The sales-editorial dynamic

One thing that is commonplace knowledge is that editors acquire books by giving an author an advance, along with royalty payment terms for books they sell. It’s a simple principle that is tremendously complex in practice.

At the core of this transaction is one of the formative relationships in any publisher – the one between Sales and Editorial.

To be deeply reductive about the scope of both disciplines, Sales want to sell as many books to customers as possible and Editorial want to find t...