In the second part of our series, author Sophia Tobin and Senior Commissioning Editor at Simon & Schuster, Clare Hey, tell us about going through the auctioning process and signing the deal.
Sophia: By the time The
Silversmith’s Wife was submitted to publishers, I had known my agent, Jane
Finigan, for some months, and had absolute confidence in her. Jane showed me the list of publishers she was
going to submit to and explained that it could take some time before offers
came in (if they did). So I could relax,
right?
No. In the days that followed, my internal monologue read as though I
was having espresso drip-fed into my bloodstream. Had I done enough? Maybe I should have had another go at the
manuscript? What if it all ended here?
I work in a library, and it’s rare that you have a manic day
there. But it was on such a day – when
the phone seemed to be ringing every fifteen seconds and I was fielding
requests for mysterious archival material – that I received a message from
Jane, indicating that we had to speak.
I watched the clock until I could call her. An offer had come in: a good offer. ‘Whatever happens,’ said Jane, slowly and
clearly – obviously aware that she was speaking to someone on the edge of
hysteria – ‘you will be a published author.’
How do you express that kind of delight when you’re sitting behind a
desk in a library? Badly, is the answer. ‘Yay,’ I croaked, self-consciously. ‘I can’t really scream or cheer or anything.’
‘Because you’re in a library,’ she said, and cheered on my behalf. ‘I have an email from the publisher. I’ll send it through.’
The idea of being in an auction always reminds of sitting in a
saleroom with a crowd of people and a man with a gavel, but the process that
followed was not like that – thank goodness. I felt insulated from the stressful parts of the experience. Over the next ten days or so it was Jane who
did all the chasing, the rounding up of responses and the negotiating. I received a filtered picture of what was
happening (I did want to say: please,
tell me the bad stuff too).
Clare: Being in an auction as an editor is almost as
nerve-wracking as it must be for the author. You love the novel and the whole
team loves the novel and you have worked out a strategy around how you will
publish it. It starts to feel like your own project – until you find out that
other editors have that exact same idea!
When I make an offer for a novel I always try to put myself in the
author’s shoes. I assume they don’t know anything about me or about Simon &
Schuster and so I try to explain a bit about who we are and where their novel
will fit into our list as a whole. And I also explain how I see the market for
their novel and how we would publish it. With The Silversmith’s Wife, as it has a crime element and a historical
element, I could see that you could publish it in two different ways. But to me
the heart of it was a historical novel that happened to tell a great story
about a crime. But it’s not just a crime, it’s about the people and the place.
And it’s not just a historical – it’s a great story that is set in the past. I
could clearly see how, with the great title and the historical setting we could
put a beautiful cover on the book and I tried as best I could to give Sophia a
flavour of that vision via Jane.
Of course, you never know how the other publishing houses are
envisaging publishing the same novel and so I just hoped that Sophia and Jane
shared my vision while secretly loading hexes on the competition…
Sophia: Then finally
there were two publishers left, with two excellent, almost identical,
offers. I had to decide. Jane had passed on the editors’ offers and
emails to me. It was like choosing
someone to marry on the basis of a brief acquaintanceship. In all my dreams of becoming a writer, I had
never anticipated having to make a choice.
I visited Jane to talk it through. ‘Help me,’ I bleated. She
remained steadfast whilst I questioned her and tried to read her body language
with the intensity of an MI5 interrogator.
I suppose it was coming home to me that what had started as a private
piece of writing – my own secret world – was now on the brink of becoming
something completely different. It was a
little late, perhaps, to become so protective of it, but it seemed to me like a
baby bird, chirruping nervously on a ledge and waiting for someone to push it
off and make it fly.
‘What if I make the wrong choice?’ I asked my husband later, after the
pros and cons had been listed and wine had been drunk. ‘What if I choose the wrong person to look
after my precious little one?’ (I was only half-joking).
‘Then it will die,’ he said, ‘and you’ll have to write another one.’
The final decision was for Simon & Schuster, because of a variety
of reasons: I knew their list, and the fact that Clare was focusing on The Silversmith’s Wife (and the
following book) primarily as historical fiction – rather than crime fiction –
was reassuring to me, as this is the direction I want to go in. I was nervous about forging a new editorial
relationship with someone I had never met, but Jane told me that Clare is
lovely and that she was sure we would get along. So I made the decision, and waited with trepidation
– and excitement – for the next step.
Next time: editing – what happens when the novel
you thought was perfect gets a fresh editorial perspective?