Given the overmuch emphasis on the craft side of writing, a lot of writers are almost shockingly in the dark when it comes to the business side of writing.
By Chimezie Chika
Many discussions around writing seem to heavily lean upon teachings and pedagogic generalisations of craft. “Show, Don’t Tell”, goes a terse phrase which has the peculiarly grand reputation of being the most famous writing admonition of all time.
Almost any new literary scrivener has heard a variation of this somewhere or at some point in their career. While this is surely an unimpeachable advice to dole out, as any good advice on craft, it is not the only knowledge that a writer must strive to acquire.
Given the overmuch emphasis on the craft side of writing, a lot of writers are almost shockingly in the dark when it comes to the business side of writing.
If you have a completed manuscript, what are you supposed to do with it? Who are you taking it to? A publisher? What do you know about publishing? When a contract comes, how do you deal with it? Who gets what percentage and how? Middle men: are such business curios also found in publishing?
In short, as a writer, how do you keep your accounts and finances beneficial and commensurate with your many days and nights writing and agonising over the writing?
The major players in the business of literature are agents, publishers, bookstores, and writers themselves. Each of these play a crucial role and bring a wealth of experience and connections to bear upon the business chain.
Agents
The first act of a writer after completing a manuscript is to find literary representation. This is because, in modern traditional publishing, it is a double burden for a writer to write and represent themselves to publishers.
In the 19th and early decades of the 20th century, the idea of agents was not the norm, and thus authors had direct relationships with publishers, through influential editors. But times have changed since.
A direct relationship with a publisher is only possible with small publishers, but even that is rare these days. For writers who choose to go through the old route of direct submissions, they soon find how increasingly strenuous it is to send out hundreds of emails to publishers in an endless bid to sell their books to them.

And most times the big five publishers, with overflowing slush piles full of unread manuscripts submitted to them, only give priority to agents not writers, since it is easier to deal with such established channels.
Whether this practice is good is a debate for another day; it is a fact that important talents could be missed by focusing only on agents.
Still, in order to present himself with the best chance of securing a publisher for their work, a writer’s first need in today’s world is to find an agent (Unless such a writer decides to go down the supposedly dark corridors of vanity publishing, which we will explain later).
While getting agented is the first important step to getting published, finding one is not at all easy. It is almost as arduous and time-intensive as submitting manuscripts directly to big publishers and hoping for a response.
The writer must first gather the emails of agents he wants representation from and send emails requesting representation with their manuscripts attached. There are many resources online that go into details about how to structure these emails. Alyssa Matesic’s YouTube channel and website is a good place to start.
Some very talented authors have had it easy with finding agents. Some of them were directly contacted by agents who came across their works in magazines; others got agents at first try. Some others got agents through winning fellowships, literary prizes, or attending literary festivals or writing workshops taught by, connected to, or attended by agents.
For the vast majority, they must follow the method of writing pitches to agents. There are already thousands of agents working today. Many of them are genre-specific with elaborate details of what they are looking for in new writers.
Others like the big agents—Curtis Brown Agency, David Godwin, Pontas Literary Agency—are institutional and have different departments for different sections of art and literature.
For the majority, there are many websites and resources online for finding agents. Some of the important ones include Query Tracker, Manuscript Wish List, Poets & Writers, AALitAgents.org, AgentQuery, etc.
Publishers
After writers, publishers are the most important link in the literary chain. Publishers owe as much to writers as writers owe to them, there is a mutual interdependence. The degree of this dependency depends on the publisher and the writer (Some can admittedly be either symbiotic or parasitic).
The role of a publisher is to edit and package the author’s manuscript and get it ready for the market. In the process, the publisher endeavours to make the book as attractive as possible, physically and intrinsically, so that, when sold, financial dividends can be made.
The publisher also has the job of marketing the book, especially through publicity and getting the book to book sellers around the world or in the specific geographical areas where they are limited to. Many big publishers possess huge advertising budgets.
This is why most times—though there are other variables at play when this happens to smaller publishers—big publishers are able to get their books to become bestsellers. The answer is often massive publicity.

Publishing has two major categories: traditional publishing and self publishing. Self publishing is simply what it says. It means that the writer decides to publish himself. There are many reasons, both valid and vain, why this could happen, which we would not go into.
One benefit for self-publishing is that the author makes his profits for himself (reason why it is sometimes called vanity publishing), but that publishing also has its problems such as inadequate funding for publishing and marketing. Self-published books are mostly shoddy affairs with either poor editing or poor printing or both.
Traditional publishing is the more standard form of publishing. It means that publishers pay authors advances and royalties to publish and market their books. Traditional publishers spend a lot of money on publishing and therefore their first interest is to make a profit as any company in a competitive market.
When a traditional publisher accepts and acquires a manuscript submitted by an agent, their first act is to assign an editor to the writer (acquisition means that the publisher agrees to publish the book and offers the author a fee for through a contract which the author must sign if he finds the publisher’s offer favourable).
Afterwards a future publishing date is fixed. The publisher begins publicity as early as possible. In short, the publisher begins publicity the moment they make the announcement of the deal.
Deal announcements are often first made on public websites like Publisher’s Marketplace—the major resource for publishing updates and news existing today. There are 5 categories of publishing deals according to the amount of money the publisher is offering for the manuscript.
Nice Deal—means the book was acquired for anywhere between $1 to $49,000; Very Nice Deal—anywhere between $50,000 to $99,000; Good Deal—anywhere from $100,000 to $250,000; Significant Deal—anywhere from $251,000 to $499,000; Major Deal—$500,000 and above.
This cryptic language allows publishers to talk about how financially significant a deal is without divulging the exact amount.
Most big traditional publishers are part of the “Big Five” corporations—Penguin/Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster, and Macmillan—that control most of world publishing.
Those who are not part of the Big Five, are usually known as independent publishers. These are traditional publishers whose budgets and publishing catalogue are far smaller than what is obtained in the Big Five.
Contracts
A publishing contract is the most important aspect of a publishing deal, for it could make or mar a writer. A good publishing contract, with favourable details, gives the author financial dividends. A bad deal rips the author off in the most insidious way and makes the author’s writerly efforts come to naught.
There are therefore legal implications in the details of a publishing contract which authors must consider with utmost seriousness and painstaking attention.
There are two aspects to the financial terms offered in a contract: The advance and the royalty. The advance—known in full as ‘advance on royalties’—is the bulk money the publisher pays the author initially before, during and upon publication of the author’s book.
Advance on royalties means that when the author receives an advance, he does not receive any royalty payment until the publisher makes back the advance payment from profits, whereupon the publisher begins to pay him royalties on installment basis according to the contractual stipulations, which could be twice a year or on a quarterly basis.
The royalties are the percentage payment the author receives from the profits of book sales. Most publishers offer about 10% royalties, but there are others who offer 13% to 15%. In my experience, those who offer 13% are usually not major publishers, likely because they are unable to pay the large advances that major publishers are able to pay.
A contract also stipulates the conditions for the payments of advances and royalties; that is, how much books need to be sold, etc. The most important aspect of a contract is the copyright. How much rights is the publisher buying from the author?
The author and his agent needs to know if the publisher is buying national or international rights and determine if it is commensurate with what the publisher is offering.

Usually, if a publisher buys international and translation rights they pay a lot more than usual, since, in such cases, publishers in international territories will have to go through the publisher and not the writer’s agent. In the absence of such a deal the agent has the duty to sell the international rights of the book to international publishers.
This could be done country by country or language by language (language rights) or, in some cases, the entire international rights could be sold to one international publisher who will then handle everything else for other territories.
A publisher might also sometimes buy movie rights and make it part of the contract. Meaning that if movie companies want to adapt the movie, they will have to pay the publisher for the movie rights from which the publisher will now give the author a percentage.
In the absence of this, the ideal situation is for the author to sell the movie rights himself through his agent. These legal technicalities in a contract must be taken seriously by the author if he must benefit. He has the right to reject whatever part of the contract he finds non-beneficial.
Bookstores
Bookstores are the final chain in the literary enterprise. They are the main distributors of books. They bring the final product, the book, to the reading public as retailers. While publishers mostly determine the retail prices of their books—except in cases of promos and discount sales—it is mostly through bookstores that these books can be sold.
The bookstores also acquire the books from publishers at wholesale discounts, usually a sale-pay basis, which allows them to turn in a profit. Just like publishers there are major booksellers which run bookstore chains across many cities and countries—including Amazon, Waterstones, Blackwell’s, etc—and there are independent bookstores which are usually small sole proprietorships.
Nigerian bookseller, Roving Heights, started as an independent bookstore but is presently on its way to becoming a bookstore chain, with three branches in Nigeria presently.
Chimezie Chika’s short stories and essays have appeared in or forthcoming from, amongst other places, The Weganda Review, The Republic, Terrain.org, Isele Magazine, Lolwe, Fahmidan Journal, Efiko Magazine, Dappled Things, Channel Magazine and Afrocritik. He is the fiction editor of Ngiga Review. His interests range from culture, history, to art, literature, and the environment. You can find him on X @chimeziechika1.