:: Wednesday, March 14, 2001 ::

 

6:37 p.m. There isn't a day that goes by that doesn't bring with it an opportunity. Some days you're offered big, obvious ones and some days you're offered more subtle ones.

Today I've been given the opportunity to talk a little about book publishing, packaging, agenting, and editing. They are four very different things, and if you're a writer, each one offers you a different opportunity and asks different things of you in return.

I happen to be a book packager and via that path, a small publisher.

If you think you'd like to be published one day, you have many paths to your goal. If you've got a manuscript that you believe is ready to go, as publishable as anything you'd see on a bookshelf, you can print it up, wrap it up, find a publisher's address, and send it off.

That will most likely be that, unless you've added extra postage for the return trip. You may or may not hear anything, good or bad. You might get a nice letter or an even nicer contract.

If you've tried more than one publisher -- in fact, many many publishers, you might wonder what else you can do to help your chances at publication. Usually, by now you've made some writing friends so that you can share notes and you've perhaps gone to a writing class or two so that you can let more people have a look at what you've been submitting and maybe they can help you understand why you've been waiting and submitting and waiting still again.

Here's where an agent might enter the picture. Some agents will look at your manuscript and give you an idea about your chances. Many will charge you a fee if you want them to read it. Most will only take a query letter, in which you list your past publishing credits and, if they're interested, a quick summary of your book's contents.

Agents deal in quantity. Since they take 15 percent of your money, they need a lot of signed-up authors. Because they must deal in quantity, time is of the essence: If your manuscript needs too much work or is too esoteric, there just won't be enough time to justify your place in their roster.

At this point you've gotten yourself into a Catch -- # 22, to be precise. Publishers depend on agents for their new material (for a variety of reasons), and agents only want you if you've been published (for obvious reasons).

There are a lot of ways around this conundrum and sometimes lightning strikes and you catch someone's eye and they like your stuff and they take a chance on you and poof! There you are. You're in.

Sometimes you spin in place, amassing any credits you can find, networking any way you can, and you wait and you hope and you keep on reading and writing and starting the process all over again.

But then, there's packaging. Packaging hasn't been around too long, and the profession came about in the early 1980s or so when there were a lot of publishing professionals suddenly without jobs because of the first wave of big-house mergers and acquisitions.

Editors -- particularly art and acquisition editors -- began to lunch together and lament their fate and the idea started to form up that maybe there might be a need for their skills outside of the publishing house. They knew better than anybody which books publishers wanted because they used to acquire them; they knew how to put a book together in record time because that's exactly what they used to do, day in and day out.

So, packagers began to fill the very real gap that many first-time or mid-list or just plain unusual writers find themselves in. A packager will look at a project, determine what is needed, and eventually, after working with you to get your manuscript ready to go, the packager will then represent you as your agent and he or she will try to sell your manuscript.

Depending on the work required, the packager will take from 15 percent all the way up to a 50/50 split if the packager is hired to co-write a manuscript in progress. Often the packager, rather than the publisher, will edit and lay out the book and the publisher will pay for that service.

Packaging, in effect, pre-packages the book project so that it's attractive to a publisher. Let's say that you're a children's book illustrator who needs a writer, or vice-versa. Packagers who specialize in children's literature can put you together with your needed other half and then as a group, you all go off to the publisher.

Or, you might be a scientist with an interesting idea but no idea how to write it up, get it illustrated, or make it readable. Research is all done -- but now you could use a packager to make it into a book instead of a grant proposal.

It's an exciting field, this packaging. It allows those who love books the opportunity to help make books.

I started our packaging company, Shadow Lawn Press, along with my college-professor husband back in the early '80s. The APBA had only a handful of members at the time and we held our meetings each month in various restaurants in Manhattan. The mobile phones on the table were as big as Cornish game hens.

The first books we packaged and sold were in the brand new personal-computer field, and we specialized in computer books for the first few years, and then true-crime books, and then celebrity books, and then current-issue books.

Since both my husband and I are writers, we bring that particular editorial skill to the package. Along the way, I've become adept at layout and pre-production and my husband has become adept at agenting, including agenting for television and films.

It's a rewarding profession, until the day comes that you have a project -- a package, a proposal, an idea, a client -- and you can't convince a publisher to buy it. Sometimes we'll try for years and years to sell something that should be selling, but just isn't. We recently sold a book from 1984 last year and this past month another proposal from 1994.

But then sometimes -- no publisher will see what we see, no matter how many pages I propose or how beautifully I package those pages.

And that's where I am right now ... if I can't sell it, I will publish it.

I look at it as a great opportunity.