Proudly announcing our third book
And the nitty-gritty of book announcements
We are thrilled to announce our third acquisition! BACKSTITCH, a novel by Marian Mitchell Donahue, for publication in Spring 2026.
I (Anjali) knew from the very first chapter that I wanted to publish this beautiful, page-turning, art-infused novel. Two sisters with a complicated relationship to each other and to their parents reunite at a retrospective exhibit of their mother’s artwork, curated by the sister who stayed behind. From page one you can tell the author, too, is an artist. Her whole family is steeped in visual art, theater, and dance. And get this: the whole book is structured around the layout of the gallery in which the mother’s art is being shown. It’s a brilliant structure, weaving around the gallery and from the present into the past, when each piece of art was conceived and created. Over the course of the story we become intimately familiar with the mother’s ambition and the ways in which the hurt she endured and the hurt she inflicted had deep and lasting repercussions on the whole family. It’s a beautiful and thoughtful exploration of family ties, the gift and cost of artistic talent, the ways in which public perception of an artist and her work can differ so wildly from her private life, and the legacy that her children must carry. We can’t wait to get the book into your hands!
Before we share with you a bit more about the publishing industry’s somewhat odd system for book announcements, we want to remind you of some upcoming Galiot offerings.
Workshop and upcoming classes
The deadline to apply for our 4-day novel and memoir workshop in Wellfleet, MA is this Saturday, March 1!
We still have a few spots left. Spring is around the corner, the Cape air will be soft, the bay will be glittering, and you’ll get to spend four glorious days workshopping your writing, generating new words, taking craft classes, and generally recharging. Grace Talusan is an amazing teacher with incredible experience, and we are lucky to have her as our guest instructor.
We also have some excellent online classes coming up in the next couple of weeks. Sign-up closes 4 days ahead of the class so we can give our instructors ample time to prepare. We know writers tend to leave things for the last minute, but that makes it tough for instructors to plan. So please sign up early and often!
Tuesday, March 4: What Every Story Needs to be Published, with Lynne Griffin
If you are a writer, you know you’ve asked yourself this question? Is my work ready for publication? Lynne is a fabulous writer and teacher and also family counselor (because most of us writers have other jobs, too) and she will for sure help you answer this.
Wednesday, March 5: 3-part workshop series, Short Story or Novel? How to Embrace Chaos in your Writing Life, with Galiot author Robyn Ryle
At Galiot we love stories that straddle genres. But there’s an art to doing two things at once and doing it well. It’s not just a little bit of this and a little bit of that. My kathak dance teacher used to say: fusion, not confusion. Robyn’s novel-in-stories that we are publishing in the Fall is a fantastic example of a successful blending of genres, and she’ll share some great tips with you.
Thursday, March 6: Writing with Conscience: How to Write About Social Issues, with Kavita Das
Ok, do we even need to discuss how important this topic is? We are in an age of many—too many—social issues. We’re writing non-fiction books and op-eds and even just pieces in our newsletters or social media platforms to explain, reveal, convince, protest, and protect people and values and fundamental morals. Kavita’s course, based on her book by the same title, is a game-changer for anyone writing about social issues.
So what’s the deal with book announcements and what is Publishers Marketplace?
Publishers Marketplace is a comprehensive site for publishing deals. Agents and publishers have member pages where they can list their staff, their mission, the types of books they are looking for, and the deals they have made. If you have a subscription to the site, you can search deals by author, title, agent, or editor. It’s a great tool if you are in querying mode because you can look up any given agent and see what they have recently sold, and to whom. The deals listed are not just the print deals, but sales of audio rights and foreign rights as well. You can’t find out the exact amount of the advance, but if you are familiar with the peculiar lingo of the PM deals, you can deduce some info:
A “nice deal” is $1 to $49,000
A “very nice deal” is $50,000 to $99,000
A “good deal” is $100,000 to $249,000
A “significant deal” is $250,000 to $499,000
A “major deal” is anything over $500,000
Most books, including Galiot ones, fall into the “nice” category. As in, look, it’s nice that I got an advance, but it’s not going to pay any major bills once I take out taxes and get the payment in three installments. (But a lower advance means you start collecting royalty checks sooner, because an advance is an advance on royalties.) Sometimes the announcement will include the words “in a pre-empt” or “at auction.” Those are words that make a writer’s heart sing. A pre-empt means an editor rushed to make an offer on a book they loved before others could get a chance to read the manuscript. An auction is just that: several editors want the book and the agent runs an auction to see who will pay the most for it.
Most US publishers will post an announcement in PM once they acquire a book. It’s a good place for foreign rights agents to scope out potential new deals for themselves. New deals are sent around in a daily newsletter called Publishers Lunch.
But there’s a formula to how these announcements are concocted.