Welcome (back) to the Scarlet Quill Society!

In 2024 YeahWrite’s free workshop is taking you all the places you want to be published — or at least helping you have the best chance possible at getting there. Check out the bottom of this post (and every post) for a roadmap to the year. We’ll be updating it with links each month as the posts go live, so that you can navigate through easily. And don’t forget to check out the Writing Resources tab up **gestures vaguely upwards** there to find our previous workshop series on prompts and editing (not at the same time).

The biggest bonus of the Scarlet Quill Society is that there are actual club meetings. That’s right! Once a month we’ll get together with you and talk about that month’s subject, answer questions, and record the chat for posterity. So if you have an easier time taking in information that way, or if you’re left with lingering questions after a monthly topical post, you’ve got a chance to get the full picture! Check out the full description at the main Scarlet Quill Society page.

Tradscribe

Here we are at last: publishing! You’ve got the basic vocabulary, you know your work is ready, and you’re all set to get your words in print! But how do you get from here to there?

We’re going to spend the next few months discussing traditional publishing before moving on to other options. Most people start by at least trying traditional publishing, so it makes sense for us to focus on it first. But before that, as usual, a quick definition.

Traditional publishing happens when an author submits a work to a market and the market decides to publish the work.

So let’s unpack that: in trad pub, the author (you, whether on your own or through an agent) submits (copyrighted) work (an article, pitch, book, artwork, etc.) to a market (magazine, journal, publishing house, anthology) and then the place you submitted to decides whether it wants to print (on physical media or digitally) your work. You have little or no control or input when it comes to that decision. All you can do is try to position yourself favorably and not disqualify yourself.

When most people ask if you’re a published author, what they actually mean is has a Big Five publishing house bought a novel from you. There are a lot of other ways to be a traditionally published author! And we’re going to try to cover most of them in the next few months, but we might as well start there even if it’s maybe the least common way to be published.

So you wrote a book. Now what?

I know. Not every writer writes books. In fact, most don’t. But bear with me.

If you’re like most writers, you assumed that the steps to becoming a pro looked like this:

Step 1: sit in attic and write

Step 2: ??

Step 3: profit

It’s step 2 we’re talking about now. Sorry, Former Gifted Kids, it turns out that there’s no automatic recognition coming if your work is “good enough.”

The first thing you’ll need to do is figure out who wants (or should want, anyway) to buy your work. If it’s a book, you’re talking about a publishing house. A publishing house can look like anything from the Big Five to an indie house run by one or two people out of their actual house. Some houses accept direct submissions (you send them your work), but many of the bigger ones will only read works recommended to them by an agent. Agents are like temp agencies: they work on your behalf to match you with prospective publishers. Having an agent lets a publisher know that somebody is willing to vouch for the quality of your work. Each agent is different; do your research to find out who will be as excited about your work as you are.

There are tons of resources online aggregating publisher and agent contact info and “wishlists” of what they’re looking for. Once you’ve identified the houses and/or agents that might want to work with you, START YOUR SPREADSHEET. You’ll want to track everywhere you send your work not only because it’s good to know, but because this is a very small world and you want to protect your reputation for professionalism, which means not resoliciting an agent who already rejected you. Sure, it seems like the worst they can do is reject you again, but also you’re likely to become an amusing lunchtime story when they’re hanging out with other agents, some of whom may still be considering you as a client.

If you wrote a novella or short story or personal essay or [insert your favorite genre of short work here], you’re going to follow a lot of the same steps (we’re not kidding about the spreadsheet) with the exception of the agent. You’ll be working directly with your publisher/market. One way to make sure that your work has a market waiting for it is to only write in response to calls for submissions. On the other hand, if your work doesn’t make it into that anthology, the specificity of the prompt may make it difficult to find another market that wants it without a lot of reworking. So there are definitely tradeoffs between writing to spec and writing for your own muse.

This seems like a lot of work, why wouldn’t I just do it myself?

At some point in your journey you will absolutely find yourself asking “I’m already doing so much work, how much harder can it be to just publish it myself?” We’re going to spend the last third of the year answering that question (I’ve got amazing self-published authors and designers lined up to chat with us and I’m incredibly excited about it, I promise we’re not just going to yell about how terrible self publishing and vanity houses are) but right now let’s talk about why you’d choose traditional publishing.

Bear in mind that the publishing world is changing fast, and if you’re not reading this in 2024 you should doublecheck everything.

The answer is that traditional publishing comes with a suite of services that you don’t have to find or pay for yourself. (Note, however, that you may be expected to reimburse the house for these services out of your royalties, so read your contract carefully and consult with your agent and/or lawyer.)

Publishing houses will:

• have access to editors for you to work with, either in house or on contract
• do the cover design for the book
• find other authors to blurb your book (those quotes on the back of the book)
• pay you (read. your. contract.)
• get your book’s ISBN
• proofread the book
• do all the work of preparing the book in ebook format if relevant
• find the readers for audio versions, if relevant, and pay them
• get your book into stores, libraries, and reviews like the LA Review of Books
• set up a web page for the book that you can direct people to

Publishing houses used to, but don’t usually anymore unless you are a star author with a good contract:

• set up publicity tours and readings
• promote your work on social media
• try to sell your book

Also, read, and we cannot stress this enough, your contract. It will say what you’re responsible for and what the house is, what they pay for and what you have to pay back. Did we just say that?: Yes, we did. Will we say it again? Probably.

This also applies, to a certain extent, to anthologies. Anthologies (and magazines) usually have a different pay structure, and the publisher is more motivated to do promotional work for them.

A note about pay

The thing about capitalism is that someone’s getting paid. If you’re doing the bulk of the work (and you are, you’re making the thing that makes people want to buy the book), you should be getting paid for it. Anthologies that make you pay to submit and then don’t pay you for the story aren’t traditional publication, they’re traditional exploitation. We’ve said before that writing for free isn’t just devaluing your own work, it contributes to the devaluation of writing in general. In this age of AI? Get paid for being a human doing the work that only humans can do.

In conclusion…

We hope we’ve given you a grasp of what traditional publication is and why you’d want to choose it for your work

Want to know more? Great news! This month’s guest is coming to hang out, chat tradpub with Rowan, and answer your burning questions (SQS members, don’t forget to email us or hit us up on Discord with questions you want answered if you can’t make the panel). We’re excited to have her!

THIS MONTH’S SPECIAL GUEST

Natalie Zina Walschots

Natalie Zina Walschots is a writer and game designer. She is the author of Hench, a novel about the mistreated and undervalued employees of supervillains, which was a finalist on the 2021 season of Canada Reads and nominated for a Locus Award for Best First Novel. She is presently working on the sequel, entitled Villain. Her work also includes LARP scripts, heavy metal music journalism, video game lore, and weirder things classified as “interactive experiences.” She is recently relocated from Toronto to Nova Scotia, so she can write by the sea.

Your turn!

Got questions? Let’s continue this conversation in the Coffeehouse on Facebook or Discord. And keep an eye out for the next face-to-face (face-to-Zoom?) meeting of the Scarlet Quill Society. 

Join the Scarlet Quill Society!

Live Scarlet Quill Society meetings take place once a month. This month’s meeting is Tuesday, May 14, at 2pm Eastern Daylight Time. Future dates and times TBD based on member and guest availability, but we’ll try to accommodate as many folks as possible. (Yeah. We know. It’s best to have a fixed time. But we think it’s even better than best to be able to accommodate a diverse slate of exciting and qualified panelists, and we hope you’ll agree.)

You can also sign up for a monthly membership! Each month, paid Society members will receive an email with a link to the Zoom meeting. If not every topic interests you, you can also purchase one-time access passes to each month’s meeting via Ko-Fi. If you can’t make it to the meeting, or you don’t like to speak on camera, you are welcome to submit questions before the meeting that our editors will answer in the meeting.

• $5 one-time access to this month’s Zoom session.
• $5 monthly subscription (Pen level): Access to all the live meetings and recordings as soon as they’re uploaded, as well as a private Discord channel where we can discuss tropes in more detail, and your topical questions will be answered by YeahWrite editors! Pen level members can also suggest tropes for future live discussions – our goal is to give you what you want and need!
• $3 monthly subscription (Pencil level): Access to the meeting recordings as soon as they’re uploaded and to the private Discord channel!

A week after the meeting, recordings will become available to all at no cost, but if you find them useful we encourage you to leave a tip in our tip jar—it helps keep the lights on over here and allows us to keep bringing you the high-quality workshop content you’ve come to expect from us, as well as acquire some exciting guest panelists. You can also sign up for a $1/month Paper level membership just to show us you love us.

Index

Wondering what the next meeting of the Scarlet Quill Society will be about? Not sure what we've covered already? Here's our club agenda for the year.

September:

• Read:
• Watch: September meeting

October:

• Read:
• Watch: October meeting

November:

• Read:
• Watch: November meeting

December:

• Read:
• Watch: December meeting

About the author:

Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.

rowan@yeahwrite.me