My book deal did NOT go how I expected...😳

The surprises of working with an independent publishing house

Big Five publishing is like the Ivy League. Everyone wants in, but most get rejected.

Including me.

At first, I was bummed that the big publishers passed on my book, a nonfiction guide to querying written with the creator of QueryTracker. I worked at both Macmillan and Penguin Random House (on the fiction side) and was most familiar with the big corporate publishing environment. It was where I’d hoped my own book would eventually land.

So when rejections rolled in from big house after big house, they stung. Some thought our book was too niche, others said there was too much overlap with other books they already bought.

But then we got enthusiastic interest from a published I’d never heard of before: Matt Holt Books (an imprint of BenBella Books), which my agent had suggested putting on our submission list.

And it turned out that not having my book published by a Big Five house might have been the best possible outcome for me and my co-author.

Let me tell you why.

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Are you querying this year?

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The publishing plot twist I didn’t see coming

BenBella is known for being an author-friendly house, which feeds into how they approach the editorial process, cover design, and marketing. Working with them turned out to be a completely different experience from what I’d been preparing for.

Working with an independent house totally reframed what I consider a “good” book deal and expanded my view of the current publishing landscape.

So today I want to share everything that has surprised me about working with an independent publisher over a Big Five house: the benefits, the downsides, and the tradeoffs nobody talks about.

Because there are so many more publishing avenues available today than ever before, and sometimes the less-obvious paths are the more rewarding ones.

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1. The edits were shockingly minimal

As a developmental editor, I was 100% expecting my co-author and I to have to tear our book apart and rebuild it from scratch. After all, neither of us had written a nonfiction book before.

I’d braced myself for months of structural overhauls, painful cuts, and revision letters that ran ten pages long. That’s the kind of edit I deliver to my own clients (sorry, it’s out of love, I promise!), and it’s what I’d seen authors receive from the houses I worked at.

But here’s the email we got from our editor instead…