Making Housewarming: Part 3, Finding the Right Publisher
Hello! Welcome to “Making Housewarming,” our series on this here blog about how we created our debut book from start to finish—everything from how we decided what we wanted to create to organizing photoshoots to finding the right publisher and a whole lot more. We’ll be covering a different part of the process every week for the next seven weeks, so make sure to check back in or join our weekly newsletter to make sure you don’t miss anything!
Be sure to scroll to the very bottom of this post where you’ll find ‘em all and catch yourself up to speed. Or don’t! I’m not your mom!
In our car when we received our book offers (there’s a video, haha!)
Telling Matt’s mom we were gonna be authors (while we were touring our future home!).
Both of those images will get more context further into this post, promise!
Once we arrived back home from our Southwestern writing adventure with our book proposal in hand, it was time for the scary part: seeing if anyone would publish our book. We sent our proposal off to our literary agent and let her do the initial shopping around. I’m not exactly clear on what this process is like, but from what I understand our lit agent (and any good lit agent!) has contacts at a large number of publishing houses, everything from smaller indie publishers to the behemoths of the publishing world, and would be sending a “hey, you interested?” email to contacts at publishing houses she thought would be a good fit for our book. I think like seven or so publishing houses out of a dozen she emailed said they’d be interested to see the proposal, and upon receiving the proposal a whole five publishers wanted to meet with us!
We were very excited! While meetings don’t always turn into offers, it felt so good to have interest from professionals in the field. We were careful to not have any expectations out of the meetings, but our literary agent told us she wouldn’t be surprised if we received at least two or three offers from the five meetings we were going to take. That sounded great to us! We were going in blind! We’re just happy to be here!
Two weeks later, all of our Zoom meetings had been scheduled into a two-day period, and it was time to pitch ourselves and our book concept. We went into each meeting expecting to really have to sell ourselves, like how you’d go into a traditional interview for a job, but I suppose our book proposal kind of did most of that work for us, so the meetings were more casual, and it even at times seemed like the publishing houses were trying to tell us why they’d be the best fit for our book, not the other way around, which was 1.) surprising and 2.) fantastic.
After the meetings Matt and I had a lot to consider. At this point we weren’t even sure any of these publishing houses would make an offer on the book, but we needed to be aligned on how we felt about each one in the case that they did. We talked and talked and browsed all of their previously published works to see which portfolio felt like a fit and kept pinching ourselves. It was like, a constant oscillation between our natural state of “how is this happening to little old us?” and the need to recognize that we were Big Boys with a Lot of Talent who had a great grand wonderful book to share with the world. It’s a strange balance that I think a lot of freelancers and creative persons deal with as they go through the hoops of struggles and success.
A week or so after the meetings, we got word that all five of the publishing houses we met with wanted to make an offer. We were so shocked and ecstatic! In case you’re as new to this as we were, an offer basically means they’re going to send a document that has a quick description of the project, an outline of the proposed number of pages and word count and photo count, and some other technical details like the book’s physical dimensions, and then how much of an advance they’ll give you and what the royalty structure would be.
Book deals actually have way more to them than just money talk, even though that’s the juiciest part. You’re also solidifying terms for things like international sales and audiobooks and bonuses for high-performance and potentially even clauses pertaining to film adaptations etc. It covers a LOT and it’s all really important.
Because more than one publishing house said they were going to make an offer, our literary agent held what is called a book auction. It’s worth noting that we absolutely weren’t prepared for this to happen, and that it’s also the best case scenario. It meant there was some hype!!! Basically, all offers were due on a specified day and time, so I think it was like on a Thursday by 3 pm PST. Once our agent had the offers in, she reviewed them and shot them over to us.
BTW, now’s a good time to go look at those two photos at the top of this post again! We were literally at inspections for the house we eventually bought and now live in when our agent sent over the offers. We took a break from the home tour to go sit in our car and review everything. So it was already a very exciting day, but it got even more exciting (if for the drama alone) because two of the publishing houses had basically tied with identical offers with identical royalty structures and advances.
Lucky for us, they were also the two we were most interested in working with after we’d had our meetings a couple weeks prior. So, because there was a tie, those top two bidders entered into a second round of auctions to make a new “best & final” offer by the following day. At this point we were just happy knowing we’d be able to have our book published with one of our dream publishers. We spent the whole afternoon and evening just giddily fleshing out fun details that weren’t even relevant until later, throwing around big ideas like titles and who we wanted to photograph it and what we wanted to do for the cover.
The two revised offers came in the next day and guess what? They tied again, with just a few minor differences as far as bonus structures. At this point we felt like we were being punk’d. Like, was this normal??? The rules of the auction said there wouldn’t be a third round, and because the offers were so similar we had a decision to make that was pretty much solely based on which publisher we’d rather work with. They were both such well regarded publishing houses, it was a huge privilege for us to be able to choose between them, and we wanted to make sure we made the right call, even though we knew we’d be in good hands regardless.
We ultimately decided that the best choice was to go with Abrams Books, because they create absolutely gorgeous lifestyle and design books that are similar to what we were hoping to create, and while perusing our bookshelf we kept seeing their logo on books that had brought us the most joy, like Lauren Liess’s Down to Earth, Justina Blakeney’s The New Bohemians, and Athena Calderone’s Live Beautiful. And as we recalled back to our first meeting several weeks prior, all we could really remember was that the whole team seemed so warm and excited, and maybe most importantly that they understood our vision, and that’s really the most you could ever want from the people who will help bring your book baby into this world. So, Abrams it was, and to this day we’re still so thrilled with that decision. Once we said yes and scribbled our little names on a big contract, the two year countdown to publication started and we had to hit the ground running on making this massive project come to life.
And, well, that’s the scoop on what finding a publisher was like!
In the next few weeks of this series we’ll dive into what happened after we had found our dream publisher—we’ll be covering what our writing process was like, how we worked together (and didn’t kill each other, huzzah!), what it was like to coordinate a photoshoot in the middle of a pandemic, and so much more. We hope you’ll join in and follow along as we count down the weeks to our book’s publication! You can subscribe to our weekly newsletter to make sure you don’t miss a thing, and preorder Housewarming if you haven’t already!
Love you loads
xoxox
Beau & Matt
