CamCat Chats: Recent Episodes

View Details

Links:

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

Helga Schier can also be found at With Pen and Paper.

A little bit about what we call Books To Live In.

Dead Air book page.

So You Had to Build a Time Machinebook page.

CamCat Publishing Author Portal.

Episode Transcript:

[00:00:00] Sue: Hey authors, this is Episode 1 of Cam Cat Chats, and today is Friday, April 17th, 2020. I'm so glad you can join us.

This is probably the craziest time ever to launch a podcast, with the country and the world going through this horrible pandemic. But we wanted our first episode to go out today because this is our Founder's Day. It's our birthday. It's the one-year anniversary of when Cam Cat Publishing was born. So we wanted to celebrate with a bang, with a podcast that we've actually been planning for months as part of our author outreach activities.

On the other hand, I hear that there are tons of brand-new podcasts being uploaded to Apple podcasts, so maybe the timing isn't so far off after all.

So I'm going to take this time to tell you a little bit about Cam Cat Publishing. Like I said, a year ago, I called up my editor with a crazy idea. I'd been trying to get an agent for over two years. And after my 47th rejection, I'd had enough. I mean, life's just too short to be waiting for months, or in the case of one agent that I'd queried, almost two years, to get a response on a query letter.

So I called up my editor, Helga Schier, and I said, "Helga, I've got this crazy idea. I want to start a publishing company."

And to her immense credit and my undying gratitude, she didn't try to talk me out of it. Instead, she said, "Hey, when do we get started?"

So it's with particular delight that Helga is going to join me for the interview portion of this, our very first show.

In fact, Helga and I enjoyed our conversation so much that we ran way over, and we had to split the conversation into two parts. So today, on our first show, we will have part one of our conversation, and the next week we'll follow up with part two.

But getting back to that initial phone call that Helga and I had a year ago, about an author turning publisher. That's one thing that makes CamCat Publishing a little bit different from other presses that I know of. There are quite a few members of the team who are authors themselves, both published and unpublished. I think that makes us a little more empathetic to authors who are just trying to get that first publishing deal.

So we started Cam Cat Publishing on this foundation that we were going to be sympathetic to authors. From the start, we were going to provide a submissions process that wasn't going to be a giant black hole of darkness where authors throw their manuscripts in and might never get a response. We didn't want to do that, and almost from the very beginning, we've done a lot of author outreach by talking directly to authors, answering their questions, hearing their pitches at events, and generally being open to dialogue.

[00:03:00] I was always surprised last year when I would go to writer's conferences, and we were the only publisher in the vendor area. It doesn't seem natural to me, for there to be a wall between publisher and author. So we try really hard not to have one. Cam Cat Books is our first imprint from Cam Cat Publishing, and with Cam Cat Books, we're looking for quality genre fiction. Mysteries and thrillers and suspense, sci-fi and fantasy, romance and westerns and adventures and historical and horror and paranormal. Basically, books that are more commercial than literary. The books we like to escape in. We call these types of books Books To Live In. The books that you've read so many times that there are cracks in the spine and you can't make out the title anymore.

Those are the kinds of books we want to publish at Cam Cat Books. Hey, in less than a year, we've acquired some pretty amazing titles. Our first release is a thriller called Dead Air by Michael Bradley, which is coming out on June 9th, so just about fourteen months from my "aha" moment about starting a publishing company.

Following Dead Air is, So You Had to Build a Time Machine by Jason Offutt. It's a Sci-fi, time-traveling comedy that made me laugh out loud the first time I read it. And that's really hard for an author to do. Both of these authors, and hopefully the others that we're releasing later this summer, will be guests on the show.

I've got one more announcement to make before the interview. We hadn't been open to young adult fiction before, but we kept getting some really good YA submissions. Some of them were so good that we've decided we're going to start accepting YA fiction manuscripts, and our first YA titles will be coming out later this year. So you can head on over to our author portal. A link will be in the show notes and check out our guidelines before submitting.

Again, our interview today is with Helga Schier, who serves as our Editorial Director here at Cam Cat Publishing, but she also works with other authors via her own company With Pen and Paper, where she's been a freelance editor for almost twenty years.

Helga is one of the members of our team who is a published author herself, so she truly understands what it's like to be on the author's side of the table. With that, here's the interview.

Sue: Well, Miss Helga, welcome to the show.

Helga: Hi, Sue. Thank you so much for having me on the show. I'm excited to be chatting about CamCat with you.

Sue: I couldn't imagine having anyone else on this first episode because you were the first person I thought of a year ago, today, on our birthday. You were the first person I thought of to call with the crazy idea. "Let's start a publishing company." Who knew?

Helga: I remember that call really well, and back then, I didn't think it was a crazy idea. And now I know it wasn't a crazy idea because I think we've come so far in that first year, I really, I mean, it's amazing. We have several frontlist titles coming out soon, and you know, the team is growing together.

[00:06:00] So I think it's really a fantastic first year.

Sue: When you think about it, a year ago, it was just you and I talking, a concept. Now, we have our first title coming out in June. That'll be basically about 14 months from start to finish to get that title out. That'll be Dead Air by Michael Bradley, and we, like you said, we've got a team, there's nine of us now on the team, across four time zones, but it's pretty awesome. It's been a great ride.

Let's get to the topic of our talk today. It's something you said to me the other day that just resonated with me so much. For the listeners, we were in a group meeting talking about what makes a good book, and Helga said, "We don't know what's good. We just know what we like."

That resonated so much because it explained to me so much about publishing that maybe I hadn't quite understood up until that moment.

Helga: Yes, yes, and I really do believe that this is true, that this is true across the board for, for publishing or maybe for every creative field that you simply don't know what's good, but you know what speaks to you, what works for you? Different interests, different tastes, your expertise, and experience. All of this, you know, flows into what you're drawn to and therefore what, you know, what any publisher and certainly what our publisher might accept to publish. I think that's a really, that's not necessarily a bad thing at all.

Subjectivity pertains to the category of books that you might want to publish, the genre, whether you want to go from mainstream or literary or kids or adults. And I think it's very good to have that variety, you know, of publishers out there because you want your publisher to specialize and to really dive into the particular books that they want to publish.

Because, you know, it's something that I said before, as well that you do not want a publisher like, you know, Condé Nast, which is behind Vogue, publishing a new book on cancer research or research on the Coronavirus that is keeping us at home right now. So I really do think it's a good thing that publishers specialize in, and look at the specific books that they want to do.

So that to me is the rationale behind that comment. But what I think it really is maybe about something else. And that is that reading and writing are so very personal—very intimate activities. And therefore, if you drill down to it, it's, writing a book is just a writer talking to a reader, to this one reader, you know, that they imagined when they're writing.

So for that writer, it's about connecting with the one reader, and for the reader, it's about stepping into the writer's world, and whether you like this world and the stories that happened there, that's so utterly subjective. And this is true for professionals, and this is true for just for the readers that, that everybody is writing for.

[00:09:00] And an editor and a publishing house is basically nothing but a reader, a professional reader, but a reader none the less, with specific tastes.

Sue: Absolutely. I mean, everybody in a publishing house is a professional reader. I'm on the acquisition side. You're on the acquisition side, but also the editorial people, the people who are doing the production. We are reading these books over and over again. Some of us will read a particular manuscript three or four times over the course of production, so we all really pretty much have to like what we're reading to read about it and read it that many times.

And so that gives us a very unique sense of what we like because when we know that we like these genre stories, we like the mysteries, we like the thrillers, we like the suspense. Some of us might like memoir. Not everybody on the team likes memoir; therefore, we don't acquire memoir. It's not something that we can spend so much time invested in because just not, it's not something everybody on the team really likes to read.

Helga: Exactly. But you said that that we all happen to like mystery and that there is a lot, and we all happen to like romance and Sci-fi as well, but there is still a difference. It's not that we all like the same things. Even if we all like the same book, we don't necessarily like the same things about that book.

So it's still, you know, liking a book for the writer, still, leave so many possibilities to just write what they like and what they're passionate about. Because really, if you are, if you look at what a publishing, what any publishing house, and certainly ours has to do when we are deciding whether we're buying a book, we are looking at these books in so many different ways and from so many different angles, which really means we're looking for this different elements and aspects in that book.

Our submissions process requires that the writer answer a lot of questions, and those questions are not random. They really, you can choose certain things that we need to know about a book to know whether or not it's the right book for us. And you, an acquisitions editor, mostly looks for the quote-unquote marketability of a book.

This is a very, very important thing to see if the book has universal appeal or at least universal enough appeal, you know, to make, to make the book money. A development editor will look far more at whether or not the execution of the idea works, if it's unique, and if it's interesting and all that.

So there are so many elements that have to come together in what we'd like, you know, for us to accept a book.

Sue: And I think it's important to understand that we're people, we're human. And not only are we, we have all the frailties and fallibilities of a human, but our tastes change. That's just being human. Sue, on a Monday, is not going to necessarily be the same as Sue on a Thursday.

[00:12:00] Helga: You know, that actually really also reminds me, how much we as a team love reading, editing, developing these books. Yesterday we got the first glimpse of the cover for The Taxidermist's Lover, and the oohs and ahhs literally that came across the computers as we were sitting in our virtual meeting were amazing.

We were all so excited about this book, which brings me to something else. The subjectivity in publishing really is also so important. Because it really means that we have to be passionate about these books, so that we can push for them, so that we can spend all the hours it takes to edit them, spend all the hours it takes to find the right designer for the cover. Spend all, you know, the time and effort it takes to create a good marketing plan. And this is what we are looking for. We are looking for those books that we are passionate about so that we can just really dig deep and drill deep, you know, to do, to just support our authors, our writers. It is a very enjoyable experience to have a book like that, to see a book like that come together.

The acquisition process is not a gatekeeping process. It is not looking for ways to reject a book. It is very much the opposite. It is looking for ways to accept a book, we want to love it, to like it. And what we're looking for in the acquisitions process is for the writer to help us, you know, like their book, to try and stand out from the competition and to, and to show us where and how their book shines.

And that again is why we have that questionnaire. It lets writers talk about their book from so many different points of view I mentioned before, and it gives us a chance to see where we can tap in and help the writer shine with his or her book.

Sue: Exactly. I going back to something that you just said about the acquisitions process not being a gatekeeping process. And I guess you would say that if there were a gatekeeper on our acquisitions team, it would be me.

And believe me, the worst part of my job is composing the rejection letters because a book either wasn't executed well or doesn't fit the kind of books that we publish. We get a lot of that, but sometimes it's just that it's a personal like or dislike. And again, I mean, when we think about when we acquired Michael Bradley's book and the time of one acquisition to publication is over nine months for Michael.

It's a long time to be talking about a book, and we're actually turning that book around pretty quickly by industry standards. Some publishers take, might take a couple of years to get a book on the shelf. So we've moved pretty quickly. But it's still a long time to be deeply involved with an author. So I am certainly looking for not just a great story that entices me in and enraptures me. I'm looking for an author that I'm going to spend a long time with, 'cause I don't want just this one book from Michael Bradley. I want his next book and his next book and Polly Hall's books. I want her next book and her next book.

[00:15:00] So the author, also the person is, is something that I'm looking at really closely when I'm looking at acquisitions, and this is where, and it's true for us, but certainly true for any publisher. When you're, as an author, when you're communicating with a publishing house, either via a query, via email, or whatever, it's so important to be professional and be polite and respectful. Being rude or ugly or complaining about our questionnaire because you think it's too long, is not going to get you anywhere.

It's not going to get you anywhere. And I don't know anybody in publishing who really has the stomach to deal with someone who just rude or impolite. We've got plenty of others in the slushpile that we can work with, and we're pretty sure that most of them are a lot nicer than anybody who's being rude. So this is a quick tip for the authors.

Helga: I think that is really very true. And I think there is; there's also more behind this. Because yes, you as a publisher, we are looking for a long-term relationship for a writer. But I really also think that this is what writers, what authors should do. They should look for a long-term relationship with their publishers.

Because you want to grow as a writer, certainly, but also with your publisher, you want to have that synergy that comes together between you and the house that publishes you and between the staff, between you and the staff that is working for your book on all ends. You want to know your editor. You want to know the person who deals with the inside design of your book. And you want to know; you want to get to know the person who's doing the marketing plans.

And I think it's not only a subjective business. It's a personal business as well, because honestly, a book is a product, yes, but it's not a product like many others. It's so dear to the writer's heart, almost like a little child, you have to look as carefully at a publisher that you want to give your book to as you do to, whatever, a school that you would send your kid to. It's really, honestly, it's a very, very close relationship, and that's, I think that's a good thing, honestly. But it's also, it simply means that you should be selective when you're looking, who do send your manuscript.

Sue: And it's so important, and it's why publishers have guidelines. It's why we put it out in multiple places. The kinds of things we want to publish.

Now, as a new publisher, authors aren't able to go to our website and see our list. You know, we don't have 10,000 the books out there that would give an author an idea of the kinds of things that we like, which you can do with some more established publishers, but it's pretty clear on our website that we are into genre fiction, right?

So don't send me a cookbook. Every week it seems, I get a cookbook. We don't do cookbooks. Okay. I love cooking. I love cookbooks, and I'd be the first one to buy the latest, newest cookbook out there, but that's not what we publish, and we're not the right ones. No matter how good that cookbook is, we're definitely not the right ones to publish it because we don't have that advocacy.

[00:18:00] We don't have that love across the team for that kind of book, but for the books we do acquire, it is also like our own child. And I can tell you, well, you know this, but I can the listeners that, you know, we've got a couple of our books up on NetGalley getting reviews and every time we get a good review, I post it to the bulletin board, and we're all jumping up and down.

I could see the physical reaction on some people's faces when we're on these video calls, how thrilled they are over a great review because we each had a part of that. So it is like our, it's like our baby. We have to share the baby with the author but is like our baby too. We're also proud of it.

What you were talking about yesterday with Polly Hall's cover, not only were there gasps on the meeting about how beautiful the cover was, and we were all imagining seeing it on the shelf. We immediately jumped there, but even after the meeting, people kept writing emails to the bulletin board about this cover.

We just kept on going all night long about how beautiful his cover was. The team gets excited, the team gets behind the author and the work so much, and that's what authors should want in their publisher. So they, it's important to make sure that you're researching the publishers and that's the long-term relationship is something you want because of the team in that publishing house. You want them to be as full-throated advocates of your book as we are of ours.

Helga: Absolutely. And it's really so important to know that it's not an adversarial relationship between publisher and writer. I mean off many, many writers feel that there is, you know, that they have to kind of fight for attention at their publishers.

And that may be true, but it really also is, we honestly do share the pride, you know, with our, just the pride of our books and we have to, or else we won't be able to sell the book out there. And honestly, if we didn't believe in the book, why would we want to, and our, our desire is to create good books and to put all our force behind it because we want to sell them.

Because this is how we make money.

Sue: Publishing, people, I think, forget sometimes publishing is a business. We don't have the luxury to take a gamble on too many iffy titles, especially smaller presses like ours. I think the larger presses, the big five houses; they can take a few more gambles than we can.

But, we're looking, during the acquisitions process, not only are we looking for stuff that we like, but stuff that we think does have a reasonable chance to sell, and sell enough to sell enough to recoup the costs, plus. We don't want to just break even. Break-even doesn't cover all of our costs. We need to make a profit. That's why businesses are in business, to make a profit.

[00:21:00] But this is a subjective business. The subjectivity of publishing drives certain factors in our business decisions and we respond to the subjectivity and the tastes of the reader, the tastes of the team on the publishing side and also the tastes of the author.

Helga: Yes. Absolutely. That's true. If you say that publishing is a business, what this basically means is that each and every book needs to reach a lot of readers. So essentially, the book has to have some sort of universal appeal, and this does not mean that it needs to be like a mainstream book.

What I mean is that every writer, even in the process of writing, has to be aware, or it has to at least think about it a little bit, as to who he or she is writing towards. And that does not mean writing towards the market. It does not mean riding a wave that's out there right now.

What it means is knowing who your reader is, thinking about who your reader is, what that person's tastes might be, background might be. So that you can tap into the shared culture that you have with the reader, and every writer has to be aware of that. That's understanding that you're not just writing for you, yourself as a writer.

Yes, you should follow your passion, but you also need to make sure that your passion translates to the reader. In order for it to do that, you have to kind of know who you are writing for.

Sue: Yeah, and I think that's something that's really important for authors to understand. When I've gone to writers’ conferences in the past, the advice always to writers, write the story that's in you, write the story that only you can tell. But on the flip side of that, it has to be a story that somebody is going to want to buy on the other end. It's got to be a story that somebody is going to want to read, and then when they're done with it, they're so excited that they share it with their friends. And you do have to be aware of your reader. You have to know who your reader is. You do have to know what your space is. My favorite example is vampire books. Now, way back, and I'm not gonna say the exact date because that will date me, but I was a big Anne Rice fan, and I thought that nobody could top an Anne Rice vampire story.

Her stories were so rich and embroidered, and I just loved losing myself in them. But ten years or so after the craze was over, along comes Stephanie Meyer, who wrote Twilight. And she, she had a completely fresh and different take on vampires, but she wasn't following in Anne Rice's footsteps, she didn't say, "Oh, well, Anne Rice wrote these vampire books, and they did well, so I'm going to write one now, like with a European vampire and all these crazy other supporting characters."

No, Stephanie Meyer did something really, really different, really new, really fresh, and made it appeal to an audience of younger readers, which is something that vampire books hadn't been really targeted towards before.

[00:24:00] Stephanie Meyer did this really well. But after her, there was a slew of vampire books that just, they were copycatting; they were trying to ride that wave of success that Stephanie Meyers had enjoyed. And you just can't do that. You can't try and hit a wave in publishing. It takes too long.

Helga: Right. I think what is the really important point for writers here is that it is a very, very good thing if there is a market out there, say for vampire stories. However, within that market, you have to find your own niche, your own unique approach. As you said, it won't do to just copycat something, but it certainly doesn't mean you have to be completely, you know, offbeat as well. It simply means you need to find a new way into this particular market. And for that, it is really important to know your market. And that really honestly and seriously means you've got to read other books, you know, that are like yours, so that you do know what tropes are out there that are so overused, but also to know the tropes are out there that are useful still to you and that you can change.

Sue: We're about to take a break here and continue our conversation with Helga Schier next week on Episode Two, as we continue our discussion on the subjectivity of publishing.

Thank you for joining us on this week's episode of Cam Cat Chats. If you liked what you heard, please consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to us. Your reviews will help other authors find our show. You can ask us questions or post comments to us on Twitter. Our handle is @camcatchats or on our podcast page www.camcatchats.com.

From our producer, Isabella Nucci, and myself, we're wishing health and safety to all of you and your families. Until next week. Bye!

View Details

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