Advances (Upon Royalties)

*All* the royalties count, damnit

I’ll be honest: I really want to write a pretty boring, explanatory newsletter about finding and choosing an agent. Something that would be helpful, hopefully, to my subscribers who are writers. But book twitter, and publishing news, keeps hijacking my plans. So I’ll take up yet another press drama that boiled over a few days last week, and quickly became very confusing, as it intersected with the American Dirt one.

On February 4, Publishers Weekly reported that the editors of the small press Emily Books decided to stop publishing new books. The editors wrote an open letter that explained their decision. Emily Books, which launched in 2011, became an imprint of Coffee House Press in 2016. Coffee House oversees and helps distribute the titles which the Emily Books editors select. It was the editors’ decision to stop doing this work; Coffee House was a passive player: one of their imprints would stop publishing new titles—nothing they could do—but of course the current catalog, all th…