The publisher conversation no one prepares you for
have now submitted book proposals to ten publishers. I did not expect, when I started writing, that learning how publishing works would become its own education. But here I am, several months in, with a clearer picture of the industry than I had at the start — and a set of reflections I want to set down honestly.
This is not a verdict. It is a journal entry from somewhere in the middle of the journey.
The picture I had formed of a publisher conversation turned out to be more optimistic than accurate.
I had imagined something editorial. A dialogue about the argument, the audience, the gap the book was trying to fill. The kind of exchange that sharpens thinking and sends you back to the manuscript with new questions worth answering.
Some of those conversations did happen, and they were genuinely valuable. The more consistent experience, however, was a layered process, largely invisible to the author, moving through gates whose criteria are never quite explained. Proposals pass from reader to reader through a sequence you are never shown. You submit, you wait — which is entirely reasonable — you follow up when enough time has passed, and eventually something comes back.
What comes back is not always what you expected. A rejection that cites misalignment with the publisher’s strategy, from a house whose catalogue contains several titles working in closely adjacent territory. A comment that suggests the reviewer encountered the proposal on a crowded afternoon rather than with the attention a carefully constructed argument deserves. You sit with these responses and try to read them accurately, which is harder than it sounds when the signal is faint.
The thing that surprised me most was not the slowness or the opacity. It was the weight placed on platform.
Publishers want to know about your LinkedIn network. Your follower count. Your reach. The question that precedes full assessment of the content is: can this author sell?
I have sat with this observation longer than the others, because I think it deserves more than a reflexive reaction. Publishing is a commercial enterprise operating under real constraints. A specialist non-fiction title in a professional niche carries genuine financial risk, and an author’s ability to reach an audience matters to that calculation. The logic is defensible.
What I keep returning to, nonetheless, is this: when the primary filter is distribution infrastructure, the author is being assessed as a sales channel before they are assessed as a thinker. The content follows the platform, rather than the other way around. For a practitioner who has spent twenty years developing an argument, and who came to publishing because the argument deserved a wider audience, that inversion is worth pausing on.
I have been speaking to other authors who have been through similar processes. One remark stayed with me: “I came away feeling I had been evaluated for the wrong thing.” It was said without bitterness, simply as an observation, and it named something I had felt but not yet articulated. The dissatisfaction is not personal. It appears to be structural — a feature of how specialist non-fiction publishing currently works rather than a series of individual missteps by individual houses.
Most of those authors arrived at the same crossroads I am approaching: a set of questions about what a publisher relationship is actually for, and what route best serves the book and the readers it is trying to reach. One conversation of my own remains open. A conclusion is forming, though I am not ready to name it yet.
What I know now that I did not know when I started: the proposal process does not just test whether a publisher wants the book. It tests whether you can articulate, under a variety of different framings and formats, exactly what the book is and why it matters. Ten proposals to ten publishers, each with different templates and different emphases, have clarified the argument in ways the writing itself did not. That was not what I expected to get from the process. It may be the most useful thing it has given me.
That is not discouraging. It is clarifying.
If you are a practitioner considering writing a book, or if you have been through this process yourself, I am genuinely curious what it looked like from where you stood.
The Decision Architect, my book on business architecture practice, is approaching completion.
