Writers Keep Telling Publishing What’s Wrong. Are We Listening? Guest Post: E.J. Ferguson of Three Dragons Press

Writers Aren’t Imagining the Editorial Problem Hello. If you do not know me, I'm Elizabeth Ferguson, Founder of Three Dragons Press. We have been in operation for over a year now, and have released a full publishing program of twelve titles for the coming year. I want to thank Sylvia for the opportunity to come onto her platform and use her recent experience with publishing industry professionals to articulate our position. Sylvia is a member of the Three Dragons Press team and served as the managing editor of our anthology, Where Connections Lead. The same is true of David Jolly, who has contributed his editorial expertise to Mizov's novel. Like other members of our team, however, their own novels are not published by Three Dragons Press. That separation is deliberate. We do not want our publishing program to become a vehicle for publishing our own work, or create a conflict between our responsibilities to the writers we acquire and our personal creative ambitions. We do, however, actively support the independent writing and publishing journeys of our team members, just as we would hope they support the work we are building together. Having now had the opportunity to review Sylvia’s writing closely, alongside the feedback she has received from industry professionals, I understand why she has found the experience so frustrating. This is an extraordinarily accomplished piece of writing, and some of the feedback raises a much larger issue than whether one agent is the right fit for one author.

It is also a pain point I have heard writers complaining about loudly and repeatedly: the pressure to make distinctive work more familiar before the people evaluating it have fully understood what the work is doing, often under the banner of “marketability.”

This is particularly interesting to me because Three Dragons Press was built with the intention of doing things differently. We are not interested in reproducing industry processes simply because they are established processes. From the beginning, we have tried to build systems around the individual book and writer, including a holistic submissions process designed to evaluate the work in context rather than reducing it to a handful of easily categorized signals. https://tinyurl.com/5bcrren9

Sylvia’s experience gives me an opportunity to show what that difference means in practice. If I put on my publisher and editor hat and examine both the manuscript and the feedback it received, what do I actually see? The first thing that struck me when I read Sylvia’s opening was how clearly it had been engineered. “Empires rise. Empires fall.” is four words, but those four words establish the scale of the story, the instability underlying the political world, and the psychology of a ruler who understands that everything she has built can collapse. The language is economical because it needs to be: the sentence is not decorating the story; it is establishing the premise through which Isarina herself understands it.

My approach to the opening chapter and scene with all of our writers is simple: drop me into this world and give me a very clear picture of what moment I am in. These four words do that. I meet the most powerful ruler of the most powerful empire, and I know exactly what that person is stressed about and the weight they carry. The scene tells me there was competition for that ruler to be appointed, but also that the ruler is now established, aware that there will always be internal rivals and that stability is continually being tested.

The first thing the scene does through the use of negative space is leave out an obvious element, and the correct editorial question is: what is the absence of that element doing? The ruler is not gendered. The omniscient voice does not give the reader an easy handout, but intentionally leaves gender ambiguous. The reader’s own assumptions are tested, and the narration delivers the answer only when someone intimate with the ruler addresses her by name, because everyone else would need to use her title. Whether this is the tightest possible version of the scene for final publication, I cannot know. Those would be conceptual decisions for the acquiring editor at a different publishing company, and I would never be presumptuous enough to tell Sylvia what to change when I am not publishing the book. What I can recognize is that the scene construction is strong. It demonstrates Sylvia’s proficiency as a writer and the work she has put into mastering the considerably more difficult omniscient point of view, which she executes here with a high degree of control.

I would hope that other editors and publishing professionals with my level of knowledge of literature and writing would, at minimum, recognize Sylvia’s advanced abilities as a writer. At TDP, that would be a point in our holistic consideration of this book that would weigh heavily in her favor. My thought would be, “Wow, the chops on this writer are amazing. She has the ability to deliver some extraordinary execution.”

In fact, she is writing at the level of the submissions we receive that make my jaw hit the ground because of the quality of the prose. I do not think an acquiring editor considering this book would find anything lacking in Sylvia’s fundamental writing ability. Sylvia told me she had received some contradictory feedback about this opening, and asked me to come up with examples from successful books that categorically contradicted the idea that an opening needs to be reshaped into a cookie-cutter replica of what makes the industry comfortable before anyone can understand what the book is. Some of the examples I found made me raise my eyebrows.

Piranesi is a good reference point, not because Sylvia writes like Susanna Clarke, but because the author drops the reader in an unknown and confusing world the reader does not understand at the beginning of the book. Piranesi does not open by making itself immediately legible according to familiar genre conventions. It gives the reader specificity without complete explanation. We know the narrator understands his world even while we do not. Clarke has applied engineering to her opening. Like Sylvia’s book, Piranesi is built on its own internal logic, rather than through the compilation of a string of genre tropes to provide the book’s structure or plot. It would be ridiculous to suggest that Piranesi should instead open with a random in medias res crutch simply to make it resemble some other, entirely different book. The opening works because it belongs specifically to Piranesi. The appropriate editorial question is whether that architecture succeeds at what it was designed to do—not whether it conforms to an architecture borrowed from somewhere else. That does not mean every unusual opening works simply because it is unusual. It means unusual construction requires analysis rather than automatic correction. When I return to Sylvia’s opening with that standard, I can identify what its choices are doing. The question then becomes whether those mechanisms are executing successfully, not why Sylvia did not construct a more familiar opening in the first place.

We are not a press operating outside the goals of commercial success. My editorial analysis of concept and writing is never divorced from audience appetite. Clarke is a highly successful author, and her success as a writer with unique construction and engineering sits comfortably alongside her market success. The two are not opposing forces. The distinctive architecture is part of what readers are being invited to experience.

Any industry use of the word “marketability” is a crutch they are hiding behind, in my opinion, and we are acutely aware of how often that word is weaponized and what an enormous pain point this has become in publishing. We will never use “marketability” as a catch-all in our analysis of a concept. When I reject a submission based on its concept or writing, I explain that decision against our own internal standards, standards that I believe are entirely compatible with commercial success. We absolutely consider audience appetite. What we will not do is hide a specific editorial judgment behind the vague assertion that something is simply “not marketable.”

Right. Your point is affirmative: distinctiveness + stronger execution create commercial opportunity. I pulled it backward into risk-management language.

Sylvia had Samantha Shannon set beside her as a rival when she wrote this book, so in terms of a direct comparison with a book that has already achieved enormous commercial success, I can see every reason to believe Sylvia can compete for that audience and achieve more, not less, commercial success. Her opportunity lies precisely in standing out: delivering the scale and ambition that readers have already demonstrated an appetite for, while bringing stronger execution and a distinctive architecture of her own. Bloomsbury is a highly respected press, and I would be delighted for Three Dragons Press to reach their level of success and tenure in the industry. However, the fact that I consider Sylvia’s writing stronger than Shannon’s would be another reason for me to acquire Isarina, not a strike against it. I would see Sylvia as giving me a stronger book for an audience that has already demonstrated a substantial appetite for its scale, themes and concept. Since the industry likes to present these decisions as both subjective and opaque, and because I want writers to understand how our editorial standards at TDP are different, I do not want to leave this at my subjective preference for Sylvia’s writing over Shannon’s. I can break that judgment down through direct textual analysis. In a side-by-side comparison, Sylvia is objectively the stronger writer. Her writing demonstrates stronger execution than Shannon’s in the following specific ways: If we put the opening pages side by side, there are specific elements of craft we can examine: precision of language, control of metaphor and imagery, narrative economy, exposition, characterization, worldbuilding, narrative distance, and how many functions an individual sentence is accomplishing at once. I have already reviewed the masterful engineering of Sylvia’s opening scene, so let me demonstrate a direct comparison with Shannon’s opening. Her first line opens with a poorly executed simile and uses the word “like” to introduce a world that ultimately requires more than 800 pages to build. Across the opening pages, she repeatedly uses conflicting imagery that is neither cohesive nor cumulative: the images do not build tension or assemble into a clear, immersive sense of the world. In fact, only a few pages later, the narrative has to stop to explain one of the world’s rituals.

By comparison, Sylvia gives me virtually no worldbuilding through exposition and does not stop to tell me what her world is like. Her imagery is cohesive and her word economy is tight, creating an immersive atmosphere that feels inhabited rather than explained.

With our debut novel, Bradbury Manor—pre-order now, released 29 September, in a shameless plug, I went through three rounds of editing with the author to achieve precisely this impact: tighter word economy and an immersive world that feels lived in. It is a technique I teach from first principles to all of our authors who want to understand how to make their cultures accessible to readers from around the world. I would never point to Shannon’s execution here as a model for them to study in a writing-technique drill, or ask them to emulate it as a way of making their worlds feel inhabited. To me, Sylvia delivers tight opening pages, even if there are minor imperfections, that as an acquiring editor, I would be chomping at the bit to polish and improve without having to spend several editing rounds teaching her word economy and how to select prose and imagery that does heavy lifting and delivers multiple meanings at the same time, and Shannon's writing would give me grave concern how much developmental work I would need to do with her to teach her scene composition. This comparison is particularly striking because Sylvia was told by an agent this week that Isarina needed developmental editing before it would be competitive. From my perspective as an acquiring editor, I reach almost the opposite conclusion. The skills I would normally expect substantial developmental work to strengthen: scene construction, word economy, control of imagery, integration of worldbuilding, narrative architecture, and making individual choices perform multiple functions simultaneously, are already among the strongest features of Sylvia’s opening. My editorial response would be to acquire that level of underlying command and work with Sylvia to polish the imperfections, not dismantle the sophisticated execution that made me want the book in the first place.

I wanted the opportunity to use this specific analysis to demonstrate how different we are as a press. I am hopeful that our developing relationship with editorial superstar Kadiatou Keita, particularly around these issues and the severe lack of real editorial understanding that appears to characterize much of the publishing industry’s collective knowledge, will continue to strengthen our depth and our ability to stand out in these areas.

If you asked me about marketability, one thing I have heard very loudly from the market is that readers are tired of publishers leaning on familiarity while delivering horribly edited books. Our team strives to lead by example in this area and provide both readers and writers with a more human experience. We want to recognize the beauty of well-executed human creativity. But recognizing it is not enough. We also have a responsibility to help writers deliver it at its highest level and to give readers beautiful writing and beautifully produced books. We are still a young press. We have a great deal left to prove, and we intend to prove it in the books we publish. But being young also gives us the opportunity to decide now what kind of publisher we want to become, and which habits of this industry we refuse to inherit.

Writers have been telling publishing what is wrong. They are tired of being asked to make distinctive work more familiar before anyone has bothered to understand it. Readers are tired of being sold familiarity as quality while basic editorial standards are allowed to slide. We are listening to both.

Three Dragons Press does not want to build its reputation by teaching writers how to fit through an existing gate. We want to build it by recognizing extraordinary human creativity, applying serious editorial intelligence to it, and producing books beautiful enough, in their writing, their ideas and their execution, to earn their place in readers’ lives.

If we become the large and established publisher we intend to become, I want us to be able to look back at what we believed when we were small and recognize the same company.

That is the standard. Now we have to live up to it.