Here Are Your Guides Through the Opaque World of Book Publishing

Unfortunately for aspiring authors, there are no easy guidelines for how to publish a book successfully, no key to ensuring bestseller status by following six simple bullet points. Much of the way the publishing industry works defies logic, so much so that aspects of it remain opaque even for those of us who have been working in and around it for 25 years (when I was starting out as an editorial assistant in the early aughts my only resource that came in book form was Getting Your Book Published For Dummies).

Factor in the amount of misinformation about writing and publishing that thrives online these days—I’m looking particularly at you, Threads—and how AI book marketing scammers are popping up like Whack-a-moles, and we end up with a whole lot of confusion about how to write and sell and promote a book. If we want to make the publishing industry more inclusive and less gatekeep-y, it’s vital for more information about the publishing process to be readily available and easy to understand.

Lucky for aspiring writers, as well as aspiring agents and editors, there are two new books that should shed some light, written by literary agents who also write newsletters about how to navigate the business of publishing and demystifying some of its quirks: Kate McKean’s Write Through It: An Insider’s Guide to Publishing and the Creative Life and Alia Hannah Habib’s Take It from Me: An Agent’s Guide to Building a Nonfiction Writing Career from Scratch. Written in their own savvy but generous voices, these books illuminate the process, clear up misconceptions, and offer guidance even while reminding us that there are few hard and fast rules. Note: both authors are friends of mine; I would never be ethically able to review their books, but I am very happy to tell you about them.

I do know is that the way that the book business works isn’t always intuitive; it’s best to have a guide with both experience and generosity.

Kate, who represents Alix Harrow, Daniel Lavery, and Mattie Lubchansky, all of whom work in different mediums, opens her book with the words “Is this normal?,” a question that speaks to how few readily available benchmarks there are in general. She catalogs many of the concerns she hears after that question, everything from “How long should it take for an agent to respond to a query?” to “Is it weird for me to feel this stressed out?” The book covers both the big existential questions as well as the nitty gritty, from differences between querying fiction versus nonfiction (if you’re pitching a novel, it helps to have the whole thing already written before going out to agents) to basic etiquette (“Do not stalk editors online”).

Alia, whose clients include nonfiction heavyweights like Hanif Abdurraqib, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Clint Smith, offers a more targeted guide for nonfiction writers looking to get published, from how to get clips to whether getting an MFA is worth it. My favorite piece of advice from Alia is from a chapter called “The Book Proposal, Or Don’t Be Boring.” Even though nonfiction book proposals are a very particular form of writing that might feel unnatural at times, it’s important that the author’s voice is lively and comes through even in an author bio or a chapter outline. The primary goal of the proposal, after all, is to make an editor want to read more.

An important note: neither Write Through It or Take It From Me are craft books. They don’t exist to tell you how to write; they’re more focused on what happens after you’ve figured that part out. (For authors looking to self-publish, Jane Friedman has already written an essential go-to guide.) Telling aspiring authors to put their heads down and just write the thing first before they start worrying about the ins and outs of the book business isn’t fair; it leaves them essentially writing into a void. Writers can’t be blamed for wanting to know more about what they’re in for before starting the whole high-risk endeavor of writing a book.

I still cannot fully decipher a profits and loss statement, the kind that editors create to forecast how a book will do financially before they acquire it for their publisher. I still don’t know exactly what will make a book sell, if word of mouth is the key or if it’s all about getting a celebrity book club slot. I don’t know which forms of social media (if any) will be effective for book promotion. But what I do know is that the way that the book business works isn’t always intuitive; it’s best to have a guide with both experience and generosity. There’s no guarantee that your book will find success, but it sure helps to have some idea of what you’re in for.