Timing Doesn’t Matter As Much As You Think It Does

From November to February, unionized workers at HarperCollins were on strike.

This is a big deal in publishing, where salaries have been low for decades and there’s only one union in the entire industry. But it’s an even bigger deal to my clients who have finished their proposal and gotten a literary agent — because their book deal was delayed.

Whether they would get a deal, how much money it would be, how many publishers would be interested, what the meetings with editors would be like, what feedback they would receive . . . was all put on hold for months in hopes that literary agents wouldn’t have to cross a picket line.

Luckily, my clients understood something about publishing that many authors don’t.

Timing for your book? Doesn’t matter all that much.

Outside of global events (like the first few months of the pandemic, or the financial crisis in 2008) the success of the how-to books that my team and I work on — and that y’all are writing — is not tied to a specific time of year, or even to a season. If you’re reading this, you’re not writing a Christmas book or a tell-all about a political candidate running in an election that year.

Instead, the books we work on solve a problem that is relatively timeless.