Demystifying the Acquisitions Meeting

What actually happens in the room where it happens

Andrea Colvin

Mar 5

 OK, you’ve gotten an agent, your agent has submitted your graphic novel pitch to multiple publishers, editors have taken it to editorial meetings, and now, finally, an editor is bringing your book to acquisitions.

So what does this mean, and what are your chances—at this point—of landing a book deal?

In my former life as an editor, I’ve been present in—and presented in—hundreds of acquisitions meetings, and I’m about to tell you how they work, what happens behind those closed doors, and what hoops your project has to jump through to land that elusive publishing contract.

First, the caveats: Though I’ve been involved in acqs meetings at a handful of publishers and heard a lot about meetings at many others, that doesn’t mean I know how all publishers work. Meetings are different in different places; personalities are involved; and things change over time. I’m not going to list publishers or tell you something that is specific to any one publisher. But I will tell you the elements all acquisitions meetings share (in my experience):

• They are probably the most difficult meetings editors have to attend.

• They are unpredictable.

• There is (almost always) one decider.

I’m going to break these down, but if you want a longer and more detailed (and potentially more colorful) description of these elements, check out the fireside chat I did with Janna Morishima over at Kids Comics Unite (you don’t have to be a member of KCU to view, but you should be! It’s free!).

OK, so an editor is bringing your book to acquisitions. What do they have to do to get ready? First they have to create a P&L (which stands for profit and loss) document that is an estimate of how much the book will cost to acquire and produce, how many copies might get sold in the first, second, and (sometimes) third year of publication, and how this all rolls up into profit for the publisher. The P&L is basically the financial story of the book. Or the financial story the editor is telling about the book. This is one way the editor shows the acquisitions team that acquiring this book is a good business decision.

READ MORE

Why Doesn’t Everyone Read Comics?

Welcome back to Graphic Novel Insider, the newsletter about comics publishing. Today’s topic is: Why doesn’t everyone read comics? Or, put another way, Why do so many people consider comics NOT REAL BOOKS?

When my daughter was in elementary school, I was the parent in charge of the school book fair. Her NYC public school did not use Scholastic, rather a local independent book warehouse that gave the school a larger percentage of book sales, but also meant us parent volunteers were in charge of merchandising. Two years in, I’d had enough of explaining to parents that graphic novels are indeed real books (much realer, IMHO, than those paperbacks that are blister-packed with plastic jewelry, but no one’s complaining about those), and I came up with a plan.

Instead of putting all the graphic novels on the graphic novel table, a long-standing tradition at this book fair, I was going to shelve them by age. So Real Friends was going to go next to the Princess in Black books. Smile would go with the middle-grade prose. Amulet would go next to Harry Potter. All real books, on real book shelves.

Read More

Graphic Novel Insider #2

Welcome back, or welcome for the first time! The goal of this newsletter, as always, is to demystify the publishing industry for you, while letting me talk about graphic novels!

Today’s topic: What kinds of graphic novels are publishers looking for right now?

Because, yes, you could have an amazing graphic novel project—expressive, compelling art; fast-paced storytelling; delightful characters—and you may have trouble placing it with a publisher. This is because (pay close attention to this part), publishers exist to make money. So they want to acquire projects that they believe will sell to consumers.

How do they know what will sell to consumers? The short answer is that they don’t. Publishers regularly bet big on projects that fizzle in the marketplace, and turn down projects that go on to become bestsellers. They are humans just like the rest of us! But they do have tools they use to make educated guesses.

One of the biggest tools they have is access to a sales database called Bookscan. Publishing folks LOVE Bookscan, because they can look up any book, from any publisher, and see how it’s selling (and you can look at the data in all sorts of different ways—how did this book sell in its first year of publication; how did it sell in its tenth year; how many copies did it sell last week; etc.).

And another tool that they use in conjunction with Bookscan is comp titles. “Comp title” can mean different things: when you are adding comp titles to your graphic novel pitch, they should be the books that yours will sit next to on the shelf. When an editor is adding comp titles to an acquisitions memo, they are trying to tell a sales story. They are saying, “This graphic novel about summer camp that I want to acquire will sell similarly to this other graphic novel about summer camp that was published two years ago.”

Most editors have gotten really good at telling this story. If your pitch has gotten this far—an editor taking it to an acquisitions meeting—that editor believes in your project. So they want to get their team to believe in it as well. And they do this by telling a story with the comp titles they choose. But does that editor know whether your book will sell well? Of course not, but they want to give it a chance. So the comp titles they pick will be ones that also sold well.

Welcome to Graphic Novel Insider

For the past fifteen or so years, I’ve worked as a graphic novel and comics editor. This trajectory has—luckily—coincided with the rise of graphic novels in bookstores and the explosion of interest from “traditional” book publishers in publishing graphic novels. For many of those years, graphic novels were the fastest growing segment of publishing, and in 2021 they became a billion-dollar market (that’s just book-length graphic novels; comic books hit about half a billion that year).

So, yeah, they are a pretty big deal. But what is a “graphic novel” exactly? How are they made? What kinds of comics are book publishers looking for? What about comics publishers (like DC and Marvel)? And can you make any money as a graphic novel creator?

I started this newsletter to cover these and other topics, and also because the mechanics of the publishing industry, graphic novels, and illustrated books in general are one of my absolute favorite topics of conversation. I’ll start out answering questions I’m commonly asked, but if there are topics you want to see covered, please ask!