some questions answered
I recently received an email from Kate P., asking when my latest Thomas Black would be out. Fear not, when my next book is published, I will announce it prominently on this website. I will scream it to the heavens.
The bad news? It’s going to be a while.
Let me explain. Most manuscripts take anywhere from nine months to eighteen months from date of submission to publication date. I have yet to turn in Monica’s Sister. In fact, I’ve yet to complete it, although it should be done in thirty days or so, depending. At that point I will submit it electronically to my agent, who will read it and make a pronouncement of some sort: She likes it; she doesn’t like it; it needs some work; it’s just fine. Then, together, we will decide where to submit it. According to my last contract with them, Ballantine Books has right of first refusal, so they will obviously get the first look.
After the book lands at a publisher and a contract is signed, the editor will begin work. This editor will — within months, never weeks — do what is called a line edit. I will then receive his or her edit and go over the changes and suggested changes. Then another editor, the copy editor, will do the same and I’ll go through the same dance a second time. Later, we get the page proofs from the printer and we read and correct them, mostly for typos. Somewhere along the line the publisher holds one of their quarterly meetings, where the book is presented and the sales force gets their take on it. A cover is commissioned and approved. Somebody writes cover copy. More meetings.
With traditional publishing, all of this takes months.
If we can’t find a deal we like with a traditional publisher, and I rate the chances of that high to awfully high right now, I’ll go electronic from the getgo and the book will be out on Kindle and Nook, etcetera, within a few months.
If anybody has a pricing structure for a new e-book, or ideas about pricing, I would love to hear it. If we go e-book, I’m determined to keep it below ten dollars, but I’m also seriously considering not violating the five dollar barrier. What would you pay for a Kindle version, or Nook, of the latest Thomas Black? I would like to hear your thoughts on this. Please use the comment section so others can see your views.
This reminds me of a critique I got on Amazon for my last book, Cape Disappointment. Somebody wrote that the Kindle price on the book was too high. They more or less implied that I, the author, was greedy. Note to the uninitiated: when dealing with legacy publishers in New York, the author has no say over the price of his or her books, not in any format. The author receives a percentage of the cover price, but the cover price of all editions is dictated by the publisher. This is not true when an author publishes in e-book format and skips the legacy publishing world altogether, a more common occurrence these days than ever before, but one that I haven’t yet pursued.
