The other major development is that it is much easier for authors to self-publish today. The bottom line is that authors that can finagle a contract with a traditional publisher get less and have to promise more, compared to twenty years ago – unless they already have a track record of selling lots of books. They tend to demand ironclad promises to have other organizations promote the book and for authors to commit to buying a certain number of their own books at a discounted rate (but high enough that the publisher makes money on those sales). Traditional publishers (and even literary agents) appear much less willing to take chances – by which I mean putting time and effort into books by authors who are not yet proven money-makers for them. What I didn’t like so much about going with a traditional publisher was the long time it took to turn a completed manuscript into a published book, and the fact that over time they let it go out of print without ever coming out with a paperback version that would be more likely to be assigned as a secondary text in college courses. (Though as I mentioned in passing in another blog post, the marketing effort was effectively suspended within a few weeks of publication since my book was not selling fast enough.) I loved getting the advance (as it helped underwrite my simple lifestyle in Bangladesh for two years), outstanding editorial support (mostly from a man named Ian Jackman), and other quality and value-added services such as marketing, cover design, legal review, and so forth. I received a $20,000 advance (equal to about $34,000 today), of which Joel got 15% and I received the remainder in three installments.īack then, it seemed that publishers were often willing to take a chance on first-time authors with writing ability and a decent idea. Random House outbid three other publishers for the right to publish Give Us Credit (later republished by John Wiley & Sons as Small Loans, Big Dreams). I got my first book contract from Times Books, then a division of Random House, in 1993 with the help of my terrific agent at the time, Joel Fishman. In order to understand a more nuanced and complete response, a little background about the publishing industry (or at least my experience of it) and how it has evolved since the 1990s is in order. The simple answer is that my publisher is Rivertowns Books, though one might also say it is Kindle Direct Publishing, an arm of Amazon.
I have answered the question on marketing in this blog post and I thought I should publish something now on how I came to work with my publisher. Since my book Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind came out, a number of people – most of them authors or aspiring authors – have asked me about my marketing budget and strategy and about how I found and chose my publisher.
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