I found an interview conducted by Sharif Khan on Gather that I thought I’d share. In his article, Mr. Khan interviews David Davidar, Publisher Penguin Canada. I encourage visitors to read the entire article titled, “Penguin Publisher Reveals What it Takes to Get Published.”

Every author I’ve met believes his or her book is a good book. Also, most authors I’ve met who have approached agents or publishers has told me they received nothing but rejection letters. Even if every book written was of best-seller quality, it is impossible for every book to become a best-seller. Mr. Davidar explains why below. I’m a big believer in building a business around your book rather than trying to become a New York Times Best Seller. To publish and promote a book on their own, authors will need to learn how to wear the two hats of writing and promoting. Here’s the section I liked most from Mr. Khan’s article:

Can you tell us about the BUSINESS of publishing? (I think for most people it’s a mystery veiled in secrecy and delusions of grandeur).

There is the myth that if you write a novel you’ll become rich, famous, attractive to women, or whatever the case may be, but I think that’s largely a myth. Very few books break out in a way such as God of Small Things and A Suitable Boy did because its only 1% who get to superstardom because they won a big prize or it’s an amazing book and enough readers caught on to the fact.

But think of the odds…There are about 100,000 books published every year. How on earth are you going to get each of those books to a reader’s attention!

Let’s say you walk into a bookstore, you face the first novel that appears and you have no idea what it’s about. There is so much competing for your attention. Most novels sell only about 400 or 500 copies. If it’s a good seller it will sell 5000 copies if it won an award and got great reviews.

It is only superstars that sell more and superstars are very few and every one knows who they are. The question we need to ask is why are there so few superstars? Why isn’t every writer published famous? There isn’t enough attention available for these writers. So that TV time, radio time, bookstore sales, all mitigate against every writer getting in.

Two or three industries suffer from the same thing, movie and TV, and music being closest to the book industry. Think of the tens of thousands of artists who’ve produced CDs and nobody’s heard of them, and nobody will hear of them because that is the way the system works. So what happens say if you’ve written a book and you approach a publisher?

Well normally you approach the publishing house through a literary agent because they are the top filter, and a top agent comes to me and says this is a wonderful book…I’ll say I’ll read it. But if you approach me directly you probably won’t get through many of the sieves…there are assistants, there are people in the mailroom, and there are book manuscripts at the back because of overflow…everyone thinks they can write a book!

Finding a good agent is becoming increasingly tough because they too are inundated with manuscripts as well. The agent comes to us generating interest in a book and we have special editors, one specializes in Canadian writers; she says okay or no, I like it or don’t like it. The book is brought to a meeting where she says she wants to pay this kind of money. You have a price on this book say $35 dollars, so the author will get a percentage royalty on every book sold. For a 10% royalty you will get $3.5 dollars on every copy sold.

So what we will do, is advance the author, through his or her agent x amount of money, say $35,000 dollars because we expect to sell 5,000 or 6,000 hardback and 10,000 copies in paperback, so we figure its worth about $35,000. So it’s not an outright gift…it’s an advance against royalties.

Then hopefully the book is published and lives up to expectations and earns out and the response is we’re happy, the author is happy, and the agent is happy…but in 90% of the cases it doesn’t earn out the advance and so you’re in trouble. Of the 100 books published in Canada, I expect 20 books to support the rest.