Commissioning

Our Commissioning Editor became interested in your book at the Frankfurt Book Fair, where the first negotiation with your publisher took place. After reading your manuscript, the Commissioning Editor researched the market and the competition and collected statistics to build a publishing proposal, which was presented at an acquisition meeting. This meeting was attended by all the other departments directly involved in publishing the book (sales, marketing, publicity and rights, amongst others).We usually discuss commercial topics; for example, estimated sales figures, and production cost. We also consider the author’s prestige and how the book fits in with Picador’s identity’

Once the Commissioning Editor had encouraged all of our other departments to pursue your book, we acquired the rights from your publisher. In order to do that, we negotiated the terms through a contract. In this document, we agreed on an advance against future royalties, which are only payable if the book is published and sells enough copies to ‘earn out’ the advance.