Everything a second book deal taught me about publishing*

*Spoiler alert, not a lot.

It has to be said that I am a very nosy person. I try not to be, but more often than not, I fail.

Yes, I do want to see everyone’s holiday pictures. I want to know who said what about whom when I don’t know any of the people involved. And I want to know the exact details of an awkward conversation someone had to have…with a person I also do not know.

It’s like a long-running episode of Black Mirror, then, that I find myself employed in the opaquest of industries—publishing. When I first started writing (on maternity leave, in an Aldi car park while my baby slept in the car), I knew so little about publishing. I don’t think I even realised that there was a difference between writing and being a writer. And, whilst there’s definitely an overlap - you write, therefore you’re a writer - and all that, publishing is an industry, and being a writer is a job. Albeit a faintly ridiculous one. Having a bit of a clue as to the industry you now work on is no bad thing. It’s just that such a clue can be hard to come by.

Now, the times they are a-changin', because more and more there is intel out there as to what goes on in the hallowed halls of publishing HQ. I know people, quite a few people actually, who are in the business, and I dedicate some small portion of my working life to helping people who don’t know much about publishing to know more of it. Mostly, this is due to some sense of misguided duty that publishing should be for everyone.

So, with a vague sense of duty at the forefront of my mind, I thought I’d do a post on how I got a second book deal. Not the mechanics of writing two more books (there are people far better than me at that), but how it all worked.

Plus, I love reading these posts from other people (like I said, nosy as hell), so let’s dive in.

I got my first book deal in February 2021. The phone call from my agent remains one of the best moments of my life, beaten only in the top five by the birth of my three children and the day I finally abandoned thongs. There were two years to wait before my first novel, My (extra) Ordinary Life, (linked, handily here. Don’t say I never give you anything), came out, and in that time, I wrote my second book, The Philosophy of Love, (omg, another link!) which was out in February 2024. And here’s some pretty pictures of them.

I think it’s important to say that I’m a mid-list author. My advances are good, but I grew up pretty poor, so my point of reference is likely off. I know people who got the same advance as me, and it wasn’t anything to get excited about for them. It was more money than I’d ever had in my life, but I still rage against the coast of ketchup. That’s my socio-economic group, okay?

I’d been led to believe (via hours upon hours of doom scrolling) that if I didn’t earn out my advance on my first deal, I’d have no hope of getting another. Earning out is where the books sell enough copies to ‘pay back’ a publisher. At this point, an author with a deal like mine would start earning royalties. I know ‘earning out’ is something many authors worry about. We see not earning out an advance as evidence of poor sales. And poor sales are to publishing what the grim reaper is to life.

Well, I didn’t earn out my advance. I don’t even really know what my sales are (can anyone understand their statements?!) But…I actually got another deal before my second book was even out. I had an offer in December 2023, and it made my Christmas.

I don’t know how usual/unusual this is. Mostly, I think I just float around Bradford (yes, people in Bradford can be floaty), having zero clue and just trying to get through the school run. But here are the things that I think helped:

· My editor. I cannot emphasise this enough. I had no idea how important editors are to the longevity of an author’s career. I lucked out, I’ve had the same editor the whole way through, and she’s brilliant. I didn’t consider the stability of the S and S team when I signed with them, but it speaks volumes that a lot of their authors (like Milly Johnson and Heidi Swain) have written twenty-plus books with them. My advice to anyone lucky enough to have multiple offers from a publisher is to ask what their staff turnover is like. A good editor can make or break your career. (Plus, my editor is also Colleen Hoover’s editor. Colleen Hoover’s sales are propping up my career. So thank you, Colleen.

· I wrote the whole book. This can be a gamble for authors, and I’m not always an advocate of it as it involves doing lots of work in advance, with no guarantee that it’ll pay off if the book isn’t picked up. But, I need to write myself into a book if I’m to have a hope in hell of knowing what I’m writing. My process is chaos. It’s the least efficient process I could possibly have come up with, and looks a lot like, write, panic, panic, panic, write. Ultimately, I think the book, having already gone through that process, made it easier to make a case for it during acquisitions.

· My agent. I got a new agent between my two deals (though only because my first agent, who was equally lovely, left publishing). It helped this deal feel like a fresh start and gave it a bit of that magic ‘debut energy.’

· I started to treat writing as a career. This is tricky, but something shifted between books two and three. I’m lucky enough to make most of my income from writing (though full disclosure, I can’t live on that alone), and I realised that being a writer as my profession differs from being a writer who writes. Both are equally valid, but I wanted to take it more seriously. I’ve been studying both publishing and writing ever since.

Writing my third book, The Next Chapter, which look at that, it’s linked here! Took me about a year (in and around other things), and it took about a month from pitching it to having an offer. This email was just as special as my first book deal, maybe even more so since my life had completely fallen apart in the meantime (see other posts on this) Being an author feels like such a key part of my identity now; I will always be on cloud nine at the fact that someone is willing to pay me to write books.

Often, I think, in publishing, we focus on the big deals and the much-hyped books. I’m not one of those (and that’s okay!) I also don’t think I can describe what I have as an established career, though never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d publish four books. What I do want to show with this post is that there is another way. You can get another deal even if you haven’t earned out. A career isn’t defined by one or even two books.

I write because I love it. I can’t not write, and I’m so grateful that I get to do it for a little longer.

For now, I’m finishing the edits to book four before it goes to my editor at the end of May, and I’m excited to start on book five. Publishing might be a business, but it’s the business of writing. What I’m learning to accept is that the writing is the only part that I have control of. I want every book to be the best thing I’ve ever written. So keep on writing, writers. It’s really the only way.

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