Understanding the List
Just last week I was talking to a class of students at a local university about the press, what I do as a publisher and how publishing itself is pretty invisible. If you talk to a reader most of them can’t name a publishing company – but they know their favourite authors. How many of us know that Stephen King is published by Simon & Schuster? I didn’t, until I read in an article that Stephen King’s books were part of the Simon & Schuster backlist.
If you’re in publishing, or looking at it, you’ll come across the idea of the publishing list. Often, if you’re an author submitting to a publisher, you may get a rejection letter saying that they liked your submission but that they don’t feel your book quite fits their list. Our list is the core of our publishing – it’s the mix of titles and authors that we’ve chosen over the years. There’s an art to creating a list, to finding those books that fit well together, authors that make sense to somehow fit side-by-side on a bookshelf, or on a book table.
When Paul Vermeersch, our senior editor, was acquiring the book All the Animals on Earth, one of the novels we’ll be bringing out this spring, he enthused to me that it was like Mark Sampson had “written a novel just for me.” That’s one of the key reasons a book joins a list. The editor reading it loves it. If the editor who is acquiring the book isn’t excited about it, it’s not going to make the cut.
Another reason is that the book makes sense in the context of the books that have gone before it. It’s a book that booksellers would expect us to represent, one we’d be good at getting attention for. Over the years we’ve done a lot of memoirs, but they tend to the political side. They can be hard hitting, they can make readers a little uncomfortable with their truths, but the purpose is to shift or challenge society. If a memoir comes in that doesn’t want to engage politically with the world in some way, it’s not really going to fit our list.
The list is how we organize all our acquisitions, but it’s something that readers and newer writers often don’t know exists. I can pick up a manuscript sent to us and say, well, this feels more like a Biblioasis book to me, or maybe I’d think it would fit in better at Book*hug. Yet, how do you do that as a reader or a writer?
It’s easier with smaller presses than with larger conglomerates like Penguin Random House with their dozens of lines and imprints. When people ask me how to know who to send their submissions to I generally reply that they should read the publisher’s books. If you like what they’re publishing, they’re more likely to feel the same about what you’re writing. If you love an author, look at who published them and then read more books from that publisher. You may find yourself following an editor after a while. You’ll know that whatever books they pick, you’ll like them. You’ll have found your list.
