Find Your Perfect Publisher
Three Easy Steps to Locate Your Manuscript’s Happy Home
No small talk today, friends. Too much text to dump. I hope you enjoy information overload. I mean, who doesn’t though?
Let’s begin today’s article by getting something right out in the open: There is no one best publisher. Even if you control for type of book—novels, anthologies, cookbooks, textbooks—there’s still no one company above all others. There is not even one best publisher for a specific author. Many of the people who publish more than one book don’t stick with one publisher for all their stuff—Stephen King, JKR, and GRRM, for example, have all published their books with multiple publishers.
My point is, there’s no simple answer to the eternal question—“To whom should I attempt to sell this manuscript I have just written?”
I do think that there’s one best publisher, or at least a small handful of best publishers, for each individual book. You just have to know how to screen for them.
There are thousands of publishing companies in the United States. Not all of them are aboveboard businesses—some of them are vanity or subsidy presses masquerading as traditional publishers (as I discussed in an earlier article). Some of them are traditional publishing companies, large and small—the type of company you’ve probably imagined publishing with, complete with editors in window offices with comfortable guest chairs. Some of them are just a guy who bought a ten-pack of ISBNs from Bowker and wants to use up the other nine. You really have to do your due diligence to figure out where you want to query.
Querying an editor or publisher won’t lock you into anything, but it uses your energy. Plus, not every publisher accepts simultaneous submissions—meaning many publishers only want to consider your manuscript if you don’t have it on submission with any other publisher at the same time. Further, if you submit to publishers who aren’t a good fit you’re going to get more rejections, and every rejection can chip away at your resolve to publish. It’s imperative not to waste time or effort—precious resources—on publishers that aren’t right for your work.
If the manuscript you’re shopping is not your first—if you’re selling a second or subsequent manuscript—then you’ve already got an established relationship with an editor. If your first book earned out—if it was profitable enough for the publisher that it paid back the advance you received and then some, essentially—then that editor is a great bet to publish your next project. And if they’re not the right fit, they might be able to introduce you to someone who is.
But if the manuscript you’re sitting on is your very first one; or if it’s so wildly different from your last one that your editor can’t help you out; or if your last book didn’t earn out and your editor is not interested in signing another project—then you have to begin the search from scratch. If you’d like to find representation through an agent, some of these tips can help you make an agent shortlist to start with. Ultimately, though, this guidance on finding publishers to query directly. If you have an agent or intend to find one, do not take this article to them. They already know who they want to submit to.
If you’re going it yourself, good news: It’s easier than you might think to put together a shortlist of potential publishers for your project and rank them to find your best option.
Find Your Best Comps
Your first step is to figure out your comps. I covered this in detail in a past article on comps, so for today I’ll just take a high-level look at choosing comps.
This isn’t the first time I’m saying this and I’m not the only person who has said it: Your book is not “a cross between Harry Potter and Game of Thrones.” I mean maybe it is—I hope not because both of those things (themselves emulations of their betters) have been emulated to death—but even if it is, you can’t put Harry Potter and Game of Thrones on your comp list.
First, they’re old and comps need to be recent. As in one-to-three-years recent. HP7 came out 14 years ago next month. I bet you feel old now. Would Harry Potter be the smash hit in today’s market that it was in 1998? Hard to say.
Second, and more important, don’t compare your manuscript to the most successful novels of all time. If you wrote a magical school fantasy and you can’t come up with a more germane comp than Harry Potter in this Year of Our Ford 2021, then you are advertising to any editor who sees your query that you don’t know the field of magical school fantasy well enough to write it better than everyone else out there trying to sell them the same thing.
Also, for our purpose of choosing likely publishers, Harry Potter is only going to lead you to Scholastic, which is not that helpful. You probably won’t sell your first book to Scholastic. Scholastic probably would not have bought HP1, if it hadn’t already been successful at Bloomsbury in the UK.
Pick three realistic comps. Your comp books should be:
Recent (published in the last one to three years);
Successful (moderately to very but not runaway viral hits);
Targeted at the same audience as your manuscript;
Part of the same genre as your manuscript (obviously);
Beyond those basics, look for books that have the same qualities you consider outstanding in your own work. If prose is your strong suit, then your comps should be standouts there as well. If you’ve got a cozy mystery with a teen girl sleuth, your comps should be other cozy mysteries with teen girl sleuths.
Ultimately, you are looking for books that appeal to the same type of person as your manuscript is intended to appeal to, because all that follows proceeds from a reasonable assumption that the publisher who liked your thoughtfully chosen comps well enough to buy them is the most likely candidate to like your manuscript well enough to buy it.
Trace the Publishing History to Its Roots
Once you have your three realistic comps chosen, it’s time to do some sleuthing of your own. First things first, write down the publisher and imprint of each of your comps. In publishing industry lingo, an imprint is a unit of a publisher that operates under one trade name and usually publishes a specific type of content, or list. For instance, Mulholland Books is an imprint of Little, Brown and Company, a publisher that is in turn a part of Hachette Book Group (a publishing company or publishing conglomerate). Mulholland Books publishes mysteries and thrillers. Little, Brown’s other imprints publish other types of books.
You can find the publisher and the imprint, if there is one, by looking at the book’s copyright page if you have a print copy. The spine usually carries the imprint and may also carry the publisher, but not always, and sometimes it will have a logo only and not the name. Make sure you get the imprint’s name if there is one, and not only the publisher. If you have the book in electronic format, your e-reader probably launches right to the first page of text, but if you back up you can find the copyright page.
If you don’t own the book, check out the book’s page on Amazon but beware—you may have to do some digging to get to the real answer. Review the book’s metadata, which usually appears just below the truncated book description and which will give you your first crack at the publisher. For instance, I looked up A Sky Beyond the Storm by Sabaa Tahir and came up with “Razorbill.” Opening the “Look Inside” feature and scrolling up to the copyright page, I got some additional info—Razorbill is an imprint of Penguin Random House. This would also be revealed by a quick google. It’s not a secret.
(Quick caveat, Amazon’s metadata won’t always match up to the “Look Inside” preview if the preview was taken from an earlier edition and the book has since gone to reprint with another company—but your comps aren’t old enough to have been sold for reprint rights, right?)
If Sky was one of my comps, I now know it was published by Razorbill. If I have the book in my hand or on my e-reader, I can also peruse the acknowledgements to see if she’s mentioned her editor by name—get that name if you can.
My next step is to review all of Tahir’s other books. In her case, all of her books have been published by Razorbill and her forthcoming All My Rage is under contract with Razorbill as well so there’s nothing additional for me to learn there. A slightly more complex example is Leigh Bardugo, whose Grishaverse titles are published by Henry Holt and Company at Macmillan, but whose Ninth House is published by Flatiron. And then consider Seanan McGuire, who has books published by Orbit (Hachette), Tordotcom (Macmillan), and DAW (Penguin Random House).
Whatever you find out about your comp’s author’s publication history, consider it critically. If any of their earlier (or later) books were published by a different imprint or publisher than the one you’re using for a comp, try to determine whether the books are similar enough that the imprint or publisher might be a good fit for your manuscript. If so—put it on the list.
The next step is to see if you can turn up any information about the book deal for your comp. If it sold at auction, try to find out what other publishers bid on it. That information isn’t always easy to find. Comb through the old book deals sections of Publishers Weekly to see if you can find your comp.
After doing all of the above for all three of your comps, you should have a tidy list of imprints and publishers—three, I hope, unless two or all of your comps are from the same imprint!—and maybe even some editors’ names to go along with them.
Weigh the Pros and Cons
Your last step is to suss out the qualities you need in a publisher, figure out which of your candidate publishers has which qualities, and use the tally of positive qualities to calculate your ranking.
What is most important to you in a publisher or imprint might not be the same as what’s most important to me, but I’ll suggest some things for you to consider for your own list.
Taking unagented queries—Obviously, if you’re not working with an agent, you need an imprint who is willing to take queries from authors.
Winning literary awards—Have books from this imprint won literary awards? Their website will probably let you know, but check the winners and shortlisted titles for your genre’s major awards going back at least a few years.
Publishing bestsellers—Have any of the books from this imprint landed on a bestseller list? This item, along with the previous (awards) is a good indicator of how much promotion the publisher is doing for its list.
Securing prestigious blurbs—Who endorses the books from this imprint? Is it all the authors’ contemporaries? Or are there blurbs from critics and mainstream publications like newspapers and magazines? That tells me whether the publisher is soliciting the endorsements or the author is expected to do so, which I can extrapolate to get an idea of how much marketing work is put on the author.
Whatever qualities you choose, list them in order of importance down the side of a sheet of paper. Across the top, head each column with one of your candidate publishers. Draw a grid and start filling in squares with Ys, Ns, and ?s. If anything is a dealbreaker—like not taking queries from authors or being temporarily closed to submissions—look that up for all of your candidates first so you don’t waste time researching an imprint you won’t query.
Once you have the grid filled as completely as possible, tally up your Ys and Ns to rank your publishers. Happy querying!
A few final thoughts:
You’ll have more success finding publishers and imprints that accept unagented queries if you include smaller, less well-known publishers on your list. If your comps are turning up all Big Five publishers, try choosing less-famous comps.
As I mentioned above, not every publisher you encounter is a traditional publisher. Make sure you do your diligence on each candidate publisher to ensure that their publishing model is a type you are comfortable doing business with (guidance on screening publishers here).
That’s it, that’s all I have! If you have a finished manuscript in hand, ready to query and submit, I wish you much success. If you’ve got a manuscript in a drawer somewhere, now’s a great time to pull it out and get to polishing. Still drafting? Camp NaNo starts next month. Now is the very best time to start whatever it is you need to get started on. Put at least one sentence down on paper today.
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