Why Did the Publisher Do That?

Hello friends,

First off, thank you all so much for taking advantage of our Seventh Anniversary sale! Welcome all new and upgraded subscribers. If you tried to use the code and it wouldn't work, email me at kate at katemckean dot com and I will help you out.

Second, I'm very happy to report that the search function on www.agentsandbooks.com has been VASTLY improved! Thanks to help of James Anthony of Excitify, you can now click on the 🔍 at the top left of the homepage and search to your heart's content. The base model search on Ghost only brings up posts that have been tagged with your search term and that meant it was only bringing up limited results. Now if you search "big swing" it'll bring up this post and this one. And if you search "option clause" you'll get this one! And if you look for "query letter" you'll get a whole bunch! We're working on that coming up as a browser tab and not a pop-up window, so stay tuned. Thanks James!!

Now, for today's topic. I have been spending more time on Threads, and frankly, it's hilarious. It feels like early, early, early Twitter, with fewer lolcats. I particularly like how people will ask the most basic questions like hey, I hear food is good. What's your favorite kind? Of course my feed is full of publishing questions and FOR THE RECORD, I don't think there are any bad publishing questions, so do not be shy to ask those on Threads (or here if you are a newly paying subscriber, for our Q&A Thursdays!). I frequently look around for publishing questions to answer when I'm scrolling. It makes me feel more productive, lol. It's just–sometimes people are like I just read a book and it was good. Can you recommend another good one? Are these bots??? And I being trolled?? But I digress.

The other day there was a kerfuffle on Threads because someone discovered that Rachel Reid's new book in the Game Changers series (aka Heated Rivalry 🏒🥵🌶️🥵🌶️🏒) was "leaked" by B&N wIthOut THe AutHor's KNowleDge???!?!?!??!?!??!? Some posters on Threads were surprised and angered that B&N would put this information online and "announce" the book without letting the author do it first. Many were the condemnations of traditional publishing and useless publishers who can't do their jobs right. (Ok, I'm exaggerating.)

Y'all. B&N did not "leak" the news of this book. It is true that the information was available online and the author was not notified of its release, but nobody–not the publisher, author, or bookstore–did anything wrong here. What happened was that someone noticed the metadata.

From the moment your book has a contract with a traditional publisher, it has metadata. It starts with your name, the book title (as it exists at that moment, though it might still change), the tentative pub date, the publisher/imprint, format (hardcover, paperback etc) and some other stuff. A lovely person at the publisher, often an assistant, has to enter all that in and it's used in basically every other aspect of your book's life. I still haven't been able to infiltrate a publisher and look at all their internal systems, but what they do tell me about this info, this metadata, is that it gets updated as necessary and at some point before the book comes out, it is released. The publisher hits a button (probably) and makes that information available to retailers, like B&N, Amazon, and indies. If you have the systems that use that info, you can see that info. It's not top secret. It's there so that people who need to know about the book to stock it in their stores can find out about it.

At some point in this process, B&N, Amazon, etc hit a button (probably) and that metadata shows up on their public websites. This is not a leak. This is not a book announcement or cover reveal. (Because yes, sometimes the cover is released in that metadata, even if the author/publisher hasn't done an official cover reveal.) This is also ok! 99.9% of the time no one is looking for this information except the author. Of course, in the case of the hot kissing hockey players, everyone is looking everywhere for those books and someone found the metadata for the next book in the series. And the book probably isn't even DONE yet! It comes out in September, so if I had to guess, the actual text of the book is just about out of copyediting (unless the recent media frenzy has delayed the author's work, which would be TOTALLY understandable) and the sales and marketing team is revving up to capitalize on the series' fantastic success. All this is completely normal. The publisher has no control over when Amazon etc releases the metadata on their site. When the metadata is wrong, which totally happens from time to time, all the publisher can do is update the info on their end and alert Amazon and wait for their robots to grab the new info and display it on the site. That's why sometimes the cover is wrong online, or it shows an old title, or an illustrator's name gets left off. Because humans feed in the information, there's gonna be some errors sometimes. And again, the author as no hand in this, except to sometimes catch errors before the publisher does, which is a little embarrassing (for the publisher) but also always fixable.

Sometimes publishers obscure the metadata so that a really secret book isn't discovered in this way. Flatiron Books (part of Macmillan) had a big book about BTS and kept that metadata under wraps until basically pub day by calling it 4C Untitled Flatiron Nonfiction Summer 2023. (4C means four color, i.e. not black & white.) Everyone thought it was a Taylor Swift book, which we didn't know would be uh "published" by Taylor Swift Publications in 2024. If you are BTS or Taylor Swift, or probably Donna Tartt, because if/when she writes another book it will be HUGE news, the publisher is going to obscure your metadata so they can control the rollout and news cycle. But none of us are those people, so we are at the mercy of the metadata, and that's ok. Hey, my picture book has been up on retailers for months and that's fine! Preorder today!

Authors do not need to control metadata, except to flag anything they see that's wrong. Publishers should not mess up metadata, and 99.8% of the time they do not, but authors and publishers are all on the same team. Reid did not get scooped about her book and denied the chance to announce it herself. What happened was her rabid fans noticed her new book and told EVERYONE about it, likely pushing pre-orders into the stratosphere. We should all be so lucky. And while I appreciate fans–of these books or any books–looking out for authors, we should all step away from the outrage machines and not assume things are 🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨 omg did you see this??????????? wtf what happenddddddddd???? 🚨🚨🚨🚨 any time we encounter something we've never seen before.

Abolish ICE,

OXOXOXOXOXOOX

Kate