I was going to go in a different direction here building off the last article, but I decided to take this small detour before tossing in part two next week and then jumping back to tie all this together.

I’m going to share with you something nine out of ten of you have never fully thought about or even lightly considered.

Every one of you reading this has a pile of skills, quirks, experiences, and random know-how rattling around in their heads. That’s your “talent stack.” It’s a thing. It’s real. We all have one.

I had never heard it put this way until I saw it years ago in a Dilbert comic. Then the light bulb went on. Then I applied it to writing and all its forms. And topics. But that’s a future column.

How tall and diverse and broad and deep is yours? The sooner you figure this out, and figure out what is lacking from your talent stack, the better. In a very real way, your talent stack is your personal toolbox. Each toolbox holds different tools for different tasks. I know for a fact after countless consultations over the years that authors do not, as a rule, think this way. That is to your detriment.

When peel back the layers and piece together their personal talent stacks, they see their writing world in a wholly different light.

These talents form your compass. Pay attention to your compass.

A talent stack is not just one shiny positive attribute. It’s the whole messy combo of what you’re good at, what you’ve lived, what you know, and what you are not good at (this is important, too). Before you dig into a writing project, you’ve got to know the inside of your toolbox like the back of your hand. Trust me, your talent stack has a big mouth, but you have to put your ego aside to not only listen to it, but to hear it.

And I can hear you now: “Ted, I’m unclear what this has to do with choose a form or picking a topic.” Stay with me.

How Do You ID Your Stack?

Start by playing detective on yourself. Grab a coffee, a notebook, and a dollop of brutal honesty; you will need all three. Then pick a quiet place. No kids, no dogs, no spouses.

Begin with this question: What do you already rock at?

Maybe you’re a trivia nerd on U.S. presidents, or you know American history inside and out because you have studied it all your life. That’s a real talent, a tool you can reach for and a good idea of the direction in which you might look for a topic. If you have studied something intensely enough to be a nerd on the subject or have spent decades reading about it, you love it.

Those untold hours researching in the bowels of an archive breathing in dust, negotiating ancient cataloging systems, and reading indecipherable handwriting? You love it. Good.

But don’t miss my point.

This is not just about history, and you are not just a nerd. This can be about science fiction or fixing cars or growing roses. You have demonstrated patience, research skills, organizational skills (one hopes), and have gained experience and knowledge in a particular field. That means you have research chops. Maybe writing history is your thing, and the form could be a manuscript that will take years to finish.

These attributes are part of your talent stack. Your compass. (See how we keep coming back that?)

Some people have a knack for explaining to others a complicated subject like tax policy or constitutional law without making eyes glaze over. Why is this important? That’s a presentation ability most people would die for. It means you can tell a story and share complex information in a way that others enjoy listening to. That’s real marketing ability, too.

Publishers will love that.

What specific jobs have you held that are unusual or take a special skill? That’s experience. Real know-how you can write about.

Are you a fast and good writer? Two more talents.

Have you traveled a lot outside the country? That’s perspective and diverse understanding of the world we live in.

Some people are super good organizers (I am not). Are you? Good, because you will need it for complex undertakings that span years and require an above-average level of organization.

“Wait!” you think. “I am disorganized!” No problem. Writing shorter might be better than a marathon topic. This helps dictate your form.

Do you see it yet?

Can you work hours on end if you need to? That’s stamina. You will need it for certain projects like a one-a-week article series. But you better know going in.

Quirks and Friends Count

We all know sarcastic SOBs. Guess what? That’s voice. Got a gallows sense of humor? That’s style. List it all, even the stuff you think is useless. The goal is to see what you’ve got to work with.

Killer sense of humor? Turn social media posts that support your larger project into snarky comedy.

Ask your pals. Trust me, they will spot what you’re blind to, like how you’re weirdly good at arguing about pizza toppings and convincing others to give weird food combos a try, like plain Cheerios and sweet grapes. Okay, that’s me, but you see where I’m going here.

Now, step back and consider those talents. Match them to a form. Short attention span? Blog posts might be your thing: quick, punchy, done.

The trick here is sizing the form to your talent stack/toolbox. Don’t try a 300-page nonfiction manuscript if you lack stamina, have ADHD, don’t like endless research, and aren’t very good at organization. If one or more of those traits are missing, you’ll likely crash and burn.

I know this.

Obvious? Seems like it. But do typical writers sort through this exercise in any meaningful way, logically and seriously, before they begin writing or even pick a form to write? No, they don’t.

You must.

Once you identify and properly (and honestly) evaluate your talent stack, use that knowledge to pick the right form—blog post, article, book, screenplay, serial—so you can finish the journey at a destination that matches your original objective.

But you’ve only hinted at the topic! That comes in next post.

Do This Now

Get out the notebook that has The Publisher’s Brief written across the top of the first page or on the outside. You know, the one you have set aside dedicated for this platform in these exercises.

Start writing down your true talents. Try to come up with a half dozen. Don’t write more than 10. Be honest with yourself.

Then go to your spouse or go to one of your best friends. I’m talking about someone you trust who really knows you. Ask them, “In your opinion, what are my true strengths and weaknesses?”

“What experiences in my life helped define me?”

“What do you think are my strongest talents?”

Go ahead. Ask. But do not relate these questions to writing. Just ask them the questions. It’s your job to put their answers into your talent stack and then extrapolate them to form and topic. Don’t argue. Don’t ask for deeper explanations. Let them reply.

L-I-S-T-E-N.

Trust me, whether you like it or not, all of these will translate into your writing (and make it better and more likely you will set realistic goals and finish).

We will talk about topics later.

Get to work. Your talent stack is your guiding star—use it to pick the form and, eventually, a topic that won’t bury you.

Ted Savas
Director, Savas Beatie
Founder, The Publisher’s Brief

If you haven’t figured it out yet, these essays are like thin onion skins. Each peels the world of publishing slowly, bit by bit. It’s the only way for you to really see how intricate and connected everything decision you make is and how it impacts you.

Let’s determine the predicate to nearly everything else downstream. I will spread this aggravating pain across two or three posts. But screw your honesty hat on because this advice could save you years of time, thousands of dollars, and help you reach your goals.

That’s g-o-a-l-s. Plural. You should have many. We will also cover that in a subsequent essay. It’s all related in ways you have never thought about.

So . . . why do you write? This question and its answer are all-encompassing.

Before you pick a topic, before you scribble a word, you must ask yourself: Why are you doing this? Writing’s not a casual fling—it’s a commitment, a grind that will eat months or years of your life, so it’s worth figuring out what’s dragging you to the page.

One Side of the Fence

People write for all sorts of reasons, and they’re as different as fingerprints. There’s no right or wrong answer. There is only your answer, and it’ll shape every step that follows whether you know it or not.

So let’s unpack this—why do you write, and what does it mean when the ink hits the paper or the keyboard clicks reach your ears?

Some authors see their name in lights—bestseller lists, notoriety, awards, etc. They want to be the next J. K. Rowling or Shelby Foote. The writers on the fame and fortune side of the fence are easy to spot—they’ve got visions of a hardcover with their face on it, a movie deal, The New York Times bestseller list. It’s not a bad dream; it’s just a steep climb. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard authors tell me this.

I’ve worn the publisher and agent hats for decades, and I can tell you the numbers don’t lie. While the number is impossible to calculate precisely, in my experience 98 out of 100 writers (all genres, fiction and nonfiction) who begin a project don’t land a traditional publishing deal for a host of reasons. Many write and edit and write and edit . . . and never finish. Others quit after a few months or a few years.

And those who actually finish. Well, if their manuscript hits an agent’s desk or a submission editor’s inbox, it’s usually ignored or rejected. It’s a long road to bookstore shelves. Make sure you begin the right way.

The odds of “rich and famous” are not in your favor. If that’s your “why,” would you still spend a year or three or five hammering out a manuscript knowing it almost certainly will never see the light of day with a mainstream publishing house? If you are being honest with yourself, the answer is almost certainly “No.”

Everyone starts with a few stars in their eyes until they come face-to-face with what it takes to turn out a good manuscript and then run up against the hard wall of rejection. It usually ends there in a blaze without glory or, as Def Leppard put it, you simply fade away. It’s not unwise to want the payoff; it’s just a gamble where the house usually wins.

But you must know your “why” going in so you can act accordingly.

The Other Side

Others feel a pull they can’t name. The need to write is like having a virus that you can’t shake. An illness for which there’s no cure.

They write because they have to, like it’s air or water or the only way to quiet the noise in their head. It’s less about external applause and more about internal release. That’s me, by the way. It always has been me.

I write because I must. Do you?

Fame is a fickle muse, and elusive to boot; need is a steady and reliable mistress or partner. Need is where the real fire lives. It’s not about external validation to folks like me; it’s internal necessity.

As an author, I’ve felt a story clawing its way out, whether anyone reads it or not. This week, I sent a lengthy nonfiction study to the printer. It took me nearly four decades of interrupted research and writing bliss to finish. I have been outlining and writing (if you can call it that) a novel on the Trojan War for more than three decades.

My novel may never see the light of day. I don’t care. Why? Because I have to write it. I have that damn “need.” It’s for me, not for you.

Thankfully, I intuitively knew my “why” on those projects before I began.

During these decades I produced hundreds of articles, books, newspaper columns, blog posts, etc. But along the way I went down far too many rabbit holes and never emerged from any of them. There was no one explaining to me what I’m telling you today. I made mistake after mistake as I flushed untold thousands of dollars and years I will never get back down the drain.

My intent is not to discourage anyone, but the opposite. You can avoid my missteps.

Just a reality check. You’ll find many more here as we progress.

Do This Now

Ask yourself why you write. I’m serious. ASK YOURSELF.

Don’t just think your answer. Don’t just speak it out loud. Write it down. You should be able to scribble a couple three paragraphs, easily.

Remember, there is no right answer. It is YOUR answer. Know what it is and be honest about it or this exercise is a waste of time.

Your answer is your compass—fame might point you to the spotlight, but “need” will keep you at your desk plugging away—and that might get you to fame and fortune or whatever your goals are.

Read that last sentence again. Why do you write? If it’s not “need,” you have the wrong “why.”

Ted Savas,
Director, Savas Beatie
Founder, The Publisher’s Brief

First, let me thank everyone who’s still with me because many of you have been here since I started on Substack. I also appreciate the comments, the Facebook messages, texts, emails, and everything else. I enjoy writing these posts more than I thought I might, and it gives me tremendous pleasure that so many of you are getting something of real value from it.

That’s the entire point.

Many of you know my background. Those of you who are new can look it up—I won’t bore you with it here. But those of you who do know me understand that I’ve worked decades helping authors get published, improve the brand and reach, and achieve their goals, while building a community of similar-minded people who go out onto the battlefields, hit museums, break bread, and help one another.

We should all help one another. This is what it’s all about.

There is a lot more coming on everything you can imagine, but a lot of what you are about to read here you will not see coming. Set yourself up for success. Do it here.

So for those of you who have subscribed, thank you.

Subscribers

So let me tell you something about the word “subscriber.” Far too many folks think it’s a modern internet word. It isn’t.

Did you know that in the 18th and 19th centuries, publishers often would not print a book until they found subscribers first—readers who put their name and their money down on a book that existed only as a promise. Enough names, the book got printed. Not enough, it didn’t. That’s literally what a pledge is.

(By the way, I only discovered a year or two ago that a five-part hardcover set I have of John Russell Young’s Around the World with General Grant was not the actual final set, but a subscriber set carried by salesmen to garner commitments for the final product. I picked it up at a used bookstore 40 years ago in Iowa City, Iowa, when I was going to law school. I have yet to find another set like this anywhere, and a Grant scholar I spoke with said he had never seen such a thing or even heard of one. I thought that was pretty cool.)

Back to the post. Some of you have wondered whether The Publisher’s Brief is going to continue, apparently because you’re enjoying it, which is wonderful. Yes, it’s going to continue, stronger and hopefully most impactful than ever.

I never asked for it in advance, but many of you have pledged 80 bucks a year to help keep this a reality. Your pledge means a lot to me and I really appreciate it. I’ve also had thousands of page views and now nearly 300 free subscribers, which is marvelous given that my efforts at marketing have been fairly low key.

So I have been giving this a lot of thought, and even though I am exceedingly busy with my publishing day job and life’s slings and outrageous fortunes, I’ve decided to turn all of this up a notch because I enjoy it and because it’s helping people. But it does take real time and effort. Here’s what I’m thinking . . .

Tiers and “The Back Channel”

The main posts will remain free, and they will continue, about once a week, as they have since I began. Want to keep reading? Great.

I have also decided to turn on the paid subscriptions, which on Substack typically run $80 a year. If you’re one of those who have already pledged—thank you, it converts automatically, nothing for you to do.

In addition to the flagship pieces every five to seven days, a paid subscription earns you something I’m calling The Back Channel. I work all day long with authors, editors, agents, ghost writers, marketers, social media content people, finance issues, taxes, accountants, contracts, employees, distributors, wholesalers—you name it, I’m doing it.

When something crosses my desk worth knowing today—not in a considered, edited, more carefully prepared weekly article, but today—I will write it down: a couple sentences, a paragraph or three, and sent it straight to you. No particular polish and no particular schedule. You might get one a day for several days and nothing for a week.

But what you get will be what I’m dealing with that I think might be important to you, quickly. You can copy these and gather them in a Word file—your own digital notebook of tips, tricks, tactics, and pitfalls everyone associated with the craft of writing should be aware of.

It might look something like this: “Are you an author? Here is what you don’t want to do. I just opened a submission, and this is how the author opened his email: ‘Savas, can you read my attached letter fast because I would like a decision within two weeks.’ I stopped reading after two sentences. Don’t do that.”

Yes, that was real, and I got that yesterday.

Funny? Sure. Helpful? I hope so. If you are about to submit your manuscript, this will be a quick smack to the side of the head to double check the tenor of your pitch and your word choice. How you are coming across to the person who decides the fate of your manuscript might be important . . .

Do This Now

Want to keep reading the weekly articles? Do nothing. Though I would appreciate whenever you feel the urge, jump into the comment section. Authors! This is exceedingly important for you, and if you’re not sure why, we have work to do.

Want to pledge? Wonderful, I deeply appreciate it. Pledge here if you haven’t already.

Are you on TikTok? First video is going up soon: @thepublishersbrief. Follow and share.

Onward.

Ted Savas,
Director, Savas Beatie
Founder, The Publisher’s Brief

Nearly all of what follows is drawn from a conversation with a great guy I met last week. Let’s call him Scott. I have met hundreds of Scotts over the past decades.

Scott researched for years, drove or flew to various archives, and paid the mounting costs. He spent endless hours away from family, friends, and hobbies — writing, editing, thinking, redrafting, drinking, and smoking (okay, probably not that last part).

Then he personally hired a professional editor/ghostwriter and, within a few months, got what he set out to produce: a finished, readable, exciting pharmaceutical thriller. He’d worked in that industry, so he wrote about what he knew. That’s smart.

Now what?

He tried traditional publishers who handled similar books. Most who bothered to reply demanded that he use an agent. Others simply rejected it without comment, and many never replied at all. That burned most of a year.

Scott did as he was instructed and queried about thirty agents. He never heard from twenty of them. The others simply noted they were not interested.

That leg burned away another year. A YEAR.

What the hell does he do now, he asked himself? He self-published. He paid real money for a professional package to do it right: cover design, formatting, everything. He ordered several hundred copies (I don’t remember the unit cost, but I remember thinking it was shockingly high when he told me).

Now what? The few people who read the book thought it was excellent. Scott gave me a copy last week, and I’ve dabbled through the front matter and first few chapters — it’s very good.

Sales? Nonexistent, for all practical purposes. Scott began working on his second book, thinking he needed to build a record of publication — continuing his main character in a multi-book story thread. Again, smart. Another self-published book with the same result. He is now working on this third book.

He is still doing it backwards.

Every author I’ve ever met assumes the order runs something like this: idea, research, outline, draft, edit, draft, edit, draft. Once finished, you find an agent and land a publisher. The manuscript comes first. The “why should anyone publish me” question comes last, like dessert: something sweet you get to once the real work is done.

That’s backwards. And it’s why so many driven, capable people who are good researchers, careful writers, people who genuinely did the work, end up standing in front of a stack of unsold books, or a book no one will publish, asking me what happened.

Remember this? It’s Less About the Craft Than You Think

When a submission crosses my desk (or an agent’s, or any acquisitions editor’s), I don’t read your manuscript first. I’m asking who wrote this book. Not a similar book: this book.

I know what you are thinking: “Ted, you have the author’s name. He or she wrote the book.” Okay, fine. I agree. Scott Smith wrote his manuscripts.

But you are missing the point entirely. Shall I say it another way? Who is it who wrote the book?

Do you see it yet?

You know my background, or you can look it up. I’ve been reading submissions and buying books since before a lot of you had email addresses. Ballpark, that’s thousands of queries in one form or another. Those who get a reply from me with any interest at all have answered the question even before I asked it.

How hard you worked to produce the manuscript isn’t the pitch. How much research you put into your manuscript isn’t the pitch. How many footnotes you have isn’t the pitch. Whether your mother or wife or husband loves the manuscript isn’t the pitch. Whether it’s a hot topic isn’t the pitch. Whether you hired an editor and it’s written beautifully isn’t the pitch.

If you understand this, or you’re beginning to see what I’m talking about, you are definitely reading the right Substack column and will get significant value reading it. If you have no idea what the hell I’m talking about, you are definitely reading the right Substack column and you better not miss a single post.

Do This Now

Find three books — any three books in your genre — by three different authors, published in the last couple of years, that landed with a real publisher or a real agent. Once you’ve identified the book, skip the book. It’s irrelevant. Research the author instead. Go back two years before the book appeared and find out where the author was already showing up. Write down what you find. All three. Are you hearing me? Write. It. Down. Yes, it matters.

Then ask the same question about yourself. Who’s going to look for a reason to say yes?

Do you see it yet?

Ted Savas,
Director, Savas Beatie
Founder, The Publisher’s Brief

In my last post (“On Artificial Intelligence and Writing”), I made it clear what happens when you let AI write for you. The time you would have spent isn’t wasted because that’s where you learn how to develop your own voice and style. This essay is not about craft. It’s about destruction of brand.

I’m seeing this more often, especially on Facebook, X, and Instagram, where a young or aspiring author posts an absolutely cheesy cover produced by artificial intelligence. Posting it should embarrass them, but they’re proud to show it off. The comments usually speak for themselves because they are almost always scathing. There’s a message there if the posters have a mind open enough to receive it.

The Wrong Door

The scenario is usually the same every time. An author “writes” a book, most of it is produced by artificial intelligence. He wants it published, but he goes the self-publishing route. He thinks it’s a great story, and it might be, but it’s not really his. It’s owned by a machine. It’s not his voice, it’s not his style, it’s not … him.

In my experience, authors are not very good at designing covers, and some of the suggestions we get are cringeworthy. We thank them and go in a professional direction. The covers that artificial intelligence designs are almost always immediately recognizable as something created by a machine. The colors are not quite right, the text is not what a designer would use—you know what I am talking about. That red flag is impossible for a reader to miss because it’s slapping them in the face.

They don’t ignore the slap. They register it and tuck it away; this is an author to be avoided. Your brand, which is everything, just took a major hit and is taking on water.

I’ve talked to many authors about this in the last six months. Most of them tell themselves the same lie: it’s temporary, it’s a steppingstone on the way to being published by a regular press, they’re trying to build an audience, they are trying to obtain some quality reviews to “build their brand,” that sort of thing.

The goals are laudable and smart, and authors should always try to achieve them. But this is not how the real publishing world works. (I’ve got several essays coming that talk about how to do that without ever publishing a book.) When your “book” screams that you could not be bothered to hire a professional designer, it also sends up a bat signal above Gotham that AI probably created most or all of the text between the covers.

It doesn’t matter whether that part about the writing is true. Do you see it yet?

Before an agent or acquiring editor spends real time on your submission, they Google you, find a Wikipedia page, news articles, social media posts—anything that will tell them something about you. Every one of us does it. If you have something on Amazon, we jump to your author page. We see what you’ve already put into the world. We find you on Facebook. Some people and websites assiduously scrub what they once posted, but let’s face it: by and large the Internet is forever. And boy does it have a lot to say about you.

An agent or editor thinks: “this person doesn’t know what quality looks like, and didn’t care enough to put in the work to find out.” Now you have a brand, and it’s not a positive one.

Remember when I told you that publishing houses look for reasons not to accept you. You’ve given them that reason.

The Hallway Metaphor

I use this metaphor all the time to teach a lesson. It applies to everything important in life. Your journey is taking you down a very long hallway. Doors line either side, one after the other. Each is a choice, and each choice takes you in a different direction. The traditional publishing door is one of them. You can spend months or years walking toward it—writing, revising, querying, getting rejected, trying again—and the door stays open the entire time, because nothing you did closed it.

Publish an AI-slop cover under your own name and post an excerpt that can be read. Do you know what you just did? You chose the wrong door. You walked through one that does not open behind you. You can’t back up. Traditional publishing may well be closed off forever.

Are there exceptions to this rule? There are exceptions to every rule, but the general principle is what we’re after here because the general principle is what applies to almost everyone.

Do This Now

If you are an author, or have posts that are public, open a browser in a private window or use DuckDuckGo (which I recommend). Google yourself the way a stranger evaluating you professionally would do. Look at your Amazon author page if you have one, or social media the way an acquiring editor might look at it: cold, once, fast. You have made an impression, one way or another. Either you’re invisible, which is a disaster, or you’re very visible, and you have been communicating exactly the wrong message that shouts, “Don’t publish me!”

Ask yourself honestly whether anything they might have seen would give them pause.

Now you know whether you have already walked through the wrong door, or whether you are still in the hallway with choices ahead of you.

Choose wisely.

Ted Savas
Director, Savas Beatie
Founder, The Publisher’s Brief

This was going to be short. It isn’t.

I’m going to say something that will make some of you uncomfortable.

If you are using artificial intelligence to write your articles, your chapters, your query letters, your manuscripts — you are not becoming a writer. You are barely an editor of a machine. That is a fundamentally different thing.

When I discuss AI with many writers, it’s amusing how many metaphorically do the sign of a cross and look around for holy water as if I’m a vampire. Why, they would never use artificial intelligence to write!

Oh really?

A Walk Down Memory Lane

Word processors began employing AI-like features in the 1990s. Remember Microsoft Office 97’s Office Assistant “Clippy”? It used “probabilistic modeling” (I had to look this up) to infer what a user might be doing and then offer help. New tools arrived, like AutoCorrect and AutoFormat.

These are early intelligent automation gadgets, and not modern generative AI, but we were no longer writing on an IBM Selectric with those noisy font balls. (I hated them even when they were new.) We’ve been getting a little help for a while.

Grammarly was first released in 2009, and not long thereafter came grammar and spell checkers and style and clarity suggestions. It was a progression, one thing after another helping with meaning, tone, and then composition rather than simple errors. None of this was your grandmother’s typewriter. Then Copilot came along, and now all the permutations and combinations of real generative AI.

The AI Art Lesson: The Siren Song to Writing

I will never forget that evening when I spotted the danger during a meal outside in Palo Alto (Silicon Valley) about five years ago. I was doing some work with a tech firm in the movie business and an entrepreneur opened up his laptop and typed in a description and within seconds one of the most beautiful images of a horse on a colorful mountain appeared.

I was dumbfounded.

“It’s never the same twice,” he quipped before typing in the exact same prompt only to produce a different picture. “I think I can sell these, each being unique.”

By the time I finished my second gin and tonic, my head had stopped spinning. It dawned on me that if anybody could create artwork like this, then the art itself had no value. A Picasso or Rembrandt or Monet only has value because a human being spent time and sweat and blood creating it. They spent a lifetime of effort perfecting what almost no one else could do. Their creations were the pinnacle of human beauty.

Why would using artificial intelligence to write something from scratch be any different?

How Do I Use It?

I was learning how to write in the 1960s so I had multiple decades of experience . I honed my craft, my voice, my style long before there was even such a thing as an electric typewriter , let alone artificial intelligence. I have ghostwritten dozens of books, and I have learned the texture and rhythm and pacing of words so thoroughly that I could set my own aside and pick up someone else’s and carry on.

You cannot set aside a voice you never developed.

Today, if I use it, I do so to polish a finished product and find grammar or spelling errors. On occasion, I will tell the details of what I intend to discuss and ask for an outline to help organize my thoughts. But the writing is my own.

I understand the temptation.

AI writing tools are impressive. They are fast. They are (usually) grammatically impeccable. They will produce in thirty seconds what might take you three hours to draft. Describe a story, a length, and a writing style, and the generative AI will produce a 1,500-word essay in Mark Twain’s style. It will be mostly flawless. It will also be of no value whatsoever because a 5-year-old can do the same thing that you can.

And that is precisely the problem.

The three hours you would spend writing are not wasted time. Those minutes are where your voice lives. They are where you discover what you think about your subject, the flow, direction, and narrative arc. It is where the hero’s journey takes form. Where you make the ten wrong choices that lead you to the one correct one—the sentence, the word, the turn of phrase that is uniquely, irreducibly yours. Even the small mistakes.

I remember a Japanese artist once telling me she always makes a tiny mistake on each painting, one no one would see but her to remind her that she is human.

AI’s voice is its patterns. Sophisticated, eerily convincing patterns assembled from the accumulated writing of human beings. (The irony, of course, is that this writing was the result of people who worked hard to develop their own style and voice. It’s a thief.)

Do This Now

Write a one-page short story. Open Word, turn off all editing functions. Turn off spell check, Copilot, everything. Make it as close to an old-fashioned typewriter as you can. Start writing. Better yet, get out a piece of paper and pencil and produce it that way.

In other words, write without a safety net. Why? (You didn’t just think that, did you?) Feel the friction of thinking, of choosing words, of revising mentally, and of completing a piece from your own mind before any machine steps in to help. (The cousin of this is doing a math exercise with paper and pencil instead of a calculator. Ugh.)

What did you learn? It’s hard to generate and sustain original prose, isn’t it? You also just realized how much you have come to rely upon spell check, autocomplete, and AI to hide . . . what?

Your weaknesses.

Good, capable writing begins with thought, not with machine corrections.

Before you ask a machine to improve your writing, learn what your own writing feels and looks like when you are walking a tightrope without a net.

I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again, because you didn’t believe me the first time.

Something is running underneath, next to, and in front of it every rejection. I told you that a couple posts back and didn’t spell it out. Time to lift the corner of that tarp. Just the corner.

(And yes, we will get back to those 28 specific reasons for rejection later. Several of you have asked about these. It makes no sense for me to put all of them into one article because there’s way too much context and discussion that needs to go with each one. Or at least each group of them. Be patient. Stay with me. We will all benefit.)

Does the Writing Matter?

Yes. To a lesser degree than you think.

Here’s why. There are people called editors. I know you have heard of them. That’s their entire job: to edit.

A good editor can take a rough manuscript with a real book buried inside it and pull that book out. Acquisition editors know this. It’s not unlike a sculptor looking at a perfectly veined and sized block of marble and seeing the finished product waiting inside to be chipped out, polished, and presented.

I’ve watched it happen more times than I can count. What an editor cannot do is manufacture a book that was never there to begin with, and that has nothing to do with your comma splices.

So when you sit up at 2:00 a.m. rewriting the same paragraph for the ninth time, convinced that this is the thing standing between you and a book deal, or that your manuscript needs a fresh or better title, I need you to hear this: it might matter. It rarely decides anything.

Does the Research Matter?

If you’re writing nonfiction, yes. More than the writing, in most cases. (Stop it . . . I know really good fiction writers perform research to write their novels so they are believable, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.)

Sit with that one for a second, because it cuts against everything that most writing groups tell you. Prose can be repaired. A structural hole in your research cannot be edited into existence after the fact. I’ve seen well-written manuscripts collapse the moment someone competent in the subject looked hard at the sourcing, and I’ve seen clumsy, adjective-laden messy prose survive because it rested on good research and nobody else had it.

Writing is the part you can see. Research is the foundation few look at until the house is already built, and someone inconveniently leans on the wrong wall.

What I’m Still Not Telling You

I’m not going to hand you the full list today of everything that outweighs craft. It’s not one thing. It’s layered — positioning, timing, subject selection, who you are versus who you claim to be on the page, whether the world has any reason to hear this from you specifically. That’s a dozen conversations, not one paragraph, and I’m not going to cheat you out of them by cramming it all into a single post.

What I want you to sit with today is smaller and more useful: craft is real, but it is not the finish line you’ve been told it is. It’s table stakes. The game starts somewhere else.

Do This Now

Start today. Stop opening your manuscript to tinker. Instead, write down — on paper, not in your head — the actual case for why you, specifically, are the right person to write this particular book, for these particular readers, right now.

Not your writing ability. Your standing to write it.

If you can’t finish that paragraph, that’s your answer — and it has nothing to do with your prose.

Ted Savas,
Director, Savas Beatie
Founder, The Publisher’s Brief

Yeah. This is a big topic with lots of interest.

You got your rejection email. If an agent or publisher is really old-fashioned, maybe you got a letter. It still happens.

But if you think an editor, staffer, agent, or publisher read your manuscript, weighed the prose, and passed — think again.

Sometimes that happens. Most of the time, it doesn’t.

The Filter

The giant sucking sound isn’t an echo of Ross Perot talking about jobs going south of the border. It’s your query circling the drain as it gets filtered out of the acceptance process.

Most writers never quite grasp that the submission process is a giant filter. Is there a person on the other end reading every word of your query, the submitted chapters, and making a judgment call on the prose? Sometimes. But most of them never get that far. Why? Because the decision has already been made.

Rejecting Does Not Mean Reading

Most manuscripts get rejected without anyone giving your work a serious read. Not because an agent or staffer or editor is lazy. Not because they don’t care. It’s because, in most cases, they don’t have to get that far to say “No.”

I know what you’re thinking. How can that be?

It’s simple: you’re the one providing the reasons to reject you in the first place. And it’s not about misplaced commas or passive voice — there are people called editors for that.

I’m sure there’s an agent or an editor or a publisher reading this right now thinking, “Wait a minute! I read everything that comes through!” Maybe you do. But most don’t, and in fact, most can’t — there are way too many submissions for the slots available to publish. It’s simply impossible to give proper time to every one. And when you can’t read them all, other criteria come into play.

Even the most conscientious reader in the business has a filter in front of them. That filter does its job long before anyone opens the manuscript — whether they want to admit it or not.

Reasons and Reasons . . .

You know my background (or you can look it up). I’ve read thousands of submissions over the decades. So an hour ago I gave myself ten minutes and wrote down every reason I could remember for rejecting someone before I’d even looked at their writing.

I got to 28. In ten minutes. Off the top of my head. I could come up with a dozen more if I had to.

Sit on that number. Feel the weight of it. Twenty-eight reasons to say no to you, and not one of them has anything to do with your sample chapters.

If you’re a conscientious author, you’ve spent years obsessing over your writing — finding your voice, your cadence, building your story, doing your due diligence to sharpen your craft. All of that matters. None of it is wasted effort.

But that’s only part of the equation that solves for acceptance. Think of it like an iceberg. Roughly seven-eighths of it sits below the waterline, invisible. Know what that part is made of? Twenty-eight reasons to reject you before I’ve read a word of your writing.

Guess what? I’ve given many of those 28 reasons real consideration, and plenty of them will weigh against you even if I decide to start reading some of what you wrote. Let that sink in.

So if you got a rejection letter — unless the editor told you otherwise — stop assuming it was a verdict on your talent. Sometimes it is. Often it isn’t.

Do This Now

Sit down today with a blank page and do what I did: write your own list of every reason a submission could get rejected that has nothing to do with the writing itself. Keep going until you run out. Treat it like a stream-of-consciousness exercise.

You won’t get to 28 on your first try. Do it anyway. The list isn’t the point — thinking like the person on the other side of the desk is.

— Ted Savas

Managing Director, Savas Beatie LLC

Founder, The Publisher’s Brief

We have all seen the posts. Maybe one of them is yours. They are all over social media.

Another rejection, an editor telling Jim or Sally how bad their writing is, a flood of comments from friends telling them how sorry they are, how hard writing is, they should never give up, or they should just self-publish.

Don’t even get me started on that last one. Sometimes that’s the proper option but at this early stage it’s the worst choice. More on that in other posts.

Want the truth? The post hurts the writer, and the comments are not useful. Empathetic? Sure. But that’s why the author posted about yet another rejection—they wanted sympathy or compassionate replies to feel better. Does that help move the ball forward? No. In fact, you are now another step farther from your goal. And you don’t even know it.

Let’s do this differently

Yes, writing is hard. That part isn’t in dispute. I’ll have a few essays down the road discussing this and some uncommon tips to help.

But here’s the thing few if any comments touch upon: if an editor says your writing isn’t very good, that doesn’t mean you lack talent. It means you haven’t written enough yet. Not enough pages, not enough drafts, not enough finished, discarded, rebuilt manuscripts. Writing is a skill built through repetition and failure, the same as anything else worth doing. If your third manuscript reads like your first, that’s not bad luck or a lack of talent. That’s not enough reps.

(Not long ago I dug out my essays from undergrad, grad, and law school. I remember how good I thought they were. Honestly, they are barely readable. That prompted me to find a couple of my first articles submitted to magazines in the late 1980s. I’m surprised they were accepted for publication because they’re not very good. Do you know why I’m a good writer today with a strong voice? Because I do it every day and I have for decades.)

Now I’ll say the quiet part out loud: too many people who complain publicly about being rejected “again” are not working nearly as hard on the actual writing as they are spending time on social media and posting about it.

But here’s where I’ll depart from the comment section and head in a different direction.

I’ve scoured thousands of submissions over the decades. That’s not hyperbole; it’s fact. That doesn’t mean I’ve read them all. It means I’ve considered them. Later you will understand the importance of that distinction.

So when I see someone generating a public post each time they get a rejection, I know immediately (as in nanosecond immediately) that the writing is rarely the only problem. There is almost always something else running underneath it, beside it, or in front of it — something the vast majority of writers know nothing about. Neither do the commenters.

I’m not going to spell it out today. Not because I’m being coy, but because it’s not one thing. It’s layered, interconnected, and deep. None of you need to hear it yet — you need to go finish the blog post or chapter or essay you’ve got open in another tab right now.

But if you’re a writer with at least one rejection under your belt or someone who hasn’t reached that stage yet—or even if you intend to self-publish and have no fear of rejection—our upcoming conversation will serve you well.

Do This Now

Stop posting about rejections. Seriously. Stop. Go write. And the next time you get turned down, think of this post and ask yourself if it really was the writing.

— Ted Savas
Managing Director, Savas Beatie LLC
Founder, The Publisher’s Brief

In my first piece, I told you who I am — lawyer, publisher, author, editor, ghostwriter, agent. I wasn’t bragging. I was just giving you my resume, so you’d know who was writing before you took advice from me about something as important as your book, blog, article, screenplay . . . you name it. If you can write it, in any form, my advice applies.

In the second essay, I told you what this Substack is and isn’t. It’s not a writing program. It’s not a pat on the head. It’s not about commas and passive voice. It’s straight talk, from someone who’s done the work.

Now I want to show you what “done the work” looks like from the inside. There are several chairs at the publishing table I’ve routinely occupied, and they don’t always agree with each other — a disagreement few writers ever grasp. Sitting in all of them has let me understand each in turn, how they operate, and how that can work for you. Or against you.

Today, three of them.

Submissions Chair

This is the gate before anyone wants to see your manuscript.

I reject manuscripts before I ever read a word. Routinely. Not because the writing is bad. I never get that far.

My company has a set of questions every submitting author must answer before I will even look at a page. This is true for most publishers. If they don’t ask them outright, in most cases they’re asking these questions in-house before they look at your work.

The writing is irrelevant at that stage. Whether you move forward, or get rejected outright, is almost entirely decided before anyone judges whether you can write a sentence.

Most writers never consider this. A sizable majority of the people who submit manuscripts never stop to ask whether their project might be dead on arrival because of something they didn’t even know mattered. And it’s not just one thing — it’s several, and almost none of them have anything to do with your writing. Today, they matter more than ever.

So here’s the question you need to ask yourself, early in the research process, early in the writing stage, and long before you ever submit anywhere: do you know the things that have nothing to do with your writing, but will decide whether your manuscript ever gets read at all?

Editor’s Chair

This is what happens once someone’s actually reading you—but you haven’t been accepted yet.

I’ve edited enough manuscripts — whatever the genre — to know one thing holds true across all of them: your audience already knows more than you think they do, and they will hold you to it.

It doesn’t matter if you’re writing about the American Civil War, training dogs, or growing roses. The people who are going to buy your book know the primary sources, have read every other book on the subject, or have the internet at their fingertips to check your details and find different perspectives.

That reader is your audience. And your manuscript has to be built to the standard they already hold in their head — a standard they can verify with a few keystrokes. It’s surprising how rarely writers consider this. Trust me: the editor reviewing your work knows this.

This is where the real grunt work comes in. Your eyes might be the window to your soul, but if you’re writing nonfiction, it’s not your eyes that matter — it’s your citations and your bibliography. Too many writers, fiction or nonfiction, are in such a hurry that they never grasp the research isn’t a bug in their process. It’s a feature of the craft. When I evaluate a submission — if it gets that far — you know how long it takes me to spot a writer who skipped that step of the craft? Thirty seconds.

There are a couple of other things that jump out like red ink that have nothing to do with research. I’ll share those another time.

Agent’s Chair

Some publishers won’t accept a manuscript unless it arrives through an agent. Finding one is a tall order, and most writers make it harder than it needs to be without even knowing it.

I enjoy being an agent — sifting through manuscripts to decide who to represent. I don’t do it as often as I used to, but I still actively represent many writers I have placed with other presses. And I can tell you straight up: good manuscripts get passed on every week, in every agent’s office, for reasons that have nothing to do with the writing.

Some of what an agent judges overlaps with what a submissions editor looks for. But not all of it.

If you’re lucky, you get a “this is not right for us at this time” reply. That’s it. That’s usually the entire explanation. Most of the time, you know what writers get instead? Nothing. Silence. They don’t even know if anyone read it.

When the silence stretches on, or your fifth rejection drops into your inbox, most writers fold or go back to the manuscript. They start line-editing Chapter 1 again. They workshop their elevator pitch for the fourth time. Sometimes that’s the right instinct. Sometimes it isn’t — because the manuscript is almost never the sole problem.

Before you tear apart another chapter or do more work because of a rejection, ask yourself this: is it a writing problem, or was I rejected for a reason I never considered?

Why I’m Telling You This

I’m not handing you three answers today. I’m handing you three situations most of you have never considered seriously enough to change what you’re doing while there’s still time to change it. The answers come later, piece by piece, article by article, as we move along.

But you can’t ask the right questions, or make the right adjustments, if you’ve never sat in the chair across the table and seen the publishing world (and the publishing business) from that perspective. I have, in all of them. That’s the whole point of this Substack.

DO THIS NOW

Don’t do anything — which, in a strange way, is doing something. I don’t want you to try to answer or solve anything you just read. Not yet. We’ll get to all of it later.

This is not where you fix anything. This is where you start to realize there are problems nobody warned you about.

Recognizing that there are gears you need to oil and maintain, and machinery you need to avoid, is the only step that matters today. And that’s enough.

If this is the first time you've thought about rejection this way, there’s a lot more coming. Subscribe so you don't miss them.

— Ted Savas

Managing Director, Savas Beatie LLC

Founder, The Publisher’s Brief

Buckle up. It’s easier to get into the gears and machinery of this journey if you have some writing under your belt.

I wrote this before but let me say it again. This article (and blog) isn’t about how to craft a sentence. That’s not what I do here. This piece is about something that comes before all of that — the decision to begin, and what taking that first step looks like.

Something you will notice about me is that I write conversationally. I tend to dictate what I write, so that makes sense. I like to think you and I are sitting at a quiet table somewhere having a chat.

I want to chat to a specific person today.

Not the guy who has three manuscripts (two unfinished) hiding in a drawer. Not the historian with a dissertation she wants to turn into a book. Not the writer who has been workshopping Chapter One for six months.

If you’re one of these people, don’t worry: I will get around to you with articles later. You’ll still find this piece interesting and helpful because you are itching to keep writing.

Today I really want to talk to the person sitting in the back of the room. You know who you are.

You’re the one who reads constantly — novels, histories, biographies, long-form journalism — and thinks, somewhere in a quiet part of your mind, what you’ve probably never said out loud: I could do this. I think I could do this. I have something to say.

And then you think: But I’ve never actually written anything. Not really. Not seriously. Where would I even start? Who am I fooling? I can’t do this!

And then you go back to reading someone else’s book.

I’ve met you, often. Every Write NOW! class I’ve ever taught — there you are, sitting in the Zoom audience nodding along, laughing at the right moments, asking smart questions — and then packing up at the end and going home to the same blank page you arrived with.

This article is for you.

Now I’m going to ask you, politely but firmly, to stop doing that.

First: The Feeling You Have Is Not Delusion

Let’s address the voice in your head that says you’re kidding, buddy. You can’t do this. That voice is lying.

The desire to write — the genuine, persistent, recurring pull toward expressing yourself through language — is not a personality quirk or a midlife fantasy. Well, you might be in midlife, and it might be a fantasy, but you know what I am talking about.

The pull is a signal, not the noise. It’s the same signal that pulled every published writer you’ve ever admired toward the page before he or she wrote a single word worth reading.

Every author you respect was once exactly where you are. Unpublished. Uncertain. Convinced that real writers are a different species entirely — born with some innate gift that they themselves lacked.

They weren’t. They aren’t. The difference between the writer whose book is on your shelf and the reader who wishes they could write and publish one is not talent.

It is the decision to begin.

That’s it. That’s the whole secret. The decision to begin — and then the daily, unglamorous, deeply unsexy discipline of continuing. I have a couple of articles on that, so stay tuned.

I’ve spent nearly four decades in this crazy business. I have worked with first-time authors who became celebrated award-winning writers. I’ve watched people who swore they couldn’t produce credible manuscripts. I’ve seen the moment — and it is an actual, observable moment — when someone discovers that they can do this.

I’ve seen it in my classes several times recently. And it never gets old.

But it starts with a decision. And it starts today.

Second: Forget Everything You Think Writing Looks Like

Here is the first thing I tell every new student in Write NOW!: Throw out your image of what a writer is.

Go on. You know what popped into your mind — the solitary genius at the oak desk with a cigarette and a drink, performing existential suffering on cue. Then, out of nowhere, the lightning bolt of inspiration strikes and perfection spills out.

A myth along those lines has paralyzed more potential writers than rejection ever has.

Real writing is not like that.

Real writing is sitting down when you don’t feel like it. It’s producing two pages that you know are bad because producing two bad pages is the only path to eventually producing two good ones. It’s reading your own sentences and wincing and fixing them and wincing again. It’s being stuck. It’s the deeply unglamorous but entirely necessary process of getting your thoughts out of your head and into language — imperfectly, incompletely, and often infuriatingly — and then going back and making them better. While you’re tired, stressed, and have a long Honey-do list waiting.

It’s a craft. Like carpentry. Like cooking. Like playing an instrument.

I played classical piano for thirteen years — through two years of college. I didn’t expect to play Beethoven the first time I sat down on a piano bench. I had to learn where middle C was. And sharps and flats. And time signatures. God, did I get tired of hearing a metronome (I can still see and hear Mrs. Petersen’s black pyramid-shaped keeper of time). I was not very good for a long while. And then I was a bit less terrible, and then — because I kept going — I became genuinely competent, and eventually pretty good.

I knew that going in. Writing is exactly the same. Nearly everything in life is the same.

The only writers who never improve are the ones who stop. Now read that again. Everyone else gets better. Every time. Without exception.

Third: Here Is Where You Actually Start

Enough philosophy. You want practical. I’ll give you practical.

I’m not going to teach you how to write. But I will give you a failsafe way how to start — because starting and writing are not the same thing, and most people confuse them.

Start small. Embarrassingly small.

This assumes you have a topic (which is yet another article or two coming up soon). Don’t try to tackle a book. Or a chapter. Or even a page.

Write one paragraph today about something you know better than most people. Something you’ve experienced, studied, observed, or lived. Something you love. It doesn’t matter what — the roses you grow, the bread you bake, the dogs you train, the industry you’ve worked in for a decade, the trip you took that changed how you see the world.

One paragraph. Four or five sentences. Right now, today, before you talk yourself out of it. Before you shut the lid on your laptop or jump to another screen.

Why a paragraph? Because a paragraph is achievable. Because finishing something — anything — builds the habit of finishing. Because one paragraph written is infinitely more valuable than one chapter imagined.

Write it by hand if you can. Type it up afterward if you must.

Don’t edit while you write — the part of your brain that generates ideas and the part that evaluates them don’t work well simultaneously. Get it out first. Fix it later. Read it aloud when you’re done. Your ear catches what your eye misses.

That’s it. That’s day one.

Fourth: What Comes After Day One

Another paragraph. That’s day two. And that’s it. Nothing more.

Day three, write one more.

At the end of a week you have seven paragraphs. Some of them will be bad. Really bad. Like I sounded that first week on the piano. One or two of them might surprise you. Look at the ones that surprised you and ask yourself why they work — what did you do there that you didn’t do in the others?

That question — why does this work? — is the beginning of craft. It is the first step from being someone who writes to being a writer.

After a month of daily paragraphs, you will have something remarkable: evidence. Evidence that you can do this. Evidence that you have things worth saying and the nascent ability to say them. Evidence that the voice in your head telling you to start was right all along.

At that point — and not before — start thinking about something longer. An essay. A short article. A piece of personal history. A profile of someone you find fascinating. Whatever pulls you.

Follow the pull. Always follow the pull. The subjects that genuinely compel you are the ones you’ll write about with the energy and specificity that make readers feel something. And you are more likely to finish them.

Don’t write about what you think you should write about. Write about what you cannot stop thinking about. The rest follows from there.

The most valuable thing I provide, and why you are here and will stay, is not just information, but honest feedback — not about comma placement or passive voice, but about positioning. Everything (and I mean everything) except the writing. How to prepare yourself up for success whatever direction you wish to travel. The starting, the topic, the timing, branding, positioning . . . the journey.

You have been carrying this around long enough.

The story in your head is not going to write itself. And no amount of reading about writing, attending panels about writing, watching videos about writing, thinking about writing, or planning to write when the time is right is going to produce a single sentence.

Only writing produces writing.

DO THIS NOW

This is the action step of this essay. Most will have action steps. Never skip the “Do This Now” step. Never.

Find the nearest pen. Grab a sheet of paper. Write one paragraph about something you know and love. You can do this in a few minutes, tops.

Do it before the voice in your head talks you out of it.

It’s been waiting long enough. So have you.

Begin.

— Ted Savas Managing Director, Savas Beatie

LLC Founder, The Publisher’s Brief

I am not a writing coach.

I’ll be direct about this — I’m always direct — because I think you deserve to know exactly what you’re subscribing to. That doesn’t mean you won’t get writing advice. But what you will get is 10x more important and you won’t get it anywhere else the way I can deliver it.

You can get detailed writing tips anywhere. Books, blogs, conferences, YouTube, writing groups — the world is full of people telling you how to write a better sentence. Some of that advice is excellent. Most of it is generic. None of it is what I do here. Well, almost none of it.

So let me tell you what I do: I show you what’s behind the curtain.

What Curtain?

I look at the world differently than most people, especially when it comes to writing and publishing. Almost everyone thinks those worlds are the same. Is there overlap? Of course. But they are very different creatures, and each has what I call its own gears. Each has its own machinery. Each brims with danger, friction, blocked avenues of advancement, and lethal dead ends when it comes to your writing and getting published successfully.

Many who write have no interest in being published — I work with them regularly. That’s another essay or two down the road.

But if you don’t know that those gears and machinery exist — if you walk in the way most writers walk in, excited and naive and trusting and impulsive — those sharp spinning teeth will chew you up before you even know what happened.

Remember the woodchipper scene in Fargo? Of course you do. That’s the writing career of those who pick up a pen or peck at a keyboard and start off on a journey that ends badly nine times out of ten.

I’ve watched it happen hundreds of times. Beginners. Talented writers. Everything in between. Some stumble and stop. Others get bored or bogged down. Many end up despising their subject matter. Some get blindsided by a contract they didn’t understand or rejected for reasons nobody explained. Others are steered toward a publisher that wasn’t right for them. Many more self-published without understanding what they were getting into.

None of that had to happen. It did because nobody showed them where the sharp gears are spinning or how the machine works. And I’m not just talking about publishing. Writing — the entire craft — is also a machine. And the written word is only a fraction of that world. You have to oil it and understand how it works or you’ll end up in that woodchipper with Steve Buscemi.

That, in a nutshell, is what I’m here for. And this will include scores of helpful articles.

What I Will and Won’t Do

I will not hold your hand through the basics of writing. I’m not going to diagram sentences, critique your use of commas, or hammer you for passive voice. That’s not my lane and there are plenty of people better positioned to help you there. When the mechanics of writing come up — and they will — I’ll jump in with some light suggestions, so you understand the strengths and weaknesses in your work and then point you in the right direction with the questions you need to ask someone else or find it online.

Beyond that, I’m not going to turn this into a writing class. After all, that is not really why you are here, and most of you get that.

What I will do is take you through everything that happens before, during, and after you write. And I’m not talking about just books. I help people with everything from blog posts and newsletters to short stories, essay collections, full-length monographs, and even screenplays — I’ve written three. I will help you navigate all the things nobody in the publishing world has any particular interest in explaining to you.

How do you decide whether you should even be writing a book — or anything, for that matter?

What should you write about and why does that decision matter more than most people realize?

How do you position yourself before you’ve published a single word?

When should you start?

How do you build the kind of credibility and presence that makes publishers take you seriously before they’ve read your manuscript?

If you think this is obvious, decades of in-the-trenches experience inform me that it’s not.

Making one small wrong choice can cost you months or years you will never get back. What’s that worth? I know this from hard personal experience. I made those mistakes. I look back and realize I wasted years and thousands of dollars.

And now I know why.

Don’t get me started on the submission process. The query letter. Finding the right publisher — not just any publisher, the right one for your book and your career. What happens when your manuscript lands on a desk or inside an inbox? What are publishers actually thinking when they read it? What makes them say yes — and what makes them turn up their nose and reject you?

And the contract. I’m an attorney. We are going to spend serious time on the contract and break down every clause you need to understand.

Two Things Already on Your Mind I’m Going to Take On Directly

Self-Publishing

The self-publishing industry sells itself almost entirely through its success stories. What it doesn’t advertise is the much longer list of writers who spent real money, real time, and real emotional energy publishing a book that went nowhere — not because the book was bad, but because they didn’t understand what they were signing up for before they started.

Self-publishing is neither good nor bad. It’s personal, often made through the lens of a business decision. And like any decision, it needs to be made with accurate information — about the real costs, the distribution realities, the marketing burden that falls entirely on you, tax liabilities, the rights implications — all of it. We’re going to go through every bit of it so that if you choose that path, and I might in some cases encourage you to do so, you choose it with your eyes wide open.

Artificial Intelligence

Everyone is either freaking out about AI or celebrating it. I’m not interested in either of those conversations.

Here’s what I am interested in: what AI actually means for writers. That is what I care about. Where can it genuinely help you without doing damage to your work. Where it will hurt you — and it will hurt you in ways subtle enough that you might not notice until the damage is done. How publishers are thinking about it right now. What happens to your voice, your development, your long-term viability as a writer if you reach for it at the wrong moment and use it the wrong way. I see this every day.

I’ll give you my honest assessment. Not a lecture. Not a panic. Just the straight truth about a tool that isn’t going away and that every writer needs to understand on their own terms.

Why The Publisher’s Brief Exists

I’ve spent basically four decades in this business. Attorney. Publisher. Author. Editor. Ghostwriter. Agent. Marketer. Acquisitions Editor. Director. I’ve been on every side of every desk this industry has.

I started The Publisher’s Brief because the gap between what writers KNOW and THINK they know and what they NEED to know is enormous — and no one with real insider knowledge I know of is willing to close it.

I am.

That’s the whole story. See you soon.

— Theodore P. Savas Managing Director, Savas Beatie LLC.

Let’s be honest. The internet is drowning in writing advice.

Most of it is crap from 20-somethings who don't know how to do much of anything yet. You know, the “influencers.” Got how I've grown to despise that word.

There are bloggers who wrote one self-published memoir, one article, or one self-published book who now consider themselves publishing authorities. Don’t get me started the “book coaches,” most of whom have never sat across a desk from an acquisition’s editor, never negotiated a contract, and never held a red pen over a manuscript at midnight that’s seen the light of being traditionally published.

And then there’s me.

My name is Theodore P. Savas. Ted, but only if you’re buying. And what I’m about to tell you isn’t bragging — it’s just a resume, and you deserve to know who’s talking (or in this case, writing) before you take anyone’s advice about something as important as your writing career.

I Started Where You Are

I grew up on the Northern Plains of Iowa — Mason City, to be precise — where winters are long, the land is flat, and there is absolutely nothing to do but read and swat mosquitoes. So I read. Constantly. Voraciously. History, mostly. The kind of stories where the stakes were life and death and the outcome hung on decisions made by imperfect people under impossible pressure.

Sound familiar? That’s also every writer’s career.

I earned my B.A. in American History from the University of Northern Iowa in 1981, started a Master’s in American History with a minor in European History, and then made the pivot that would define everything that came after: I walked into the University of Iowa College of Law in 1983 and walked out in 1986 — with Distinction, since you asked.

Then I Became a Lawyer. A Real One.

For more than a dozen years I actively practiced law in Silicon Valley during the 80s and 90s—the center of the known universe and I was in the middle of it. It was paradise then.

What does that have to do with publishing? Everything.

Because publishing is a legal minefield that almost nobody warns writers about. Contracts. Rights. Royalties. Subsidiary rights. Reversion clauses. Plagiarism. Copyright infringement. Work-for-hire agreements that will haunt you for decades. The publishing world is full of people who will smile warmly, tell you how much they love your manuscript, and hand you a contract written entirely in their favor.

I learned to read those contracts. I learned to negotiate them. And at some point I’m going to teach you what to look for — before you sign anything.

First, you need to learn how to write and brand yourself. Don’t worry. We’ll get there.

Then I Became a Publisher. From Scratch.

In 1990 — while still practicing law — I decided to start a publishing company and pitched my buddy David A. Woodbury. It began with a quarterly journal called Civil War Regiments and morphed into books by Savas Woodbury Publishers. It took off like a rocket, and within a few years it was simply Savas Publishing. I had built something real from nothing while practicing law full time. I didn’t care about sleep.

In 2000, I sold it to an East Coast publisher that morphed into a merger with Perseus Books Group. I spent more than three years ghostwriting, editing, and coaching little league. I was done with publishing, but publishing wasn’t done with me.

In 2003, one of my former authors, Russel H. “Cap” Beatie, A prominent SEC attorney on Madison Avenue in New York City approached me to start a new history publishing company. I turned him down three times. He flew out to California to talk with me and within a few months we co-founded Savas Beatie. Our tagline — “Independent, scholarly, and a bit old fashioned” — tells you everything about how we do business. We’ve been doing it ever since. (Sadly, Cap fell ill and died in 2013.) My company is the best publisher of American Civil War titles in the world. Ask our customers. That’s not hyperbole. That’s just truth.

I’ve sat on both sides of the desk. By 2004 I had published several articles, edited and authored several books, and had ghostwritten more than a dozen. I’ve been the writer desperate for a yes, the editor putting complex projects together, and the publisher reading through the slush pile at midnight deciding whose dream will live and whose goes into the trash can.

I know what we’re thinking. And I’m going to tell you.

Then I Became an Author. And an Editor. And a Teacher.

I have written, edited, or co-authored more than a dozen books published in multiple languages. I have ghostwritten nearly forty more for authors, publishers, and agents — books you have probably read without knowing I had anything to do with them.

I taught legal, historical, and business-related classes at the college level for two decades. In 2011, when the students became lazier by the class and more entitled by the week, and the administration no longer had my back as an adjunct professor and allow me to properly educate, I told them to put it where the sun doesn’t shine. I walked away. I refuse to compromise on excellence.

After watching years of authors making giant missteps and knowing like the back of my hand the gears and machinery of the publishing industry, I created a course called Write NOW! It is specifically formulated to help aspiring and veteran authors get on track, stay on track, and — most importantly — understand HOW to get published and what to do after you are published.

Along the way I’ve won a few awards: The Gold Star Book Award from the Military Writers Society of America; The Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Book Award; Lilla M. Hawes Award (Georgia Historical Society); The Iron Brigade Award for Civil War Scholarship; and the Vandiver Award (2023), which recognizes “outstanding contributions to Civil War scholarship or preservation efforts.”

I mention these not to impress you but to make one simple point: I have done the work.

So Why This Substack?

Because in nearly forty years of writing, editing, publishing, practicing law, and teaching, I have watched talented writers get chewed up by a system they didn’t understand. I have watched good manuscripts die because the author didn’t know how to brand himself, or how she should craft the right perception BEFORE ever sending a query letter. I have watched writers sign contracts that gave away rights they didn’t know they had. I have watched editors pass on brilliant books because the authors did not really understand the submission process. I could go on, but you get the drift.

None of that had to happen. None of it.

The Publisher’s Brief exists because the publishing world is full of gatekeepers and much of it counts on writers not knowing how it works. Every column I will write will put a crack in that wall.

You’ll get the tips. The tactics. The straight talk about what publishers and editors and marketers and readers are really thinking when they read your work. I will demystify the submission process. I will set forth the legal landmines and how you can avoid them, which clauses should make you walk away, and which are negotiable even when they tell you they’re not.

No gatekeeping. No varnish. No filter.

Just Savas — attorney, publisher, teacher, author, editor, agent, and entrepreneur— telling you what you need to know.

Welcome to The Publisher’s Brief. Subscribe. Tell a writer friend or a wannabe with the energy and vision to succeed. And whatever you do — don’t sign anything yet.

— Ted Savas Managing Director, Savas Beatie LLC Founder, The Publisher’s Brief