Editor Interview: The Story Plant

Character-driven fiction

I am interested in a wide range of fiction. Recent books I admire include TOM LAKE by Ann Patchett, THE EVERLASTING by Alix Harrow, ATMOSPHERE by Taylor Jenkins Reid, and SHROUD by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Again, my tastes are all over the place. Among my absolute favorites are Barbara Kingsolver, Ray Bradbury, Pat Conroy, Jonathan Tropper, and N.K. Jemisin, but, really, that's the tip of the iceberg.

We are fully dedicated to author development and empowerment. Most of the principals of the company are themselves serious writers.

Make sure your characters are fully developed and relatable. Never sacrifice character development for pacing. Readers are happy to turn pages a little less quickly if they are deeply committed to the characters and their outcomes.

A manuscript that feels as though the writer was writing an essential story, a story they HAD to tell.

That we're looking for manuscripts that capture a current trend. We are far more interested in reading novels that the writer absolutely loved writing.

We definitely want to know if a writer has published previously or has expertise relevant to the manuscript they are submitting. Beyond that, I really want to know what the novel a writer is querying matters to that writer.

This is entirely dependent on the manuscript itself. Some writers are great at writing query letters and not great at writing fiction. I tend to give up on those quickly. After I request a manuscript, though, I always want to have the full manuscript available because if a novel catches my attention, I want to keep reading it.

We always consider whether we think a novel has transmedia potential. We also do internal profitability estimates.

I really only get a couple of hours a day to dedicate to reading and editing, so I try to make that time as distraction-free as possible.

This ranges dramatically. I've taken writers through as many as a half-dozen passes on a manuscript before it goes to the copyeditor, but typically there's one developmental editing pass followed by a quicker review of the revised manuscript. From there, the manuscript goes through copyediting, typesetting, and then proofreading. The author is closely involved at every stage and gets final approval of the proofread pages.

Yes, if appropriate.

We are a privately funded company.

We have recently sold The Story Plant to a major multimedia startup and, as such, we have access to marketing resources we've never had before. Going forward, we will be marketing aggressively through publicity, advertising, influencer marketing, and bookseller merchandising.