Tag Archives: behind the curtain

Package Madness

Oh, the glamorous life of an editor and publisher! The long three-martini lunches! The gala events in glittering penthouses! The hours upon hours spent hunched over a table packing and labeling boxes… …what? Yeah, it’s a lot more of the latter and less of the former, at least at a small publishing house. I spent [...]

More on digital printing and short-run

Remember what I said about digital printing and short-run printing? Yeah, guess what? It’s not just the little presses making use of it. You may have heard of a little outfit called Penguin – well, they’re now using Quad/Graphics to do short-run prints of many of their backlist titles. Take that, traditional supply chain!

A brief guide to queries

I’ve been diving back into the Sea of Slush these past few weeks, and I’ve noticed something interesting. Queries aren’t matching up, for the most part, with samples. I’ve had a few queries that were dynamite, but the samples that accompanied them were sadly disappointing – it’s as though the author used up all their [...]

Behind the Curtain, Part 4: The Contract

In the Behind the Curtain series, we’ve discussed writing your manuscript, pitching it, and getting accepted. What happens next? This is the part where things start getting really mysterious. Even writers who’ve honed their craft for years often have absolutely no idea what happens on the business end of things, or what happens behind the [...]

Behind the Curtain, Part 3: Decisions

Thus far in the Behind the Curtain series, we’ve talked about writing your manuscript, prepping your pitch, and where your pitch goes once you’ve mailed it out. Now it’s time to talk about what you really want to know regarding the submissions process – how decisions are made. Once the slush reader gets to your [...]

Behind the Curtain, Part 2.5: Slush

Before we move on to the next full installment of Behind the Curtain, I thought I’d do a little prep work. You see, the next section is about acceptance and rejection, and how manuscripts get read, sorted, and categorized for acquisition. In order to understand that, though, you need to understand a little bit about [...]

Behind the Curtain, Part 1.5: Revenge of the Manuscript

Okay, I lied. We’re not doing Part 2 yet. It was pointed out to me that there’s some key aspects to the manuscript process that I ignored. Really, they’re more like key aspects of the writer’s psyche: resilience and determination. First, resilience. You have to have it. You have to be willing to accept criticism, [...]

Behind the Curtain, Part 1: The Manuscript

I threatened to do a series of posts demystifying the publishing process. Now I guess I get to follow through on that. But where do I start? When the manuscript is accepted, or perhaps even before that? No better place to start than the beginning, so here we go. Welcome to the first in a [...]