wait, I think Todd originally published the After series on Wattpad, as fan fic, so maybe that doesn't count as self-publishing. Colleen Hoover is another one; new-adult romance authors have had some real success in making the leap from self-pub to trade. And if you look deep in AW's Self-Pub forum, you'll find the saga of Unteachable by Elliot Wake, who now has multiple trade publications. There are probably many others in that genre I don't know about. Whether their success resulted from their social media efforts is another question—in some cases, book bloggers or reviewers who discovered the book seem to have played a large role. And the more self-published books there are, the harder it is for that to happen.

Even though I can think of examples, the bulk are in romance, with a few in SF. YA or lit fic examples, for instance, seem rare. For authors working in a category/genre where trade publishing and print books still dominate, I'd say it makes more sense to try trade publishing first. (I had a debate with a friend recently over whether it's better to self-pub or publish with a tiny no-name press if your book is best suited for trade publishing but didn't sell. I think I'd go for self-pub if I really just wanted to get it out there, but I wouldn't expect to sell many copies.)

My agent claims that publishers like authors to have a big twitter following, while there is little interest in a Facebook presence. I've always found FB to be a clunky place to have an author page, while Twitter is a much more immediate, effective and dynamic place to market.

However, I know writers who claim the exact opposite!

Facebook is an awful place to network due to algorithms. It's aspiring authors all liking each other's pages and living in a closed loop where mostly they dont interact with new readers.

mrsmig said:

One could argue that both E.L. James (Fifty Shades of Grey, et al) and Andy Weir (The Martian, Artemis) did just that. I can't think of any others.

Click to expand...

Hugh Howey, Wool. "Wool" was originally a self-pubbed short story, to which he added some sequel novellas. Simon & Schuster gave him a substantial six-figure sum for print-only rights for North America. And Howey has by now sold other rights as well.

So it does happen, kind of like striking gold. You need a story that people want to read along with canny self-marketing and word-of-mouth. But without the first, the last will never happen.

These threads make me anxious. We're often reassured that **no, you don't need a social media presence, the best thing to do is just focus your time and energy on your writing, making it shine.** But then members here who are agented, published authors say their agents/publishers DID demand the socmed all wrapped up with a bow, with polished platforms and follower counts in the zillions, before any ink dried. It's confusing as. It'd be nice to hear from some agents on this, because it's a topic that comes up again and again without a consistent answer.

mrsmig said:

I think all agents (and all publishers) would like their authors to have a strong social media presence, because increased visibility means more eyes on the product, which translates to more potential sales.

It's the publishers (like mine) who depend on the author's social media presence to sell the book that are so exasperating. But that's a conversation for another time and another thread.

Click to expand...

I think this is an important point, actually. Some publishers have a marketing model that depends more on social media, and they presumably know how to leverage it.

If you read observations of some big-selling authors, though (I'm thinking of folks like Chuck Wendig, who's very forthcoming about practical stuff, not to mention really, really smart and funny), they'll tell you that social media doesn't really move the needle much.

Now, I love getting readers. Don't care how it happens. If I get one new reader off Twitter, I'm thrilled to bits, and that's the truth. But for me, social media has never even come close to goosing my numbers in a way my publisher cares about. If it's supposed to, I'm obviously doing it wrong.

FWIW I've bought books and artwork because of Facebook, Tumblr, even Instagram and the like, but never Twitter.

Albedo said:

It'd be nice to hear from some agents on this, because it's a topic that comes up again and again without a consistent answer.

Click to expand...

Probably because there is no consistent answer. Even agents don't agree on this.

BethS said:

Probably because there is no consistent answer. Even agents don't agree on this.

Click to expand...

What can we even do, then? I kinda feel no matter what I do now re: social media or no it will be shown to be wrong and useless. Don't engage and I'm depriving my self of a platform, engage and spend a whole lot of time not writing only to find I haven't been engaging in the correct way. The agents might not agree, but they're all sure they're right! Sorry to whinge, but I find this particularly frustrating.

I think it's more that you just do what you can, as best you can, and accept that a lot of it is outside of your control.

I hate things I can't control. Stupid fate.

Albedo said:

Sorry to whinge, but I find this particularly frustrating.

Click to expand...

Me, too.

FWIW, my perception (which is subjective and limited) is that everybody wants social media to make a significant difference, and maybe sometimes, for certain individuals, it does (for unpredictable reasons). But I doubt for most of us it's a huge driver of sales.

OTOH, it certainly doesn't hurt to be active on social media (unless you're a jerk, and then it seems to depend on what sort of jerk you are ). Hence the advice to pursue it.