Reflections on negotiating a contract 1: Leverage and the power to negotiate

Reposted from the TAAOnline blog

When I wrote my last series of posts, I was waiting to hear whether a publisher would offer me a contract for my book for graduate students. The publisher—Routledge—did make an offer, marking the pleasant culmination of the 10+ month proposal process, and I could begin to look forward to publication, most likely in 2020 of my book titled Literature Review and Research Design: A Guide to Effective Research Practice. Getting the offer was a great milestone, but it didn’t put an end to the larger process of getting published. The next phase began with the question of whether to accept the offered contract and whether and how to negotiate for changes. As with my previous series of posts, I offer the reflections of a relative novice, not the advice of an expert.


With the offer came the question of contractual terms and negotiating a contract. The initial offer came with basic terms—royalty rates and some other points. A few days later, it was followed by the formal contract which brought a large number of additional issues into play. The excitement of getting the contract offer was significant, but not so exciting that I would just accept any contract, either. Getting an offer increases my confidence in my book. Although I don’t want to look for a new publisher to make an offer, nor do I want to self-publish again, they’re real options rather than taking what I perceive to be a bad contract. Unfortunately, I’m not entirely sure what makes a good or bad contract.

Once before, I was involved in negotiating a publication contract, also with Routledge, when they published the scholarly book of which I was second author. With one contract already under my belt, I had  slightly more experience than none at all. I knew what a Routledge contract looked like ten years ago, and not much more. For that previous contract, I had simply followed the lead of my first author, and he wasn’t particularly concerned with details, so we basically accepted the contract they offered. But this time, I had no first author to follow; this time, I was in charge, with the corresponding privileges and responsibilities, and the anxieties, too. Being a careful and cautious person, dealing with the myriad specific issues covered in a contract was/is quite intimidating.
The contract I received was about 13 pages long, with about 25 main clauses, many of which had several subclauses. I read through it all carefully. Some of it was obvious, some less so. Some of it seemed totally reasonable, some less so. Not surprisingly, I suppose, it was not all exactly as I would have best liked it. But to what extent could I negotiate changes? Did I have any power to negotiate, or was I simply at the mercy of the publisher’s offer? I decided I had enough power to at least negotiate a little but not very aggressively.

Although I was not desperate to sign, I really didn’t want to get back into the process of sending out proposals. This was a strong incentive to accept their terms. The fact that I would prefer to work with Routledge (a preference that might be naive) was also incentive. Furthermore, I did not perceive myself has having a great deal of leverage: I am not already famous; I do not have any prestige stemming from institutional affiliation. These considerations weighed in favor of just accepting their terms without negotiation for fear of losing the contract.

Balanced against that was my confidence in the quality of my work, and in my ability to either find another publisher or self-publish. Essentially, as I saw it, I had only the leverage of the book itself, plus, perhaps, a little added because the editor had invested her effort in it. It is a strong book, I believe, and good enough that the editor had invested her time and budget to look at it, get reviews, and promote it for a contract—for that matter, she used the time of the publishers, too, when she presented it as a possible project. So, whatever general weakness in position I suffered as an unknown, I did have the book going for me. I focused on this bit of negotiating leverage for emotional support because it was better than having nothing.

For a large number of clauses, I had questions or concerns, including those that covered royalties, copyright infringement, right to future editions, permissions, and the book title. Many of these seemed to me like they favored the publisher more than I felt appropriate, but it seems to me that most contracts I sign or agree to are filled with unavoidable unpleasantness, and can’t be changed. (For example, the Terms of Service contracts that I accept on myriad websites don’t leave any room for negotiation, must be accepted to use the service, and contain all sorts of unpleasant clauses). For this contract, I felt like I did have the opportunity to negotiate because it was a contract written specifically for me. And so, I asked my editor lots of questions as a way of approaching possible negotiation.

If there is an overall theme to this series of posts, it would be that it doesn’t hurt to ask. I asked a lot of questions and in response, Routledge made a few changes in my favor.

Because of my appreciation of the value of the contract and the desire to avoid alienating Routledge, I asked with courtesy and without contention. Realistically, I was mostly ready to accept what they had offered, and didn’t expect that they would make changes in my favor. But, to protect my own interests, I asked. And it was a contract that I could actually negotiate. In this case, I did have the chance to negotiate; I decided I ought to use it.

On the general point of having negotiating leverage, it is worth keeping in mind that even if you have no leverage beyond that of your book, you do have that. You didn’t get a contract offer unless the publisher had some hopes it could sell; they may be willing to make some concessions to keep the rights.

In my second post in this series, “Reflections on Negotiating a Contract 2: Myriad Details”, I will consider the wide variety of issues that came up as I read my contract.

Reflections on seeking a publisher 2: A lengthy process

Here's another reposted from the TAAOnline Blog.

The process of proposing and publishing takes a long time, so patience is important. I started the proposal process nine months ago, and there’s a chance I may be working on a new proposal soon. There are ways that I could have saved time in the process, but even if I had been maximally efficient, I would still have been looking at a process of several months.

In February, I sent my first proposal to an agent who specifically requested sole consideration, which was fine with me, given that part of why I was trying an agent was to avoid doing multiple proposals. (I will discuss the question of giving publisher sole consideration in a future post.) The agent’s website said if I hadn’t gotten a response within six weeks that I should assume that my proposal was rejected, so I waited (and avoided the difficult task of preparing another proposal).  When I hadn’t heard within five weeks, I started to work again, thinking about to whom to send my next proposal.

At that point, I decided to try sending query letters to gauge interest, rather than a full-blown proposal. I figured that a brief query letter would require less effort than a full proposal, and being only a brief query about possible interest, not a full proposal, it skirted the issue of sole consideration.

At the beginning of the seventh week after sending out my first proposal (early April), I sent out my first query letter. My plan was to send out one every day until I got some interest. I chose to do only one a day because I wanted to write a letter that was specific to each publisher, and writing a good cover letter can take a few hours.

The fortunate circumstance of receiving a positive same-day response to my very first query derailed my one-a-day-to-several-publishers plan. The quick response was thrilling, of course, but it meant I had to do a full proposal, which took me away from writing another query letter. It was a few days of work and then a week to hear back. All of this felt like things were moving quickly and couldn’t be better—the first publisher to whom I wrote, and one of the top publishers on my list! The editor expressed interest in sending the proposal to reviewers (again, great!), but suggested some revisions to the proposal first. That took me a week, but by early May I had submitted a revised proposal. The editor confirmed receipt, warning me that she was going to a conference and then on holiday and wouldn’t be able to get back to me for a week or two. And that was really the end of it. Over the next couple of months, I received first a few promises to get to my proposal right away, and then later no response to my emails.

I procrastinated, hoping that the editor would follow up, so it was not until early August that I sent out a new proposal (yes, a whole proposal, not just a query letter—my strategy was not entirely consistent). It got no immediate response (and none since), and ten days later, I sent out another proposal.  This one got a next-day response—a rejection. It was as positive and friendly a rejection as could be imagined—the editor encouraged my proposing to other publishers, and even took time to answer some follow-up questions I asked in response to his rejection—but a rejection all the same. It was, by this time, late August.

For my next step, I returned to the plan of sending multiple query letters. And again, my first query letter received a quick response: the editor to whom I had written was forwarding my query to a colleague. The next day I received an email from an editor (the third in the chain) who  identified herself as the editor of one of the books my query mentioned as a competitor, and who invited me to send my proposal. That took me a few days, but my delay was basically irrelevant, as she was about to leave for a conference and then holiday.

Two weeks later—end of the first week of September—she decided to send my proposal out to reviewers.  That would take about eight weeks, she warned—an accurate estimate, as the reviews were returned in late October. The reviews were positive enough that, pending my response to the reviewer’s concerns, she was interested in taking it to a publisher’s meeting with the intention of offering me a contract. My response only took a day, but it was Friday, and the editor is in the UK, so she didn’t get to it until the beginning of the next week, and, as the weekly publication meeting is held on Tuesdays, she didn’t have sufficient time to prepare the book for that week’s meeting, which brings the process up to date at the moment I write, over nine months since I started.

Maybe I could have cut a few months out of that process by acting more swiftly and aggressively, but even if we disregard my proposals that were rejected, by the time the publication meeting has been held, it will have been nearly three months just with one publisher, and everything moving relatively quickly (my editor warned that reviews don’t always come in in a timely fashion, for example, but mine did).

Publication is a long process, even when everything moves quickly. Finding a publisher takes a significant chunk of time.  It is one reason for writing a proposal before you finish your book, which is the subject of my next post.

Reflections on seeking a publisher 1: Introduction

Reposted from the TAAOnline Blog.

For most of the past year (2018), I have been seeking a publisher for my book for graduate students about using scholarly literature. As I write this, my proposal is scheduled to be discussed at a publication meeting a few days from now, and by the time this blog post gets published, I will either have a contract offer or another rejection.

In this and the following posts, I reflect on some of the issues that have come up in my process—issues that might be of interest to writers who are not yet experienced in proposing books to publishers. Those with more experience might view my reflections as naive (and if so, feel free to comment), but those with less experience might at least find comfort in someone else struggling with similar issues, even if they don’t find useful suggestions.


I am not an entire neophyte to the publication process, but my early experiences with proposing a book were brief. The first time, I was second author of a book that sailed through the publication process on the strength of the first author. After that, I wrote a proposal for my first single-authored book—a book on dissertation writing—that I submitted to two publishers who both rejected it. Then, feeling frustrated by rejection and inspired by a friend who had self-published, I tried self-publishing—a process in which the publisher never rejects the manuscript. Self-publishing gave me an appreciation of the many things that publishers do, and of the good reasons to try to get published, despite the whole difficult proposal process. There is a huge amount of work between a complete manuscript and a published book, and then another huge effort in promotion. Publishers offer all this. And they also offer a certain prestige that self-publication does not carry: a respected publisher is sharing its reputation with the author. For these reasons, I set out to find a publisher.

In January 2018, to prepare for contacting publishers, I gave my completed manuscript to a copy editor to review. The manuscript was the culmination of several years of effort that had been started of the plan of self-publishing again. (This touches on one of the big issues I’ll discuss more: whether to write a proposal before or after a book is complete.)

The very first question in the process was intimidating: To whom would I propose? I had given some casual thought to this in the past, but I had never done any serious research into what criteria make a good publisher, and which publishers met those criteria. I had some personal familiarity with the books of different publishers who published books that I saw as aimed at the same market as mine, but I didn’t have any organized or systematic sense of all of the publishers who might have been interested, nor did I have any knowledge about differences between how publishers treat their authors. Just navigating the decision of where to send submissions was difficult as I felt overwhelmed by all that I didn’t know along with my doubts about how my work would be received by others.

For me, one of the greatest difficulties in writing is the anxiety about giving my work to others. For me, writing itself is difficult but rarely anxiety provoking when I’m focused on the ideas I want to communicate. But when I think about getting feedback, anxiety kicks in. When I was writing the book, I was thinking about scholars I had helped in the past, but when I’m writing an actual proposal and my audience is someone I can expect to be critical, the possibility of rejection is that much more prominent, and anxiety is more of an issue. Combine that anxiety of rejection with the myriad details of the publication process, and the whole can feel overwhelming. To whom do you propose? What publisher? How do you identify a good publisher? What does that publisher want in the proposal? Do you want to propose to one publisher or many? When I started looking at different publishers’ websites to see their proposal process, this anxiety kicked in, as I was suddenly comparing my book to the material from the various publishers and to the standards those publishers explicitly stated. For me, the difficulty was sufficient that I skipped some of what might be considered due diligence. I didn’t research which publisher treats their authors the best, or which does the best job of promoting books, both of which would be reasonable concerns for an author. For better or worse, I picked  a single specific target to whom to send a proposal and just started writing.

Now, nine+ months, and four unsuccessful proposals later, my fifth proposal has an editor who is to recommend it for publication to her publisher. To have reached this upcoming publication meeting, I have successfully passed through the editor’s initial review of my proposal as well as the reviews of two reviewers. The meeting offers hope that I will move on to the next stage—a contract—but also the peril of a return to the proposal process in which I revise my proposal for the next publisher. While I have no desire for the latter, I do feel that my experience has given me a better sense of how to proceed, and the process does feel less intimidating now that I’m in it. Proposing a book is fraught with the danger of rejection, but if you don’t try it, your ideas may never be heard. For many, it’s a risk worth taking.

At present, I have four additional posts intended as part of this series. The first following post discusses the lengthy nature of the process. The next post considers when to write a proposal: before or after you have written the book. The following post discusses writing a proposal. The final post considers the question of giving a publisher or agent sole consideration.

Are you struggling with a project for publication? Contact me; I can help!