What Publishing Does For You — Brandon Sanderson's Writing Lecture #11 (2025)

Hey, this is Brendan Sanderson's writing lecture series. This is week two on the publishing industry. I delve a lot into agents and in pitching your book and in going to conventions. So hopefully this will be helpful for you. Next week is our last week, so come back for that one.

All right, welcome to writing science fiction and fantasy. Uh, this is our second lecture on the business of writing. This is also going to be a bit of a fire hose like last week. Uh, hopefully there'll be a little more time for questions this week than there was last week.

All right, so if you'll remember last week, we talked through kind of the history of publishing and what publishing departments do. Uh, we did focus a lot on sci-fi fantasy and afterwards I'm like, I probably should mention that the other genres were also growing up at the same time, right? Uh, it wasn't just Tolken uh that kicked off kind of the hardcoverver uh boom for uh for publishing. I mean, we got Agatha Christie in there. We've got Ian Fleming in there. Um, right, like people are writing in all of the kind of traditionally, like you got Georgia O'Hare. Uh, these traditionally kind of a little more lowbrow um genres were coming of age and then we eventually hit the modern age with the modern hardcover blockbuster book.

So let's talk. I'm actually going to do these a little out of order. Let's talk about how people used to break into the industry. Uh, for context, once upon a time in science fiction and fantasy, if you wanted to break in, the thing that you did was write short stories. Uh, this is because the pulp magazines were the big seller uh of science fiction fantasy. A lot of the people who were reading it didn't have a lot of disposable income. They were uh reading these magazines and they were reading a lot of short stories. And this is where the golden age of science fiction really kind of came about. Uh, your Azimovs and your Clarks and these people were all publishing in the magazines. And so if you wanted to break in, the general advice was, go sell some things in short fiction markets. And then once you've proven yourself in short fiction, you can then start putting in your cover letters. We'll talk about cover letters and um, and queries and things. You start putting in them, "Hey, um, I uh have published an analog and FNSF and blah blah blah, and this is my first novel. It's about this." You'd have these really great writing credentials to sell your book through query letter.

Back then, you often didn't need an agent. Um, remember how I talked about last week all these little publishing houses that used to be separate? They got gobbled up. Well, when they got gobbled up, particularly the science fiction ones, they usually left all of the structure intact, the publishers and things. And these were all people who were all friends of each other who'd grown up going to conventions together. I think I told you about uh, did I tell you about Mosha, my editor last time? Like, he just showed up at a house once and they're like, "Oh, read for us." Right? You're a nerd. Read. Tell us what you think of this. Um, and a lot of these people knew each other very well. And in fact, they knew the authors that were consistently publishing in the magazines. And so when someone who had been consistently publishing wrote their debut novel, all of the publishers would be interested. Uh, and generally that was your funnel.

Well, in the 80s things started to change. The hardcoverver blockbuster took over uh as the main way people were reading. Uh, readers had more disposable income. They were buying full novels. And it turns out that what the market really wanted was that because that started to eat away at the short fiction market. When I was breaking in, a lot of people were still saying, "Well, have you published any short fiction?" And a lot of us breaking at the time were like, "We don't read the magazines. None of us have ever looked at one." We grew up reading Robert Jordan. We didn't grow up reading uh analog science fiction. And so because of that um, we started just submitting novels straight out and the industry didn't quite know what to do with us, right? Because this method, this pipeline to publication was no longer functioning as it once had because people weren't reading or writing short fiction at the levels that they used to. And uh, in fact, the magazines, you know, they there are still several of the of the good ones out there. I do recommend them. Writing short fiction is still a a perfectly uh fantastic thing to do, but you should read it and write it because you love it, not because it's an avenue to break in. It still can be if you are good at short fiction, but it is no longer the main way to break in.

During about this time, agents in sci-fi fantasy really started to come to prominence because suddenly the novel was the main way and you had to find it in the slush pile. This wasn't the only economic pressure on the pub on the authors and publishers that for agents to rise, but it was definitely a contributing factor in my opinion. And so suddenly all of these novels are being submitted and the publishers are overwhelmed by them because now they have to take these submissions. There's not this this apprenticeship and they have to find the diamonds in the rough. They start offloading more and more of the work to agents who start during this time to be the slush pile readers because the publishers get overwhelmed.

About this time in the late '90s, agents started charging more. They used to be 10%. And we'll talk about agents next. They then moved into charging 15% which is now the standard. That is off the top of everything you earn that you publish through them. Um, which is generally going to be all of your novels. Agents generally don't care about short fiction. You can do whatever you want with that, but a short fiction piece will often earn you pizza money, not rent money. Okay?

So, the uh, the agents start taking over and the publishers, they kind of like this. Like imagine you're an editor and you're there and you're like, I used to have this slush pile to the ceiling full of terrible books and now instead I don't have to read that. An agent has already read through all of that and brings me the best stuff. And this started to really become the way that you broke in. I broke in in 2003. I was at the tail end of the p the time when you could break in without an agent. Um, and I broke in through networking.

Back in the day like in the 80s and 90s in order to have a new style of apprenticeship, a lot of the breakouts came from people who went to conventions, hobnobbed with the editors and agents, started to make a name for themselves just by being, you know, somebody who was at the conventions that talked intelligently uh about, you know, science fiction, fantasy. When I took this class um in 2000, Dave Wolverton said to me, he's like, "Your writing is really good, Brandon. You finished six novels. You need to be publishing." I'm like, "Well, how do I do that?" He's like, "All right, I want you to go to World Con and World Fantasy Convention and to the Nebula Award weekend whenever it's in New York. That's where you'll find the agents and editors."

So, I started doing that that year. I actually stayed with Scar's cousins brother. Scar's brother. Scar uh and I and a couple others went and slept on the floor of his brother's house. Uh, cuz Scar's from Jersey and we figured that's better than paying uh New York hotel prices cuz the Nebula Awards were there and we went to the Nebula Awards like that summer. This one always throws me off. It moves. Um, you know, I'm used to being able to lounge back and and pontificate. Uh, we go, we sleep on the floor. We bought umbrellas. Someone stole our umbrellas. Um, we went to the Nebula Awards very awkwardly cuz Dave said, "Go sit in the bar. That's where people chat." And we're like, we're sitting there with our sprites. Hi. And everyone is super friendly. Like, not everyone was drinking. They're just there in the hotel bar where this is happening. I sat down next to next to an editor at Tor, not knowing it, and just started up a conversation uh and said, "Hey, can I send you a book?" Like, I I make it sound like I was cool. It was more like um, right. And he said, "Yeah, sure. Send me a book." Uh, he never got back to me on that. I joke that there's still a copy of White Sand somewhere in the at Tor that they're going to dig it out, you know, underneath some cabinet somewhere and be like, "A Sanderson book that we haven't published. Stop the presses." Um, right. Uh, but I sent him that and then I went up to the like little cocktail party up up above and I met an agent named Joshua Bilmis who said, "Yeah, go ahead and send me something." And I sent him something and he rejected it. But he rejected it, saying, "This is actually pretty good. Send me your next thing."

Um, that next uh year after that, I went to World to World Fantasy in Montreal. Scar wasn't at this one, but uh Dan and Peter were. And Ben, for some reason, um, yeah, you guys know Ben. Um, he's our he's our friend who's a computer science guy that just is beused by all these nerds. Um, and so we went there and at a party I met Mosha. Um, like, and I pitched him a book and he said, "Send me that book." Moshe eventually bought that book. Uh, Joshua I called up when uh when Mosha had said, "Hey, I want to buy this." And I said, "Hey, you gave me a really good rejection. Uh, you've read a couple of my books now. You've rejected them all, but there's one that Tor wants. Are you interested in handling negotiations for me?" And he said, "Free money?" "Yes." Well, he actually said, "Send me the book. Make let me make sure it's good." Uh, he read the book. He's like, "All right, it's pretty good. That's better than the ones you sent me um before. So yeah, we'll do this." And so he handled negotiations. Um, and that's how I broke in. This is again kind of the last generation where that was possible. Um, as the old guard in publishing uh got older and retired, the new people that they hired actually like had corporate experience and understood like being part of a big publishing company. And they all basically moved to taking the agent submissions, right? Um, and the agents, a really good agent is more than just somebody who submits your book. They submit your book to the right place. So, the agents all learned that the best thing they could do was be taking editors out to lunch. They would learn what the editors have bought recently, what they're looking for, what they like, and they would keep relationships with all the editors at all the publishers. So when the right book came in, the agent would be able to target it at the right people and hopefully improve their sales numbers or their sales percentage, the percentage of selling a book.

So these days, that's kind of how it is. Selling without an agent is virtually impossible. Uh, there are a few places you can do it. Bane Books will still take one uh on agent. In fact, Jim Bane, who founded it, hated agents and those who have taken over uh for Jim have um have kind of maintained that. Uh, Bane is kind of what you might call a medium-sized press. It's not a small press. It's not one of the big five. It's its own kind of thing. So, um, you know, Bane is an outlier. There's a there are other ones in children. Scholastic is an outlier. Scholastic is not one of the big five, but it plays like one. Bane kind of plays like one only in sci-fi fantasy. Uh, they tend to have lower advances, but they tend to support their authors very well. So that's kind of, you know, uh, if you read Bane books, you'll know what kind of style. They're a little bit more pulpy, a little more sword and sorcery/space opery, but they'll do anything. Um, so right now, that's basically your options in sci-fi fantasy. You have the imprints of the big five and you have Bane. Uh, there are some various small presses. In general, I do not recommend small presses for people who are breaking in if they intend to want to have a career in science fiction and fantasy. There are good small presses. I have published with Tachyon and I had a wonderful experience with them. There are other presses like Tachyon that with the right book, like a novella or just in the right circumstances, an agent might say yes, let's submit to them. And a lot of these you can submit to without an agent. Also, that said, the advances are small. Their distribution tends to be um a little bit smaller and it is very hard to earn a living with a small press. Not impossible to leverage that into being a best-selling author, but I recommend that authors if they want to go traditionally go for the go to the top or that they independently publish. The the middle ground is generally not something I recommend just because the small presses for how good some of them can be. Um, and again, I have published with Tachyon and it was the right thing to do for for that specific book. They did the print version of Emperor Soul and I maintained the ebook rights and sold the ebook myself. Um, main reason that I say to avoid them is because um generally because of the current environment with indie publishing. Um, you're going to be asked to do the same things for a small press that you have to do indie publishing. Do all the publicity yourself and things like this, which means that if you're going to have to do that anyway, you might as well independently publish and make a larger cut off of the smaller amount of money. Um, your your mileage may vary.

All right. So, we've kind of covered that these days you break in with agents. What is an agent in the publishing industry? Agents have a bad reputation in the music and uh film industry. Generally, publishing or uh book agents do not have that bad reputation with their um with their authors. Um, I have had an excellent experience with mine. Most authors I know asterisks we'll get to um, you know, the exceptions have very good experience with their agents and agents are generally highly regarded. Um, they're New Yorkers a lot of them but not all of them. Um, and they tend to uh they tend to talk like New Yorkers in my experience. Um, so what does this mean? Well, an agent in books is really kind of four different things. All right. On one hand, there's the thing we've talked about. They sell your book. That is one of their main jobs is as a new author to take the book and be able to target it to the right publishers. They also are one small part business manager. So, an agent will give you career advice. An agent will give you guidance. Um, because these days they act as a slush pile. They also uh tend to be doing developmental editing, which is a thing that the old guard in publishing does not like at all. And in fact uh Heinlein would probably if he knew and were capable would climb out of the grave and start slapping us all around for letting agents do developmental editing on books. Uh, because his opinion would be, only the person giving you money has a right to tell you to change anything and even then if you don't like it, you should scream at them till they till they change their mind. Um, I'm very opinionated on on revisions and things and I like to pass that along. People who don't like agents, this is a sticking point. Uh, where that asterisk comes from, it is because some um, some authors, part particularly indie authors say, um, I don't want to do developmental edits for someone who's not an editor buying the book and number two, they worry about conflict of interest, meaning an agent uh needs to keep a good relationship with all of these editors in order to keep selling books. So agents are worried about submitting books that they're not, you know, that they haven't had some developmental editing ex uh work on because they only want to be submitting the best things to the editors so they maintain that relationship. So the relationship with the editor to some authors becomes a sticking point that the agents therefore are not um following the author's needs, they are following the editor's needs. So those are kind of the two of the sticking points.

Um, an agent will be an expert in contract negotiations. In publishing, you should not need a separate attorney than an agent until you get big enough that Hollywood is paying attention. And then you probably want one. Um, but until then, an agent can do all of your contract negotiations with the um with the editor and they should know how to do that and what to get. In fact, the big agencies will have already negotiated certain things that they always get that will go right in your contract automatically. Okay.

Um, and then the fourth thing, fourth thing an agent um can be is your friend in the publishing industry. Um, your editor should be your friend, but the moment contract negotiations start or something's wrong that you disagree with the editor, then uh, you know, they work for the publisher and not for you. Because of this, you should have a good relationship with your editor. You should want to do the revisions that they're suggesting because you should want to try them out. But if they ask for a revision that you try out and it is not good for the book, the agent is the person who goes to bat for you and says, "No, they're not changing this."

Um, some examples of things that my agent has done for me. My agent keeps keeps track of what the bookstores order as their orders for his uh for his books independently of what the uh publisher says. So when Elantris was coming out, Barnes & Noble had decided on like an eight-book copy order for the paperback, which was really good. The hardcover had sold really well. They put in that was eight copies per store. Joshua knew this is back when bookstores actually sold books. Um, now they sell Legos, right? And then they then they upsell you to books. Um, the bookstores were the way that people bought books. Um, as an aside, um, one time I tried, I went to every bookstore in San Diego and, uh, one of my marketing tactics was I took a big box of paperbacks of Elantris and I'd go in and I'd say, "Hey, who's your book seller on staff who loves sci-fi or fantasy?" And they'd be like, "Oh, yeah. You know, it's Sandy right over here." Every time someone comes in that's a science fiction nerd, we send them to her. And so I went to her and I said, "Hey, will you I'll give you a free copy of my book if you'll read it." And these people were just ecstatic, right? Because they usually weren't the managers. Uh, they were just there because they love books and they didn't get the free books that got sent. So they get the free books. I managed to get to 36 bookstores in San Diego during a two-day period. I think there's now eight. Um, it changes, right? And these were like, we've had a contraction in the number of uh bookstores, but regardless, uh, Elantris, they took eight copies. Joshua went to his sources and found that they were only getting four. Tor had told us eight. Joshua went to Tor and said, "You promised us eight copies." They're like, "Well, it wasn't a promise. It was a-" He's like, "Go check the paperwork. What did they write down?" And he argued and argued. Finally went and checked. They're like, "All right, they wrote down four. They're taking eight." And then eight copies of Elantris showed up in every bookstore. Um, this is the sort of thing that Joshua does. When um, the cover for the paperback of Mistborn was really bad and I think I told you guys about this, that that was like the closest my career ever came to collapsing. Um, we got very angry and by we, I mean Joshua became the biggest pain in the rear that Tor had ever dealt with until they agreed to put a new cover on and try something new and that saved my career. Um, now I was the one that said we need a new cover, but I didn't have to be the bad guy. Joshua got to be the bad guy. So, the agent is the person who will always be in your corner um when you need to kind of turn a failank toward the publisher on those hopefully rare occasions where you're in disagreement with the publisher, but you're always going to be in disagreement with them during contract negotiations. Um, I have watched people in publishing swap from my best buddy sitting at dinner laughing to me bringing up a contract point to instantly they are a different person because now they have to put on their marketing hat and now they have to protect their business against me. And so instant change of demeanor and so the agent is there to deal with that so that you don't have to.

Okay. In exchange for that, you will generally sign a contract with an agent that says you will use them for all of your novels. And every contract they negotiate, they will get 15% off the top. This generally means that the publishers will send the agent the check. They will take 15% and send 85 to you. If that bothers you, they you can have the publisher split it. It's actually really nice to have the agent do it because a good agent, one of the things they will also do is sell your book in other countries. Uh, America, one of our primary exports is entertainment. Um, and what we tend to do is sell books worldwide. My books are in, I don't know, 29, 30 countries or something like that. Uh, Joshua had the rights to a Elantris sold to other countries before the book came out in the US. Uh, and early on this money was small, right? He does it for bragging rights. If you get $250 for these rights or those rights, they're not really making him much money. Uh, for foreign rights, generally an agent will take 20%. They'll take 10% for themselves and a foreign agent who handles negotiations in language will take 10%. And the US agent will build these relationships with all these foreign agents. So it's like $250, you know, they make $50 split between two of them or whatever. $25 is not worth the time, but the kind of mark of, hey, we sold it in this this language is really important. And if you do that 20 times, that $200 that you're getting suddenly becomes real money to the author even though it's not much to the agent. And so a good agent knows this is kind of like how authors, particularly newer in their career, sometimes survive. And Joshua was very big on this, still is. But this is like uh a gold, you know, standard he holds up for his agency is, we sell everywhere and we make our authors um a decent amount of money just off the foreign rights. And so in doing that's kind of money I lived on. I told you guys that I sold my first contract was for Elantris was $10,000. Joshua negotiated up from $5,000 to $10,000. So they offered $5,000 for one book. He got me $20,000 for two books. But that's paid out in uh like four chunks. So you get like a certain amount on signing, a certain amount on turn-in of the hardcover, a certain amount of uh of turn of publication of the paperback, a certain amount on publication of the hardcover. I guess those two are reversed, but you know what I'm saying. You get these little chunks strung out. And because that $20 grand didn't even come in one year, a lot of that money that he got me as an agent um is what what I lived on. That and the sweet, sweet income of my school teacher wife. Who public school teacher wife at a middle school. She was she was my sugar mama at that time.

Um, so this is what an agent is going to do. They are investing in hopefully you becoming a Brandon Sanderson because right now, you know, we will have six-figure incomes out of some of these foreign markets, uh approaching seven figures out of uh some of the markets. And so because of that, he's able to have worked so hard at the beginning. Now he kind of just gets to get that money. Though you would say, "What does an agent do for you when you're at level?" The number of things we have to yell and argue about are much bigger. So he still earns his money. Um, but a lot of what they're doing is hoping that the small author will become the big author and things like this.

Um, so you generally are going to need an agent. If you go traditionally, you can use an entertainment lawyer instead. Very few authors do this, but it is a possibility that I should mention. You pay them by the hour, a billable hour instead. They negotiate your contract and they handle only the contract negotiation part. You're in charge of then foreign sales, um, being the bad guy and all these things. If you feel good doing this, you can do it. I think Lee Modiset, who was a local author, did it himself for a while. He was in politics and then he was an attorney and nobody wanted to negotiate with him and he made them and he got good contracts himself and then he'd have an entertainment attorney look it over to make sure and uh things like this. A lot of indie authors still use agents for foreign deals. Very difficult to sell foreign. Uh, the indie markets just are not huge there. Um, and the ebook markets are not as big overseas as they are here. This is generally because the EU um has put laws in place that that uh forbid ebooks from undercutting print books in order to protect bookstores. Because of that, ebooks just are not a thing in a lot of countries. Um, if you're going to spend the same amount for it, people will just go to the bookshop and buy it, which is the purpose of the thing. But it also has kind of stifled a lot of growth in the industry. Uh, you don't have people who are able to go read $3 ebooks uh because all the ebooks are $30. Um, and so uh, it's kind of uh strangled that but it, you know, you know, there are there are gives and takes to every every law made and so the ebook market, it there are a few places where it does all right, but in general, the US is where ebooks are huge. Um, they do fine in the UK, but US, no, no one's like us. Everybody has laws preventing e um ebooks from selling uh what they do here.

Um, so you will probably need an agent. How do you get an agent? Well, we'll go into pitching your book next. Let's stop and ask questions. The fire hose of what an agent does, what they're for. Um, I I should mention that you'll sign that contract with an agent. The contracts with agents should be very easy to get out of when you're signing your contract with an agent. Um, let me let me give you a few things. Number one, only submit to agents or agencies whose books you can find in the bookstores right now. You should be able to go to the bookstore and find that agency's books. Buy new authors in the bookstores right now. If you can't, you shouldn't probably be submitting to that agent. Okay. Um, Joshua always likes me to give the warning. There are accreditation agent um agencies for agents. You do not have to belong to one. Good agents don't and badge agents do. Your best um two weapons in finding a good agent is have do they have uh books by new authors in the bookstores right now? And number two, do their authors say good things about them? That's basically how you do your research on agents. Go to the fronts of books, see if they they acknowledge their agent. Try to see that author at a convention, ask what they think of their agent. Most of the time, you will not be able to submit to the big author's agent. Joshua takes almost no uh new clients, but Joshua has a bunch of sub-agents that he mentors. A new agent at an established agency is still a fine place to submit. Even if that agent's books aren't out yet, they will be mentored by um a very uh established agent. Joshua did this for Scott Meredith. Scott Meredith retired, all of his agents went and started their own agencies. When Joshua retires, all of his agents will go start their own agencies. And that's kind of how agenting works these days. Uh, generally, your agents are people who've apprenticed under other agents. Uh, the good ones. All right. So, watch out for scams. Maybe we'll talk more about that later. Any questions on what I've said so far? We'll go here and then over here.

Should you ever have to pay for an agent to read your book? Excellent question. Should you have to pay for an agent to read your book? Um, no. Asterisks. Uh, there are a few times if you are paying for a pitch session with an agent at a conference, that's okay. All right. Uh, that money generally goes to the conference to defray the cost of bringing the agent out and things like that. Um, generally stay very far away from reading fees. Once in a while, there is a legit one. Sometimes there's a legit contest that has like a cheap, like $5 reading fee to keep the submissions down and things, but agents should be doing this for the industry. They should not be charging reading fees and they sure certainly shouldn't be uh exorbitant ones. Unless you're indie published, money flows toward the author. No author should have to spend anything except postage um or, you know, going to a conference or something. Any publisher who asks you for money, scam. Agents who ask you for money, scam. Asterisks where if it's a very small amount, once in a while legit agents do it, but almost never do you hear of it should be a huge red flag um if they ask you for money. Uh, I know early on you said that it used to be 10% it's now 15%? Yes, 15%. Can you renegotiate a performance-based um cut depending on how many sales you get? Yeah, good question. Can you negotiate a performance-based cut depending on how many sales you get? The answer is yes, if you get big enough, you can negotiate anything. Very difficult to do as a new author and I wouldn't even broach it as a new author, but once you you sell, if you become very big, you can generally, you will have a good enough relationship with your agent and you'll see like, I have never done this and I am one of the biggest uh authors in the business. Joshua has earned his money now. Joshua doesn't take a cut from our Kickstarters, right? He doesn't take a cut of of some of these things, but there are very difficult things I've asked Joshua to do that he's been able to do and he deserves that money. He, you know, picked me up very early. And one of the nice things I should mention about Joshua is he didn't take 15% because I had already sold the book. He said, "All right, um, this contract, you did all the work. I'm only taking 10%." And then he bumped it up to 15 after he was negotiating, like, you know. But my first contract, he only took 10%, which I always thought was uh was nice of him because he's like, "You already sold the book. I can't take the full agent uh commission on this." Um, so yeah, but you can, it has been done before. It will be done again. You get there, you can do what you want. Yeah. Uh, back here, um, you mentioned a lot about going to writer conferences. Um, I was wondering like how would you recommend investing in something? Yes, that's uh that's point number four. Cons is not cons, it means conferences. I just didn't want to try to spell conference and get it wrong. There's all there's an E in there that I that I mess up. Um, but yeah, so let me get back to that one as my last point. All right. All right. Other questions over here and then we'll come back to you and then we'll go over there.

Do you have any advice for those who want to become agents? Advice if you want to become an agent. Um, so almost all agenting is done in New York. This is because the agents are taking the editors out to dinner, right? And out to lunch and things like this. There are reputable agents who don't live in New York. They generally moved out of New York after they established themselves, right? Um, and so you can find good agents all around the country, but for a new agent, you're going to have to move to New York. They do look at the publishing programs at NYU and Columbia um and things like this. They're going to look for somebody who has a keen eye for picking out marketable fiction. Um, and you know, uh the agents that Joshua has hired, like he got several from bookstores. He would go to bookstores and he'd say, "Who do you recommend? Who's new?" and he'd read the book and he would he found the people who were recommending to him the books that he would have bought and then he started hiring them as his sub-agents, but others came through the programs. He just does an internship. He offers an internship. A bunch of people apply. This is generally how people make it into publishing is through internships, both editing and agenting. A lot of agents start as editors and then become agents, not all of them. Um, but, you know, tip is, go to New York and start becoming part of the community there and start applying to the internships. It's a very hard road. Peter Strom, my editorial VP, tried it for two years in New York, uh basically sucked all of his savings away, never made any inroads, and had to move back and eventually got a job in California working for a manga company as an editor. So, he wasn't trying to be an agent, he was trying to be an editor. Agenting, you are going to generally the agents are a little more suave than the editors. So, uh, being someone who's good with people and can negotiate and, you know, that sort of thing is a really good like editors don't have to be good at that. Agents do. So, um, that's what I'd recommend. All right. There's one over here.

Yeah. Um, when you mentioned the agent contract, you said that you signed that they get 15% off the top and they get rights to your next books to represent. So, yes, let me dig into that more. They are basically representing you as a person in all novels. Now, you can make it, some people have a different agent for YA and adult as long as that's done up front. Um, you know, agents tend to be okay with it. Uh, it doesn't happen as often because usually an agency has a YA specialist and an adult specialist and this and you just use the same agency. Uh, it's just you have different, like Eddie at Jabberwocky does my YA stuff. Um, right. And so um, but they are representing you. Meaning if you're going to release a book that falls under the agency agreement, which is generally everything, but it might just be you're going to send it to them and they're going to represent you. If you don't like how they do things, you basically divorce them. You send them a letter and say, "You're no longer my agent." That's the end of it. That's all you have to do. They will still collect royalties on every contract they negotiated for you as long as that contract lasts. And they will continue to send it to it to you. And I, I know I remember I left one thing out. It's sometimes nice to have the agent get all the money rather than having the publisher split it because um I get money from like, like I said, 30 different countries and a bunch of different audiobook uh things and three publishers in the US and this, it all comes to Joshua. He then cuts me a check with itemized sort of stuff. Oh, and here's another thing where they charge you. They charge you postage like when they're shipping out your books to people. Um, but that should come out of their cut once they sell the book. So Joshua never charged me anything until he sold the book, but then there was like a couple hundred for shipping books to the to across the world that came out of the first check. Um, it's never been more than a couple hundred bucks, but we get an itemized thing. Um, and then during tax season, you get a 1099. You get a single $1099 from an agent. That is so much easier if you're doing your own taxes than inputting like, yes, I made $75 from the Arabic rights and now I have to go, do we have a tax treaty with uh with this country? How do I fill out a form for having, you know, like all this stuff? It's all complicated, but a 1099 is so nice. Um, so that's one of the the reasons. This does offer a point of failure uh for the agent, meaning the agent could keep your money and you know, what's what's the kids say, gaslight you. And there have been notable instances of agents, you know, keeping the money. Like Joshua has in his contract, you must be sent the money. Any money we get for you must be sent within 10 business days. He's just got that in his contract so that they just wire the money. Basically, it's within a day or two of them getting it. So, they're earning interest on their author's money's money, right? Um, but an agent can do stuff like that. An agent can cook the books um and things like that. An agent will get a royalty statement from the publisher every six months, which will detail every sale and the royalties you made on it. And then they should pass that along to you. She rolls her eyes. She hasn't gotten hers yet. Um, they should pass that along to you that you can then break down exact sales um and you can have your publisher send send you that. You can uh you can audit the agent and I do recommend uh generally you should not consider your agent your full-on business manager. You should be in charge of your business. You should be watching what your sales are. You should be making sure that the numbers are right because the agents are good, but they can make mistakes and it's your business, not theirs. When you become an author, you are starting a small business and you should treat it as such. The IRS will treat it as such. So, you should Okay, you are now a small business owner. The moment you make more than whatever it is, $500. I am not a tax uh person. Go to your tax people. But wherever it is, what you told me it's $600 now. Whenever you make past hobbyist income, you then essentially have a small business. Even if you haven't incorporated, uh we can talk about stuff like that, but there you are. All right.

Over here, just going to say, what's your opinion on submitting manuscripts and publishing through Shadow Mountain? What's my opinion on Shadow Mountain? Shadow Mountain is a lot like Bane. It is a viable option that you have here that that others don't have, and it plays like one of the big guys in a small realm. Um, so Shadow Mountain uh tends to have worse contracts and worse advances, but Bane tends to be the same way. If you know what you're doing and you either have a good agent or you ask someone like me, you we can get the bad clauses out. Um, and uh, maybe I'll go over what the bad clauses are here for you. Um, I do recommend Shadow Mountain. Everyone that I've known that's published there has had at least a good, if not excellent, experience. And they are what we call a regional press rather than a small press. And they do a good job. So, if you are lucky enough to uh to have an offer on a middle-grade or YA book with Shadow Mountain, which for those watching online, that's a regional press that's here in Utah that focuses on middle grade and YA mostly. Um, I do recommend um taking that. Um, I know Mole has had a good time with them. Um, so, but he's not the only one. Uh, they do a decent job. Um, all right. Let's let's write on the board causes to watch out for in publishing contracts. Okay. All right. So, I'm going to I'm going to Okay, we got to get to pitching and conventions. We got time. All right. Things you should keep out of your contracts. Number one, remember our royalty rates from last time. You should be looking for those royalty rates or better. Okay. We won't go into that uh in depth. You should keep rights to world/characters. Okay. Do. I've seen well-meaning small presses and even horror stories of large presses that should know better where they try to get the rights to world/characters for sequels. Run. Well, don't run away. If it's a big publisher, just have your agent scream at them and they'll feel embarrassed because they shouldn't go in no contract and they know it. Um, they are allowed to have first refusal rights on your next book. We talked about those last week, right? Did I nod? Yes. I talked about first refusal. Good. No. Someone's saying no. Someone's saying yes. Yeah, I did. Go watch. Yeah. So, right of first refusal means that the publisher can have the right to see your next book. That's different from owning the rights to the characters, right? That it's okay if they say, "I would like to have rights of first refusal on your next um adult, you know, book book for the adult audience." Um, try to keep that right of first refusal as narrow as possible. Um, like I put in my books, you can see the next Stormlight book and have rights of first refusal. You can't have my next fantasy book, right? Um, I keep it to series. Uh, they can be hard-nosed when you're a new author on this. It's okay to sign a right of first refusal on next novel. Keep it to next novel. They they don't want, you know, and if most of them will agree to next novel for the same market. So, if you write a middle grade, they don't have to see it if you've published an epic fantasy. And I recommend that, but they should not get rights to your world and character. They should not get your copyright. They should be able to publish the book for life of copyright, but it should copyright to you. And they usually register that for you. You send a book to the Library of Congress. Um, I think is how you do it. Am I right? I don't know. You wouldn't know. Peter would know. Um, so all right. Um, they should not be keeping uh uh film rights. No p book publisher has any idea what to do with your film rights. Generally, they will slip something in all of them that say, "If you sell film rights, we get 50% of it," is generally what they'll put in. And then agents will laugh at them and they'll chuckle along nervously and strike it out. This should just not be in any publishers don't do anything with film rights. They just want to make free money. Your film rights are yours. Okay? They should um they shouldn't keep your foreign rights. Oh no, I have to spell foreign. Ei. No. Yeah. Okay. I did it right that time. Wow. Oh well. Clapping for the professional author knowing how to spell. Is the bar that low? Um, so um, you should keep your foreign rights. Exceptions. I think I mentioned this last year. You um selling North American Spanish rights to particularly a YA middle-grade um um um publisher, totally fine. You're not going to be able to do much with your North American Spanish, but try to keep your South American and your uh European Spanish rights. Those are decent markets. Uh, you can let go of world English rights. Some publishers just will not let you have world English. World English is um all the rights that are English-speaking countries um outside of North America and the Philippines. North American rights includes the Philippines. If you need to know why,

Go to history class. Um, just like, uh, World English, uh, rights include India. Um, which just basically means World English is, uh, British Commonwealth minus Canada. Um, and the right to, like, usually both can sell on the continent. I think anyone who has any rights can sell on the continent. But for instance, Tour can't sell my books in the UK, Australia, um, Ireland, um, or India. Both can sell in, uh, in foreign markets, foreign language markets. But the World English market, uh, the UK has. You're allowed to, I say allowed. You can do whatever you want, but some publishers will not let you keep World English. So, you kind of just have to bend on that sometimes. You did, right? Yeah. Um, I almost did. Joshua was adamant and finally they let go. Um, so, you should keep your foreign rights. These are kind of like your big ones, right? These are your big, uh, get this out of your contract sort of stuff if it happens to be in there.

You would love to keep audio. They don't let you do this very often anymore. Um, if you can keep them, sell them to a separate audiobook company. You're going to have a hard time doing this in your first contract these days. Used to be easy. Um, now audio is such a big percentage of the market that they have mandates from above that they can't let go of audio. Uh, anything else I should put up here? Um, we've talked about non-compete. Oh, yeah. Non-compete. Non-compete is above the line. They started to put non-compete contracts in. Maybe I'm an old fogy and this is one you can't get out, but I consider that just like morally reprehensible that they put a non-compete clause in. Like they should have your right of first refusal. That should be enough. There should be no sort of non-compete. And I can, I think those non-compete clauses in contracts across the board in a lot of industries are just deemed illegal, and they don't stand up in court. You should just, yeah, I can't believe any agent would let, uh, one of these slip, but they do. Um, so, uh, try not to have a non-compete clause. Um, you should be able to write, you should be able to write books and sell books, right? Even if you can't write a new fantasy novel because they have the right of first refusal and they're sitting on your book. Um, but then not right first refusal means they can't sit on it forever. You should be able to get it back and then sell it. Okay. All right. Those are your, uh, those are your, your, your, uh, things to watch out for in contracts.

Um, let's go to, let's go to pitching. All right. All right. Pitching novels. How do you sell these days? You're going to have to pitch your novel. Usually, this is done in the form of a query letter. Um, I hear from a little bird that these days query letters are often, uh, filled out as a form on the agent's website rather than actually submitting something yourself. Um, it seems like a smart way for them to go because they can kind of control, uh, how the query is formatted and things like that. But a query letter is generally the about the same as what we call an elevator pitch. These are kind of two versions of the same thing. A, um, a query letter elevator pitch is your one-paragraph pitch, your best chance at selling the book. If you're writing one of these, understand that one paragraph is not enough to explain to them your whole book. And in fact, it's not enough to explain to them even the most, all the important points of your book. You want to pick one thing to highlight that makes your book stand out and pitch that one thing. Well, I had two elevator pitches for Mistborn. I'm going to go over them with you. I will say upfront, I was never great at queries. I was during the era where you didn't need queries. And indeed, I, I submitted queries like once or twice. Every other submission I made was directly to the hands of an editor. Um, and so I will talk about that with conventions, but I submitted to all of the big, uh, six back then directly by meeting the editors and just sending them books. Um, again, I didn't have an agent. Um, so agents, queries became the standard as agents became the standard, and they were already the standard by the time I broke in. I just knew how to, because Dave mentored me doing it the old way that they'd done in the 80s and 90s that was still viable and managed to slip in as that door was closing. Okay, so here are my pitches for Mistborn, and hopefully this can help you. I got very good at these after I published because I would pitch it to people in bookstores as I was sitting there because I would go do a book signing. My three friends would come get a book signed. Uh, yeah, it was usually Dan and Ben and Peter. Um, and then Scar came sometimes. Yeah. Um, and then I would sit there because the signing lasted for two hours and I would use car salesman my book to everybody who walked past. Uh, some of your parents may have bought books from me that way. I used to be able to say some of you, but, um, yeah. And so I got very good at pitching, and what I learned is stay away from too many proper nouns. Right? What you don't want is Blorkz Zop is the the Zinglebop king of, uh, Zorkland. Uh, right, don't start that way. We're fantasy novels. We know we like our funny names. Don't start that way. Uh, one name is fine. I would say, um, I had two pitches depending on who I was pitching to. I would kind of feel them out as I chatted with them what they liked and things like that. And to the person who was hardcore science fiction fan, I would say, this is the story of what happens when the hero fails. What if Frodo got to the end of Lord of the Rings with the ring and Sauron's like, "Oh, my ring. I've been looking for that. Thanks for that. Must have been a hard journey," and then killed him and took over the world? This story is about a gang of thieves who live in this world who said, "All right, the prophecies were lies. Hero didn't save us. We're going to do this our way. We're going to rob the dark lord. Silly, bribe his armies away and overthrow the empire." Um, and so it's a heist novel about a gang of thieves who rob the dark lord. That's a one-paragraph pitch for Mistborn, right? Um, you can see it doesn't even mention the names of the characters. This is a pitch on the high concept of Mistborn. This is the, you've read fantasy novels, you know about the hero, uh, who saved the world. What if that hero failed? This is that story. Um, and then it gets the, it's a mashup of a heist and an epic fantasy.

Now, if someone was more character interested, uh, if someone was younger, in particular, I would say, all right, story about a young street thief named Vin who finds out that the luck she's always had is actually related to a really cool magic system. She gets recruited by a gang of three thieves who are planning to rob God, and they need her to be the mole, her, their mole among the nobility of this world that worships this dark god. She does it, but she falls in love with one of them. Boom. Right. That's that's the, uh, you know, and I'd say I usually said because back then Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was big. I'm like, it's a cross between My Fair Lady and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, right? Street thief trained to be a noblewoman while at night she's a ninja. Um, and so you can see how both of those are just like one paragraph, essentially. It's a big paragraph. Starts with a good thesis statement, right? And if you've got a zinger, you put it right there, right? Somewhere in here, you know, it's about the world where the hero lost and they're going to, a gang of thieves is going to try to rob the dark lord. Get that in your first sentence. Expand on it just a little bit, and then end with a zinger out. That is your query. That's your paragraph about your book. Otherwise, your query should include a little bit about you. Not very much, but a little bit about you. And usually, they recommend comp titles. Am I correct? Like this will appeal to fans of X. Um, not the social media platform. Um, I don't know if it has fans anymore. Um, uh, this should appeal to fans of, uh, and then list some several books. Piece of advice, don't just list the most popular books ever, right? List books that when they read your pitch, they're like, "Oh, I can see how that would be similar, but not the same as." Right? Pick picking good comp titles is tricky because if you just be like, this will appeal to fans of what are the top three books that sold this year. Um, the agent's just going to roll their eyes and it'll be a mark against you. But if you have, if you've listed good comp titles that the agent will know, but that aren't all, you know, sometimes you want to have some good sellers, but they don't always have to be good sellers, then they'll understand when they read your, your pitch. That's a query. Did I miss anything? Uh, bio. Bio. A little bit about you, like I said. Um, if you happen to have published in short fiction markets, include that. If you're, uh, writing in a specialist subgenre, for instance, if you're writing military science fiction and you are a marine, include that. Uh, Elizabeth Moon tells the story, um, she's a little older now, so a lot of you won't have read her, but she's an excellent writer. Um, uh, the story of how they didn't put that she was ex-Marine on the back of her, uh, first books, and they didn't sell. As soon as they added Marine, books just started flying off the shelves. I'm not sure how much that's exaggerated, but, you know, um, when the readers and editors want to know, like, if you're writing hard science fiction about the colonization of Mars and you're like, you know, a water science, um, expert, um, about, you know, the water, how you would get water, uh, refined on Mars, that's relevant. Um, don't put on things that are going to make you look like you're clout chasing. Don't be like, "I'm a student of Brandon Sanderson." It's not going to help you. Uh, it'll just look like you're clout chasing. I'm afraid. I'm sorry. Uh, if you don't have any writing credits, just don't mention any. Um, if you are indie published with around 10,000 in sales, not in free books, but actual sales, that starts to look really good, and they will sit up and take notice. Yeah. Would it be a bad idea to mention like being a DM or something? Uh, if you're a professional DM or something like that. But I would, you know, if you can work it into your bio in a way that doesn't seem cringe, if you're like, you know, I don't know. I'm not sure if you can honestly, let's be real. Um, but if you're saying a little about me, I am X and X and I love running my, uh, campaigns. Maybe like, um, but yeah, be light on something that might come off cringe. Uh, other questions? Yeah. And for bio, like leaving out the personal, is this specifically for pitches to agents or for just general books? Oh, this is not for your bio in your book. This is for pitches. All of this is for pitches. You can figure out your bio and your books later on. I would put a GM thing in your bio and your books. That's, you know, that's, uh, flavor for who you are. For the bio, you just want to give like a sentence that might be relevant in some way or just something to set you apart. Uh, if it in any way relates to the book, include it. If it doesn't, then don't. Like if I were Rachel and I had a huge doll collection, I wrote The Doll Makers, I would include that, right? Um, but mostly you want to keep the bio section kind of short. Uh, let your, let your book do the the talking for you because, um, we'll get to outlines and, uh, sample chapters. Go ahead. Do you still have to make pitches even though you're well? Do I have to make pitches? Uh, I do not. Um, my pitches, I'm Brandon Sanderson, right? Um, and that generally works. Yeah. Um, I have to do them in Hollywood. Hollywood doesn't care, right? Hollywood doesn't care if you've sold 40 million books. They're like, uh, 40 million people go see the movie, then it's still a failure. Now, 40 million might be okay. Uh, but they know that 40 million books means 10,000 people buying four books each, more likely, right? Or and things like that. So, or really it's like, uh, like a million of you buying everything and then some buying one or two. Uh, but, uh, I have to do pitches a lot in Hollywood. Um, in New York, I do not have to. Um, they all know that if they don't take it, I can sell it myself. Uh, right, my secret project, he's made $10 million, right? Um, so, yeah, um, it's, it's a different world, but I did still have to pitch, um, back when, um, like even during the Wheel of Time era when I sold Steelheart, I still did a full pitch package and things like that, but as I was, I was talking about, uh, Rachel's asking me about it. They got back the next day, right? Normally, they don't get back the next day. So, was that after the Wheel of Time when you stopped making pitches? Yeah. Um, basically once Stormlight came out and sold on its own, right? I pitched Stormlight. Every other book since then, I just send it to the publisher and say, "This is the one you're publishing this year, right?" Um, and so, but that's not unusual, right? Stephen King sends you a book. You don't, right? John Grisham sends you a book. Um, and I'm somewhere in between, right? I outsell John Grisham. I don't sell outsell Stephen King. So, I just kind of, right, in sandwiched in between those two. Yeah. What do you put in your bio if you don't have anything that's related to your book? What do you put in your bio if you don't have anything that's related? Some little flavor thing, like, you know, I, uh, was a CS major, um, and I love, you know, K-dramas. I don't know, just something, something simple that is not going to take a lot of attention, but that doesn't isn't distracting, but is a little bit distinctive for you. Does that make sense? Who doesn't love K-dramas, though? All right, go ahead. How customized should a query or pitch be based on who you're querying to? Excellent. We'll get to that in conventions. Okay. Um, that's that's next on the list. Yeah. In relation to non-compete, what does it, I know what a non-compete does in like most industries. What does that do in an author's case? Nobody really knows because they're unenforceable and they're stupid. But basically, it says you can't write books for anyone else. It's basically a really strict first refusal rights thing. While you're writing, publishing these books, you will not release another book that could draw sales away from the book that we've released by you, is basically what they're saying. Um, and so, yeah, am I right on that? Yeah, there. So, it's really bad, but it's really annoying. And I know some authors that are very annoyed by the ones in their contracts. Yeah. Um, what would, what would you, know anything about publishing in like World English first? Yes, publishing World English. Good question. Uh, totally doable. You have to sell in, in, um, in London. Um, you, I suppose, could sell in, um, in Australia. Um, but London's like, so World English, my rights, they're, they sell, they're about 10% of my US rights in, in sales numbers, which makes sense because the population, um, of the UK, um, is about 10% uh, or something like that. It, that's very rough. Don't quote me wrong on that, but you know what I mean. Um, so, um, Steven Erikson from Canada sold in the UK first. It's doable. Uh, if you happen to be able to get an agent, a British agent, um, or, you know, for some reason you're often in the UK and you go to conventions over there and you meet editors over there, once in a while it happens. Um, and so it is, it is viable, particularly if you have some contacts, uh, in, in London and you happen to to be there or things like that. Uh, hard to do, but not impossible. Is it only London or you said London or Australia? I mean, Australia technically, but to Australia has been that fraction of population. Again, it's almost impossible to make a living selling only in Australia, according to my Australian friends who have tried it. So, basically, there are no countries you can make a living as a science fiction fantasy author in, except for like, so, US, UK, English, right? Germany, you can do it. Uh, Poland, Spain, like some of the very strong European economies, you can do it. It gets real thin after that because a lot of the countries, like for instance, in all of Scandinavia, they just read in English. I don't know if you've known people from, you know, from like Sweden, but their English is generally better than ours is, right? Um, and so the Swedish, um, we had a guy from Iceland, uh, took my class last year. Um, his his name literally was Thor. Is Gwithian Thor. Um, Thor took my class and like his English is better than our English, right? So you get that problem. Portugal is about the same, the same way. They tend to read in English. Um, just various countries. You have to have a strong local, um, uh, reading science fiction fantasy community. And you can kind of tell where they are based on which, like for instance, um, Sapkowski is from Poland, right? The Witcher. Uh, they've got a very, Lamb is from Poland. Germany has a bunch, like, um, like Courtney Schafer and people like this from Germany. You can kind of see the places where people can make a living, um, at sci-fi fantasy. But basically breaking into the US is one of the big goals to do if you write it, cuz we read a lot of science fiction fantasy and we are, uh, you know, the strongest economy in the world. So, kind of a follow-up. If you World English, how hard is it to transfer? How hard is it to transfer if you do World English first? It can be a bit of a hiccup. Um, so with Steven Erikson, um, he published in the UK. People started importing his books to the US, and he had trouble getting traction in the US because everyone, his fans were all importing, and so they would put them on shelves and the, there weren't fans to buy the new books in the US because they already imported them all, imported them all. That was a problem of them. Us who finally started publishing him played catch-up and wasn't published in the new books until like six months after, and that really stunted his growth, but I mean, Stephen Erikson is still one of the better-selling epic fantasy authors, and so, uh, that's Malazan Book of the Fallen, um, if you've heard of that, and again, I believe you'd have to ask him for sure, I believe he's Canadian that published in the UK first, so, um, all right, I need to do conventions, so we're going to do one last question. Do you have a quick tip for pitching films? Uh, pitching films? Um, yeah. I have a best-selling book. Um, I have never to this day, okay, not never now. Up until about my Kickstarter, I had never had a a film company give me the time of day unless they came to me first. Never until I had the Kickstarter. That pushed me over the edge. Before then, anything I pitched in Hollywood, they ignored me. Okay. So you have, if you want to, uh, be in Hollywood, Michael Crichton couldn't get any sold until he wrote books and then sold his books. Um, you either need to go the screenplay route and go move to Hollywood and do that whole thing, or you need to get a best-selling book first. Um, I would say that, you know, like spec scripts almost never sell these days. And if you don't have a best-selling book, you're, it's, you're in worst case. So, do not try to sell anything to Hollywood without a book backing it up, is what I would recommend. Okay? There's a one in a million shot you could do it. So, don't let me crush your dreams, but just let me tell you, like, I would go to them and I'd be like, I have 20 million sales. Here is my new book idea. The book is coming out soon. Would we, you want to do a film deal about it? Crickets. Um, so, yeah. Okay. I got to do cons. So save your questions for next week. Um, or until after that. All right. Let's talk about conventions. Uh, because, uh, you know, and there was another question I was going to, I'm going to get to this. If I don't get to that other question, um, throw it at me again. So, do I recommend conventions and conferences? When I was breaking in, the way to slip in was to go to these old conventions where, remember I told you they started to argue about who was the best, you know, what was the best episode of Star Trek, right? Uh, and to write Kirk/Spock fic. Um, those people all became editors or published authors or agents. And for a long time, that was the industry. So these conventions were still the places they all got together and chatted, which is why Dave said, "Go to them. Go to the parties. Sit in the bar, chat with people, go to all the parties, have, hold a can of Sprite and chat with people." It was actually much less intimidating than I thought it would be. Everyone was just like cool, um, and and whatnot. And you just chatted and, uh, you would, I would go to, um, editors and I had some magic words which if you are so lucky, maybe you can still, uh, use. The wrong words are, "What are you looking for?" Never ask that. The right words were, "What have you bought recently by a new author and why?" This gets them talking about what they like. Why they bought this new author's book. It gives you a book to go read to see what that editor likes. You legitimately are making that editor happy because they know you're going to go buy that book, and you should. Um, and it's making, giving you way more information because you're hearing what this editor liked about this book. What I did with, uh, Dan and Peter is I kept a little list of all these editors and everyone I'd asked about. I wrote down the books that they had bought recently and I went and I found them and I read them so that, oh, this is the question was, should you personalize? And when I would send my, uh, my letters to them, they would be things like, "I met you at this convention, you recommended this book, I loved it. I think you'll like my book because I do something similar to this author in this," proving I'd read their book. That was golden, right? They loved that. Um, and because of these sorts of things, I was able to personalize these letters. Doesn't work as well anymore, but I think that could still work with agents. I don't know. I haven't broken in this way. There in science fiction fantasy, um, there are two general things. There are what we call conferences and what we call conventions. This is my definition. Others may have different definitions. A conference to me is a for-profit institution that you pay a larger price tag to get into and by doing so receive professional advice from professional authors who have been invited to present. Agents and editors who've been invited specifically to pre, uh, present locally. You will find that at Storymakers, Writers for Young Readers, um, I think FutureScapes counts as well. Okay, these are conferences. Often they involve pitch sessions. Um, you sometimes pay for those. They are not huge amounts, but the tickets to get into these conventions can be expensive. Uh, you know, $600 bucks or something like that. Um, and so I looked to her because back when I did it, it was cheaper. Uh, but that was, you know, in the stone age. Um, so that's a conference. I do recommend conferences if you have this disposable income to go, particularly if you watch conferences around the country for ones inviting in agents and editors that you've done research on that you're interested in publishing with. You can still skip agents this way. You can have a pitch session with an editor, and they, you will at the end of your pitch session, uh, they will either say, "Oh, yeah, send me that," or you can ask them, "Would you like to see some sample chapters?" Queries, when you're querying, it'll tell you if they want a writing sample or not, and how much. Your best goal to do is to try to get as much of your fiction into a submission as is appropriate. Don't send them things they're not asking for. But you want them to read your fiction, not your query, right? Um, and so if they allow you to send sample chapters, do so. Send the beginning. When they say sample chapters, they don't mean chapter 37 and 56. You think they're the best written. People make that mistake a lot. Send them what the p, the audience is going to see when they open your book. Okay? Um, if they ask for an outline, an outline is not an outline form as you might have learned in school. An outline is a two-page document-ish that is, uh, paragraph kind of in paragraphs explanation of the plot of your book. This is like a two-page pitch instead of a one-paragraph pitch. In the outline, give away the ending. Do not not put your ending in. Your outline includes the whole book. Um, usually what you're going to look for is you're going to look for, they'll ask for a query, three sample chapters, and an outline. That's your package. Okay, that's what you're wanting to send to them. And if you are going to conferences and meeting editors and agents and they say, "Yeah, send me something." That's almost certainly what they mean. They will probably be more explicit with you. Say, "Yeah, send me sample chapters and outline." When they do that, go the next day. Don't hand it to them in person and submit through either the form or if they give you an email, email it or whatever. Get it to them and put in the, uh, the, uh, the subject line "Requested Material" because they did ask for it. Okay. Uh, if you can skip the query-only stage, you're in good shape. Um, like if you look at the stats, if you, once you, like for every, like a hundred queries, someone gets some, like every thousand. Yeah. What's that? It's like for every thousand they ask for sample chapters on one or something like that. It's just ridiculous. And if you've already gotten there, you've just skipped a huge hurdle in percentage. It probably is more like one in a hundred. Uh, it's probably not one in a thousand, but I don't know. You'd have to ask agents. So, your job is to try to skip that if you can, if you can go to the conferences. Conventions are different. Conventions are these fan-run things. Uh, Life, the Universe, and Everything is the local one here. Uh, WorldCon is the biggest of these. These are not nonprofit, run by fans to argue about your favorite episodes of Star Trek, and these were grown up in the community organically. A lot of authors and agents and editors attend. They're willing to do business at some of the, at some of the parties. That's less and less than they used to be, but they're still there. I will give you a caveat. Um, when I went, I had a wonderful time. Um, I would pitch to e editors. It was, you know, I got very comfortable with holding my Sprite and pitching to editors and things like that. Um, I shared this story quite a lot in my early days as I'm like, "This is the way you break in." Because back then it was. I had a female student go to one, and the very first person that she started talking to with at one of these, at one of these parties said, "Yeah, come back to my room. I can get you published by Tor." No. They treat a six-foot-one gregarious dude differently than they treat other people. This has been a, this is, the cons are not as bad anymore. It's been 20 years. There's been a lot of movement toward, uh, separating fan spaces and professional spaces and things like this. But I do have to share that story. Um, and so I can't give you any more details because I've been asked not to share them. But, um, you know, go with a friend. I would always recommend going with a friend to anything. Um, and things like this, but, um, conventions, your mileage will vary. You still can. Brian McClellan sold by doing the brand and format. He just listened to what I did. He did it a few years. He sold. That was still back in the early 2000s. Um, I haven't heard of people doing it recently, but it's, you know, anything is possible. All right. So, there's the big, um, Oh, I should mention comic cons are something different. Ignore those for publishing. They can be fun to go to. You will only find publicists there. They can't buy your book. Don't go to any comic con, um, or fan expo expecting to sell your book. They are very different. Um, go to conferences first. Maybe some conventions if an editor's coming that you like, but understand those are more free form. They are not professional. They are more fan-run. You can, um, you know, your mileage may vary. All right, we will do Q&A next week on anything you want to ask about. Save your publishing questions for then. Thank you all so much. One more week. [Applause]