It’s been a little over ten years since my first novel – Horizon – was published by HarperCollins, so I thought I’d share a few insights from that experience.
In 2014, HarperCollins Australia put out an open submission call for manuscripts. They’d decided to dip a toe in the emerging electronic book market and they were looking for Australian genre stories to feed into their global ebook imprint called Impulse. Impulse had been active in the US for a little while before the Australian call out, mainly in the romance genre.
I had a manuscript for Horizon, which I’d shopped around without any luck, so I polished it up and submitted it. And I was lucky enough to be one of the authors they selected. As you’d imagine, I felt this was a fantastic opportunity, and as well as the simple validation of having my work acknowledged as ‘good enough’ for publication, a deal with HarperCollins came with a lot of positives.
The first thing that was very cool was being invited with my fellow Impulse authors to HarperCollins head office in Sydney for an orientation day that included talks from graphic designers, marketing personnel, editors and the publishing director as well as a very nice luncheon and wrap-up drinks. It was great to meet my fellow authors and HarperCollins managed a Facebook group so we could keep in touch with each other afterwards.
After that introduction, the focus shifted to producing the books. Even today, the margins in ebooks are incredibly small and Impulse was an experiment for HarperCollins Australia, so it was understandable that there wasn’t a huge budget behind the imprint.
With a more mainstream imprint, editing would have included a structural edit followed by a copy edit and finally a proofread. Because of the tight budget, Impulse books would receive a copy edit only, so they deliberately selected works that were already structurally sound. I have a feeling my manuscript went to a freelance editor engaged by HarperCollins who may not have had much experience with works of fiction. I say this because when I got the manuscript back from them, the editor had gotten rid of all the contractions I’d used in character speech. As a result, everyone sounded like a robot. Luckily, I was given some time to go through the manuscript and reverse those changes and review any other changes they’d made (some of which I agreed with). At some point after the manuscript left me, the file had also been infected with some kind of virus, which randomly removed spaces between words. So I had to fix that up too. Still, these things happen!
It’s not uncommon for authors to have absolutely no say in the cover for their book. So it was an added bonus that HarperCollins sent me a draft cover for comment. Horizon centres mainly on a spaceship exploring an extraterrestrial star system. The cover I received did have a spaceship on it, but it didn’t match the detailed description of the ship contained in the book (though it was a pretty cool ship). I asked if there was an option to change it and suggested something along the lines of the social media avatar pic I’d been using at the time (and still use) as it was reminiscent of a sequence in the book. They kindly agreed and I was very happy with the final cover.
As I mentioned, the budget was tight so there was no question of advance payment on signing. But they did offer 25% on nett receipts of book sales. Apart from that the contract was fairly standard. I knew from talking to other authors that publishers regularly included agreement by the author to other rights in addition to print rights such as radio, audiobook, television and movie rights. I also knew that while Impulse was ebook only, HarperCollins may also produce a physical print edition (if the book was selling particularly well) but this wasn’t guaranteed. I didn’t want to sign away all rights, so I asked them to strike out the other media rights, which I reserved to myself. I also asked that they introduce a sunset clause on the print rights option if they didn’t decide to exercise that right within five years of publication, because – again – I wanted to be able to create a print book of Horizon if they didn’t. HarperCollins were happy to agree to this.
The other benefit of being published is that they did all the pre- and launch-publicity. Okay there may not have been a ‘media budget’ for Impulse books, but these titles were included in the regular media and promotional work HarperCollins did for all their books. And it wasn’t just for Australia. It was global. That included social media, Facebook ads, inclusion in their catalogue and meetings with sales platforms like Apple and Amazon and inclusion in NetGalley which I know from experience is not cheap. Horizon was also included in a free sampler ebook of upcoming science fiction and fantasy titles called Onward, Voyager! which was headlined by Chuck Wendig. It’s still pretty popular on Amazon and I’m sure I got more than a few sales because of that.
Of course, the main benefit of getting published by a company like HarperCollins is sales. I checked my statements recently and since publication in November 2014, Horizon has sold over two thousand copies (and eight hundred copies in the first six months). That may not be bestseller numbers but it makes me happy.
As a footnote, I ended up getting the print rights back from HarperCollins and created a print version of the book in 2023. This differs a little from the ebook version as I got a professional structural edit and copy edit done. It’s essentially the same story. But I think it reads a little better. So as not to confuse buyers, I made sure the cover was similar in design to the ebook cover.
