The Book Process: Part 2

Part 2: Sealing the deal

If you've gotten an offer from a publisher, what happens next?

Two things. First, you have to come to agreement on the terms of your deal. You might negotiate specific points with the acquisitions editor first -- like the amount of your advance, the percentage you will make on each copy of the book sold, and deadlines for the work. Some items will be pretty flexible while others will be set in stone. Which are which depends on the publisher and the editor.

Some publishers of knitting books are craft-book specialists. They may be corporate relatives of a knitting magazine (think Sixth & Spring, Interweave and XRX). Others are publishers of all kinds of books who include craft books as part of their business (think STC, PotterCraft, Lark and Krause). The extent to which you can negotiate may also depend on how "corporate" or "crafty" a particular publisher is.

Popular Misconceptions about Book Contracts

1. You will get a lot of money.

Not likely. There are a lot of book proposals out there, and a lot of people who consider knitting design to be a sideline to their regular profession (meaning they will accept less because they aren't doing just knitting design for a living). The bigger the knitting name you are, the more influence you have to get a bigger advance (because there will be more competition to sign you, and because you are a surer bet to sell lots of books). A past experience with the publisher that turned out well may also be a point in your favor when it comes to the amount of an advance -- if your last book sold really well, say.

A friend once told me that she was asked by an acquaintance if she was making tons of money on her book. The acquaintance said "So do they give you, like, $150,000 or something?" Hah! You're lucky if you get in the $5000 to $20,000 range, depending on on a lot of different factors, like how big the publisher is, how famous you are, and so on.

2. You get to keep all the money in the advance.

Maybe, maybe not. Different publishers do the deal different ways. Some give you an advance that is all yours to keep, and the publisher also has a separate budget to pay for things like photography, styling, tech editing and other designers who might contribute patterns. Others give you an advance from which YOU are expected to pay various costs -- tech editing, photographer and stylist, contributing designers. You may also have the option of either hiring people like tech editor and photographer yourself and getting a larger advance OR receiving a smaller advance and letting the publisher do the photography and editing (and paying the photographer and editor directly).

No matter what, though, you have to do the math.

Say you get an advance of $8000 (I just made that number up; no, I will not tell you how much my advances have been, nosey-pants.). Suppose you are doing a multicontributor book, and you need to solicit designs from about 18 other designers. If the publisher has a separate budget for designs, and is handling all the photography, getting paid eight grand and keeping it all for your work on the book is not bad. But think how quickly that money gets eaten up if you have to pay all 18 contributors out of it. Suppose you are doing a hat book, and suppose (just to make the numbers easy) that each contributor gets paid $250 for their pattern. That's $4500 of your advance, over half of it, that you have to pay out to others; you are really only getting paid $3500 to write the book and design the patterns you are contributing. That may sound like a lot of money, but there's a lot of work involved in writing a book. Just the number of emails that I deal with on a weekly basis answering questions, researching things, getting information out to my contributors is a substantial amount of work, let alone designing, knitting, writing and editing.

Likewise, if the publishing company agrees to pay you $30,000, you may be jumping for joy. But if you've got to pay a photographer at a thousand dollars a day to shoot the pictures from that money, not to mention models, a stylist and tech editing, that money is going to get eaten up awfully fast.

Update: MMO points out that you also have to pay taxes on this money, as a self-employed person, further eroding the take-home amount.


3. You can negotiate exactly the terms you want in your contract.

Unlikely. There are certain provisions that the publisher won't budge on. They won't change a single word or even eliminate a measly comma that doesn't belong there anyway. Other provisions may be open to negotiation, like amount of advance, and dates for deadlines.

But overall, the publishing company has most of the power in these negotiations by simple virtue of the fact that lots of people want to write books and only a few can get published each year. That means if you are displeased with a provision or term of your deal, and the publisher doesn't agree to change it, you may end up having to decide if it's worth it to suck it up and go forward with the deal, or walk away and not do the book.

4. It's not worth it to hire a lawyer to look at the contract.

That all depends on you. Are you comfortable reading technical material? Do you have a better-than-average understanding of legal terms and concepts? Are you planning on asking for very specific terms? Do you do this for a living or as a lark?

I am fortunate in that I'm a lawyer and my husband is a lawyer. So we are very comfortable going over legal material and interpreting it. (No, we will not review your contract for you for free.) You have to decide for yourself whether the expense of hiring a lawyer is worth the comfort of knowing that you were advised by an expert. Of course, for some folks, hiring a lawyer is prohibitively expensive and in this case, you've got to do your best to understand exactly what you're getting yourself into, perhaps with the help of the library and Google.


After you agree verbally on terms, then the publisher will send you a written contract. Getting the contract signed is the second step of the process. You make sure the terms reflect the deal you agreed to, suggest any changes to the language that are necessary are desirable (the publisher may accept or reject changes, probably rejecting most of them), and sign. At some point after that, depending in part upon how the particular publisher works it and on what deal you struck, you'll get a check for (typically) half your advance. You'll get the second half when all your work is done.

The Book Process: part I

I did a blog post a little while back about some of the similarities I noticed between the quilting blog world and the knitting blog world. One thing I've seen on a lot of quilting blogs lately is a "Process Pledge." The Process Pledge is a vow to not just "show finishes or occasionally confess about our moments of indecision, but chat openly and often about our works in progress, our inspirations, and our moments of decision," to quote one blogger.

It got me thinking about blogging about the process of writing a knitting book, and since there's been some positive feedback from you, the readers, about me doing that, well, here goes. It's important to remember when you read this that these observations are based mainly on my personal experience, which is limited, and to a lesser extent on my conversations with others in the knitting/crochet industry. Others may have had different experiences. It's probably also worth noting that I don't have any background in the publishing industry. If anyone else wants to chime in by leaving a comment to give a different take on this, please feel free. So here goes.

Part 1: Selling your idea

Every book starts with an idea. It can be a topic that hasn't really been covered before in a book, or one that hasn't yet been covered adequately (I envisioned Knitting Socks with Handpainted Yarns because no one had written a book about that topic but so many knitters seemed to struggle with it). Maybe it starts with a sensibility or a very distinct knitting style -- Melanie Falick books do this beautifully. Often an author uses a theme to group projects around, like Kristen Rengren's Vintage Baby Knits, or gathers projects that all use a particular technique, say all fair-isle patterns.

One of the things that's exciting about a creative industry like knitting is seeing the fascinating ideas that people come up with. Stitch 'N Bitch is a great example. By combining her own sensibility (hip, urban chicks with sticks) with a learn-how-t0-knit book, Debbie Stoller came up with a franchise that hit exactly the right spot at the right time. Charmed Knits: Projects for Fans of Harry Potter was published in 2007, but is still selling strong, cleverly sensing the overlap between knitters and Harry Potter fans. There have been knitting books for roller derby fans, a book featuring knit bloggers, two books devoted to punk-themed knits, a book of vampire knits, and coming within the next year is a book of goth knits, knits for self-proclaimed nerds, and who knows what else. There have been books based on Barbara Walker's techniques, socks inspired by oriental rugs, knits in skinny yarns, knits in chunky yarns, and so on.

However, the world of publishing is littered with the carcasses of book ideas that never made it. Sometimes good ideas just don't make good books. Sometimes a trend doesn't have a long enough shelf life to make it through the book-writing process; books take at least a year and often two or more to write from beginning to publication date. If you pitched "Grunge Knits" in 1993, by the time the book came to press in 1995 or 1996, grunge might seem passe. Sometimes an idea is good, but it proves to be difficult to get the people at a publishing company (especially one that doesn't specialize in craft books) to realize it. Or maybe they recently published a book that seems too similar ("we just published a sock book last year'). And sometimes an idea is good, but sadly, it just doesn't make it in front of the right editor at the right time.

In any event, once you've got that idea ("Deep-Sea Knits: 25 Projects Inspired by Jacques Cousteau") you've got to somehow get it in front of a book editor -- specifically an acquisitions editor who has the cool job of reviewing proposals and ideas for books and deciding which ones to pursue.

It can be really hard to get an idea in front of an acquisitions editor (although I can see why -- you know that everybody from their son's softball coach to the bag boy at the supermarket is always trying to sell book ideas to them, so who can blame them for being kind of hard to approach?). If you can manage it, it helps to run an idea by an editor in an informal way to get their reaction before going to the trouble of putting together a proposal. Generally, they either wrinkle their nose and say "I don't think we'd be interested in that" (oh boy, have I seen that nose-wrinkle a million times) or they say "That sounds interesting; do you have a written proposal?"

If you get past the nose-wrinkling test, then you've got to come up with a professional-looking written book proposal. Every editor and publishing company has a slightly different style and format (check the publisher's website; often they have written guidelines to help you) but basically you spell out your idea, tell why you think it's worth writing a book about it, give some analysis of the market (i.e. who do you expect will want to buy it), and provide outlines, sample chapters, sample projects and so on. Putting a written proposal together is a lot of work. Having it look super-polished is well worth the extra time it takes. When I first started mucking around with the idea of writing books, I thought that the strength of the writing and the concept were more important than the packaging; now I think that the packaging of the concept is half the battle. If you think that spending a lot of time crafting a book proposal is too much work, then trust me: you don't really want to write a book.

When your proposal is ready to go, you send it to the acquisitions editor, and wait. And wait. And maybe wait some more.

It's hard to say how long it can take to get a firm answer on a proposal. Sometimes you get a pretty fast no. Sometimes you are contacted and asked more questions, or to provide more material or elaborate on your idea. You might be asked if you are open to a slight change of focus. Sometimes you don't hear for ages and you have no idea why.

If you're lucky, and the proposal ends up in front of the right person at the right time, you'll get a call or email telling you the editor wants to do the book, but first has to present the proposal to a committee of some sort. The committee members may include management and other corporate overlords, marketing people, publicity people, art people, who knows who else? If you're very lucky, and if the acquisitions editor has all the information (s)he needs, your proposal will sail through and you'll get approval. Yay! Hurry up and sign the contract before they change their minds!

If you're not so lucky, the editor will come back with more questions, which may be hard to answer (e.g. "We did a book on beach knits a few years ago; how will Deep-Sea Knitting be different?"). You'll provide more information and hope it goes through the committee next time. Alas, there are times where you and the editor like an idea, but for some strange reason, perhaps a reason that is never articulated fully to you, the committee says no. Could be budget; could be publishing trends; could be a zillion different things. If you really believe in the strength of your idea, take that proposal and send it out to another publisher.

The conventional wisdom says that a prospective author only submits a proposal to one publishing company at a time; after they give you an answer, you then approach another one; and so on. However, if you sign with a literary agent, the agent can submit the proposal to multiple publishers simultaneously. I don't know why it's somehow appropriate to do it one way if you're unrepresented, and another way if you have an agent.

By the end of this process, you will either have a book contract, or will have been turned down by every publisher of craft books known to humankind. You can either try self-publishing, start work on a new proposal, or decide to go in a different direction.

You can see how the process of getting a book contract tends to straddle the line between doing something new and interesting (which seems risky to publishers but has the possible upside of being very popular while being the only or first book to tackle that topic) and doing something tried-and-true (easier to sell because publishers can look at sales figures for similar books and feel more confident there's a market for the topic, but may feel derivative or repetitive). It also explains why a year and a half after "Deep Sea Knits" is published, you might see "Underwater Knits" and "Titanic: 20 Knitting Projects Insipred by the Greatest Shipwreck of All Time" and maybe even "SpongeBob Knits" for the kiddies.

Next in the series: beginning work on a book