Not Just Words on a Page

Hi friends,

There was some ~~~discourse~~ on twitter this weekend (basically an editor said she feels books under 80k words are hard for her to acquire which ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) and while I’m not going to write today about whether is right or wrong (it’s both! yay publishing!) I talked here, back in 2019!!!!, about word counts and why books are generally certain lengths, and you should read it. To briefly recap, most books, especially novels, are over about 50,000 words because under that books look thin and consumers perceive that as having less value than longer books. There are so many exceptions to this! Don’t @ me! Your book may not, however, automatically be the exception!

I do want to talk about the ways we can remember that books are a hard good that exist in the world and are sold in retail establishments, and not just art. They can be either and both, but either way it matters. Even when you’re still drafting your book, it helps to remember how it will physically come to be.

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It matters if your book has pictures in it. Even just one. Yes, it would be fun to start each chapter in your book with an image. Even if you are producing the images yourself and don’t need to commission an artist, this can change many things about how your book is produced. Simple black and white line art isn’t so hard, but different kinds of images need different kinds of inks to look good, and then only look good on certain kinds of paper. And those inks and paper are only available, at reasonable cost, at certain printers in certain parts of the world and then your book needs time to be shipped and… you see where this is going. If your book doesn’t need images, you might not get them.

At some point you book is a cereal box. I’ve said this before, but it is true, and it mainly applies to covers. I’m sorry if this makes your teeth itch, thinking about how art becomes commerce, but we’re here talking about selling books. And at some point, you (and your agent and your editor and their boss and the sales team and the marketing team) has to think about how your book will look on the shelf and what people will think when they see your cover. Will it “pop,” as we like to say? Will it say to the reader this is a serious book or this is a fun book or this book looks like the other books you like so you will like it and should buy it? This matters! Your book cover is not (just) a visual representation of the themes and art of your writing. It’s an advertisement for how much someone will like purchasing and reading your book! Try to remember this when you get the first draft of your cover.

Think about how you like to hold and touch and hug physical books. Think about the things you DON’T like about physical books. Listen, I know you have hugged a book. I have! There are books out there that I reach out and touch anytime I see them—on my own shelf, at a store, at a friends’ house. Booooooooooook, I think, I love you. Sometimes that has to do with the cover and paper and design and sometimes it’s because of what’s inside and sometimes it is both! The fancy things that make books look and feel special—like spot gloss (shiny bits) on the cover or thick paper or deckled edges—cost money. So publishers have to be reasonably sure they are going to make back their investment in these enhancements. Which leads me to the next thing:

Publishers make all their money on hardcovers. So do you. The margins on making money from books is thin! This goes all the way from the author to the bookseller. But everyone makes more money when people buy a hardcover. Including you, the author. Hardcover royalty rates are higher than paperbacks. The list price is higher, too, so you’re getting a bigger slice of a bigger pie. That’s why the hardcover usually comes out first here, and the paperback (most of the time) follows a year or more later. Yes, other countries, especially the UK, do simultaneous hardcover and paperback publication and yes it is cool. But we don’t and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. The format chosen for a book is not foremost an aesthetic choice. It’s almost always a financial/market/genre decision.

An ebook is not just a PDF on your Kindle. A long time ago and a publishing discourse cycle away, people loudly proclaimed that ebooks should be dirt cheap because there’s no paper/shipping involved and thus obviously they didn’t cost any real money to make. This is false! But also, they are not just a file the publisher emails to your ereader. They have their own production costs and constraints. And your book with pictures in it is not so fun to read on an ereader. You (or the publisher, really) has to consider how your book will function in every format.

Your [fun visual/typographic thing] is cute, but what’s it like to read? And how will it translate to the audio book? I recently started an audio book where the narrator said that in the printed book, a name was represented by dash, but for the audiobook, she would say “X.” Genius! I thought. I am sure they have been doing something like this in audiobooks for decades, but I hadn’t come across a disclaimer like this before. If you’re doing a thing in your book, like copious footnotes or wingdings or whatever, consider what the reading experience will be like, and especially for those who might read your book in other ways than on paper with their eyes. What’s cute in Word on your screen is not always cute on paper.

Books move through space and time, often on boats! I mean, we all know more about the supply chain now than we ever thought we would. (Did you hear about the books that fell into the sea?????) Many books are printed overseas and make their way to the US on boats. Which takes weeks if not months! We can’t just print them domestically because there are fewer and fewer printers and they don’t just print books! This is why the production timeline for books is so long and why being late with your manuscript affects so many things. If your book has special printing needs (color, pictures, etc) then there are even fewer printers out there that can handle your book, in a cost effective way.

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There you have it folks. This is what we talk about when we talk about physical books. It’s not just a matter of printing words on a page.

Take care, vax up.

XOXOOX,

Kate