Alive & Knitting
writing, knitting, and other tangled webs we weave

Aug

16

Serving Two Masters – Part II

Filed Under Publishing

The other thing you have to consider when planning to write for two houses is what publishers want.

1. We’ve already talked about one thing publishers want – they want a sufficiently frequent publication schedule to allow them to build your brand. And that means that a single title house will want a book from you (in romance) every 6 to 9 months. In series, you could easily find yourself with more slots than that. It naturally follows that you must be more prolific than one house can possibly accommodate in order to write for two houses.

This notion of how frequent publication should be has changed, btw. When I started out in the early 90’s, most single title romance authors had one slot a year. Part of the reason I queried Harlequin Historicals was that I knew I was more prolific than that and they were at that time giving two slots a year to some of their authors. By the time I sold to them, a few authors had had three slots in one calendar year: in 1994 I was the first Harlequin Historicals author given four slots in one year.

The fear was that publishing an author too frequently would lead to cannibalization of her/his sales. (Yup. That’s really the verb they used.) It was known that people bought books and didn’t read them immediately (TBR piles are not new!) and so publishing people worried that readers wouldn’t buy another title by an author until the first title had made it out of the TBR stack. Throughout the 90’s, there was an ongoing experimentation with adding one more slot for a popular author, then one more. This was easy to do, because a lot of authors moved from series to single title, writing two new ST’s a year and then having all of their backlist mobilized. For a while, it seemed that Nora Roberts had a release every month of the year, but the cannibalization point was never reached. Does it exist? If it does, it will be a prolific author with a massive backlist like Nora who finds it. So far, there’s no sign of it.

This revelation shortened the time between books at each house and made it harder to write for two houses. It became fashionable to pump up an author’s schedule to build the brand. I was offered a promotion at Warner with the Jewels of Kinfairlie series – if I wrote all three in less than a year, they would publish all three in the same year, package them as a series and sell them in as a series. Other houses do similar programs with linked books, releasing the linked titles every second month or even every month. This has become a way to catch the readers’ attention. So, even in ST, you can end up with more than two slots a year and you don’t want to be in a position that you have to turn down such a promotional opportunity.

2. The other thing a publisher wants from you is something specific to brand. If you only sell to one house, then you and your work is the brand. If you sell to more than one house, it’s much easier on everybody if you divide your work, giving one segment of it to each house. Here are some common choices:

• contemporary vs. historical
• paranormal vs. not
• romantic suspense vs. not
• mystery with romantic elements vs. romance
• category vs. single title
• short vs. long

The clearer the brand, the easier it is for the house to develop a graphic brand for the part of your work that they are publishing. It also adds predictability into the editorial relationship, because the house then knows what to expect from your option submission.

In fact, these kinds of divisions often occur because the author’s first editor doesn’t like a particular segment of her work. (Or the house isn’t interested in selling that kind of work.) I initially ended up with two brands for this reason: of the first 10 historical romances I wrote for Harlequin Historicals, three had fantasy or paranormal elements. The house had less success selling these works than the others and asked me to write “straight” historicals for them in the future. I missed writing the woowoo stuff. Berkley was establishing their imprints for paranormal and fantasy romances, so I submitted some work there and ultimately sold four fantasy romances to them. The division in my work was between ’straight historicals’ and fantasy romance.

Another detail to consider here – the subsequent years were my most productive. I wrote four plus books a year, alternating between the two brands. There’s an old saying that if you want something done, you should ask someone who’s busy to do it, the implication being that there’s a better chance of it getting done. Well, I find the same thing with writing. If I have deadlines, I’m more productive. If I’m alternating between two kinds of work, I’m more prolific and I think my work is fresher. I can contrast these years of alternating work with writing the three Jewels of Kinfairlie medievals in one year – that was three books in a year, instead of four, but because they were all medievals – all in fact set back to back in time with common characters – there were a lot of days that I just didn’t work. I didn’t want to repeat myself or repeat themes. I wanted each book to be distinctive and being essentially locked into the one time frame made me fret about it. I was less productive than I would have been if I’d been alternating between that world and a different one. That’s just me, but you’ll discover similar traits of your own.

3. One other thing we should talk about is the name game. It was believed throughout the 90’s – almost certainly because of that fear of cannibalizing one’s own sales – that authors should take different names for their different brands. This gave the house an even more distinct identity for the work it was marketing. The idea was that the reader would know what to expect – a J.D.Robb was a suspense while a Nora Roberts was a romance. An Amanda Quick was an historical romance while a Jayne Ann Krentz was a contemporary romance. That kind of thing.

It appears that readers are not as picky about what subgenre their fave authors write as publishers once feared they were – in fact, this kind of division is now widely seen as “dividing the brand” and exactly the wrong thing to do in building your career. The choice is up to you.

4. Finally, option clauses. It is imperative that you manage your option clauses if you intend to write for two houses. In fact, you’d best be managing your option clauses from the get-go if this is your career plan, even if you only write for one house for a while. The option clause defines what the house gets to see next of your work. The boilerplate option clause in most contracts says something like “the Author’s next Work”, but it’s not expected that you sign that. What the house really wants is the next book you write that is most like the one you just sold them. You want to narrow the option clause to make it as specific as possible. So, if you sell a paranormal historical romance, the option clause should be limited to your next paranormal historical romance.

If you know what your other work is going to be, you can ensure that you define your option to exclude that work. You can specify “historical” in your option, if your work elsewhere is going to be “contemporary”. Make it mutually exclusive. Word counts are often used to distinguish between series and single title work, for example. This strategy means that each house has a distinct chunk of work they can expect to look at. It’s better to use terms that are readily quantifiable – like word count, or qualifiers about setting like contemp vs. historical – instead of subjective terms like “sexy” or “funny”.

There’s no reason why you can’t keep two houses happy, provided that you’re sufficiently prolific (and well, pretty organized) but you have to stack the deck in your own favour to make it work. Here’s hoping that I gave you some good ideas to consider ahead of time – because advance planning is key to success here.

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