The week before acquisitions
The commissioning editor wants to bring four books to Thursday's meeting. For each one there is a reader's report, sometimes two, sent back by email as a Word attachment. There is a note from sales about how a comparable title sold. There is a rough profit and loss sheet in Excel with an assumed print run and a guess at the advance. The agent has sent an update saying another house is interested.
On Wednesday night the editor pastes all of this into a document, prints copies and hopes the version of the costing is the latest one. In the meeting, the publisher asks what happened to a book discussed in the spring, and nobody can remember whether it was declined or held for a revision.
Where the problem starts
Each piece of information is created by a different person in a different tool. Readers write in Word, sales work in whatever holds your distributor data, finance owns the costing template, and the agent's messages sit in the editor's inbox. Nothing ties them to the book, so the book's history is reassembled from scratch every time it comes up.
- Readers' reports come back in different formats with no score or recommendation field.
- Costings are copied and edited, so several versions of the same P&L exist.
- Comparable title figures are looked up by hand each time.
- Decisions are minuted in a document that is never linked back to the book.
- Offers, counter-offers and deadlines from agents live in one person's email.
The price of reassembling each book
The time cost falls on the editor, who should be reading and talking to agents rather than formatting packs. The bigger cost is in decisions made on incomplete information, or not made at all because the meeting ran out of time working out what it was looking at.
| Symptom | Consequence |
|---|---|
| Old version of the costing presented | An offer is made on the wrong print run or discount |
| No record of a past decline | The same book is considered again a year later |
| Agent deadline missed | The book goes to the other house |
| Reports not comparable | Strong readers' views are lost in long prose |
| Pack built late at night | Mistakes that nobody has time to catch |
How we connect reports, costings and decisions
We build a light acquisitions record that sits next to your existing submissions process, or grows out of the submissions queue if you have one.
- One record per book under consideration, holding author, agent, format plans and status.
- A readers' report form with the fields your editors care about (recommendation, market, comparable titles, concerns) plus free text, so reports can be compared at a glance.
- A costing sheet attached to the record, versioned, with the version used in each meeting stored against the decision.
- Optional lookup of your own past sales for comparable titles from your distributor reports, where that data is available to us.
- An offers log per book: what was offered, when, what the agent said back and the deadline, with a reminder before it expires.
- A meeting pack generated as a PDF from the records on the agenda, and a decision field completed in the meeting.
The costing formulas stay yours. We do not decide how you calculate a P&L, we make sure everyone is looking at the same one.
What the editor's week looks like after
Reports arrive through the form and attach themselves to the book. On Wednesday the editor ticks four books for the agenda and the pack is produced. In the meeting, anyone can open a book's history and see every report, every costing version and every earlier discussion. Decisions go straight onto the record, and a declined book is findable the next time its author's name appears.
Over time you build something small publishers rarely have: a searchable memory of what you considered, what you paid for, and why.
Does this sound like your list?
- Your acquisitions pack is assembled by hand the night before.
- You have argued in a meeting about which costing is current.
- Nobody can find out quickly why a book was turned down last year.
- Agent deadlines are tracked in one editor's head.
- Readers' reports vary so much that they are hard to weigh against each other.