Episode 11: Listener Q&A

Sequins, suspenders, shirt sleeves and bonus questions! 🎉

Welcome to the Pub Dates newsletter! We’re so glad you’re here.

This newsletter is released as a companion to each podcast episode, and we use it to share the visual elements of our discussion — from mood boards to design sketches, from photos to secret giveaways just for subscribers.

For the last few episodes you’ve been hearing our callout for listener questions, and in episode eleven, we answered them! Well, some of them. There were a lot. We promised we’d answer a couple of extra questions in the newsletter, so read on to find those!

First, though, you heard us talking in the intro about how excited we were to see Six the Musical. Well, we did, and it was even better than these two superfans imagined it could be. Here we are at the end, brimming with feminism and glitter, having just spent 75 minutes clapping and cheering.

Seriously, these women. So wildly talented. If you get the chance to go along, we can’t recommend it more highly, and if you can’t go, listen to it wherever you can! If you want to learn more about the Tudor queens, you can also check out Kate’s current season of The Exploress podcast.

Now, we did say we’d answer a couple of extra questions, so here we go…

From Brooke: Kate, how are you now a full time author when you don’t have a book out yet?

Kate: Hi Brooke!

I’m able to be a full-time author because of the glory that is the advance. When you make a deal with a publisher, you tend to get paid in two forms: advances and royalties. Royalties are a percentage of your book’s sales, so authors don’t see those until months after their book’s publication (and sometimes they don’t see them at all, but that’s a whole other topic). An advance is an up-front amount that your publisher pays you, and it’s roughly based on how well they think your book will do.

Historically, the advance was paid…well...in advance of a book’s publication, and it was meant to help a writer pay their bills and keep on writing. It’s not exactly a salary, but it is a set amount of money that the publisher promises to pay their author, no matter how a book does when it finally comes out. These days, advances are usually paid out in chunks - sometimes three, or even four or five - over the course of the publication process. I got my first one upon signing my contract and will get my last one a year after Nightbirds comes out.

Very few authors get an advance that’s enough for them to live on: I know plenty of debuts who are still working full or part-time jobs. I feel very fortunate for this opportunity to devote myself fully to writing. And, of course, to making Pub Dates!

From Megan W: How long are deadlines on contract? I'm constantly terrified that I won't write fast enough for a publisher. Thanks in advance for the read!

Amie: I’ll take this one! Hi Megan!

The answer to this — as with many things in publishing (and life) is ‘it depends.’ It depends on the author, on the publisher’s timelines, on the particular project, all kinds of things.

If a project is time sensitive, it could happen on a very short deadline—this is sometimes called “crashing” a book, and it means that not just the author, but everyone at the publisher works to much quicker deadlines than usual, to hustle the book through. That’s rare, though.

More usually, I’d say that on average, the time from a book being acquired to the book being published is roughly two years. Many publishers want (or need) the text of a book locked as far out as a year before publication, to allow for everything from the distribution of advance reader copies, to printing and shipping in this age of supply chain issues. So that means you and your editor have about a year to pass the book back and forth and get your edits and copy edits done.

This is really a situation where your mileage may vary, though — I sold Isles to my publisher three years out from publication, because I wanted to have a long time to get other projects put to bed, and get my draft to where I wanted to be. I also had a small child, and knew I would be slow. Other friends who write slowly have negotiated long deadlines upfront to accommodate this. In this respect, it’s really the same as in any other job — you communicate up front, and then you keep communicating about what will be done, and when.

From Neve: LOOOOOOVE the podcast! It's really interesting for me as I'm only a teenager, but I know I want to be an author as an adult, so it's cool to see behind the scenes of publishing. I actually listen to both of your podcasts separately, so when I heard about this one, I was like, OH MY GOODNESS I HAVE TO LISTEN TO THIS!!! And the icebreakers are awesome by the way (I would travel back in time to 1915 Australia so I don't have to do any research for my history assignment 😉). Question: how long did it take you to write your first drafts? It takes me sooooo loooooong just to finish the first couple of chapters, honestly.

Amie: Hi Neve! This is actually a complicated one for me. Usually I’d say I spend a month or two outlining, and then draft a book over the course of about four months. So it’s maybe six months all up — though that has varied wildly from book to book.

For this book, though? Totally different. The characters and the opening came to me in a blinding flash in 2013. I was so excited that I was writing snatches of it when I was literally with other people, completely antisocial. I knew I had something special, and I was sure I’d have the whole thing soon enough.

Except… I didn’t. I couldn’t make the middle work, and slowly I began to realise that I’d had an idea bigger than my own skill level. I had to put Isles aside and get better, before I was ready to write the story. I kept thinking about it over the years, pulling out that first chapter or two and gazing at them, and then putting it back in the drawer.

Finally, a few years ago, I was ready. By then I’d been working with my editor, Melanie Nolan (you’ll meet her in a future episode) for two series and six books, so I was able to sell Isles to her before it was written. We talk about that in our episode titled ‘A Modest Proposal.’ Once that was done, funnily enough, the drafting took… about six months.

Kate, you didn’t write Nightbirds under contract — how long did you take?

Kate: Hi Neve!

The first thing that came to mind in trying to answer your question was “well, how long’s a piece of string?” Drafting usually takes me quite a while, if I'm honest, but it’s hard to put a concrete number on it because most of the novels I’ve ever written were written in fits and starts. My first novel took me perhaps six months to draft; one of my later novels took me something like 1.5 years.

I started Nightbirds in 2018, wrote about 10,000 or 20,000 words, and then stopped so I could sit down and really think through the story and the world building, because I knew I didn’t have a firm enough handle on it yet to keep going. I didn’t finish drafting it until 2020, but it didn’t REALLY take me all that time to do the actual writing. I took long breaks in there, because other projects demanded my attention, and also because sometimes I need to stop and let a story marinate before I can move forward with confidence.

But I’ll tell you a secret: sometimes I draft slowly because I’m a bit of a perfectionist. This means my first drafts tend to be fairly polished, but it also means I sometimes get bogged down in things that might not matter later. I’m trying to change my ways as I write Nightbirds’ sequel, though! I’m writing on contract, after all, and I’m now writing full time. Plus, I think there’s a lot to be said for drafting swiftly and boldly: don’t let your inner critic get in the way. Write the story as you see it, skip parts you aren’t sure about yet, take chances. And it terms of first chapters, don’t sweat it if it feels like they take you a long time. You’re still getting to know the story and the characters and their world. I think of starting a new draft as trying to get an old fashioned train out of a station: it’s slow, at first, because the engine isn’t warmed up yet, but once the train gets moving things tend to move faster.

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That’s it for this episode — we’ll see you next time! And if this episode inspired you to ask a question of your own, you can leave it in the comments, and we’ll add it to the list for our end-of-year Q&A episode.