A talk with Kyle Beachy about literary agents.
Plus: The One Self-Publishing Marketing Plan to Rule Them All; and reviews of "Three Thousand Years of Longing," Horatio Hornblower and more
Originally published at the Jason Pettus newsletter through Substack on September 23, 2022, and republished here at this website on January 20, 2024.
I recently heard from an old friend of mine, Chicago author Kyle Beachy, who I originally got to know through my old small press’s podcast when I interviewed him about his debut novel, 2009’s The Slide which was published by The Dial Press, a subsidiary of Penguin Random House. This by definition means that Kyle secured the services of a literary agent early in his publishing process, in that editors at mainstream presses like The Dial don’t accept submissions at all unless they specifically come from an agent, thinking (pretty rightly) that since the agent doesn’t get paid unless the book is sold, they’re not going to waste their time representing bad or unpublishable manuscripts. This has worked out well for Kyle, for he published not only this but most recently a nonfiction collection of themed creative essays on skateboarding called The Most Fun Thing, put out through Grand Central Publishing, the company that was created when Warner Communications acquired the famous Paperback Library.
This is quite unusual when it comes to the typical reader of this newsletter—most of the authors I work with either self-publish or sell their manuscript directly to a small press, in that case needing no agent at all—so I thought this would be a particularly great thing to have Kyle talk about in a little more detail here in this issue. I kept it short, since I didn’t want to waste his time or yours, but I hope you’ll agree with me that his thoughts here are illuminating and worth the time for any unpublished author to think about. My big thanks to him for taking a few minutes to talk about this subject, and don’t forget to check out both of his books whenever you have a chance.
You've gone the old-fashioned route in your literary career, which is to sign with a literary agent and get your first novel signed with a major press. I'm sure many of my subscribers already know the steps to getting an agent, but could you tell us the most surprising thing you learned through the process, as well as the most useful thing?
I'm always surprised how long the steps take, once the exchange with agents gets moving. Often they'll respond quickly to a query because you happen to have caught them at a good time. Sometimes, even, the initial pass over your sample will move along at pace. But then, giving them the entire manuscript means strapping into this seemingly endless waiting game. So, the most useful thing is patience. You've got no choice but to be patient, and there is nothing that will serve you during this process but patience.
Do you feel an agent has helped you with your overall career? How do they affect things like you publishing short pieces in literary journals?
I've had two agents and they've both sold my manuscripts, so it would be real strange to argue that they haven't helped my career. They've also helped, at times, with counsel—my current agent is someone who's super effective at talking me through frustrations either with myself or my publisher. Neither, though, has helped publish short pieces in journals. As I've experienced two rounds of publishing cycles, it's the publicists who are more interested in getting my work into magazines and journals.
Your newest nonfiction book was put out by Grand Central Publishing. Is there a marked difference when you work for one major press versus another? Did you ever feel like a cog in the machine at either of these places?
Well that's hard for me to say, because the more relevant detail is that twelve or so years passed between my first book and my second. Publishing changed a lot during that time. My first novel was coming out right as the big chain markets crashed. So, one day I've got someone at Barnes and Noble telling my publishers what my cover should look like if we want it to be featured on the front tables, and the next day, never mind, B&N is slashing all their orders across the board, we can go with our original cover. Is it depressing that a retail chain was able to dictate the book's cover? Was this, maybe, kind of an extortionary practice? I'd say so. But was it better than what we have today? This round I got a modest advance, a pretty large first print run, but no budget to promote the book or even help cover plane travel or hotels for readings I arranged. Now I learn they won't do a paperback because they didn't sell enough of the hardback and, well, they probably printed too many of them. So, in short, it's not rad to be a non-major author at a company that relies on a handful of major sales for their bottom lines. Probably this answers your cog question.
The One Self-Publishing Marketing Plan to Rule Them All
In the last issue of my newsletter, I examined in detail the ongoing raging debate within the world of indie and genre literature—to self-publish or to go with a small press. Whatever the case, though, I had mentioned, it’s now largely up to the authors themselves to fund and run their own marketing and promotional campaign for their book once it’s out; and now that I’m working as a freelancer with a wide variety of writers around the world who are in all kinds of different situations, I’m getting to see what’s working in all of these settings and create a sort of aggregated “best practices” list that can hopefully start being replicated by any author in their situation for basic success (“basic” here meaning “selling a thousand copies and breaking even within a year of the book coming out”). In today’s issue I thought I’d lay out what I’ve learned so far about what I think such a repeatable blueprint might look like; I word it that way because I expect to be continuously tinkering and changing this as I learn more and more, and as the industry changes more and more. If you’re coming across this in the future through a web search, you should always check out the newsletter issues closer to your current date, because I’ll have more nuanced things to say about the subject by then.
I laid out the very basics last time, so let me quickly repeat it here: I currently recommend putting together USD “$12,000” to “spend” in the first 365 days after your book coming out, with the goal being to sell a thousand copies of the book in that first year, which is generally around the break-even point whether a self-publisher or trying to make up your advance as a traditionally published author. That’s deliberately in quotation marks because that only comprises $6,000 in actual money; the other $6,000 is volunteer labor, also called “sweat equity” in that you are literally building value into your book through your sweat and effort. You can get an entry-level job at Whole Foods or Starbucks here in Chicago for $15 an hour, so if you want to be a little more enticing and offer $20 an hour to do the tedious duties that come with marketing your book—then if you pretended to hire yourself and pay yourself this $20/hr wage—you would need to put in 300 hours of labor in that first year of the book’s existence to reach your $6,000 budget.
How does this break down? Roughly—as just a general guide, mind you, with your numbers maybe varying greatly—you could realistically look at it this way. Examining the money first:
$2,000 for traditional ads at Amazon and its sister sites Kindle Unlimited and Audible. I didn’t create this situation, I’m just reporting it—Amazon now almost completely dominates the entire publishing industry. I didn’t create this situation, I’m just reporting it! One of the things I’ve discovered from watching my clients’ successes and failures is that a certain amount of traditional advertising must be done if you want to sell a thousand or more copies of your book, and so it simply makes sense to spend that at the place where 80 percent of your audience is getting their paperbacks, 90 percent their ebooks, 95 percent their audiobooks. There it is. Sorry, folks.
$2,000 for a book giveaway promotion at Goodreads. Also owned by Amazon! But in this case, Goodreads is a vast and popular social network, like Facebook just for book nerds; and so instead of traditional ads, you pay them for the right to give away a certain amount of copies of your book to readers through the website, in return for the recipients promising to post a public review, and have the whole giveaway promoted at the special page online Goodreads maintains just for these book promotions (which, to be clear, are insanely popular, and get thousands of requests for every title offered). The initial cost over there looks deceptively cheap, but don’t forget that you also must pay for the printing and shipping of all those individual copies out to every giveaway recipient, which adds up fast.
$2,000 to attend literary conventions. Every genre has its own special get-together every year. Some are huge, like science-fiction’s Worldcon, horror’s Stokercon, or crime’s Bouchercon. Some are regional and therefore cheaper to attend, or smaller and therefore easier to stand out. General literary writers outside of a specific genre can always attend the American Writers and Publishers (AWP) convention, the largest literary gathering in the United States. Actually pressing the flesh at these events is a must for the “complementary marketing plan” we’ll be looking at later, so you should put aside the money to attend one large one or several small ones each year.
And then looking at the 300 hours of labor you put in, it would break down into the following major categories:
Soliciting reviews, interviews, features and guest posts. Ready for a hot take? Never pay a publicity company to seek reviews of your book on your behalf. I’m not saying it’s a scam, but I am saying that these publicists get blocked quickly among the people on their distribution lists—I know, because as a published reviewer back in the day through my small press’s website, I was constantly getting added to these distribution lists against my wishes for many years. Their emails concerning your book are going straight into a lot of these people’s spam or trash folders, even though they’re continuing to boast to you about how they have “1,500 reviewers” they solicit each time, because technically they are soliciting 1,500 reviewers each time. You get a much better reception rate by sending these out yourself as the author, handwriting each one, and including a detail in each cover letter that lets them know that you’ve been by the reviewer’s publication to check it out. It’s tedious, but just chalk it up to your 300 hours and start sending them out. It's this or Starbucks, buddy!
Attending virtual and physical bookclubs. This is one of the most powerful ways an author can not only sell books but also create a profound bond with their readers, turning them into free walking advertisements for their book. It’s easy to research these groups at social media, and especially Goodreads, which has an entire section of their website for them; the general idea is that you offer a private bookclub a discount on their group order of your book (often 20 to 25 percent off), and then after they’ve read it you come and join them for their discussion afterwards, either physically or through something like a Zoom call. How I wish I could’ve gotten Bret Easton Ellis to stop by my student union with my reading group when I was a freshman in 1986! That’s what makes this a powerful marketing tool, precisely that one-on-one connection. Before the pandemic, a crime-writing friend of mine told me about when he would sometimes be sent by his day job to a place like, say, Cincinnati for a week, and he would contact all the bookclubs in the surrounding suburbs about driving out on weekday evenings to hang out at someone’s house and discuss the book with their club over tea and snacks, and have these amazing experiences all week while having his day job pick up the actual travel bill. Here’s hoping we one day soon get to a “post-pandemic” time when authors will be able to do this again.
Attending the literary conventions you put aside the money for. As we’ll examine in the “complementary marketing plan” below, these conventions are not just for you to have fun and wander around like a common fan; you’re a published author now, and this is one of the few times a year where you work your ass off every waking moment of the day. You should rest up, make a plan, and be ready to devote 16 hours a day at a convention (a full 48 hours of your year’s 300 volunteer hours over that convention weekend) towards deep marketing work for you and your career, no matter what your level of success—signing books, attending parties, having deep discussions with fans and other writers, supporting old friends, making new ones, and in a lot of cases actually being granted 15-minute exclusive intimate interviews with big movers and shakers in the publishing industry, for talks about possibly making a move upward in your career, that you earned by having your self-published book out and available for sale and showing off at the con.
And that finally gets us to the “complementary marketing plan,” which is basic and easy to remember; every time you spend a little burst of money, you should surround it by a much larger and more encompassing set of volunteer labor that directly ties to and amplifies the money being spent. That way you get the biggest bang for your buck, both when it comes to what effect you get from your money, and how efficient your sweat equity is. A great obvious example are the conventions, how you spend a big chunk of money at once on airfare, hotel and a ticket, but you put in 48 hours of labor and make every dollar you spent count. To amplify it even further, for example, you could go to one of those cheap business card printing services online and get a thousand promotional cards for your book printed off, each containing a special code that lets the recipient download a free copy at Amazon, but that is only good until midnight that Sunday night. That means that people at the convention have to download it to their Kindle that very night back in their hotel room, which means you get a big head-start on the 500 other authors at the con who are also giving away free copies of their book at the Kindle Store, but are letting people do it well after they get back home.
I’ve very sadly watched a lot of authors throw away a lot of good money over the years, tricked by marketing companies into spending lots on things that didn’t matter; so that’s the entire goal of this plan, to acknowledge that some money has to be spent, but that it should be done as wisely as possible, and backed by a much larger amount of volunteer labor that will amplify the money’s effect and have a much bigger impact than just the money alone. I have to admit, this is one of the big places where my own small press failed back in the 2010s, that I come from an indie/punk background and thought an endless amount of volunteer labor could make up for a lack of traditional advertising. It can’t, it turns out, as I’ve learned from both my own failure as a publisher and the successes of my most thriving clients as a freelancer; but it can certainly be done more smartly than a lot of people do it, so that $6,000 of money gets you $20,000 of results (1,000 books sold at $19.99 apiece), or however you want to measure it.
That said, don’t forget, another big lesson concerning all this is that you generally can only make a certain percentage more in revenue than how much you spent on marketing and promoting your book, and that a lot of “surprise runaway success stories” you hear about Kindle books actually had very quiet, expensive and effective marketing plans behind the scenes to achieve its “miraculous” sales. Like I said before, for example, these numbers we’ve been talking about here is just for the goal of selling 1,000 copies of your book in the first year, which is the amount a self-publisher generally needs to sell to break even, and the amount a traditionally published author generally needs to sell to make up their advance and start actively generating money from their sales again. But what if you want to sell 10,000 copies over maybe two years? You might, for example, really ramp the advertisements up; plan on being on the road a lot more often; rent out your own booth at a convention, and bring along enough people to have it manned the entire weekend; or add an entirely new expense by trying to get your book nominated for an industry award, like an Edgar or Hugo or Lambda or Independent Publisher Book Award.
It happens that books occasionally come out of nowhere with no money spent or no effort made that suddenly through a random miracle sell a million copies; but it’s much more common to look at success in the commercial arts as a ratio of how much money was spent promoting it versus how much money was made from it. If you want a big huge success, be prepared to spend a huge amount of money and do a huge amount of labor. Or, plan on doing a book series, but instead of spending any of the revenue, keep plowing 100% of it back into the plans for the next book; and be ready to put in a part-time job’s amount of work, because this now legitimately is a part-time job. But if you’re looking to simply publish a book and make your money back while still in that one-year window of the book being considered “fresh,” I’m starting to believe based on my various clients’ successes that the above outline can more or less work in more or less this form for more or less a profit on any book self-published or put out through a small press. I look forward to further tweaking in the months ahead; needless to say, if you have information you think I’m overlooking, numbers you think are off, or complications you think I’m not considering, please drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com and let me know, and I’ll factor it into future updates!
The Latest Reviews: National Cinema Day Edition
Just one new book review to report since the last issue, but it’s a good one, my first-ever read of a C.S. Forester “Horatio Hornblower” novel (specifically the first one, 1937’s Beat to Quarters), set among the British Navy of the Napoleonic Era. I enjoyed it quite a lot, and it also gave me an excuse to talk at length about the “grandpa-lit” genre that at 53 I find myself just now starting to grow into (including not only authors like Forester but Louis L’Amour, Zane Grey, James A. Michener, Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton, among others).
Ah, but I recently started up my movie reviews at Letterboxd as well, prompted by the recent “National Cinema Day” over Labor Day weekend, in which all movies in American theatres nationwide were only $3. I saw Three Thousand Years of Longing, in which Idris Elba plays a sexy genie, and Tilda Swinton uses one of her wishes to have sex with him, because duuuuh. I absolutely loved it, just like I knew I would love a charming romantic fairytale from the creator of the “Mad Max” franchise.
And I’ve also begun a new viewing project this autumn, after learning that a total of 27 Woody Allen films are currently available to watch at the six streaming services I belong to (Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Hoopla and Tubi). I’ve so far done a write-up for 1971’s Bananas, and a double-review for 1972’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex *But Were Afraid to Ask and 1975’s Love and Death.
Have a book you’d like me to review? How about some news from your own publishing project to share? Have you tried a particular marketing idea and had it surprisingly succeed or fail? How about a publishing professional you’ve had a recent good experience with and would like to recommend? The content of this newsletter is largely shaped by your ideas, so don’t hesitate to drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com about anything on your mind. Remember, if you’re subscribed to this newsletter while booking a job with me, I’ll automatically knock 25 percent off your bill—any job, any bill—so don’t forget to mention it when soliciting me for editing work. For now, I’ll leave you below with a little example from earlier this week of the ever-glamorous world around here of #FreelancingLife. Bye!
