What Can You Control in Trad Publishing?

Hi Friends,

One of the big differences between self-publishing and traditional publishing is who is at the wheel of the publication process. When you self-publish, you are 100% in control, and responsible, for every decision. That either feels freeing or daunting to you, and that makes sense. When you self-publish, YOU decide the pub date, YOU decide the cover, YOU decide where the commas go--using whatever experience you have, can find, or can pay for. When you traditionally publish, you work with a team whose job it is to make these decisions. And of course, when you work with a team, decisions are made together, or by whoever is in charge. Sometimes that's you and sometime's that's the publisher.

(If you sense a bias in my writing of traditional publishing over self-publishing, you're probably not wrong. Obvs, I've worked in traditional publishing for 20 years, so that's were my experience is. But I think self-publishing is wonderful and those who want to should do it. I personally do not want to do all that work, which is were my bias is rooted. Self-publishing is great, and isn't the "lesser" of the many avenues to getting readers for you book. I never want it to go away.)

If you are considering trad publishing vs self-publishing, and are worried about trad publishers taking over your book and making it theirs instead of yours, I want to assuage those fears today. Your agent, your editor, your publicity and marketing team know it's your book. They know it's important to you and that it's worthy of all the respect and care they can give. They also know way more than you do about editing, publicizing, and marketing a book, at least most of the time. However, in the crunch of too many books and not enough employees, the reasons the publisher needs to or wants to do A Thing can get lost. (That's why you have an agent to explain things to you.) You're not going to like every decision that is made about your book, and that's normal when working with a team. But you shouldn't hate decisions made about your book, and if you do, keep asking questions until you get an answer you understand. You still might not like it, but you may at least understand it.

Contractually speaking, there are lots of guardrails and approval processes to prevent the worst from happening–the worst being you hate some or all aspects of the publishing process of your book. Here are the things that are routinely in traditional publishing contracts that outline who has the final say over what. (Your mileage may vary, but this is what I know to be industry standard. This is also not an exhaustive list–just the big things most people focus on. This is also not legal advice.)

The Text of Your Book: In our contracts, we consider it baseline for the author to have approval of the copyedited manuscript. That's that last point before it goes into the production process and the last point anyone can change anything substantive (including you). There's proofreading and typesetting at that point, and small grammatical or formatting errors can be changed then, by you or the publishers, but no one can come in and change your character names or the order of chapters or anything like that. You get several more times to review the manuscript after that before it goes to the printer, and yes, you do have to make sure everything's in it's right place. Honest and unintentional mistakes can happen! But when you hold the copyright, you have the final say about your text.

The publisher can say to you, though, hey, we can't publish this unless you do X & Y. That may be for legal reasons, as in, their lawyers think you and they are going to get sued, or an editorial reason, as in we don't think this book is complete or editorially acceptable unless you do X, and those are specific scenarios that are outlined in your contract, too, and include a specific procedure to resolve them. In twenty years I have never been in a situation where an issue like this popped up out of the blue. I've never gotten to the copyediting stage and had an editor say oh by the way we can't publish this unless you change who dies in the end, or, this character can't be gay, or something else that would get a lot of clicks if it were a story on Threads. If a book is cancelled for any one of these reasons, by either party, it's something we can see a long way off, and it's not something used as a weapon to punish an author. Yeah, I know you heard a story of someone getting their book cancelled because they wouldn't take out a comma, but I bet there's more to the story than that.

Book Title: In most book contracts, the publisher and author settle on a book's title by mutual approval. That means the publisher and the author both have to agree on it. Titles are hard! Titles are also very important in selling and marketing a book. Most of the conflicts I see about titles are rooted in the fact that the title has to make sense to readers before they read the book, and everyone coming up with the title has already read the book a few dozen times by the time they're finalizing what goes on the cover. I've worked with authors and editors for weeks on coming up with a title. I've had titles I loved (as the agent) not make it to the cover and have been disappointed by that fact. But in each of those cases, I could see that the title we loved made more sense after you read the book (or would have supremely bad SEO or were impossible to spell or were confusing or were too close to another very popular book or didn't feel like a title in that genre) and the title we settled on was ultimately for the best. If you're arguing with your publisher about a title, step back and think if I'd never read this book, what would I think a book with this title was about? If you hate, hate, hate the title suggestions made by your team SAY SOMETHING. They'll keep brainstorming. I personally love coming up with titles, so if you're really stuck, call me. Remember, the point of a good title is to entice as many people as possible to read and buy your book. Don't you want that, too?

Audiobook Narrator: In most cases, the author has approval of the audiobook narrator for their book, either outright, or mutual approval with the publisher. In practice, how I've seen this work is the editor (on the publisher side or the audiobook publisher side) will first talk with the author about any specific traits the audiobook narrator should have or be able to do. Should their identity align with the main character's? Do they need to do any specific accents? Does there need to be multiple narrators? Does the narrator's gender matter? Does the author have any narrator favorites from their own audiobook reading? Sometimes these things matter, and sometimes it doesn't. Then the audiobook publisher will offer up several choices for the author to choose from. You'll listen to a few clips and see if one sticks out as The One for your book. Some authors have very little experience with audio narrators, either in choosing one or listening to them, and some have very strong feelings about it. Both of these are fine. And if the author wants to narrate? This could happen! I narrated my own audiobook, and it was a great experience. But I also auditioned for it. I sent in a few minutes of me reading the book, just on a voice memo, because I wanted the professionals to tell me if I sounded ok. Nothing turns me off an audiobook faster than a narrator that sounds off. In non-fiction, audio publishers often love it when the author narrates, because the reader loves it, too. For fiction, it's often trickier for the author to read, because it's way more like acting than reading. Still, some of my clients have done it, and they've auditioned, too. You want a professional opinion on this because the narrator can make or break an audiobook.

There are things in traditional publishing, of course, that you can't dictate and contractually, you don't get a say in. In practice, the publisher often consults with an author about these things, but when it comes down to it, the publisher has the final say. Like:

Publication Date: You can't say I want my book to come out on X date. I mean, you can, but that's not what drives the overall decision. The publisher sets the publication date according to many factors, including the pub dates of other books on their list, national events, sales seasons, sales opportunities (e.g. dad books for Father's Day, etc), holidays, relevant book-related anniversaries, and most importantly, printer schedules. Your book has a specific date at the printer, and if you miss it (don't miss it) your book will be delayed. They can't just squeeze you in another slot without pushing other books out of the way. And there aren't just other book printers, especially in the US, just waiting around for books to print. If your book is full-color, it's very possible it's being printed overseas, and it has to make it's way back to the US on a boat. That takes WEEKS! Pub dates are determined by a detailed calculus of when the book is done and when it needs to come out and who long it takes to put the ink on the page. Delays on either end can really complicate things.

Your publisher will, in most cases, talk to you about the pub date before anything's set in stone, often in concert with figuring out your due date. If they say, how about July 9th? and you will be on a two-week trip for your sister's destination wedding that's been planned for the last five years, yeah, they're not going to insist on the 9th. You won't be around to promote the book! I've also had authors ask to move pub dates because they came at particularly busy periods for their family (school, sports, etc, etc) and this is fine, too. There's always something in the way of a pub date, but both parties do their best to make the best decision. There is no on, or dozen, best publication dates, because if there were, books wouldn't come out on that day. There are better seasons for different kinds of books (beach reads, big, serious non-fiction, books that will be used a lot in schools, etc) but a lot of times a pub date is set by this is when everything will be done and this is when we have time in the schedule. If you want a certain day because the numerology is better, I can't say that will sway a publisher, but you can try. There are lots of factors that influence when your publisher date is that you can’t see. Oh, and it'll always be a Tuesday. The reasons for that are another newsletter on its own.

Marketing Plan: Your marketing plan will not be spelled out in your contract. The publisher will not agree in writing that they will do X thing and get you on X morning TV show because A: they don't book the shows themselves and B: it's not in their best interests to put that in a contract and that's how contracts work. (You are also not putting in the contract that you guarantee you will write a best seller, so, there you go.)

You will get a marketing plan for your book, usually 6-8ish months before your pub date, and it will be a big list of things the publisher is going to try. It will not be a list of things they guarantee will happen because book marketing rests on others responding to a pitch. Does the Today Show want you on? Does NPR want to interview you? Does People magazine want to do your cover reveal? 9900 other authors are asking those same people those same questions and no one can make People magazine do exactly what they want. This has been made even hards by the dwindling book media landscape as well as publishers being greatly understaffed in these departments. The publisher is in charge of marketing to book-facing outlets and you have more control over marketing to individual-reader facing markets because no one is looking at Penguin Random House’s Instagram and you very may well have more followers than they do. You know (likely) the places, online and off, where people talk about your topic because that’s where you go to talk about your topic. Marketing is a contentious subject in author and publishing circles because A: There’s no guaranteed way to make people buy a book and B: the publisher does not employ enough people to effectively market each title. I wish I could fix this. It might be the most frustrating part of the whole publishing process, but the contract is not where it gets fixed.

The most important thing to think about throughout your whole publishing career is what to throw a fit about and what to compromise on. This is definitely something you can talk to your agent about and they can help you understand what’s an annoying fact of publishing and what’s a wrong that must be corrected. Things go wrong because publishing is run by humans. You are a human working with other humans, too. Expecting things to work perfectly or demanding perfection isn’t really how the world works. You get to be loud about what’s important. You should stand up for what you need and what you want. You should ask as many questions as you need to and you should get the best answers to those questions, even if they're not what you want to hear. But if you want either traditional or self-publishing to be easy, seamless, transparent, fair, and logical, well..... I don't know what to tell you.

I hope your publishing career is fulfilling, on the whole. Whatever happens, I hope you enjoy the ride. That's my biggest goal, at the moment.

OXOXOOX,

Kate

Who am I and what is this? This is Agents & Books, a twice-weekly newsletter about writing, publishing, and the creative life. I've been an agent for 20 years, most of it at the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency, and I'm the author of two books: Write Through It: An Insider's Guide to Publishing and the Creative Life (Simon Element, 2025) and a picture book called Pay Attention to Me!, with illustrations by Rob Justus (Sourcebooks, 2026). If you haven't already, become a subscriber today. $5 a month or $50 a year. Same price since 2019! Need to unsubscribel? Look here.