This is Delivery & Acceptance

I want you to get paid and I love talking about money.

I’m a literary agent who specializes in nonfiction. When people ask me what I do for a living, they often seem intrigued, and just as often, a little confused and perhaps even intimidated. This doesn’t surprise me, given the nature of book publishing — so idiosyncratic and willfully obscure, so full of unspoken procedures and rules, largely centered in a handful of buildings in one very expensive city that people also find confusing and intimidating.¹

The “nonfiction” part doesn’t help matters. When people think of “book publishing,” they usually think of novels. How often have you seen a movie about a writer gleefully celebrating the debut of their book on the “mental health impacts of their phone-based life on children”? (Thank you to the New York Times for that book description; as of this writing, the book in question has sold over 500,000 copies in hardcover and spent forty weeks on the bestseller list.)

This isn’t because people aren’t interested in reading nonfiction (see above) or in writing it. Nearly as often as I tell people I’m a literary agent for nonfiction, they tell me their idea for a nonfiction book — though admittedly, I’m spending time with a self-selecting crowd. I’ve found that the process of publishing a nonfiction book is often a total mystery, even to those who already know folks who have published books and who have published articles and essays themselves.

I wish this weren’t the case—no aspiring writer should find that their greatest hurdle in publishing is simply figuring out how publishing works. (The writing part is hard enough.) The lack of easily accessible information about the ins-and-outs of nonfiction is what led me to write a book on it. It’s called Take It From Me and it will be published by Pantheon next year. The book is now in production (and one of the things we’ll discuss in this newsletter is why it can take over a year for a book to travel from being an email attachment in your editor’s inbox to something your mom can buy, during which time your mom will ask you on a weekly basis when she can buy it). In between then and now, I have lots to say and lots to share. In researching the book, I interviewed over 70 writers and publishing professionals. While the key insights from those interviews are woven throughout my book, the interviews themselves are rich with information and advice, and the writers are delightful. I’ll be sharing excerpts from those interviews here, as well as guidance on all things publishing.

In sharing the experiences of other writers and my own as an agent, I hope to make the process of becoming a published writer a little more navigable.

The theme of this first newsletter is the phrase that’s also its title, “delivery and acceptance.” I chose to start here because I think it's not only one of the more suggestive and melodious terms in publishing, but also one of the most poorly understood. Like so many of Book World’s mysteries, this phrase’s misunderstandings have to do with money. (I find that the money stuff is the stuff writers know the least about, thanks to both the taboos around the topic, especially in the white-shoe world of publishing, and the notion that getting paid for art diminishes its importance or aesthetic value. As for me, I want you to get paid and I love talking about money.)

So, delivery and acceptance?

Important piece of information #1: book advances² are paid in parts, most typically quarters.

Important piece of information #2: those parts are typically

1) on the signing of the contract

2) on delivery and acceptance of the manuscript (publishing folks usually abbreviate this to D&A)

3) on first publication of the book, usually in hardcover, and

4) on publication of the book in paperback and/or twelve months after the book first comes out.

So, for the sake of nice, round numbers, let’s say your advance is $100,000, you’d receive $25,000 on signing; $25,000 on delivery and acceptance, $25,000 on hardcover publication and $25,000 with the paperback.³ Sometimes your agent can negotiate a different or more advantageous payout, but this is more or less how it usually goes.

Important piece of information #3: So you’ve sent in your manuscript, you’ve “delivered” it. Now what is meant by “acceptance”? Many writers assume it means something informal, like your editor acknowledges your manuscript has been turned in and bam, money gets wired to you. Or perhaps it’s a little more involved than that, meaning the editor acknowledges receipt of your manuscript or that she says it’s good or even that she’s done editing.

It means none of those things. Acceptance, and the accompanying acceptance payment, is typically triggered when the book is in its final form, fully edited,⁴ and has been transmitted to production for printing. The time between sending that first draft to your editor and when your book is in production can take weeks or more typically, months.

Why is this important? Because in the excitement of landing a book deal, and in hearing you’ll get that second tranche of money at delivery and acceptance, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the road to acceptance is longer than it seems. I try to explain this to my writers at the close of every book deal, but I’ve seen that selling a book is a bit like childbirth, so painful and exciting that you block most of it out once it’s over. In practice, this means that many writers are expecting that second payment moments after emailing their first full finished draft to their editors — and making plans for how they’ll spend it.

I would like to save you the stress of misunderstanding when you’ll be getting new gutters or the handbag of your book tour dreams. Please, despite this new understanding of the D&A timeline and no matter how big your bills, put aside just a little of your advance to buy yourself a treat to commemorate this amazing accomplishment.

I would like to save you other stresses too, and I believe knowing more about the process, and hearing from those who have successfully navigated it (and of course stumbled along the way) is the best way to do so. Upcoming issues of this newsletter will include interviews with writers who have had singular careers, an English professor writing on the history of the literary agent, a book “collaborator” (formerly known as a ghost writer, RIP ghost writers), book editors and publicists, among many others.

And speaking of money, this newsletter is free and I⁵ plan to keep it so. I named my book Take It From Me because I really do want you to take it. While I do need to charge for my book (everyone needs to get paid), I wanted to make some of the material that couldn't fit into the book available to all. Take it, run with it, and let me know if there is anything in particular you’d like me to cover.

Yours with thanks,

Alia

❦

1. New York is home to all of the Big Five publishers, i.e. Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, HarperCollins, and Hachette. The Big Five account for 80% of the market share of Book World and of bestsellers. Later issues of this newsletter will explain the Big Five in more detail, as well as include interviews with writers and editors who have flourished while working outside of it.

2. I’ll cover book advances and royalties at some point too but if you have any questions about them, AMA.

3. If your book is sold by an agent, as the vast majority of books published by Big Five publishers are, the money will be paid directly to the agency, which will commission it at 15%, the industry standard, and the remaining 85% will be sent to you.

4. Most books go through four proofing stages, where you go over them to make sure they are absolutely perfect and include all of your requested edits and changes. This is why it is particularly maddening to see the inevitable Amazon review noting a typo on page 144. We really tried.

5. H/T to my boss David Gernert, who came up with the title.