Dive deep into the world of agenting with our guest, Cherise Fisher, who shares her unique insights from a 25-year career in publishing.
In this episode, Cherise delves into the relationship between a writer and editor, from page to bookstore shelf, dispelling common misconceptions, like whether an agent “edits” a book proposal, their role in the business side of writing, and sharing her do’s and don’ts for authors. Plus, find out how she became an agent to New York Times bestsellers, like Sadiqa Johnson and Tia Williams, and what attributes she looks for in clients.
She also talks about her career, from graduating college to her first job in publishing, how she became an acquiring editor at Simon & Schuster, and eventually Editor in Chief of Plume, an imprint of Penguin Random House. And what prompted her to change her career trajectory and leave the editorial side of publishing to become a literary agent.
In addition to sharing personal anecdotes and inside stories, Cherise dispels common misconceptions in the non-fiction market and discusses the economics of publishing. Learn the various strategies publishers utilize to maximize profit amidst slim margins, what are 'comp titles', and the calculated exaggeration of print runs, not to mention what it really means to ‘earn out’ your advance. If you're a seasoned author, an aspiring writer, or even just a curious reader, this episode will enrich your perception of the book publishing world.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Music.
(00:05):
How Books Work, Real Talk with editors, agents, and publishing insiders.
Hosted by writers Julie Seitao and Alice Robb.
Cherise Fisher began her career in publishing as the assistant to the editor-in-chief
of Dell Publishing a month after graduating from Yale University.
Over the course of her 25-year career as an acquiring editor at Simon & Schuster
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and the editor-in-chief of Plume,
an imprint of Penguin Random House, She has edited and published several national
best-selling and award-winning authors, including George Lopez,
Nelson George, Victoria Christopher Murray, Bill Wright, and Tony Parsons.
She represents several high-profile authors, including New York Times best-selling
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authors Sadiqa Johnson and Tia Williams.
It's our pleasure to have Charisse on the show with us today.
We're so excited to have you on. Thank you for inviting me.
Yeah, I mean, the thought process behind this, just as a little background,
was that we feel like it's such an opaque industry, publishing,
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nonfiction writers especially.
There's quite a few fiction podcasts out there, but I feel like for nonfiction, the industry,
there's such high barriers to entry, and there's so much writers don't know,
and there's so much that goes on behind the scenes in publishing houses that
is just, you know, sort of leveled the playing field.
(01:34):
So we felt like this was a really good opportunity to talk to people who've
been on the inside about what's really happening.
And, you know, sort of, I mean, it's interesting when you said that there are
so many people that there is this sort of lack of transparency,
and there's so many things that nonfiction writers don't know.
And actually, the actual truth is there's so many things that editors don't know.
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I learned that when I became the editor-in-chief of Plume.
I was not a publisher, but I sat in rooms where my publisher was.
I understood and heard conversations that were had about books,
about what kind of books receive what kind of support.
Which I had never known, you know, as an editor. And I was an editor for a very long time.
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So there's transparency all along. And the actual real truth is that the most
experienced people in publishing are sort of engaged in things that they know
have worked before. But they don't know what they're doing either.
We're all kind of doing our best. I feel like that's like when you're a kid
and you find out your parents don't know everything.
(02:44):
Thing it's sort of that like shocking realization
that maybe you could talk
I mean I don't mean to jump right in I think we were going to do a bio
but maybe maybe you could maybe you could talk about what you mean exactly like
when you were in these meetings and what they didn't know yeah I mean I think
that you as a writer have this expectation that the book that you have worked worked on,
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poured the blood, the sweat, the tears into is going to be put in the hands
of a set of professionals who know exactly what to do.
And they don't actually. They have a lot of experience on what has worked before.
But I think you would all agree with me that our culture is moving so quickly
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and changing so quickly that what has worked yesterday is not going to necessarily
work for today and definitely won't necessarily work for tomorrow,
which kind of puts us into one of the most important qualities of a nonfiction
writer is their own relationship with their audience and their own grasp of
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who their audience is and what their audience is interested in, if that makes sense.
Because you're actually closer to what your audience reads,
what your audience listens to, you're actually closer to them than a publisher is, right?
So I think that's a big something I didn't know.
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That's a big factor of it. I know you've been in publishing for 25 years.
Is that right? 600 years.
It's actually not 25. I think I'm going to my 30th college reunion next year.
No yes 30 i don't know i'm not responsible,
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who cares i'm not responsible you have a lot of
experience but yeah i mean it's yeah 1994 is that 30 years or 40 years 30 years
anyway a long time yes a long time so you must have seen i mean you You must
have really seen things kind of evolve on the ground, right?
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And you've been in all different, I mean, you've been an editor and now you're an agent, right?
What are your, I guess, I don't know, what inspired you to make the jump from editor to agent?
I had two kids.
Really close to each other. They're 16 months apart. part.
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And I think that when you have children, you're really happy to go back to work, right?
So I was happy to go back to work and
to sort of be in a role that was so comfortable for me for so many years.
But then I also loved these kids.
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And particularly being an editor-in-chief, as I was at the time,
you spend a lot of time managing other people. So I had all these babies you the work. Hello.
And babies at home.
Who literally shared DNA with me. And then I had babies at work, which was also fine.
I mean, I liked managing people, but I was a step away from the book.
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I acquired books and I edited books, but my primary job was to make sure that
the people who worked for me were acquiring books and selling books.
And so I spent a lot of time reading for other people and helping other people
who make decisions and being in those rooms being like, oh, this marketing budget,
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I think we're going to get out 20,000 copies of this book. And so the marketing budget is this.
This book is our lead title. I mean, these are decisions that are made like
a year before the book is.
Sometimes before a book is even delivered, they're making a decision about how
many copies they think that they're going to get out, right?
So I'm in these meetings, but I'm away from the stuff that geeks me out,
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which is to open up a page and read some words and love them and try to move
them around like the best puzzle you've ever made so that they could be even more impactful.
Like that sort of day-to-day editing and that day-to-day advocacy for something
that actually spoke to my soul on a very individual and sincere and authentic
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way was something that I was doing less. Yes. Right.
So what I love about publishing was not something that I was doing every day.
If you're going to leave your babies at home to monitor babies at work,
you should really love what you're doing at work.
And I just felt a little estranged. So I decided to,
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leave that job so I could be an editor again, an executive editor or something,
you know, but I wanted to just be someone who was responsible for my own titles
and for my own lift again.
And while I was interviewing with other publishers, one of my clients,
her name is Sadiqa Johnson, she's now a client.
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At the time, she was somebody who her novel had been submitted to me.
I knew that I was on my way out, so I turned it down. and she actually DM'd
me on Facebook, which is nothing we would ever suggest a writer to do.
But she DM'd me on Facebook and she asked me if I'd be willing to edit it,
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if she could pay me to be a freelance editor because she and her husband had
decided to self-publish the book.
Anyway, I ended up doing this freelance job because, well, whatever, why not?
And I remember the novel and I liked the novel and she was so sincere and I
felt like she had a real shot of doing well with this book, which she ended up doing.
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She self-published, she did really well with it because she was absolutely relentless
with selling it, with getting publicity attention, with getting awards.
She was absolutely relentless.
And so when she wrote her second book for her publishing company,
I said, you know, I think we should try and get you an agent. Jen.
And she was like, okay, I'm game. She had been heartbroken by that process, right?
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Because she'd written this novel, that first one, which was called Love in a Carry-On Bag.
And her agent had submitted everywhere and she'd gotten close,
close, close, but never got that deal, right?
So she was pretty heartbroken by the process of getting a publisher,
one of the major five or the big five, if there's still five left, I think there are.
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And so she just was like, fine, but
you know what like nobody knows my book as
well as you nobody knows my writing as well as you and no one is as great an
advocate for me no one's greater than you in terms of an advocate for my book
so I think you should be my agent I was like so I shared her novel with a.
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Agent named Wendy Sherman, who I had done a lot of work with,
who I trusted a lot, who I knew to be an amazing advocate for her authors.
I said to her, listen, I freelance edited her first book. This is how it did.
This is her second book, which I think is fantastic. And I think you should consider it.
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And she read it in like three days. And she called me back and said, this is amazing.
And I think you should co-agent it with me.
And I was like, well, but okay
you know at some point if like the universe is
sending you several messages you kind of have to listen so
I was like fine but even then like I represented
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Sadiqa and I sold two books first first attempted agenting I sold two books
a two book deal to Saint Martins but I was still not totally in it I was still
freelance editing but then I got another author and then I I got another author
and then here we are eight years later.
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Can we like, I want to backtrack and just ask you about the beginning,
even, you know, to your journey to being an editor in chief,
how you, cause we kind of went backwards,
but yeah, tell us how you first got into it all. Into publishing. Yeah.
Well, I went to this amazing school.
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I went to an amazing school for girls called the Brearley school.
You know, This is a story about the old girls' network, right?
Because there's an old boys' network, and there should be an old girls' network.
Anyway, I'm in college, and funny enough, I came across, in an effort to get
an author to come to campus to speak, I came across what a literary agent is.
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This is when I'm literally 19.
I'd never heard of a literary agent. Let's go back even further. there.
I always loved writing and I loved editing and I loved being bossy.
And I thought that I was going to be a magazine editor because magazine editors
were like sexy and glamorous.
And I kind of had somehow, I don't know why I had an image of what that was,
(12:08):
but I had an image of what that was.
And so for, in the school that I went to, they have a senior project,
which means that like, Like for the listeners who don't know,
it means that after you get into your spring semester,
your senior year, you are allowed to do sort of independent study or internships.
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You sort of create this hodgepodge of things that you're really interested in
and a really smart thing that the school does.
So part of my senior project was to intern at a magazine. So I'm like a magazine editor.
Then when I'm in college, I come across this job called literary agent,
which I thought, like, what is that?
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And so I figured, well, oh, wow, there's a whole world of people who are involved in publishing.
Never knew it. I read a book my whole life. I don't know where I thought they
came from. I don't remember my mother ever taking me to a bookstore.
I'm pretty sure I went to the library. But I really have a sense of like,
oh, there is a place where these things are printed and there are people who
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copyedited it and there are other people who just, I had no knowledge of that.
But this introduction to a literary agent opened this world to me.
So I think it was my junior year.
Maybe it was my, oh, it must have been my senior year. I decided to go to,
like, you know, the school had, my college had some sort of like career office. this.
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They had binders back in those days where they had turn chip programs,
which is like you use your spring break to work in an industry for those two
weeks. You follow people around for free for two weeks.
So I opened this up and I looked at publishing and there was a job opening and
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there There was an opportunity to be an extern for a spring break at Bantam.
And I applied for it. Well, little did I know I was applying to work for a girl,
a girl, a woman who actually went to the same school that I did.
And she saw my resume and she was just like, what? She's bring her in. And I didn't know her.
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I think that Linda is probably four or five years older than me.
So I didn't really know her, but she saw my school on the resume and she was like, bring her in.
And so I went and I worked for her for two weeks and she called the human resources
department at Banton Double Day Dell. And she says, listen, I have an intern here.
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She's been working for me for two weeks. She's absolutely amazing.
You guys absolutely need to interview her for a long-term position when she graduates from school.
And so they interviewed me, and I got a job. Old Girls Network.
We like that. So amazing.
Yeah. I love that. And so you worked your way up as an editor. Yes.
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My parent job was as the assistant to the editor-in-chief. And I worked for
her for about two years as her assistant.
And then I became her assistant editor. And then I became an associate editor.
And then I moved to Simon & Schuster. And I went from associate editor there to senior editor there.
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And then I got the call to be editor-in-chief of Plume. So.
It's so it's so interesting, I think, from a writer's perspective,
knowing how those conversations are.
I mean, you mentioned it briefly, but I'd love you to expand on,
you know, you're you're deciding a year in advance often before you've even
seen a manuscript, you know, what the print run will be, what the publicity
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budget will be. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?
I mean, that insight is is hugely beneficial. official. Yeah.
I mean, I think the publishing has this really, you know, they project themselves
as like cultural institutions when in fact they're quite, they're very much businesses, right?
So we're not selling soap or watches.
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We're selling books and each book has this individual opportunity to be something.
But at the end of the day, if you don't sell books as a publisher, you're not in business.
So they're also, publishing is also an industry that operates on a very thin profit margin, right?
There's not a lot of profit per book.
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So how publishers make money is by publishing an array of books.
And most publishers don't really make money until they have a backlist.
That's why you see publishers buying other publishers.
They're actually buying buying their backlist, right?
Meaning books that are technically more than six months old,
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but they could be 20 years old. They could be 10 years old.
Those books that are classics that people are always going to buy,
that's what a publishing company builds their business on, right?
Because they know there's some expectations about how those sales are going
to go. So a book is acquired.
When a book is acquired by a publisher,
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they are assuming certain things about how the book will sell based on what
books that are similar to it have sold, right?
The so-called comp titles, which people hate to talk about, but it's actually
the whole financial foundation of any publishing company.
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So you go in as an editor, right? You go in and you say, my book is going to sell like this book.
My book X is going to sell like my book Y because book X sold like this.
My book X is going to sell like book Y because this is what they have in common.
But my book Y is going to sell even more because they have 60,000 people,
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60,000 followers on Instagram who they can reach.
Whatever, right? I mean, there's a business argument.
This is what I'm trying to say. There's a business argument made for every book
that is completely separate from the quality of the book itself.
And so you acquire
the book according to those assumptions you pay in advance right
so let's say seven
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nine eight months later this book is
scheduled for the next nine or ten months and there are people sitting in the
room with all of these acquisition pnls on there saying well when we bought
this book we assumed that we were going to be able to ship 20 000 copies of
this book and we paid X amount of money for it.
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So we better sell 20,000 copies. I'm making up a number, right?
But sometimes you say, we need to sell 20,000, but let's tell our sales force
to project to the outside world,
meaning booksellers, that we're going to print 50,000. It's all a game, right?
(19:04):
We're going to tell them that we're going to print 50,000.
It's all a game. We're going to to tell them that we're going to print 50 so
that they're like, oh, 50, maybe let's take a really better look at this.
Let's take a closer look at what this means, what this book is.
Oh, all right. Well, they're saying 50.
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So they probably, so I don't know, I guess we'll take 10.
This one bookseller is like, I guess we'll take 10.
We'll roll the dice on taking five, says another another bookseller will roll the dice on taking 15.
Or then you have somebody like Target. It's like, this book is totally not for us. Goodbye.
Thank you. Or you have a place like Costco, which is like, this doesn't have anything for us.
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Or you have a place like Costco and it says, oh, this is kind of cool.
Yeah, let's see. I think this would be great for our clientele.
So there's all of this back and forth bargaining about how many booksellers
are going to actually order.
But it starts with a publisher looking at that acquisition P&L,
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knowing what they need to make in order to feel comfortable,
and devising a publishing plan around what their expectations are about how the book will perform.
Now, having said that, which sounds so almost defeating, right?
Like, oh, so they made a decision about my book way before they even read a
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copy. That that may sound defeating.
There's always the thing about publishing that is so addictive.
This is what appeals to the gamblers in us.
Is that they might read a book that they absolutely fall in love with.
Then there's a buzz inside the publishing company. Yeah, but did you actually
read it? It's really very good.
And it's actually more like this. And it's actually more like that.
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And then you might have somebody in the sales force or in the marketing department
that becomes a particular fan of that book.
And then the publisher decides, oh my God, we actually have something that the
the read actually delivers.
So let's pay a little bit more attention. That's what they call a makebook in publishing.
It's this one title that becomes something that they love and adore individually,
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that they give a little extra push, not because what's on paper is what they
have to push, but because there's a little bit of a love for it, right?
And there's also those titles that that for
some whatever reason some grand alignment of
planets and stars gets this like publicity break
that's crazy or you know oprah
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decides to oprah you know why i said that out loud on this podcast i'm probably
going to disappear like say say somebody like alice walker like bumps into this
randomly this galley and decides oh wow maybe i will give it a quote So then people are like, wait.
So there's all these little points where a book can grab extra attention,
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which is not in the hands of someone who a year ago made a decision about it.
And that year ago decision is an estimate.
So that year ago decision about the numbers and about the marketing closet,
there's always that opportunity for magic to happen.
There's always those reviews that come in early, that come in amazing,
that people are like, oh, wait a second. And then you have these books that
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nobody expected to be amazing bestsellers that become that.
And that's, that's what keeps us, what is, you know, there's that psychological
term where I get term, but like, you know, if they zap you sometimes,
but not all of the time, like if they zap you with pleasure,
sometimes, but not all the time, you keep trying to get zapped,
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even though you might get zapped.
You know what I'm talking about. I hope we all talked.
I'm not making that up. That was Psych 101 in freshman year.
I think I read that study. Yeah. Okay, from a very technical perspective,
I'm just curious, when do the bookstellers start putting in those orders?
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Is it about, you know, like six months before or like when do they, okay.
It's about six months before. So here, I'm going to give you some show and tell.
So this is, is this backwards? Do you see it backwards? Did you see it? No, I see it.
Okay. So this novel, A Love Song for Ricky Wilde, is amazing.
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One of my clients, this book comes out in February.
In February. February two months ago, I had a meeting with the publisher who
told me what the first print is,
because two months before that, they had gone out to publishers and I mean,
to booksellers and based on the sale of her previous book,
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Seven Days in June, they had estimates for what the book would be.
And so yeah so fair so yeah
two months ago was what october yeah
they set the first print because they had to but i
think that they told the booksellers back
nine months ago like oh we're going to print a hundred thousand copies of the
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book and they said they are shipping a lot but not a hundred thousand so i knew
that that was all a game in fact probably on the back of this galley it says
something like 100 000 copy first printing so if everyone's inflating those numbers,
do the booksellers must know that it's all just sort of a gas and yeah they do.
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We all lie to each other we pretend we're not it's like dating i mean it's just
i think that there's a difference like i think that publishers know well it's
probably not going to be a hundred thousand but they are positioning it as their
major lead book so we should pay attention,
and if they're telling me if they're
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telling me barnes and noble a hundred thousand they're also telling
target a hundred thousand back in
the day they were also telling you know
borders a hundred thousand so i don't want to be the one who's
like not player in this game yeah
and then i wanted to go back to something you said about
how you know publishers are operating on
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such a thin margin yeah as writers you
hear so many statistics about how you know how so few books earn out and yes
books lose money and i guess i wanted to ask like is that true and can an author
survive losing a lot of money yeah so i don't think that that's true i hear
that quote all the time and it's actually not really true.
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Because what most books, the actual truth is that most books do not earn out
of their advance within the first two years of the book's life.
Most books do not earn out of their advance. But the way P&Ls work, it is very possible to.
(26:05):
For a publisher to make a profit on a book that does not earn out.
It is very possible because let's say, I actually teach a whole class on this.
I'm not going to bore you guys with it because I teach a class at City College
in the fall and we have a whole P&L discussion and these poor English majors
are like, why is she telling us all of this?
Then they get it, right? Because it's a business.
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But basically there's a number in every P&L and a publisher,
let's say, would like to make a 30% rate of return on every single title.
But if they make a 10% rate of return, they're still making money.
If they make a 15%, they're still making money.
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If the book earns out, they're probably going to earn like that 30 that they
want to, but they're still making money.
So that's not that the book is losing money.
Books don't actually lose money, but the author may not earn back their advance.
So the author might get an advance.
I'm going to make up a number, 10,000.
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And that might be all they get from the book.
Because it takes a long time for that money to earn out so that they start making additional royalties.
But the publisher is making a fair amount of money.
And then, like I always said, there's that time when you've paid $50,000 as an advance for a book.
(27:35):
You expect to sell 12,000 copies.
And then, oh my God, why is everybody reading this? And you end up selling 700,000
copies. That's extreme.
But you end up selling so much more that that one title is making so much money
that the other books are kind of all lifted with it.
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The other question you asked me was, what does not earning out on their advance,
how does that affect an author?
And that's a really important question. And as an agent, I tell my clients all
the time, I'm the type of agent that is interested in your career growing. growing.
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I'm not interested in selling one particular book.
All of my clients are people who are going to write several books.
If I have a client and I don't usually, who just has one book in them,
yeah, get whatever advance you can get, right?
But if you're somebody who wants to continue writing and wants to develop that
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as your career, I think that it's good for your P&Ls at at the end of the day,
your profit and loss statements at the end of the day to look really good.
Which is not to say, oh, I didn't earn out on my $10,000 advance and so I'm
not gonna get another publishing deal. Yeah, you might.
But if you don't earn out on a $600,000 advance, no one's gonna give you another $600,000 advance.
(29:09):
Yeah, I mean, that's so hard because a lot of agents, obviously,
you guys are paid off commission.
So you're motivated to get as big in advance. I mean, and the system is set
up so that, you know, auctions or whatever preempts, you know, you're all trying.
I mean, and who would want to turn down money, right?
Especially when the chance of getting royalties is so low.
(29:31):
This is your one chance to make money. So how do you balance that?
Because I think that is something that some of us have to contend with.
You say, don't ask for the big number. Let's keep it lower.
It's also like not believing in yourself.
(29:52):
It's confusing. Yeah. I mean, here's how I look at it. I love sending people royalty checks.
I love sending people royalty checks. I think that, yes, it's very easy to think,
oh, the advance is the only money I'm going to get, so let me get as much.
That's the wrong way of thinking about it for me, right? Right.
Let's look for a really good partner for this book who is going to publish it,
(30:16):
who is aligned with my vision for the book and is going to put a lot in with
an enormous amount of experience with books like mine,
who is going to put a lot into it so that the book's actual success,
so that the book actually performs well.
And so that I do have the opportunity to earn more money.
The opportunity to earn more money.
(30:39):
Perfect example. I have a book. I don't have a copy of it here.
I have a book coming out in March called Disappointing Affirmations.
Hilarious book. It's like a book. It sort of looks like this fake self-help
book, and it's based on an Instagram page called Disappointing Affirmations.
Now, this guy, his name is Dave Janowski. basically he started this page in
(31:03):
like June, 2022, right? Is that right? Yeah.
What year are we in? He started this page in June 22 as kind of a lark.
It was like a hobby and he started doing it and it just got a lot of traction.
I think I met him like around August and he had a hundred thousand followers
on Instagram, which in three months is pretty impressive with like memes that are just funny.
(31:27):
One meme is like, unfollow your dream or have a panic attack.
You deserved it. Disappointing affirmations.
I met him in August and I was like, wow, this is great. There were some editors who saw his page.
I had a couple of editors who I knew were ready for it. I sent it to a couple
more. We had this auction before and then I sent it to several.
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I started getting all that bubbly, all those people like, I'm interested.
I want to meet with him. I want to talk with him. I want And I said,
okay, let's stop everything.
And let's, for Dave, I said, I want you to write a list of things.
What you're actually looking for in a publisher and what you're actually looking
for with a publishing experience and what do you want for this book?
(32:11):
And things that he wrote down were things like, I want it to be a hardcover
that looks like a fake book.
I want it to be with a publishing company that can do different things like
a calendar or note cards or whatever.
I want a publisher that can do that. I want a publisher that has,
the editor has a really great sense of of humor that I can connect to.
(32:33):
I want a publisher that respects the fact that I have grown this page and that
I have other pages, right?
So he wrote this list before we even had an auction and he sent it to me and
I was like, we're not going to discuss this anymore, but this is the list, right?
So anyway, auction, offers, it was nice.
And there was like a $20,000 difference difference between one publisher and another.
(32:57):
The publisher that was $20,000 less was one that I thought matched his criteria much better.
And I reminded him of that because of course you get this thing like,
oh, this is a $20,000 difference.
Obviously I should go with them. And I was like, Like, let's go back to that
(33:18):
list about what you ideally wanted.
And so he did. And I managed to let them creep up from that.
I closed that $20,000 gap a little bit.
But significantly, the publisher who ultimately got him did have a hardcover in mind.
And hardcovers are priced higher than trade paperback originals.
(33:40):
And so the numbers were different. but his potential to earn out on that advance was better.
So you asked me how I balance it. I balance it because I don't think people
should think about advances as the only thing they're going to get.
I think people should think about the publisher doing the best job that they
can do and prioritize that so that the book has its best opportunity to earn
(34:03):
back the advance so they can continue to earn money.
Okay. I had one follow-up on that question. Does the advance correlate with
the publicity push since they've already invested in the front end?
Yeah. I mean, I think that there are a lot of agents who believe that the higher
the advance is, the more likely the company is going to pay attention to the book.
(34:28):
That is true 62% of the times, right?
And advance is always something thing that a publisher can write off at the end of the year.
So big advance doesn't necessarily mean big push. It doesn't.
Big push is often about what's the opportunity that's in the book itself.
(34:53):
So I'll go back to the example of Tia Williams. Her advance was not what it should have been.
The advance was not what it should have been because
there was because of the competition because of how
the auction worked whatever but we had an editor who absolutely loved the book
(35:14):
we had a publishing company that was trying to sort of firm up their status
with women's commercial fiction and we went with them and.
People started reading the book and they started loving it and they started
realizing, wait a minute, Tia is super, uber. She was a magazine writer for all these years.
(35:36):
She was a beauty editor for Essence, for Cosmo, I think, a couple of others.
Right. So she was very well known in the magazine industry and people just still loved her. Right.
So they were like, oh, I'll put this in front of my book editor.
I'll put this here. I'll put this there. She was also super cute and super endearing.
(35:58):
So she could be in front of a camera very easily. She could do the really podcast.
She had an Instagram that was very like voicey as the people say,
like she had a real strong voice and people really engaged with her.
So then a publicist looks at that woman and all those things that she is offering to them.
(36:21):
That's something that, oh, we can go after that. We can work with that.
Whereas there might be someone who, you know, has a face for radio,
who is like, who doesn't know how to be witty, who's like a genius, right?
Right. Like they wrote this genius book on the history of Harry S. Truman's presidency.
(36:42):
But is there an opportunity to be in People magazine for the man who writes
Harry S. Truman's biography?
Not necessarily. So like so the publicity money starts to shift because there's
an opportunity for us to take advantage of here.
And then, you know, Tia ended up being a Reese Witherspoon pick.
And so then it was like, so there's a lot of opportunity.
(37:06):
Then a lot more money went in that direction because, oh, this is going to get
so much attention, we're going to build on it.
I think that marketing and publicity money follows opportunity,
is what I'm trying to say.
I do think, I think that publishers who spend huge advances on books.
They do so because they think that it is similar to other books that have sold X amount, right?
(37:31):
And so they might, and they have to sell that much because of an auction and
because of ego and whatever else.
They do end up with a big advance. And when you have a big advance,
you're like, oh, we need to do this.
We need to make it like this. But if there is an opportunity there because of
who the author is or what the book is or what the climate of the world is,
then it doesn't necessarily get that publishing and marketing.
(37:55):
If that makes sense. Yeah. Did you ever see as an editor, I guess it's kind
of a sad question, but like the opposite of like a make book,
like say a publisher really splashes. Oh, a hundred times.
Oh yeah. Oh, absolutely.
I don't even want to mention anybody's name because it's so sad,
(38:15):
but there are absolutely times when publishers have paid an enormous amount
of money and they think that there's big fanfare and people do everything that they can.
And everything that they expect it to.
And wait, nobody cares. Nobody gives a rat's tail.
That's going to say something else. And it's disappointing. Here's an example.
(38:37):
I have no idea the business of this book besides the numbers that I have asked
for on BookScan, But Jada Pinkett Smith, the wife of Will Smith, she wrote a memoir.
She was in every single media opportunity. She was on the Today Show,
I'm pretty sure. She was everywhere.
(38:59):
I heard her on Fresh Air.
You heard her everywhere. You heard her every single where.
I have no idea how much they paid for that book, but I know that that book did not sell very well.
You know, and you're like, why didn't this book sell well?
Well, some people feel that because she was overexposed in the media,
(39:22):
like there was so much information that was leaked out during the publicity
tour that people were like, well, I guess I got the whole book.
Like, what else do I need?
Right. Some people felt that way. Some people know that Jada Pinkett Smith wasn't
particularly well liked at that moment that her book came out.
You know, not particularly relatable, not particularly whatever.
(39:46):
And so it just, so it was disappointing to people that there,
there are endless books that I could name that did not match up with its expectation,
either in the marketing, the publicity of it, you know, based on what it got in terms of publicity,
or even based on what a publisher were paid thinking they were going to be really successful.
(40:10):
There have definitely been a lot of books that fell far short.
I have a two-part question, I guess, with that. You said that it did not sell well.
So are there benchmarks for what sells well for nonfiction?
Because that's mostly what we're focused on in fiction, number one.
(40:32):
Number two, my understanding is, going back to advances and P&Ls that,
first of all, P&Ls are like very proprietary.
No one knows what they are per the different publishing houses of their own and all that.
And that also nobody really knows exactly what an advance is or if it if it,
you know, sold out the advance or whatever, unless you're at that publishing
(40:53):
house and you're, you know, you're going to stay there and all of that. So I just curious.
What's the question you're asking? Oh, sorry. So so my question is,
I guess that's like a comment.
My question is, are there, since you, if you don't know what the advance is
and if it's sold out and stuff, are there benchmarks for what it means when
(41:14):
you say it did not sell well?
I mean, a celebrity memoir, I'm sure has a standard, but does also a history
book or a memoir, all that.
Yeah, I think that's a really good question. Or a women's history book.
Or a women's history book, yeah. Or the department stores.
Exactly. hopefully I think that.
(41:35):
That this is a question that every single author I've ever worked with have
asked me, like, what would make my book a success?
And what I have learned to tell them is that there are several metrics of success, which is true.
Like it's me, not, it's not me bullshitting. It's actually true.
Like what is successful to you as the author might be one thing.
(41:57):
What is successful to me as an editor might be another thing.
What is successful to a sales rep at Barnes and Noble is another thing, right?
So there are so many different metrics of success that it's hard to point out one thing.
Even like I said, oh, the book didn't earn out of its advance.
Well, most books don't. So that's not really a metric of success.
(42:19):
It could certainly, one could say, oh, this book earned out.
So it was successful. It was successful according to that metric, right?
So there is no one number.
When I say that the Jada Pinkett Smith memoir was not as successful as they expected.
(42:43):
Now, granted, I remember looking up the numbers for my class when I was teaching
my class because I wanted to juxtapose the Britney Spears book,
which sold like a million copies its first week out, right? Wow. Did it really?
Yeah. Wow. Yeah.
Like the same week, I think Jada Pinkett's book sold 2000 copies. Oh my God.
(43:06):
Yeah. So are there books that don't sell 2000 copies in a week?
Yeah, there are, right? So So if I published a book about eating carrots so
that my eyesight would be really fantastic, I would be thrilled that I sold 2,000 copies that week.
(43:27):
If I was a celebrity who had been an actress for over 20 years and married to
the biggest movie star in the world and had X amount of followers on Instagram
and had X amount of people tuning in to my YouTube show every week.
Would 2,000 copies be what I expect to make per week?
(43:48):
That's literally 2,000 people. That's not even like a stadium full of people who bought her book.
I don't even know what 2,000 looks like, but it's not across the country.
Yeah. So no, there isn't one number, but it's all context because for somebody,
2,000 could be amazing, but for
her and these expectations that we have around it, it's not as amazing.
(44:13):
Did I answer your question? question i mean sort
of i mean i don't
know i you know and right i
mean my advice to anybody is yeah for yourself
what would make my book successful i had a client who wrote this book about
(44:33):
blended families and she was thinking about the new york times bestseller list
which people often think about it's a real bullshit way of thinking about success
for me you shouldn't judge judge yourself on the success of that book.
I know that as an editor, for me, success would be that my books were in print.
I remember I did a book years ago called Itsy Bitsy Yoga, which is yoga positions
(44:57):
you put your baby in to help them go to sleep, to help them digest.
And it was so cute. And I edited this book and I had a baby maybe 10 years later.
And do you know somebody bought it for me as a gift
this book and I was like oh
(45:19):
my god this is everything to me this that
was everything to me because she didn't go
and look at the acknowledgments and be like Cherise actually
has copies of this book in her house signed
by the author she didn't think about that she was just like wow this is a great
book to give to a new mom that was success to me I had a client who who she
(45:40):
did this co-parenting book and she would get piles of DMs like your book really helped me, you know?
And so when she had her own vision about what her book could be in the world,
it was, this is a book that I want to do to inspire and shift the culture into
thinking about blended families in a different way.
(46:02):
And even the two, three, four, five, six people who did that for for her, you know, was a success.
I mean, most authors I know say, you know, they just want their book to be successful
enough that they can write another book.
I mean, I feel that way. Yeah.
You know, that's what most of us feel, I think. Yeah. You know,
(46:25):
just to have... I think that's a really wonderful metric.
Yeah, I think that's a really wonderful metric because then you have a little bit more...
There's a lot of room for that. There's a lot of room for that.
Although that does speak to asking for a lower advance, potentially.
You don't ever ask for a lower advance.
You never ask for a lower advance.
(46:47):
But you look at advances in a full, a more holistic way than the actual number.
You look at the advance for the company that's offering it. You know,
a company like Beacon in Boston, an amazing publisher, but small,
non-profit, I think they're not so profit.
They don't really give advances more than $10,000, right?
(47:09):
So if they tell you, oh, we're going to offer you $15,000 on it,
they feel really passionate about it.
But if you go to Random House with a $15,000 advance, that's just a Tuesday.
Like that means nothing to a Random House publisher, but to someplace like Beacon,
it means a lot, you know? So there's context for everything.
(47:29):
We need to look beyond advances, and we need to think about the full,
look at these books holistically, look at these publishers.
You know, I don't, all of my clients speak to Ed Luthier at a publishing company
before I start an auction, because I want them to get a sense of like,
who is going to be advocating for me?
I think I do that because I was an editor for so long. I know how important editors are.
(47:54):
And so I know how important the relationship between an editor and an author
is, the creative relationship.
So I always have them have that conversation.
I think that that's a really important thing to do for a writer.
I like the idea of also doing that before you hear what numbers they're offering,
because otherwise I feel like you just convince yourself.
(48:17):
Absolutely. Wendy always says to me, Wendy Sherman is like, she's so like by
Yento or something, but she'll say things like, you know, when you're dating,
you don't fall in love with the man. You fall in love with the whole package.
So you fall in love with the man, maybe he has the right shade of hair,
the right fullness of a mustache or a beard. Maybe he's the right height.
(48:42):
But if he's living in his mother's basement, that's like a minus on his path. Right.
You're living in your mom's basement or you find a man who, you know,
he's a doctor and he, you know, has this really successful practice,
but he's like four foot nine.
(49:02):
I shouldn't be sized this like this, but you know what I mean?
Like someone who's 4'11", I agree.
But like so do you think to myself you know
oh but he is like this passionate doctor who's changing people's
lives that raises it you know you it's a package you got to look at the whole
(49:24):
package that's my takeaway for y'all look at the whole i guess one i know we
have to wrap soon this is such an amazing conversation i just want to thank
you but peppering you i know i'm like Can I keep you? I know. I guess.
And I want to hear so much about you guys. I'm so sorry. No, no. This is the point.
(49:46):
We're boring. We want to hear about you guys.
Well, one thing I want to ask is, you know, what do you think?
Okay. So the relationship between writers and agents and also writers and editors
is, you know, also can be confusing. thing.
What do you, do you have advice for what writers should look at when they're considering agents?
(50:12):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, I was asked this question recently with a client of mine.
We were both on a panel together and I said, your agent is like your spouse
and your editor is the lover that you've taken on. Okay.
Meaning that your, your agent is is with you for the duration, ideally.
(50:34):
Your agent is with you for the duration, and the two of you are looking out
at the world together because you have unified.
Your interests collide, like you have the same interests and you have the same
priorities because you're looking at the world together, which is what spouses
are supposed to do, right?
They're in a house looking out at the world together.
(50:56):
Your lover, which is your editor, is someone who's actually betrothed to another,
which is the publishing company.
And so they love you and they adore you and you guys have this hot spice between
you, but they actually work for somebody else, not for you.
(51:16):
So what you're thinking about for an agent, number one, well,
number one is that you have to understand what you are looking for in terms of a spouse.
Like what is the most important quality of a person who I'm thinking long-term with?
If I am a writer who wants someone who is ruthless, who will go into a publishing
(51:40):
company with like blood dripping from their lips and say, this author needs
this or we're walking out of here.
Like if you want that kind of tough guy kind of person, totally legitimate because
you know, like I'm in it for the money, honey.
And so go and get me a check, daddy. Like, you know, you might want that.
Or you might need the spouse who like brings you a cup of tea every night just
(52:05):
so that you could feel comfortable, right?
You might be the kind of writer that really needs someone who is going to like
give you kisses and roses and support you in that kind of loving way,
you know, or you might want somebody who, you know, is steady,
really experienced and gives you some solid advice, right?
(52:25):
So you first have to understand, like, do I want a barracuda?
Do I want a teddy bear? Do I want mama bear?
Do I want somebody who's what do I want for myself? What do I need for myself
in the kind of career that I'm getting?
So you have to understand that about yourself and look for someone with those qualities.
You have to understand, I think that the key element between you and an agent is trust.
(52:49):
I trust this person. I think any of my clients will tell you,
Charisse doesn't play about us and she will always tell me the truth.
And I trust her implicitly. I trust her business mind. Let me just toot my own horn.
I trust her business mind. I trust her editorial eye.
I trust that she is there for me 100%. Trust is always key.
(53:13):
What's the purpose of a spouse if you can't trust them, right?
So I think knowing what type of approach they have to the publishing process
is something you have to know about yourself.
And I think trust is what glues it all together. Hmm.
For spells. Did you tell your author what their print run was?
I mean, I know it was really good, so maybe you did, but is that the kind of
(53:36):
thing that, should I ask my agent that?
Yeah, I would tell, you know, it's interesting because Wendy,
who is my amazing, loving partner, my other version, like my kind of specs in
a way, she does not tell her authors that much. much.
And I think that that could be infantilizing. And I want all of my authors to
(53:58):
know the business of their books.
And so I do tell, did I tell Tia?
No, Tia was there. We were in the meeting together. So she heard she was in
the meeting together, but she doesn't care.
She's like, what does that mean? Does that mean something? I'm like, it's good.
I'm okay. I was like, I walked into the Ripped bodice last week and my book wasn't there.
(54:20):
That to her is a big deal, you know, because it's very tangible for her. We got books. Got it.
The books were shipped in there within a week and a half.
I was like, excuse me, do you understand that you have a romance bookshop that
is literally a 10 minute walk from my author's apartment and you don't have
(54:42):
copies? How did that happen?
I don't even want to know about how many copies they're going to order now.
I would like to know how that possibly could have happened.
They're like, okay, shoot, and they figured it out. It was all fixed.
That's awesome. So, I'm going to ask you a question.
(55:02):
Alice, should we ask her final question so we can let Charisse get back to all her amazing authors?
I feel like we've sort of covered it. But yeah, we've been trying to ask all
of our guests for what their one top piece of advice for, I guess, new writers would be.
Although I feel like you could be exempt because you have been a really, some very wise advice.
(55:28):
Yeah, good advice. Up to you. you know, no, you go.
Well, I was going to say that it really, that the answer to that question really
depends on what, who you're describing.
I think that there are people who are beginning the process of writing a book
and their top advice is quite different from someone who was a published author
(55:49):
and quite different from someone who's the first time published author.
So for somebody who is, I'm interested in writing a book, what do I need to
do first? First, I would say, put your butt in the chair and write.
Put your butt in the chair and write. You know, we can have this very intellectual
conversation about you getting an agent and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
(56:11):
An agent doesn't care about you until you're putting something that they're
reading in front of them.
So that's important advice. Put your butt in the chair, develop a discipline to be on this journey.
Develop the discipline to being on the journey of writing because none of this
conversation, this whole conversation about publishing starts with someone who
(56:35):
is inspired to write something.
So we got to keep people in that mode of inspiration.
Yeah, I think all this stuff can be so intimidating that it stops people from
even trying. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yeah.
So I think that's really true. We did hear from a different agent that the nonfiction
market is not doing very well. So I do wonder.
(56:58):
What does that mean? I don't know. The numbers are small. The sales numbers are smaller.
Like you have to sell less to get on the list. Or celebrity memoirs right now.
Yeah. Yeah. There's not a lot. Listen. Everything is hard.
Whatever. For some people, getting out of the bed is hard.
I don't know. I just feel like, are the numbers smaller?
(57:23):
There was a point in time of, let's call it the, I don't know,
the 80s. I mean, I was alive, but I wasn't in publishing.
So let's go to the 90s when I wasn't publishing. There was a time in the 90s
where publishers took off a whole week in December and flew to Puerto Rico for sales conference.
And everybody drank. Half of it was about drinking and hooking up more so than
(57:47):
selling books. Nowadays, your sales conference is on Zoom and for a week, right?
Because money just looks different, but money looking different.
People are still reading and people are reading more than ever.
People are like, oh, Facebook, Instagram, blah, blah, blah. What are people
doing on Facebook? They're reading.
(58:08):
They're reading about other people's lives. They're reading about issues.
You look at how social justice in the world has been affected by people being
engaged online and how that feeds the best sellers list.
I mean, I, you know, yeah, we can all sort of reminisce about a time when money
was spent in a kind of reckless way.
(58:31):
I don't think it's more difficult to make a living as a writer today.
I think that it's more difficult in the sense of I have certain responsibilities
for myself and for my work that maybe someone did not have in 1982.
We're going to cry about that. That's 1982. This is 2023.
It just looks different. And if you have an agent over a certain age,
(58:54):
they're going to be all nostalgic about the past.
You can't stay in the past. The future is here.
You can't stay in the past it's very
true well i feel inspired yeah yeah
thank you so much this is so good yeah i think i think this will be so informative
(59:15):
for the three people who might listen the four people it's a small audience
but i got you know but it's gross exactly,
But it will grow.
You know what's hysterical to me? I went to the Hawaii Writers Conference.
That's my version of success. Like somebody just decides to pay for me to fly
(59:37):
to Hawaii for the weekend.
I'm like, I think I'm right, y'all.
There's some other metrics about my success. Anyway, so I went there.
And oh, God, I just forgot what I was talking about. Isn't that so sad?
How many people will listen oh yes people will listen people will listen.
(01:00:03):
Oh i know i know i know so i would sit
down with these writers right because they're trying to pitch me their book
ideas and they will bring up the most random podcast that i did like 15 years
ago like you know so it lives forever is what i'm trying to tell you oh god
people like research search me and they come and they're like,
(01:00:25):
oh my God, I totally remember when you talked about blah, blah, blah.
And I'm like, wow, that's some deep stalking you did.
That's great. That does remind me, like, what do you look for in a writer, in a client?
Yeah. I mean, I think I look for a real, I look for someone who is first and
(01:00:46):
foremost passionately inspired by what they're writing about.
I look to see like, why are you writing this, right? Why are you writing this?
Because I know that the why is going to have implications for how long they've
been at it, for how passionate they're going to present themselves about it.
Like if you're super inspired by what you're writing, other people catch that
(01:01:10):
enthusiasm and inspiration off of you.
You cannot help but talk about it in all kinds of ways and at all times.
And so that type of thing means that you are in relationship with other people
who are talking about this with you, which is what the beginning of a platform.
I look for someone who is incredibly interested in how the words lay on the page.
(01:01:36):
I look for people who are interested in the craft of writing,
who are interested in improving constantly and communicating what they they
have been inspired to communicate.
That's my Goosey Lucy answer. All right. That's my, that's my spiritual answer.
I love that. I don't know.
(01:01:58):
Thank you so much, Charisse. I have a thousand other questions,
but I know we have to go. It was really great.
We still have part two. I know. There you go.
Our second season. We'll ask you back.
We have one. We have one technological request.
Oh, yeah. You log off. we had a little
(01:02:19):
snafu the other day if you need to log
off so do i wait no no don't log
off okay so when we end the call if you
just keep the browser up for like five minutes
so we can make sure that the track has uploaded oh
i do see a thing 99 uploading yeah
(01:02:39):
yeah that's so i don't press leave i
just do you just leave she can leave right just not close like don't close your
your browser chrome yeah yeah yeah honey no one closes chrome chrome is on 24
no we had no our our guest yesterday doesn't have chrome so that was i don't know who that person is.
(01:03:03):
But you know they probably have an aol account
too like what's going on like yeah when you
said that this works best with chrome i was like well we had
never come across that before until yesterday so that was important why we said
that okay all right well thank you so much and i'll see you at a brearley thing
(01:03:24):
hopefully soon i know it's so exciting okay cool okay maybe i don't know i don't know All right.
Thanks, Charisse. It's great to see you guys.
Okay. Bye-bye. Live your success.
Thank you so much. That's very sweet.
Okay, bye. Thanks for listening. This has been an episode of How Books Work.
(01:03:48):
Join us on our next episode as we continue to explore publishing.
Music.
Music.
(00:05):
How Books Work, Real Talk with editors, agents, and publishing insiders.
Hosted by writers Julie Seitao and Alice Robb.
Cherise Fisher began her career in publishing as the assistant to the editor-in-chief
of Dell Publishing a month after graduating from Yale University.
Over the course of her 25-year career as an acquiring editor at Simon & Schuster
(00:30):
and the editor-in-chief of Plume,
an imprint of Penguin Random House, She has edited and published several national
best-selling and award-winning authors, including George Lopez,
Nelson George, Victoria Christopher Murray, Bill Wright, and Tony Parsons.
She represents several high-profile authors, including New York Times best-selling
(00:52):
authors Sadiqa Johnson and Tia Williams.
It's our pleasure to have Charisse on the show with us today.
We're so excited to have you on. Thank you for inviting me.
Yeah, I mean, the thought process behind this, just as a little background,
was that we feel like it's such an opaque industry, publishing,
(01:13):
nonfiction writers especially.
There's quite a few fiction podcasts out there, but I feel like for nonfiction, the industry,
there's such high barriers to entry, and there's so much writers don't know,
and there's so much that goes on behind the scenes in publishing houses that
is just, you know, sort of leveled the playing field.
(01:34):
So we felt like this was a really good opportunity to talk to people who've
been on the inside about what's really happening.
And, you know, sort of, I mean, it's interesting when you said that there are
so many people that there is this sort of lack of transparency,
and there's so many things that nonfiction writers don't know.
And actually, the actual truth is there's so many things that editors don't know.
(01:58):
I learned that when I became the editor-in-chief of Plume.
I was not a publisher, but I sat in rooms where my publisher was.
I understood and heard conversations that were had about books,
about what kind of books receive what kind of support.
Which I had never known, you know, as an editor. And I was an editor for a very long time.
(02:22):
So there's transparency all along. And the actual real truth is that the most
experienced people in publishing are sort of engaged in things that they know
have worked before. But they don't know what they're doing either.
We're all kind of doing our best. I feel like that's like when you're a kid
and you find out your parents don't know everything.
(02:44):
Thing it's sort of that like shocking realization
that maybe you could talk
I mean I don't mean to jump right in I think we were going to do a bio
but maybe maybe you could maybe you could talk about what you mean exactly like
when you were in these meetings and what they didn't know yeah I mean I think
that you as a writer have this expectation that the book that you have worked worked on,
(03:13):
poured the blood, the sweat, the tears into is going to be put in the hands
of a set of professionals who know exactly what to do.
And they don't actually. They have a lot of experience on what has worked before.
But I think you would all agree with me that our culture is moving so quickly
(03:36):
and changing so quickly that what has worked yesterday is not going to necessarily
work for today and definitely won't necessarily work for tomorrow,
which kind of puts us into one of the most important qualities of a nonfiction
writer is their own relationship with their audience and their own grasp of
(04:00):
who their audience is and what their audience is interested in, if that makes sense.
Because you're actually closer to what your audience reads,
what your audience listens to, you're actually closer to them than a publisher is, right?
So I think that's a big something I didn't know.
(04:24):
That's a big factor of it. I know you've been in publishing for 25 years.
Is that right? 600 years.
It's actually not 25. I think I'm going to my 30th college reunion next year.
No yes 30 i don't know i'm not responsible,
(04:51):
who cares i'm not responsible you have a lot of
experience but yeah i mean it's yeah 1994 is that 30 years or 40 years 30 years
anyway a long time yes a long time so you must have seen i mean you You must
have really seen things kind of evolve on the ground, right?
(05:11):
And you've been in all different, I mean, you've been an editor and now you're an agent, right?
What are your, I guess, I don't know, what inspired you to make the jump from editor to agent?
I had two kids.
Really close to each other. They're 16 months apart. part.
(05:33):
And I think that when you have children, you're really happy to go back to work, right?
So I was happy to go back to work and
to sort of be in a role that was so comfortable for me for so many years.
But then I also loved these kids.
(05:54):
And particularly being an editor-in-chief, as I was at the time,
you spend a lot of time managing other people. So I had all these babies you the work. Hello.
And babies at home.
Who literally shared DNA with me. And then I had babies at work, which was also fine.
I mean, I liked managing people, but I was a step away from the book.
(06:17):
I acquired books and I edited books, but my primary job was to make sure that
the people who worked for me were acquiring books and selling books.
And so I spent a lot of time reading for other people and helping other people
who make decisions and being in those rooms being like, oh, this marketing budget,
(06:38):
I think we're going to get out 20,000 copies of this book. And so the marketing budget is this.
This book is our lead title. I mean, these are decisions that are made like
a year before the book is.
Sometimes before a book is even delivered, they're making a decision about how
many copies they think that they're going to get out, right?
So I'm in these meetings, but I'm away from the stuff that geeks me out,
(07:03):
which is to open up a page and read some words and love them and try to move
them around like the best puzzle you've ever made so that they could be even more impactful.
Like that sort of day-to-day editing and that day-to-day advocacy for something
that actually spoke to my soul on a very individual and sincere and authentic
(07:26):
way was something that I was doing less. Yes. Right.
So what I love about publishing was not something that I was doing every day.
If you're going to leave your babies at home to monitor babies at work,
you should really love what you're doing at work.
And I just felt a little estranged. So I decided to,
(07:47):
leave that job so I could be an editor again, an executive editor or something,
you know, but I wanted to just be someone who was responsible for my own titles
and for my own lift again.
And while I was interviewing with other publishers, one of my clients,
her name is Sadiqa Johnson, she's now a client.
(08:07):
At the time, she was somebody who her novel had been submitted to me.
I knew that I was on my way out, so I turned it down. and she actually DM'd
me on Facebook, which is nothing we would ever suggest a writer to do.
But she DM'd me on Facebook and she asked me if I'd be willing to edit it,
(08:27):
if she could pay me to be a freelance editor because she and her husband had
decided to self-publish the book.
Anyway, I ended up doing this freelance job because, well, whatever, why not?
And I remember the novel and I liked the novel and she was so sincere and I
felt like she had a real shot of doing well with this book, which she ended up doing.
(08:49):
She self-published, she did really well with it because she was absolutely relentless
with selling it, with getting publicity attention, with getting awards.
She was absolutely relentless.
And so when she wrote her second book for her publishing company,
I said, you know, I think we should try and get you an agent. Jen.
And she was like, okay, I'm game. She had been heartbroken by that process, right?
(09:14):
Because she'd written this novel, that first one, which was called Love in a Carry-On Bag.
And her agent had submitted everywhere and she'd gotten close,
close, close, but never got that deal, right?
So she was pretty heartbroken by the process of getting a publisher,
one of the major five or the big five, if there's still five left, I think there are.
(09:34):
And so she just was like, fine, but
you know what like nobody knows my book as
well as you nobody knows my writing as well as you and no one is as great an
advocate for me no one's greater than you in terms of an advocate for my book
so I think you should be my agent I was like so I shared her novel with a.
(09:59):
Agent named Wendy Sherman, who I had done a lot of work with,
who I trusted a lot, who I knew to be an amazing advocate for her authors.
I said to her, listen, I freelance edited her first book. This is how it did.
This is her second book, which I think is fantastic. And I think you should consider it.
(10:19):
And she read it in like three days. And she called me back and said, this is amazing.
And I think you should co-agent it with me.
And I was like, well, but okay
you know at some point if like the universe is
sending you several messages you kind of have to listen so
I was like fine but even then like I represented
(10:41):
Sadiqa and I sold two books first first attempted agenting I sold two books
a two book deal to Saint Martins but I was still not totally in it I was still
freelance editing but then I got another author and then I I got another author
and then here we are eight years later.
(11:01):
Can we like, I want to backtrack and just ask you about the beginning,
even, you know, to your journey to being an editor in chief,
how you, cause we kind of went backwards,
but yeah, tell us how you first got into it all. Into publishing. Yeah.
Well, I went to this amazing school.
(11:22):
I went to an amazing school for girls called the Brearley school.
You know, This is a story about the old girls' network, right?
Because there's an old boys' network, and there should be an old girls' network.
Anyway, I'm in college, and funny enough, I came across, in an effort to get
an author to come to campus to speak, I came across what a literary agent is.
(11:45):
This is when I'm literally 19.
I'd never heard of a literary agent. Let's go back even further. there.
I always loved writing and I loved editing and I loved being bossy.
And I thought that I was going to be a magazine editor because magazine editors
were like sexy and glamorous.
And I kind of had somehow, I don't know why I had an image of what that was,
(12:08):
but I had an image of what that was.
And so for, in the school that I went to, they have a senior project,
which means that like, Like for the listeners who don't know,
it means that after you get into your spring semester,
your senior year, you are allowed to do sort of independent study or internships.
(12:29):
You sort of create this hodgepodge of things that you're really interested in
and a really smart thing that the school does.
So part of my senior project was to intern at a magazine. So I'm like a magazine editor.
Then when I'm in college, I come across this job called literary agent,
which I thought, like, what is that?
(12:50):
And so I figured, well, oh, wow, there's a whole world of people who are involved in publishing.
Never knew it. I read a book my whole life. I don't know where I thought they
came from. I don't remember my mother ever taking me to a bookstore.
I'm pretty sure I went to the library. But I really have a sense of like,
oh, there is a place where these things are printed and there are people who
(13:13):
copyedited it and there are other people who just, I had no knowledge of that.
But this introduction to a literary agent opened this world to me.
So I think it was my junior year.
Maybe it was my, oh, it must have been my senior year. I decided to go to,
like, you know, the school had, my college had some sort of like career office. this.
(13:33):
They had binders back in those days where they had turn chip programs,
which is like you use your spring break to work in an industry for those two
weeks. You follow people around for free for two weeks.
So I opened this up and I looked at publishing and there was a job opening and
(13:54):
there There was an opportunity to be an extern for a spring break at Bantam.
And I applied for it. Well, little did I know I was applying to work for a girl,
a girl, a woman who actually went to the same school that I did.
And she saw my resume and she was just like, what? She's bring her in. And I didn't know her.
(14:19):
I think that Linda is probably four or five years older than me.
So I didn't really know her, but she saw my school on the resume and she was like, bring her in.
And so I went and I worked for her for two weeks and she called the human resources
department at Banton Double Day Dell. And she says, listen, I have an intern here.
(14:42):
She's been working for me for two weeks. She's absolutely amazing.
You guys absolutely need to interview her for a long-term position when she graduates from school.
And so they interviewed me, and I got a job. Old Girls Network.
We like that. So amazing.
Yeah. I love that. And so you worked your way up as an editor. Yes.
(15:03):
My parent job was as the assistant to the editor-in-chief. And I worked for
her for about two years as her assistant.
And then I became her assistant editor. And then I became an associate editor.
And then I moved to Simon & Schuster. And I went from associate editor there to senior editor there.
(15:24):
And then I got the call to be editor-in-chief of Plume. So.
It's so it's so interesting, I think, from a writer's perspective,
knowing how those conversations are.
I mean, you mentioned it briefly, but I'd love you to expand on,
you know, you're you're deciding a year in advance often before you've even
seen a manuscript, you know, what the print run will be, what the publicity
(15:47):
budget will be. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?
I mean, that insight is is hugely beneficial. official. Yeah.
I mean, I think the publishing has this really, you know, they project themselves
as like cultural institutions when in fact they're quite, they're very much businesses, right?
So we're not selling soap or watches.
(16:08):
We're selling books and each book has this individual opportunity to be something.
But at the end of the day, if you don't sell books as a publisher, you're not in business.
So they're also, publishing is also an industry that operates on a very thin profit margin, right?
There's not a lot of profit per book.
(16:30):
So how publishers make money is by publishing an array of books.
And most publishers don't really make money until they have a backlist.
That's why you see publishers buying other publishers.
They're actually buying buying their backlist, right?
Meaning books that are technically more than six months old,
(16:50):
but they could be 20 years old. They could be 10 years old.
Those books that are classics that people are always going to buy,
that's what a publishing company builds their business on, right?
Because they know there's some expectations about how those sales are going
to go. So a book is acquired.
When a book is acquired by a publisher,
(17:12):
they are assuming certain things about how the book will sell based on what
books that are similar to it have sold, right?
The so-called comp titles, which people hate to talk about, but it's actually
the whole financial foundation of any publishing company.
(17:33):
So you go in as an editor, right? You go in and you say, my book is going to sell like this book.
My book X is going to sell like my book Y because book X sold like this.
My book X is going to sell like book Y because this is what they have in common.
But my book Y is going to sell even more because they have 60,000 people,
(17:58):
60,000 followers on Instagram who they can reach.
Whatever, right? I mean, there's a business argument.
This is what I'm trying to say. There's a business argument made for every book
that is completely separate from the quality of the book itself.
And so you acquire
the book according to those assumptions you pay in advance right
so let's say seven
(18:21):
nine eight months later this book is
scheduled for the next nine or ten months and there are people sitting in the
room with all of these acquisition pnls on there saying well when we bought
this book we assumed that we were going to be able to ship 20 000 copies of
this book and we paid X amount of money for it.
(18:43):
So we better sell 20,000 copies. I'm making up a number, right?
But sometimes you say, we need to sell 20,000, but let's tell our sales force
to project to the outside world,
meaning booksellers, that we're going to print 50,000. It's all a game, right?
(19:04):
We're going to tell them that we're going to print 50,000.
It's all a game. We're going to to tell them that we're going to print 50 so
that they're like, oh, 50, maybe let's take a really better look at this.
Let's take a closer look at what this means, what this book is.
Oh, all right. Well, they're saying 50.
(19:24):
So they probably, so I don't know, I guess we'll take 10.
This one bookseller is like, I guess we'll take 10.
We'll roll the dice on taking five, says another another bookseller will roll the dice on taking 15.
Or then you have somebody like Target. It's like, this book is totally not for us. Goodbye.
Thank you. Or you have a place like Costco, which is like, this doesn't have anything for us.
(19:48):
Or you have a place like Costco and it says, oh, this is kind of cool.
Yeah, let's see. I think this would be great for our clientele.
So there's all of this back and forth bargaining about how many booksellers
are going to actually order.
But it starts with a publisher looking at that acquisition P&L,
(20:10):
knowing what they need to make in order to feel comfortable,
and devising a publishing plan around what their expectations are about how the book will perform.
Now, having said that, which sounds so almost defeating, right?
Like, oh, so they made a decision about my book way before they even read a
(20:30):
copy. That that may sound defeating.
There's always the thing about publishing that is so addictive.
This is what appeals to the gamblers in us.
Is that they might read a book that they absolutely fall in love with.
Then there's a buzz inside the publishing company. Yeah, but did you actually
read it? It's really very good.
And it's actually more like this. And it's actually more like that.
(20:53):
And then you might have somebody in the sales force or in the marketing department
that becomes a particular fan of that book.
And then the publisher decides, oh my God, we actually have something that the
the read actually delivers.
So let's pay a little bit more attention. That's what they call a makebook in publishing.
It's this one title that becomes something that they love and adore individually,
(21:17):
that they give a little extra push, not because what's on paper is what they
have to push, but because there's a little bit of a love for it, right?
And there's also those titles that that for
some whatever reason some grand alignment of
planets and stars gets this like publicity break
that's crazy or you know oprah
(21:40):
decides to oprah you know why i said that out loud on this podcast i'm probably
going to disappear like say say somebody like alice walker like bumps into this
randomly this galley and decides oh wow maybe i will give it a quote So then people are like, wait.
So there's all these little points where a book can grab extra attention,
(22:02):
which is not in the hands of someone who a year ago made a decision about it.
And that year ago decision is an estimate.
So that year ago decision about the numbers and about the marketing closet,
there's always that opportunity for magic to happen.
There's always those reviews that come in early, that come in amazing,
that people are like, oh, wait a second. And then you have these books that
(22:27):
nobody expected to be amazing bestsellers that become that.
And that's, that's what keeps us, what is, you know, there's that psychological
term where I get term, but like, you know, if they zap you sometimes,
but not all of the time, like if they zap you with pleasure,
sometimes, but not all the time, you keep trying to get zapped,
(22:47):
even though you might get zapped.
You know what I'm talking about. I hope we all talked.
I'm not making that up. That was Psych 101 in freshman year.
I think I read that study. Yeah. Okay, from a very technical perspective,
I'm just curious, when do the bookstellers start putting in those orders?
(23:12):
Is it about, you know, like six months before or like when do they, okay.
It's about six months before. So here, I'm going to give you some show and tell.
So this is, is this backwards? Do you see it backwards? Did you see it? No, I see it.
Okay. So this novel, A Love Song for Ricky Wilde, is amazing.
(23:33):
One of my clients, this book comes out in February.
In February. February two months ago, I had a meeting with the publisher who
told me what the first print is,
because two months before that, they had gone out to publishers and I mean,
to booksellers and based on the sale of her previous book,
(23:54):
Seven Days in June, they had estimates for what the book would be.
And so yeah so fair so yeah
two months ago was what october yeah
they set the first print because they had to but i
think that they told the booksellers back
nine months ago like oh we're going to print a hundred thousand copies of the
(24:15):
book and they said they are shipping a lot but not a hundred thousand so i knew
that that was all a game in fact probably on the back of this galley it says
something like 100 000 copy first printing so if everyone's inflating those numbers,
do the booksellers must know that it's all just sort of a gas and yeah they do.
(24:38):
We all lie to each other we pretend we're not it's like dating i mean it's just
i think that there's a difference like i think that publishers know well it's
probably not going to be a hundred thousand but they are positioning it as their
major lead book so we should pay attention,
and if they're telling me if they're
(25:00):
telling me barnes and noble a hundred thousand they're also telling
target a hundred thousand back in
the day they were also telling you know
borders a hundred thousand so i don't want to be the one who's
like not player in this game yeah
and then i wanted to go back to something you said about
how you know publishers are operating on
(25:22):
such a thin margin yeah as writers you
hear so many statistics about how you know how so few books earn out and yes
books lose money and i guess i wanted to ask like is that true and can an author
survive losing a lot of money yeah so i don't think that that's true i hear
that quote all the time and it's actually not really true.
(25:44):
Because what most books, the actual truth is that most books do not earn out
of their advance within the first two years of the book's life.
Most books do not earn out of their advance. But the way P&Ls work, it is very possible to.
(26:05):
For a publisher to make a profit on a book that does not earn out.
It is very possible because let's say, I actually teach a whole class on this.
I'm not going to bore you guys with it because I teach a class at City College
in the fall and we have a whole P&L discussion and these poor English majors
are like, why is she telling us all of this?
Then they get it, right? Because it's a business.
(26:28):
But basically there's a number in every P&L and a publisher,
let's say, would like to make a 30% rate of return on every single title.
But if they make a 10% rate of return, they're still making money.
If they make a 15%, they're still making money.
(26:49):
If the book earns out, they're probably going to earn like that 30 that they
want to, but they're still making money.
So that's not that the book is losing money.
Books don't actually lose money, but the author may not earn back their advance.
So the author might get an advance.
I'm going to make up a number, 10,000.
(27:11):
And that might be all they get from the book.
Because it takes a long time for that money to earn out so that they start making additional royalties.
But the publisher is making a fair amount of money.
And then, like I always said, there's that time when you've paid $50,000 as an advance for a book.
(27:35):
You expect to sell 12,000 copies.
And then, oh my God, why is everybody reading this? And you end up selling 700,000
copies. That's extreme.
But you end up selling so much more that that one title is making so much money
that the other books are kind of all lifted with it.
(27:57):
The other question you asked me was, what does not earning out on their advance,
how does that affect an author?
And that's a really important question. And as an agent, I tell my clients all
the time, I'm the type of agent that is interested in your career growing. growing.
(28:20):
I'm not interested in selling one particular book.
All of my clients are people who are going to write several books.
If I have a client and I don't usually, who just has one book in them,
yeah, get whatever advance you can get, right?
But if you're somebody who wants to continue writing and wants to develop that
(28:40):
as your career, I think that it's good for your P&Ls at at the end of the day,
your profit and loss statements at the end of the day to look really good.
Which is not to say, oh, I didn't earn out on my $10,000 advance and so I'm
not gonna get another publishing deal. Yeah, you might.
But if you don't earn out on a $600,000 advance, no one's gonna give you another $600,000 advance.
(29:09):
Yeah, I mean, that's so hard because a lot of agents, obviously,
you guys are paid off commission.
So you're motivated to get as big in advance. I mean, and the system is set
up so that, you know, auctions or whatever preempts, you know, you're all trying.
I mean, and who would want to turn down money, right?
Especially when the chance of getting royalties is so low.
(29:31):
This is your one chance to make money. So how do you balance that?
Because I think that is something that some of us have to contend with.
You say, don't ask for the big number. Let's keep it lower.
It's also like not believing in yourself.
(29:52):
It's confusing. Yeah. I mean, here's how I look at it. I love sending people royalty checks.
I love sending people royalty checks. I think that, yes, it's very easy to think,
oh, the advance is the only money I'm going to get, so let me get as much.
That's the wrong way of thinking about it for me, right? Right.
Let's look for a really good partner for this book who is going to publish it,
(30:16):
who is aligned with my vision for the book and is going to put a lot in with
an enormous amount of experience with books like mine,
who is going to put a lot into it so that the book's actual success,
so that the book actually performs well.
And so that I do have the opportunity to earn more money.
The opportunity to earn more money.
(30:39):
Perfect example. I have a book. I don't have a copy of it here.
I have a book coming out in March called Disappointing Affirmations.
Hilarious book. It's like a book. It sort of looks like this fake self-help
book, and it's based on an Instagram page called Disappointing Affirmations.
Now, this guy, his name is Dave Janowski. basically he started this page in
(31:03):
like June, 2022, right? Is that right? Yeah.
What year are we in? He started this page in June 22 as kind of a lark.
It was like a hobby and he started doing it and it just got a lot of traction.
I think I met him like around August and he had a hundred thousand followers
on Instagram, which in three months is pretty impressive with like memes that are just funny.
(31:27):
One meme is like, unfollow your dream or have a panic attack.
You deserved it. Disappointing affirmations.
I met him in August and I was like, wow, this is great. There were some editors who saw his page.
I had a couple of editors who I knew were ready for it. I sent it to a couple
more. We had this auction before and then I sent it to several.
(31:50):
I started getting all that bubbly, all those people like, I'm interested.
I want to meet with him. I want to talk with him. I want And I said,
okay, let's stop everything.
And let's, for Dave, I said, I want you to write a list of things.
What you're actually looking for in a publisher and what you're actually looking
for with a publishing experience and what do you want for this book?
(32:11):
And things that he wrote down were things like, I want it to be a hardcover
that looks like a fake book.
I want it to be with a publishing company that can do different things like
a calendar or note cards or whatever.
I want a publisher that can do that. I want a publisher that has,
the editor has a really great sense of of humor that I can connect to.
(32:33):
I want a publisher that respects the fact that I have grown this page and that
I have other pages, right?
So he wrote this list before we even had an auction and he sent it to me and
I was like, we're not going to discuss this anymore, but this is the list, right?
So anyway, auction, offers, it was nice.
And there was like a $20,000 difference difference between one publisher and another.
(32:57):
The publisher that was $20,000 less was one that I thought matched his criteria much better.
And I reminded him of that because of course you get this thing like,
oh, this is a $20,000 difference.
Obviously I should go with them. And I was like, Like, let's go back to that
(33:18):
list about what you ideally wanted.
And so he did. And I managed to let them creep up from that.
I closed that $20,000 gap a little bit.
But significantly, the publisher who ultimately got him did have a hardcover in mind.
And hardcovers are priced higher than trade paperback originals.
(33:40):
And so the numbers were different. but his potential to earn out on that advance was better.
So you asked me how I balance it. I balance it because I don't think people
should think about advances as the only thing they're going to get.
I think people should think about the publisher doing the best job that they
can do and prioritize that so that the book has its best opportunity to earn
(34:03):
back the advance so they can continue to earn money.
Okay. I had one follow-up on that question. Does the advance correlate with
the publicity push since they've already invested in the front end?
Yeah. I mean, I think that there are a lot of agents who believe that the higher
the advance is, the more likely the company is going to pay attention to the book.
(34:28):
That is true 62% of the times, right?
And advance is always something thing that a publisher can write off at the end of the year.
So big advance doesn't necessarily mean big push. It doesn't.
Big push is often about what's the opportunity that's in the book itself.
(34:53):
So I'll go back to the example of Tia Williams. Her advance was not what it should have been.
The advance was not what it should have been because
there was because of the competition because of how
the auction worked whatever but we had an editor who absolutely loved the book
(35:14):
we had a publishing company that was trying to sort of firm up their status
with women's commercial fiction and we went with them and.
People started reading the book and they started loving it and they started
realizing, wait a minute, Tia is super, uber. She was a magazine writer for all these years.
(35:36):
She was a beauty editor for Essence, for Cosmo, I think, a couple of others.
Right. So she was very well known in the magazine industry and people just still loved her. Right.
So they were like, oh, I'll put this in front of my book editor.
I'll put this here. I'll put this there. She was also super cute and super endearing.
(35:58):
So she could be in front of a camera very easily. She could do the really podcast.
She had an Instagram that was very like voicey as the people say,
like she had a real strong voice and people really engaged with her.
So then a publicist looks at that woman and all those things that she is offering to them.
(36:21):
That's something that, oh, we can go after that. We can work with that.
Whereas there might be someone who, you know, has a face for radio,
who is like, who doesn't know how to be witty, who's like a genius, right?
Right. Like they wrote this genius book on the history of Harry S. Truman's presidency.
(36:42):
But is there an opportunity to be in People magazine for the man who writes
Harry S. Truman's biography?
Not necessarily. So like so the publicity money starts to shift because there's
an opportunity for us to take advantage of here.
And then, you know, Tia ended up being a Reese Witherspoon pick.
And so then it was like, so there's a lot of opportunity.
(37:06):
Then a lot more money went in that direction because, oh, this is going to get
so much attention, we're going to build on it.
I think that marketing and publicity money follows opportunity,
is what I'm trying to say.
I do think, I think that publishers who spend huge advances on books.
They do so because they think that it is similar to other books that have sold X amount, right?
(37:31):
And so they might, and they have to sell that much because of an auction and
because of ego and whatever else.
They do end up with a big advance. And when you have a big advance,
you're like, oh, we need to do this.
We need to make it like this. But if there is an opportunity there because of
who the author is or what the book is or what the climate of the world is,
then it doesn't necessarily get that publishing and marketing.
(37:55):
If that makes sense. Yeah. Did you ever see as an editor, I guess it's kind
of a sad question, but like the opposite of like a make book,
like say a publisher really splashes. Oh, a hundred times.
Oh yeah. Oh, absolutely.
I don't even want to mention anybody's name because it's so sad,
(38:15):
but there are absolutely times when publishers have paid an enormous amount
of money and they think that there's big fanfare and people do everything that they can.
And everything that they expect it to.
And wait, nobody cares. Nobody gives a rat's tail.
That's going to say something else. And it's disappointing. Here's an example.
(38:37):
I have no idea the business of this book besides the numbers that I have asked
for on BookScan, But Jada Pinkett Smith, the wife of Will Smith, she wrote a memoir.
She was in every single media opportunity. She was on the Today Show,
I'm pretty sure. She was everywhere.
(38:59):
I heard her on Fresh Air.
You heard her everywhere. You heard her every single where.
I have no idea how much they paid for that book, but I know that that book did not sell very well.
You know, and you're like, why didn't this book sell well?
Well, some people feel that because she was overexposed in the media,
(39:22):
like there was so much information that was leaked out during the publicity
tour that people were like, well, I guess I got the whole book.
Like, what else do I need?
Right. Some people felt that way. Some people know that Jada Pinkett Smith wasn't
particularly well liked at that moment that her book came out.
You know, not particularly relatable, not particularly whatever.
(39:46):
And so it just, so it was disappointing to people that there,
there are endless books that I could name that did not match up with its expectation,
either in the marketing, the publicity of it, you know, based on what it got in terms of publicity,
or even based on what a publisher were paid thinking they were going to be really successful.
(40:10):
There have definitely been a lot of books that fell far short.
I have a two-part question, I guess, with that. You said that it did not sell well.
So are there benchmarks for what sells well for nonfiction?
Because that's mostly what we're focused on in fiction, number one.
(40:32):
Number two, my understanding is, going back to advances and P&Ls that,
first of all, P&Ls are like very proprietary.
No one knows what they are per the different publishing houses of their own and all that.
And that also nobody really knows exactly what an advance is or if it if it,
you know, sold out the advance or whatever, unless you're at that publishing
(40:53):
house and you're, you know, you're going to stay there and all of that. So I just curious.
What's the question you're asking? Oh, sorry. So so my question is,
I guess that's like a comment.
My question is, are there, since you, if you don't know what the advance is
and if it's sold out and stuff, are there benchmarks for what it means when
(41:14):
you say it did not sell well?
I mean, a celebrity memoir, I'm sure has a standard, but does also a history
book or a memoir, all that.
Yeah, I think that's a really good question. Or a women's history book.
Or a women's history book, yeah. Or the department stores.
Exactly. hopefully I think that.
(41:35):
That this is a question that every single author I've ever worked with have
asked me, like, what would make my book a success?
And what I have learned to tell them is that there are several metrics of success, which is true.
Like it's me, not, it's not me bullshitting. It's actually true.
Like what is successful to you as the author might be one thing.
(41:57):
What is successful to me as an editor might be another thing.
What is successful to a sales rep at Barnes and Noble is another thing, right?
So there are so many different metrics of success that it's hard to point out one thing.
Even like I said, oh, the book didn't earn out of its advance.
Well, most books don't. So that's not really a metric of success.
(42:19):
It could certainly, one could say, oh, this book earned out.
So it was successful. It was successful according to that metric, right?
So there is no one number.
When I say that the Jada Pinkett Smith memoir was not as successful as they expected.
(42:43):
Now, granted, I remember looking up the numbers for my class when I was teaching
my class because I wanted to juxtapose the Britney Spears book,
which sold like a million copies its first week out, right? Wow. Did it really?
Yeah. Wow. Yeah.
Like the same week, I think Jada Pinkett's book sold 2000 copies. Oh my God.
(43:06):
Yeah. So are there books that don't sell 2000 copies in a week?
Yeah, there are, right? So So if I published a book about eating carrots so
that my eyesight would be really fantastic, I would be thrilled that I sold 2,000 copies that week.
(43:27):
If I was a celebrity who had been an actress for over 20 years and married to
the biggest movie star in the world and had X amount of followers on Instagram
and had X amount of people tuning in to my YouTube show every week.
Would 2,000 copies be what I expect to make per week?
(43:48):
That's literally 2,000 people. That's not even like a stadium full of people who bought her book.
I don't even know what 2,000 looks like, but it's not across the country.
Yeah. So no, there isn't one number, but it's all context because for somebody,
2,000 could be amazing, but for
her and these expectations that we have around it, it's not as amazing.
(44:13):
Did I answer your question? question i mean sort
of i mean i don't
know i you know and right i
mean my advice to anybody is yeah for yourself
what would make my book successful i had a client who wrote this book about
(44:33):
blended families and she was thinking about the new york times bestseller list
which people often think about it's a real bullshit way of thinking about success
for me you shouldn't judge judge yourself on the success of that book.
I know that as an editor, for me, success would be that my books were in print.
I remember I did a book years ago called Itsy Bitsy Yoga, which is yoga positions
(44:57):
you put your baby in to help them go to sleep, to help them digest.
And it was so cute. And I edited this book and I had a baby maybe 10 years later.
And do you know somebody bought it for me as a gift
this book and I was like oh
(45:19):
my god this is everything to me this that
was everything to me because she didn't go
and look at the acknowledgments and be like Cherise actually
has copies of this book in her house signed
by the author she didn't think about that she was just like wow this is a great
book to give to a new mom that was success to me I had a client who who she
(45:40):
did this co-parenting book and she would get piles of DMs like your book really helped me, you know?
And so when she had her own vision about what her book could be in the world,
it was, this is a book that I want to do to inspire and shift the culture into
thinking about blended families in a different way.
(46:02):
And even the two, three, four, five, six people who did that for for her, you know, was a success.
I mean, most authors I know say, you know, they just want their book to be successful
enough that they can write another book.
I mean, I feel that way. Yeah.
You know, that's what most of us feel, I think. Yeah. You know,
(46:25):
just to have... I think that's a really wonderful metric.
Yeah, I think that's a really wonderful metric because then you have a little bit more...
There's a lot of room for that. There's a lot of room for that.
Although that does speak to asking for a lower advance, potentially.
You don't ever ask for a lower advance.
You never ask for a lower advance.
(46:47):
But you look at advances in a full, a more holistic way than the actual number.
You look at the advance for the company that's offering it. You know,
a company like Beacon in Boston, an amazing publisher, but small,
non-profit, I think they're not so profit.
They don't really give advances more than $10,000, right?
(47:09):
So if they tell you, oh, we're going to offer you $15,000 on it,
they feel really passionate about it.
But if you go to Random House with a $15,000 advance, that's just a Tuesday.
Like that means nothing to a Random House publisher, but to someplace like Beacon,
it means a lot, you know? So there's context for everything.
(47:29):
We need to look beyond advances, and we need to think about the full,
look at these books holistically, look at these publishers.
You know, I don't, all of my clients speak to Ed Luthier at a publishing company
before I start an auction, because I want them to get a sense of like,
who is going to be advocating for me?
I think I do that because I was an editor for so long. I know how important editors are.
(47:54):
And so I know how important the relationship between an editor and an author
is, the creative relationship.
So I always have them have that conversation.
I think that that's a really important thing to do for a writer.
I like the idea of also doing that before you hear what numbers they're offering,
because otherwise I feel like you just convince yourself.
(48:17):
Absolutely. Wendy always says to me, Wendy Sherman is like, she's so like by
Yento or something, but she'll say things like, you know, when you're dating,
you don't fall in love with the man. You fall in love with the whole package.
So you fall in love with the man, maybe he has the right shade of hair,
the right fullness of a mustache or a beard. Maybe he's the right height.
(48:42):
But if he's living in his mother's basement, that's like a minus on his path. Right.
You're living in your mom's basement or you find a man who, you know,
he's a doctor and he, you know, has this really successful practice,
but he's like four foot nine.
(49:02):
I shouldn't be sized this like this, but you know what I mean?
Like someone who's 4'11", I agree.
But like so do you think to myself you know
oh but he is like this passionate doctor who's changing people's
lives that raises it you know you it's a package you got to look at the whole
(49:24):
package that's my takeaway for y'all look at the whole i guess one i know we
have to wrap soon this is such an amazing conversation i just want to thank
you but peppering you i know i'm like Can I keep you? I know. I guess.
And I want to hear so much about you guys. I'm so sorry. No, no. This is the point.
(49:46):
We're boring. We want to hear about you guys.
Well, one thing I want to ask is, you know, what do you think?
Okay. So the relationship between writers and agents and also writers and editors
is, you know, also can be confusing. thing.
What do you, do you have advice for what writers should look at when they're considering agents?
(50:12):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, I was asked this question recently with a client of mine.
We were both on a panel together and I said, your agent is like your spouse
and your editor is the lover that you've taken on. Okay.
Meaning that your, your agent is is with you for the duration, ideally.
(50:34):
Your agent is with you for the duration, and the two of you are looking out
at the world together because you have unified.
Your interests collide, like you have the same interests and you have the same
priorities because you're looking at the world together, which is what spouses
are supposed to do, right?
They're in a house looking out at the world together.
(50:56):
Your lover, which is your editor, is someone who's actually betrothed to another,
which is the publishing company.
And so they love you and they adore you and you guys have this hot spice between
you, but they actually work for somebody else, not for you.
(51:16):
So what you're thinking about for an agent, number one, well,
number one is that you have to understand what you are looking for in terms of a spouse.
Like what is the most important quality of a person who I'm thinking long-term with?
If I am a writer who wants someone who is ruthless, who will go into a publishing
(51:40):
company with like blood dripping from their lips and say, this author needs
this or we're walking out of here.
Like if you want that kind of tough guy kind of person, totally legitimate because
you know, like I'm in it for the money, honey.
And so go and get me a check, daddy. Like, you know, you might want that.
Or you might need the spouse who like brings you a cup of tea every night just
(52:05):
so that you could feel comfortable, right?
You might be the kind of writer that really needs someone who is going to like
give you kisses and roses and support you in that kind of loving way,
you know, or you might want somebody who, you know, is steady,
really experienced and gives you some solid advice, right?
(52:25):
So you first have to understand, like, do I want a barracuda?
Do I want a teddy bear? Do I want mama bear?
Do I want somebody who's what do I want for myself? What do I need for myself
in the kind of career that I'm getting?
So you have to understand that about yourself and look for someone with those qualities.
You have to understand, I think that the key element between you and an agent is trust.
(52:49):
I trust this person. I think any of my clients will tell you,
Charisse doesn't play about us and she will always tell me the truth.
And I trust her implicitly. I trust her business mind. Let me just toot my own horn.
I trust her business mind. I trust her editorial eye.
I trust that she is there for me 100%. Trust is always key.
(53:13):
What's the purpose of a spouse if you can't trust them, right?
So I think knowing what type of approach they have to the publishing process
is something you have to know about yourself.
And I think trust is what glues it all together. Hmm.
For spells. Did you tell your author what their print run was?
I mean, I know it was really good, so maybe you did, but is that the kind of
(53:36):
thing that, should I ask my agent that?
Yeah, I would tell, you know, it's interesting because Wendy,
who is my amazing, loving partner, my other version, like my kind of specs in
a way, she does not tell her authors that much. much.
And I think that that could be infantilizing. And I want all of my authors to
(53:58):
know the business of their books.
And so I do tell, did I tell Tia?
No, Tia was there. We were in the meeting together. So she heard she was in
the meeting together, but she doesn't care.
She's like, what does that mean? Does that mean something? I'm like, it's good.
I'm okay. I was like, I walked into the Ripped bodice last week and my book wasn't there.
(54:20):
That to her is a big deal, you know, because it's very tangible for her. We got books. Got it.
The books were shipped in there within a week and a half.
I was like, excuse me, do you understand that you have a romance bookshop that
is literally a 10 minute walk from my author's apartment and you don't have
(54:42):
copies? How did that happen?
I don't even want to know about how many copies they're going to order now.
I would like to know how that possibly could have happened.
They're like, okay, shoot, and they figured it out. It was all fixed.
That's awesome. So, I'm going to ask you a question.
(55:02):
Alice, should we ask her final question so we can let Charisse get back to all her amazing authors?
I feel like we've sort of covered it. But yeah, we've been trying to ask all
of our guests for what their one top piece of advice for, I guess, new writers would be.
Although I feel like you could be exempt because you have been a really, some very wise advice.
(55:28):
Yeah, good advice. Up to you. you know, no, you go.
Well, I was going to say that it really, that the answer to that question really
depends on what, who you're describing.
I think that there are people who are beginning the process of writing a book
and their top advice is quite different from someone who was a published author
(55:49):
and quite different from someone who's the first time published author.
So for somebody who is, I'm interested in writing a book, what do I need to
do first? First, I would say, put your butt in the chair and write.
Put your butt in the chair and write. You know, we can have this very intellectual
conversation about you getting an agent and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
(56:11):
An agent doesn't care about you until you're putting something that they're
reading in front of them.
So that's important advice. Put your butt in the chair, develop a discipline to be on this journey.
Develop the discipline to being on the journey of writing because none of this
conversation, this whole conversation about publishing starts with someone who
(56:35):
is inspired to write something.
So we got to keep people in that mode of inspiration.
Yeah, I think all this stuff can be so intimidating that it stops people from
even trying. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yeah.
So I think that's really true. We did hear from a different agent that the nonfiction
market is not doing very well. So I do wonder.
(56:58):
What does that mean? I don't know. The numbers are small. The sales numbers are smaller.
Like you have to sell less to get on the list. Or celebrity memoirs right now.
Yeah. Yeah. There's not a lot. Listen. Everything is hard.
Whatever. For some people, getting out of the bed is hard.
I don't know. I just feel like, are the numbers smaller?
(57:23):
There was a point in time of, let's call it the, I don't know,
the 80s. I mean, I was alive, but I wasn't in publishing.
So let's go to the 90s when I wasn't publishing. There was a time in the 90s
where publishers took off a whole week in December and flew to Puerto Rico for sales conference.
And everybody drank. Half of it was about drinking and hooking up more so than
(57:47):
selling books. Nowadays, your sales conference is on Zoom and for a week, right?
Because money just looks different, but money looking different.
People are still reading and people are reading more than ever.
People are like, oh, Facebook, Instagram, blah, blah, blah. What are people
doing on Facebook? They're reading.
(58:08):
They're reading about other people's lives. They're reading about issues.
You look at how social justice in the world has been affected by people being
engaged online and how that feeds the best sellers list.
I mean, I, you know, yeah, we can all sort of reminisce about a time when money
was spent in a kind of reckless way.
(58:31):
I don't think it's more difficult to make a living as a writer today.
I think that it's more difficult in the sense of I have certain responsibilities
for myself and for my work that maybe someone did not have in 1982.
We're going to cry about that. That's 1982. This is 2023.
It just looks different. And if you have an agent over a certain age,
(58:54):
they're going to be all nostalgic about the past.
You can't stay in the past. The future is here.
You can't stay in the past it's very
true well i feel inspired yeah yeah
thank you so much this is so good yeah i think i think this will be so informative
(59:15):
for the three people who might listen the four people it's a small audience
but i got you know but it's gross exactly,
But it will grow.
You know what's hysterical to me? I went to the Hawaii Writers Conference.
That's my version of success. Like somebody just decides to pay for me to fly
(59:37):
to Hawaii for the weekend.
I'm like, I think I'm right, y'all.
There's some other metrics about my success. Anyway, so I went there.
And oh, God, I just forgot what I was talking about. Isn't that so sad?
How many people will listen oh yes people will listen people will listen.
(01:00:03):
Oh i know i know i know so i would sit
down with these writers right because they're trying to pitch me their book
ideas and they will bring up the most random podcast that i did like 15 years
ago like you know so it lives forever is what i'm trying to tell you oh god
people like research search me and they come and they're like,
(01:00:25):
oh my God, I totally remember when you talked about blah, blah, blah.
And I'm like, wow, that's some deep stalking you did.
That's great. That does remind me, like, what do you look for in a writer, in a client?
Yeah. I mean, I think I look for a real, I look for someone who is first and
(01:00:46):
foremost passionately inspired by what they're writing about.
I look to see like, why are you writing this, right? Why are you writing this?
Because I know that the why is going to have implications for how long they've
been at it, for how passionate they're going to present themselves about it.
Like if you're super inspired by what you're writing, other people catch that
(01:01:10):
enthusiasm and inspiration off of you.
You cannot help but talk about it in all kinds of ways and at all times.
And so that type of thing means that you are in relationship with other people
who are talking about this with you, which is what the beginning of a platform.
I look for someone who is incredibly interested in how the words lay on the page.
(01:01:36):
I look for people who are interested in the craft of writing,
who are interested in improving constantly and communicating what they they
have been inspired to communicate.
That's my Goosey Lucy answer. All right. That's my, that's my spiritual answer.
I love that. I don't know.
(01:01:58):
Thank you so much, Charisse. I have a thousand other questions,
but I know we have to go. It was really great.
We still have part two. I know. There you go.
Our second season. We'll ask you back.
We have one. We have one technological request.
Oh, yeah. You log off. we had a little
(01:02:19):
snafu the other day if you need to log
off so do i wait no no don't log
off okay so when we end the call if you
just keep the browser up for like five minutes
so we can make sure that the track has uploaded oh
i do see a thing 99 uploading yeah
(01:02:39):
yeah that's so i don't press leave i
just do you just leave she can leave right just not close like don't close your
your browser chrome yeah yeah yeah honey no one closes chrome chrome is on 24
no we had no our our guest yesterday doesn't have chrome so that was i don't know who that person is.
(01:03:03):
But you know they probably have an aol account
too like what's going on like yeah when you
said that this works best with chrome i was like well we had
never come across that before until yesterday so that was important why we said
that okay all right well thank you so much and i'll see you at a brearley thing
(01:03:24):
hopefully soon i know it's so exciting okay cool okay maybe i don't know i don't know All right.
Thanks, Charisse. It's great to see you guys.
Okay. Bye-bye. Live your success.
Thank you so much. That's very sweet.
Okay, bye. Thanks for listening. This has been an episode of How Books Work.
(01:03:48):
Join us on our next episode as we continue to explore publishing.
Music.
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