Author Information
Getting Published
Getting published seems to be a very arbitrary business. The quality of a work isn't necessarily the key - books are successful based on the amount of marketing effort and spend by the publishers. After all, readers don't know how good your book is before they buy it - they've just got the blurb, the front cover, maybe the first couple of paragraphs and, if they're lucky, a recommendation from someone they trust. So publishers go for books which they think are marketable.
It sometimes appears that the only way to be considered by a publisher is to get an agent, who acts as a first filter of quality for publishers. And it's understandable - there's some awful, really bad writing out there. It's expensive for publishers to wade through in the hope of finding hidden gold.
The use of an agent introduces yet another hurdle between the author and the reader, which we find unfortunate and often unnecessary. Having an agent can mean that your slice of the earnings goes down even further, and the price to the reader goes up just a little. The more links in the supply chain, the greater the complexity and the greater the total cost.
Of course, agents can often be handy. If you're up against an unscrupulous publisher, a wily agent can watch out for the contractual traps and get you the best deal possible. If it were me, however, I'd just avoid the unscrupulous publishers.
There are some handy reference sources out there. The ubiquitous Writer's Handbook (click here or ask at your local bookshop for the latest version) has plenty of contact details and some useful tips. The Bookseller magazine gives you a flavour of what drives retailers and publishers - and if you know what makes them tick, you can tailor your submissions more effectively.
Good luck, and if all the big boys turn you down, try Snowbooks - if your writing is suitably fabulous, that is.
A Detailed Look at Our Acquisitions Process
So you want to be published by Snowbooks, eh? Marvellous – thanks for thinking of us. This article is about our acquisitions process: how we make our minds up about what - and who - we’re going to publish.
The Manuscript
The first stage is to submit your manuscript using our submission process:
- Simply send an email to manuscripts@snowbooks.com. No manuscripts submitted in hard copy through the post, from either agents or authors, will be returned.
- Don't feel obliged to write a covering letter. We know how time-consuming they can be, and we'll ignore most of it anyway. Seems a shame to ask you to put so much effort into it. If you do want to mention anything about yourself, please don't attach a separate document - some notes in the body of the email will be fine.
- Attach a single document containing your work. We do not require a synopsis. If you want to score extra points, we would be fascinated to see a blurb, if you can bear to write one - you know, the copy that goes on the back of the book.
- If you are submitting a novel, please send the full work, not just a sample. If you are submitting non-fiction, a proposal, outline or fragment is fine but remember that the more material you can share with us, the easier it is to consider your proposal. You are welcome to write a covering email or to just send without - it's up to you, just so long as it's electronic!
- This document should be saved according to the following naming convention:
date of submission as dd.mm.yy_surname_firstname_title of book.doc
For example:
23.09.04_Doe_John_mynovel.doc
The email itself should be named as follows:
Snowbooks Submission: [authorname] [Book Title]
Easy. If you wonder why we ask for email submissions only, it might help if I tell you the rest of the process:
Once we receive an email at the manuscripts@snowbooks.com address, it is forwarded straight to our submissions database. Submissions are logged and read chronologically. You can imagine that if we accepted submissions by paper or on disc this upsets the process and therefore increases the time taken to process submissions. The important thing is reading the mss, not juggling complex filing systems.
When we review manuscripts, these are the questions we’re asking ourselves:
- Can we make a good case to the retailer for why they should promote it (because without the retailers no one will get a chance to buy the book)? Would we be comfortable explaining to them why they should order it?
- Do we love it enough to invest around £10,000 of our own money and eight months of our working life in it?
- Do we have enough experience of and credibility in this market to give the book a fighting chance?
The Author
When we decide that a manuscript meets our criteria, we contact the author to ask them if they’d like their mss to be published by us. At this stage we have a good long chat with the author to see if they’re the sort of person we want to do business with. I’m not shy of saying it: we founded Snowbooks because we wanted to be happy and proud of what we do. Part of this means that we only deal with people we like. So who are they? People with objectives that are similar to ours. And what are they?
We want to have fun creating the book. We want to enjoy the process of book cover design, editing and typesetting, and want you to enjoy it too. If you feel that the publisher-author relationship is inherently them-and-us, we’re not going to get along. This has to be a partnership.
We want the book to be financially successful. Our business model is based on our knowledge of how retail works. We believe that most readers buy books because of their experience browsing in-store or online, based on cover design, price, and the quality of the first few words that they read when flicking through the book. They also buy what their friends recommend – but they don't buy (in their masses) based on reviews in the media. The most important thing is to get the book in front of readers, hence the importance we place on arranging 3 for 2 promotions for all of our books. So: we are retailer, not media, focussed.
We want to be clever about how we spend our time and money. For example, we would rather spend three months making sure the big retailers will support your book and put money into an in-store poster campaign (which we know will generate sales) than engage in time-consuming and expensive author tours, signings and events that have no guarantee of generating sales. Author tours and readings eat up a lot of time and money but we haven’t seen much evidence that they sell books. In most cases, we don’t arrange those kinds of events.
We want to stick to our values, which are to be nice to people, to be proud of what we do, to be successful and to do things properly. We want to work with people who share these values.
If this makes sense, you’re probably the right sort of author for us. Hooray! So get that submission emailed off to us today...
An Open Rejection Letter
Due to the number of submissions we receive, we find it impossible to give the kind of detailed responses we'd often like. If you're wondering why we didn't accept your submission, please read our Open Rejection Letter.