Episode Transcript: Hey authors

This is episode 0 of CamCat Chats, the podcast where one indie press gives insight into the world of traditional publishing. I’m your host, Sue Arroyo, Publisher of CamCat Publishing.

Publishing is like that giant ice wall in Game of Thrones - incredibly tall and incredibly wide and incredibly opaque. For most authors, the world on the other side of that wall is a mysterious place, full of scary creatures and demons. Queries and manuscripts and book proposals venture to the other side of the wall, sometimes never to be heard from again. In CamCat Chats, we're trying to open a gate in the wall. We're trying to pull the curtain back a little bit on the publishing world and give authors a sense of what's going on behind the scenes, in order to help them perfect their submissions and write the books that publishers and agents and editors are just dying to read. We want to help authors stand apart and stand out in the slushpile.

Now we're just one publisher, and we're a new publishing house at that but we've got experienced people on the team, who bring decades of firsthand knowledge in the industry to our little press. We want to give authors a chance to meet these team members and learn what makes them tick and what gets them excited about books and about the industry in general. So, we'll have staff introductions where you can hear directly from the people who work so hard to get our books on the shelf.

We're also going to interview the authors who have successfully made it past the wall. These are authors we're publishing this year, and hopefully we’ll get to talk to a few who are being published by somebody else. These authors are all amazing people. They have insight into their writing process and their submissions process and what they did to get published, what they did to make their story unique and land that coveted publishing contract.

We’re lucky to have some industry guests coming on the show, from agents to publicists and marketing experts. These talented people can provide industry knowledge from outside of our little press.

Finally, our team is going to talk to you. We’ll talk about common mistakes that we see in the submissions queue every week and we'll talk about the things that get us excited in a manuscript. We’ll also be answering questions. Our listeners will be able to submit questions via Twitter at @CamCatChats and we’ll answer as many as we can. So, if you want to know what people at a publishing house think when they see something in a manuscript, or just want to figure out how something in publishing works, go ahead and submit a question to @CamCatChats on Twitter or our podcast page, www.camcatchats.com.

See you next week.

Links: Send your questions/comments to us via Twitter: @CamCatChats