The Human Element

In this blog I’ve discussed several facets of the publishing business – submissions, editing, marketing and more.  But one part of our business that I haven’t gotten into is more ephemeral and harder to define. For want of a better term, I’m calling this side of the business the human element.

It is true that writing is both a skill and an art, while publishing is a business. But a publisher is more than a venture capitalist, investing in the potential value of a product.  That is because a publisher doesn’t simply invest in a book.  He also invests in the author, and dealing with the artistic temperament of a creative fiction writer is often much more challenging than dealing with that writer’s work.

For example, editing is the process through which good manuscripts become great manuscripts. At Intrigue Publishing, like most small presses, that process is collaborative.  Professional editors know how to improve pace, strengthen characters, and fill plot holes. But only the author knows how to present his theme, establish the chosen atmosphere and preserve her own voice. We want to end up with the best book possible, but we never want to take the book away from the writer.  Better to let the book and the writer go than to have an unhappy or bitter author in our stable.

The same applies to cover design.  Our job is to create a book cover that will get a reader’s attention, express the book’s genre and tone, and prompt the reader to pick that book up. But authors feel, often very strongly, that what matters is that their cover represents their story accurately.  So for many writers it can’t be a great cover if it depicts a scene that doesn’t actually occur in the book, if characters are facing each other who don’t meet in their story, or if the heroine is wearing a gown she would never wear.  This type of thing may not matter much to the big six publishers (or are there only five now?) but we don’t want to have one of our authors out there promoting their book but hating the cover.

Every press is bound to make decision an author doesn’t favor (we’ve debated the font, page layout and even chapter heads with writers) but we consider every choice carefully and always stand ready to explain why a writer’s preference isn’t followed.  We must never forget that it takes a special person to create a novel others will want to read, and that the publishing industry really rests on that human element.