It's no surprise, but a book's publication date is pretty important. Also referred to as the on-sale date or release date1, pub dates are when a book becomes available for purchase. Just about everything relating to the development, production/manufacturing, sales, and marketing/publicity of new books is scheduled in relation to pub dates. Production deadlines are built to ensure finished copies of books are shipped to bookstores in time for their planned release. Award eligibility is often determined by when a book first published. Bonus advances can trigger if sales hit certain pre-determined milestones within a certain amount of time after publication. And a zillion other things all hinge on the first day a book is sold in stores.

But despite everything in publishing revolving around pub dates, we don't actually know when a book's exact on-sale date will be until pretty far along in the development process. (Except we know it's always going to be on a Tuesday. Really.2)

That may seem weird. Why not just set an on-sale date from the get-go?

It's because figuring out which books come out when is a complex puzzle. There are a lot of factors at play, and some may not all be clear the moment a book is acquired:

• cashflow and staffing resources – ideally publishers want to stagger books they're gambling on to be their biggest hits, like a new novel from a bestselling author and a memoir by an A-list celeb, to help balance their cashflow and avoid top titles competing for the same publicity hits. But even outside those top titles, the creative team (editors, designers, etc.) can only work on developing so many books at one time. So all books have to be strategically spread out.

• production and manufacturing timelines – complex logistics go into printing and shipping books around the country and the world, and different types of books (e.g. a picture book versus a novel) have different production timelines.

• maximizing marketing and promo opportunities – some books are "evergreen" and could publish at any time, but for others the subject matter dictates the timing. You wouldn't want to publish a Christmas-themed book in June! (Holiday tie-in books often have a target pub month earlier than other titles for this reason.)

• the author's and illustrator's schedules – creators do some of the heaviest lifting promoting their books, so publishers want to ensure that the author and/or illustrator don't have multiple books publishing too close together. If relevant, they’ll also consider things in the creators' schedules that might help or harm book promo and schedule new books accordingly.

• Development process – of course, books can't publish until the author and/or illustrator have finished writing and illustrating them. And try as we might to stick to contractual schedules, we all know the creative process can sometimes take longer than planned…

Multiply all these variables by the many, many new books that publishers release each year, and you can see the issue. Setting a publication date in stone at acquisition would be a nightmare.

So instead, we start with a loose target for when a book will publish, the pub season, and as the season gets closer and the book's development unfolds, we narrow the pub season down to a pub month, and eventually to a specific pub date.

'Tis the Season

Just to keep everything nice and confusing, there isn't one standard definition of pub seasons across the industry in the way that everyone's agreed to publish new books on Tuesdays. There's some overlap with terms and dates, but each publisher ultimately creates their own publication calendar according to what works best for their business.

Most of the large or mid-sized publishers have three pub seasons per year that each span four months. September through December is almost always designated as the "Fall" season. The other two can go by different names. Some publishers designate the January through April season as “Winter” and others call it "Spring." May through August is typically referred to as "Summer", but some publishers call that one “Spring” instead, or “Spring/Summer.”

So when two publishing people are talking about “Spring 2025” for example, that could potentially mean any time between January and August3. 🙃

And to make matters even more fun, some publishers divide the year into two seasons instead of three. Biannual seasons are almost always 6 months long, but they don't always split the year down the middle – for example, a publisher I used to work for designated September through February as “Fall”, and March through August as “Spring”.

Pub seasons don’t disappear once we know a book's pub month or specific pub date. Many sales, marketing, and publicity initiatives are organized by pub season to group all the new books coming out in smaller cohorts – launch meetings and sales catalogues will often cover all the books in one particular season, for example. Once your book has been out in the world for around a year, though, the relevance of the pub season starts to melt away.

You won't be surprised to learn that most of my Airtable title tracking is organized by pub date too. But how does that work when dates aren't available for much of the time a book's in development? Next time, I'm going to show you a cool formula I use to automatically estimate and update pub dates and keep all my data organized. We'll also go over the basics of setting up formulas in Airtable and look at a few of the formula functions I use the most often.

Get excited, fellow spreadsheet nerds!

So let's dive in to a whole post about one important little button on your email: reply all.

Some of you may already be well-acquainted with the reply all button. There's a whole lot of reply-all-ing in publishing. But for those of you who aren't yet hitting the reply all button every time you respond to an email – maybe because it requires a few extra clicks on your phone and doesn't seem worth the effort, or because you're worried about annoying people with emails they don't need to see, or simply because you forget to – I suggest trying to make this a habit in 2025. Reply all is your friend!

Why does reply all matter?

Let's set the scene. You're illustrating a picture book, and you email your art director (copying in your agent, of course1) with a question. When she responds, you notice that she copies in your editor, your editor's assistant, another designer, and (hopefully) keeps your agent copied in too.

That may seem like a lot of fuss over whatever you and your AD are talking about. Maybe your question was something really mundane or technical about the art – why would all those other people want to know about that? Should you reply only to your AD and not add clutter to the other people's inboxes?

The answer is almost certainly no! Hit the reply all button, even if you have no idea why your editor's assistant's intern's mom should be copied on an email about the little tweak you're making to the art for page 22-23.

First of all, I'm a big proponent of copying your agent on nearly2 every email you send to your publishing team. That includes all the replies to the original note – she'll want to know how the conversation unfolds! Your agent is your advocate, and it's waaay easier for us to support you when we have a full picture of what's going on. It also means we don't need to bug you for status updates about your book, since we'll already know everything you know without extra work if we're looped into your correspondence.

The same applies to your publishing team. Your editor and art director (and others) are working closely together on your book, and it's often helpful for them both to be looped into correspondence with you. The work one person takes the lead on often still affects the other. For example, even though a conversation about making tweaks to an illustration is generally going to fall under your art director's purview, maybe your editor's assistant needs to know that you're tweaking page 22-23 because she's meeting with your book's production editor tomorrow and can convey the update to her. Your editor may be liaising with the marketing team on promo materials that will use this illustration, so she can tell them that an updated file is forthcoming. The other designer may be collaborating with your AD on the book’s design. And the editorial intern may be shadowing all conversations about this book in order to learn about the bookmaking process.

Or maybe it's for completely different reasons. Who knows. We agents and illustrators don’t always know (or need to know!) how labor is divided between your book's publishing team. The great thing about cultivating a habit of replying all is that it doesn't require you personally, as the creator, to actually decide who needs to see what. You're leaving that up to the person on the other side of the line. If you have a question for your art director, you can just send it to her (copying your agent!) and let her decide who else at the house, if anyone, needs to be looped in when she responds to you. From there, you're just keeping the lines of communication open by replying to everyone she's included in your conversation.

Make replying all a habit

Reply all is my default. Even if I'm only emailing one person, reply all gets the job done, so I think it's good to get into the habit.

And when you're in the habit of replying to everyone, you'll also probably pay more attention to who's been copied into what. I usually try to say hello to everyone who’s been looped into an email exchange even if I suspect some people will be silent observers. It helps to recognize the whole team’s contributions to your book, even if they're mostly working in the background (from your point of view), and to build relationships with them, too – and we all know publishing is a relationship business. So even if you're having a conversation with your editor, if she's looped in her assistant to the thread, you could say hello to them both at the top of your note.

There are exceptions to every rule of course, and sometimes you might not want to reply all – for example, if you want to ask your agent for her thoughts on something your editor said before you respond. In those rarer moments you can just switch to regular-reply mode. Or do what I do and start a new email thread for the side convo, then return to the main thread that everyone else is in later3.

The bottom line is that, in my opinion, reply all is almost always more helpful than not. If someone starts copying in other folks to your conversation, you can trust that it's because they all need to see the information you're discussing (even if you don't know why). So as we all dive back into our inboxes, let's lean into replying all. It's a small change that can go a long way towards streamlining communication, avoiding mistakes, and strengthening relationships with your publishing team. If only all my other new year's resolutions could be so easy!

It turns out that transitioning to a new agency is kind of strange. You’re starting a new job, but you’re also… not. I’m *so* grateful and excited that my clients were happy to come on this journey with me (at such a low-key, totally-stress-free time! 😅) so we can keep making great books together.

You’ve probably got an idea, now, about why I’ve been MIA here for a while. For one thing, I haven’t been doing a lot of fun airtable stuff recently since I wasn’t sure what sort of new systems I’d be rolling into at my new agency home (and it didn’t make sense to build something that would soon become obsolete).

But mostly, I’ve just been flat-out busy! There was a lot of housekeeping to do before closing things out at my last agency to leave things in good order; lots of communicating with agencies and editors and my clients; and lots of normal work to do. It’s a very good reason to be super busy, but… something had to fall off my list.

I’m excited to be back though! And I’ve got a bunch of ideas brewing for new posts. Despite it starting to feel like winter outside, I’m in a season of planting seeds, with big things to come.

Thanks for following along!

A couple postscripts…

Please note that I'll be closed to queries for the rest of the year as I settle in at Root, but I’m planning to open again in early 2025. Watch this space!

Truly a huge thanks to my client Briana, who surprised me this weekend with the illustrations in this post – she wanted me to be able to celebrate joining a new agency the way many illustrators do. I’m so lucky to work with some of the most thoughtful people in the biz 💚

If you haven't read my earlier posts on how I track submissions in airtable and how I build sub lists, I recommend checking those out before reading further!

But as a quick refresh, what I mean by a "wide" base set-up is that there are a LOT of fields in one table – some of my tables are just shy of 200 fields.

That would be totally unwieldy in a traditional spreadsheet program like Excel; you'd get lost in a sea of data. But even though Airtable looks like a spreadsheet, it's actually a database, where you can quickly sort, filter, and hide data. You can slice up that huge underlying table into lots of different bite-sized views and quickly toggle between them, so you're only ever looking at a small section of your big table at once.

It can feel weird to build wide tables in Airtable, especially if you're used to spreadsheets. But personally, I think going wide is one of the best parts of using Airtable versus a traditional spreadsheet! It's a way to tap into the power of a database, so it's worth trying to shift your mindset.

Temporarily turning on field visibility in other views

As I said in the post on building submission lists, my first step is adding editors who like that creator's work:

I always start sub list planning with editors who have expressed a specific interest in the author or illustrator's work. This includes editors the creator has worked with on other books; editors who passed on their previous submissions but had positive feedback; and editors who have let me know that they're a fan of the illustrator's art style.

I have a series of views in my "Subs & Interest" table that track publisher interest in each of my clients' work – one view for each client. Every time an editor or art director shares feedback on a client's work, I make a note of their comment in Airtable. I have a long text field for each one of my clients where I drop in the editor or AD's comments, and I also add the client's name to a multi-select field called "Client Interest."

For example, if an editor responds to a promo update to say that they love my client Sonia Agüera's art style and would like to see more work from them, I'll add that note to the field called "SONIA AGUERA" and add "Sonia" to the Client Interest field:

Then I have a view for each client that filters based on whether their name is in the Client Interest multi-select field1. The view pulls in some top-level info for each editor, and the comment they made about the client's work:

I use these views when I'm building submission lists and sending out updates on a client's new art samples. Having a "wide" table makes it super easy to add editors to sub lists: I temporarily unhide the submission's status field so it shows up within the client interest view, and toggle the status field to "idea" or "first wave," etc.2

I also usually turn on visibility for the submission's "Inclusion" field as well, and summarize or copy and paste the editor's comment there so it shows up in the submission list. When I'm done, I'll hide the submission fields in the "Client Interest" view again. I also do the reverse when I'm archiving a submission3 – I'll make a client's Interest comment field visible within their submission's view, and make sure I've added all the relevant feedback from editors on that client's work (positive and otherwise) to their comment field.4

If I separated my data about publisher interest in a client's work and submissions in different tables, I wouldn't be able to merge data like this when it suited me. (And originally, I actually did separate this info into two different tables! But the limitations of that approach it became annoying, so later I merged it all together into one table.)

An overview of active subs and the "overlap puzzle"

Another thing I mentioned in my post about building sub lists is the editor overlap puzzle:

A sub list is not only formed of the editors I think are most likely to love a project; those editors also need to be spread across different imprints/publishing houses, and there is an unwritten rule to not "double up" on submissions with one editor. So I need to check whether an editor I want to include on a sub list is already considering another submission, and potentially wait until she closes that out to send her something else.

Right now, I primarily send out pitches for picture books, which means I am usually submitting to the same smallish group of editors who work on picture books. It's tricky to avoid accidentally sending one editor multiple projects. I needed a way to see an up-to-date overview of editors that were currently considering submissions – and I wanted it to update automatically so it would be accurate and I wouldn't have to do any extra work.

Because all my submission tracking fields are in the same "wide" table, I set up a couple views that pull together all the status fields for each of my submissions and filter them in different ways.

Subs Overview

A view I made called "Subs Overview" is the one I use most often. It shows the status of all submissions at any stage (active, forthcoming, or paused) across every editor I have in my base:

I'm really visual, so I like how this view works almost like a chart. When I'm methodically whittling down a list of ideas into a final sub list, I'll scroll down this view slowly, focusing on one of the status fields. It makes clear where there are gaps in my sub lists that I could consider filling, and where I have overlap between editors or imprints that I need to address. 

Editors with Subs

But, there *is* a whole lot of information to digest at once in that view. So I have another version of Subs Overview that I filter based on whether editors are actively considering a submission. I call this my "Editors with Subs" view, and use it to double-check that I haven't accidentally missed any points of overlap.

I have a bunch of overlapping filters set up to create this view – one filter for each submission status field – which each pull in records based on whether the submission status is one of the "active" status options, like "submission out" or "editor sharing with others."

Note that I used the "or" field when overlapping the filter conditions, because I wanted to pull in editor records where ANY status field was active. Using "and" would look for editors where ALL the status fields were active, so it wouldn't work here.

The TL;DR of this whole post is: going wide with your table set-up allows you to see and interact with the same field in multiple views, so you can compare and contrast different sets of data. There are probably other ways to achieve everything I've shown you here by using formulas, linked fields, and/or automations. I actually experimented with a couple other workflows myself before I settled on this one! But for me, this set-up is the easiest and most straightforward. There isn't really a reason not to go ham with making huge tables in Airtable, but there are certainly perks!

Last week I wrote about how I use Airtable to track the status of my clients' projects out on submission. Today we're going to step backwards a bit from there and look at how I decide which editors to share a submission with in the first place. This group of editors is called a submission list.

Building sub lists is a key component of an agent's job. We all probably have slightly different workflows, so note that what works for me is only one way of building sub lists. Your agent might do it differently. That's cool. There are many different paths to a great sub list.

What I do is compile a big list of names in a primordial soup of ideas – sometimes over the course of weeks or even months, depending on how long it takes to get a project ready for submission (and how early I start jotting down editor ideas). Then when we are just about ready to send out a project, I whittle down all those ideas into a submission list of around 10-15 editors.

Sounds straightforward, but submission lists can be complex and agents puts a lot of thought into coming up with that relatively short list of names. Here's more detail on how I personally do it!

ADDING EDITORS TO THE SOUP OF IDEAS

Interest in the creator's work

I always start sub list planning with editors who have expressed a specific interest in the author or illustrator's work. This includes editors the creator has worked with on other books; editors who passed on their previous submissions but had positive feedback; and editors who have let me know that they're a fan of the illustrator's art style.

Sometimes these editors skip the primordial soup of ideas stage and go straight on the submission list – for example, I'll almost certainly share a creator's new project with the editors they've worked with before on other books.

Top of mind editors and imprints

Next, I'll add editors who immediately come to my mind for the project. The better I know the editor, the more likely they're going to live in the "RAM" of my brain. Getting to know editors via calls, lunches, or working together on other books helps me get a good download on their personality and tastes. Occasionally I'll have such a strong feeling that an editor might love a particular project that I'll put them straight on the submission list as well.

Sometimes a project feels like it might suit a particular imprint or house that has a distinct personality or a very clear stated mission for the types of books it publishes, and I'll look for the right editor to submit to there. I'll choose based on a combination of reviewing notes I have about each editor's wishlist and studying the imprint's recent deals and key titles. If multiple editors seem like they could be a good fit, I'll add them all in the ideas phase and then narrow it down to one person later – but imprints with distinct personalities tend to have small teams!

Creator preferences

After I run through all the editors and imprints that are top of mind for me, I also check my notes to see if there are any particular editors and/or imprints my client has told me that they'd love to work with. I don't automatically add these to the submission list, but I definitely do put them into the idea pot.1

Comp titles

I like to check which editors acquired titles I'm comping to and consider whether they might be a good fit for the project I'm taking out. This can be hit or miss; it depends on what type of DNA the project on submission shares with the comp title. If there's a lot of overlap, the editor may not be interested in the submission because they've already worked on a similar book. However, if what the two books share is more of a vibe – such as a similar type of humor or tone – but the stories are quite different, then the editor of one could be a good match for both.

Submission lists for similar projects

If I've worked on submissions in the past that are in the same genre or share other characteristics with the project I'm about to take out, I'll reference those sub lists to get ideas. I'll check for editors who shared positive feedback on the older project and whom I might want to try again with the new submission. For example, if an editor passed on a funny picture book but said "I loved the humor in this" I might want to add them to the idea pool for another picture book with a lot of humor.

Filling in the gaps

At this point, I'll have a hearty idea soup brewing. My last step is to systematically go through my editor database and fill in any gaps. Do I have ideas down from all the major and mid-size publishers? Did I miss any small/indie presses who might be a good fit? Should I think about Canada or the UK/ANZ for this sub?

WHITTLING IDEAS DOWN TO THE SUBMISSION LIST

Once I've got all my "maybes" gathered together, I find it easier to suss out which editor ideas feel the most promising and actually start putting together the sub list.

This stage is a bit of a puzzle, however. A sub list is not only formed of the editors I think are most likely to love a project; those editors also need to be spread across different imprints/publishing houses, and there is an unwritten rule to not "double up" on submissions with one editor. So I need to check whether an editor I want to include on a sub list is already considering another submission, and potentially wait until she closes that out to send her something else.2

I often whittle down submission lists for multiple projects at a time so I can weigh any overlapping ideas against each other. For example, if an editor is on my idea list for two projects, I'll think about which project that editor is more likely to love and include her in the initial round for that one. I'll add the editor to the rolling list for the other project with a note not to submit until the first project is closed out.3

In most cases, agents can only submit to one editor at an imprint; a pass from that editor is considered a pass from the entire imprint. So if I have multiple editor ideas at the same imprint, I have to choose only one person to submit to.

Hopefully one editor will stand out as the right fit after a deeper dive into their wishlist and other acquisitions. But if it still feels like a draw, I'll consider some practical factors – like other projects I'll be submitting around the same time as I described above, or how reliable that editor has been with sending me feedback on past submissions. If an editor has ghosted me on the last few projects I've sent her and I think one of her colleagues might be just as likely to click with a project, I'll try her colleague.

I usually aim for the initial submission list (i.e. the first group of editors I'll submit a project to all at once) to be around 10 editors. Sometimes I'll include a few more if I have lots of really promising ideas or if I think a submission might get a lot of interest quickly. As passes come in, I refer to my broader idea list to potentially trickle out the submission to new editors.

Whew, I thought this would be a short post for some reason. But there is quite a lot to consider when building submission lists. (And maybe the reason I think of it as "building" a list makes more sense now too!)

Next week we're going to change gears and chat with my fabulous client Hayden Goodman about her new book, The Heart Never Forgets. But after that, I'll be returning to submission lists with another Airtable post. We'll zoom in on some other corners of my submission tracking base to look at how my "wide" set-up helps me quickly add editor ideas to submission lists from different views, and get a birds' eye view of the sub list "puzzle" across multiple projects.

Thanks for reading, and see you next week!

Of course, Federico is also an amazingly talented illustrator. But I already knew that!

So when I started to make moves on bringing this newsletter to life, I knew I wanted to commission Federico to create a logo and a few doodles I could use as section dividers2. I sent him the specs and a some ideas I had and asked if he'd have the time and interest. He's busy illustrating some fab new books so I wanted to keep it as low-key as possible.

I was super excited that he said yes! And friends, oh my goodness did he knock it out of the park.

Those of you reading this via email will have already seen the gorgeous email banner he created. But for everyone on the app and online, check this out:

I love it SO MUCH. How kind of Federico to give me way better hair than I have in real life.3 And the books and bubble letters in a spreadsheet grid?! So good.

But there's more, because he actually made me two versions of the banner!! I love this one too. I don't know what I’m going to do with it yet (let me know in the comments if you have ideas!) but I'm going to find a way to use it somewhere.

As for the logo? He made three!!

I am truly obsessed with all of these, and I'm going to be using each one to represent a different section of the newsletter: Publishing Insights, Airtable Tips, and Illustrator Interviews. I hope that substack will use the corresponding logo when I send out new posts, but I'm still not entirely sure how that works. We'll see!

And best of all, even though I said that I definitely don't need a cover illustration because that would be too much effort, Federico made one anyway. And it's so, so good:

If you missed it, he turned a bookshelf into an Airtable grid!! Brilliant. I assure you this was not at all my idea. I could have never thought of something so clever, haha. And this is why you hire illustrators, folks! They are not only good at drawing, they are good at thinking. At visual problem solving. And Federico, as you can see, is one of the best.

Thank you, thank you, Federico!! I'm sorry if you're reading this and feeling embarrassed about my profuse thanks and praise of your art… but also, I'm not that sorry. 😉

Next week I'll be writing about what I think about when I put together submission lists. Until then, ciao!

Share Art Agenting & Airtable

The very first thing I set up in Airtable when I became an agent was a submission tracking base. I've since gone on to completely redesign how it works "under the hood" and added several extra bits of functionality to it that are integral to my current workflow, but the gist remains the same. And since this is the oldest part of my JGLM Airtable ecosystem, I wanted to start our tour here.

If you're brand-new to Airtable, this submissions base is a good case study to get a better sense of how it works. I find that it's easiest to learn a new program by seeing it in action!

Two quick notes before we dive in:

Because all the information about my clients' projects on submission is confidential, I duplicated my actual submissions base and filled it in with some dummy data1 for these screenshots. The entire framework is exactly the same as my real submissions tracking base though.

Also, I'm giving you a tour of how this base looks today, but I have some ideas brewing for how I'd like to tweak it further. Everything's always a work in progress! I'll update you later to share the changes I make and why I decided to make them.

Anatomy of a View

Each of my clients' projects on submission gets its own view. Because I'm on a paid Airtable plan, I can organize my views into sections. I have several sections in this "Subs & Interest" table, but for now let's focus on this (fake!) example project called Pothos in "Active Subs."

Each submission view is created by choosing which fields (columns) and filtering which records (rows) of all available fields/records in the table are visible in this particular view. I'm going to talk more about this below, but for now, I just wanted to point out those sections highlighted in light blue and light green at the top of the grid.

This view is organized into groups. The groups are based on the single select field called POTHOS / STATUS.

I really like the functionality of grouping records. Visually, it works well for my brain to see data organized this way. And whenever the field a project is grouped by is updated, the record automatically moves to the new group. There's a little animation that shows the record sliding into place.

In the screenshot above, I've split the view into two halves – the leftmost five fields are general information about each editor. These same fields appear in all of my submission views for different projects. The first four fields are pretty self-explanatory – name, title, publisher, imprint. The field called "NOTES & WISHLIST" is where I save all the information I keep on file about each editor's tastes and the types of projects they're looking for.2

The other eight fields that appear in this view are specific to tracking this particular submission. Let's take a quick look at each one:

INCLUSION - this is where I write quick notes to myself about why I've included each editor on the submission list. I also share these notes with my clients when I share the sub list with them so they have a bit of context.

SUBMITTED - the date I sent the pitch out to that editor

LAST NUDGE - the most recent date I've nudged an editor about the submission

SCHED NUDGE - the next date I'm planning to nudge. Whenever I submit a project or send a nudge, I update this field to prep for my next nudge. And I have an automation set up to send me a reminder email when this date rolls around so I don't forget. (I'll write about automations in a separate post one day!)

LAST ED. COMM - This stands for "last editor comment" and I use it to mark the date the editor gets back to me with a meaningful comment, like a pass or an update that they are sharing the project with their team. Originally, I used to update this field when editors confirmed receipt too, but I don't do that anymore because of an automation I set up that runs off this field.3

EDITOR COMMENT - I copy and paste whatever the editor says about the project here. Sometimes I'll also summarize key updates and put them in italics, like "Call with client on DATE to discuss editor's R&R notes"

NOTE - this column doesn't show up in the screenshot, but it's a place I put random things I want to remember about the sub, such as "editor is on parental leave from DATE to DATE" or "mark as ghosted if no reply by DATE"

STATUS - this column also doesn't show up in the screenshot, but you can see the data since it's the field that the records are grouped by. I keep it visible in the view so that I can easily change the status while I'm working in this view.

Under the Hood

You may have noticed that in the screenshots, all of those eight fields I just discussed actually contain the word "POTHOS." Why? Let's circle back to the beginning, with hidden fields and filtered records.

Something that I do with many of my Airtable bases is set them up to be very wide4 – in the sense that there are a LOT of fields in one table. For example, I currently have a little over 150 fields in my "Subs & Interest" tracking table that we're looking at here.

That would be totally unwieldy in a program like Excel; you'd get lost in a sea of data. But in Airtable you can slice up that huge underlying table into lots of different bite-sized views, so you're only ever actually looking at a small section of your table at once.

And that's what I'm doing with each individual project submission view – looking at a small slice of what is a big CRM5 table tracking editors and art directors.

Share Art Agenting & Airtable

So what are all those 150 fields in my Subs & Interest table? Well, a big chunk of them are for each of my clients' projects on submission. In order to have a view like I shared above for each sub, every project on submission needs to have its own field for all eight of those criteria (inclusion rationale, date submitted, etc). And because the type of information repeats (i.e. "INCLUSION") I use a tag or code word to designate which project the field relates to so the field names are all unique.

In real life, I use one descriptive word from the book's title as my tag. For example, spirits was the tag for a project called School Spirits. So the fields for that submission were called INCLUSION / SPIRITS and so on. In my fake data for this dummy base, I used flower names for all the project tags: daisy, tulip, pothos6...

To create a submission view, I toggle off visibility for all the available fields in the table except for the five fields of general information about each editor (name, title, etc.) and the eight submission tracking fields with the project's tag word.

Filtering records is more straightforward. In my real Subs & Interest table, I have over a thousand records. But I only want to see the editors on each project's submission list in my tracking view. So I set up a filter that's based on the sub's status field.

Airtable's filters are pretty intuitive. I have mine set up to only pull in records where the STATUS field for a particular project "is not empty."

Of course, I only have to set up the view with hidden fields and filtered records once, because views can be saved in Airtable. It's super easy for me to toggle between all my different project sub views and update each grid as new info trickles in.

Sharing the tracking grids

If any of my clients are reading along here, some of you will probably recognize these grids! One of my favorite things about Airtable is that you can create a link to share a read-only version of a view with anyone – they don't even need an airtable account to see it. So I offer to share a link with my clients who want to follow along with their submission.7 (I do turn off the visibility of some fields in my clients' version of the tracking view, such as the editor wishlist field and the nudge fields.)

These read-only share links have a couple of security measures you can choose to use, including needing a password to view. (The password is set for each individual share link; it's totally separate from an Airtable account password.)

The read-only views are, obviously, read-only – so you don't have to worry about anyone with the link accidentally changing the data in your base. But read-only viewers can manipulate the way information is displayed in their read-only view. For example, you can click into records to expand them, or expand individual cells where some text is cut off (such as with the inclusion notes or editor comments). It's also possible to change the sort and grouping criteria, and change the row height.

But friends! You can see all this for yourself. Go ahead and click around in the read-only view of this base you've been looking at via screenshots for the past ten minutes.

Link: https://airtable.com/appDHkl3q8isTcc1y/shri9HTwktyEXmORr
Password: ArtAgenting+Airtable

There are lots of different ways to use Airtable to track the status of submissions, and this is only one of them. If you're an agent using airtable for your subs, I'd love to hear how you're doing it differently in the comments.

Leave a comment

And despite the length of this post, I've actually only scratched the surface of my submissions tracking system. Stay tuned for what I think about when I build submission lists, how this "wide" base set-up helps me avoid doubling-up on submissions to editors, the details on those automations I teased, and more.

Thanks for following along, and if you found this helpful, please share with a friend! See you next week.

If you're reading this newsletter, you've probably heard of literary agents.

Literary agents represent book authors and illustrators. We broker deals with publishers to sell our clients' books and help to guide our clients' publishing careers. Like most types of agents, literary agents are paid on commission; we take a percentage of the income our clients' earn on books we represent.

If you're a illustrator looking for representation, you've probably noticed that there are a lot of literary agents out there, and not all of them represent illustrators. But you may not know that there are actually two types of agents that represent children's book illustrators: literary agents and artist's representatives.

While there's a lot of overlap, there are also some key differences between literary agents and artist reps. I think it's important for illustrators to understand what both literary agents and art reps do so you can decide which approach works best for you and your goals. But it's not always super clear which category folks you're querying fall into when you're researching. So let's take a look at both roles and outline some clues to help you determine whether someone is an art rep or a literary agent.

But first, I want to note that while I only represent illustrators, I am a literary agent, not an art rep1. So I obviously have a bias towards literary agents. But there are lots of great benefits to working with art reps too, and I've tried to be as impartial as possible with this overview.

Okay, let's dive in!

Two Key Differences (Plus, a Mildly Hot Take)

Commission

One of the biggest differences between literary agents and art reps is their rate of commission. Literary agents charge clients a 15% commission – a pretty standard rate that is seen across the industry, from small boutique agencies to really large ones.

Art reps have a higher commission. The rate can vary; I've personally heard of rates ranging from 20% to as high as 35%. This may or may not include expenses the agency incurs to promote the illustrator's work (like mailing out postcards for example); sometimes there is an additional charge or fee for that.

And some literary agents charge the illustrators they represent a slightly higher commission than their authors to cover the additional time and costs of promoting their illustrators' work2.

Types of covered Works

Another key difference is the types of projects that each agency would cover. Art reps often work across many different industries, such as advertising, surface design/licensing, editorial, and book publishing. They usually want to be involved with all of their clients' projects within those industries.

Whereas literary agents focus on the publishing industry. If you're an illustrator or an author-illustrator, this means that your work (written or illustrated) that would be considered a literary work is covered by a literary agent, but you're free to pursue other types of illustration work on your own3.

Approach to negotiation

Here's my third key difference that might be a little controversial to publish online, but I think it's important to note so I'm going to do it anyway: in my experience, literary agents tend to have a more rigorous and in-depth approach to negotiating book deal terms and contracts than art reps.

This isn't to say that art reps do not advocate for their clients – they do! But overall, I found that art reps tended to focus on the illustrator's advance and schedule, while literary agents were more likely to get really into the weeds on other points of the negotiation too, in addition to the advance. 

Let me say again that is my personal opinion based on the many illustrator deals I negotiated while working at publishers. There are certainly exceptions to this in both directions. And it's not like I negotiated deals with every single agent and rep out there, either. So make of this what you will!

Other Points of Comparison

The other ways art reps and literary agents tend to differ can get blurry. Each agent and rep has their own slightly unique approach and may be taking a little from column A and a little from column B. So bear in mind that mileage may vary and there are lots of exceptions to these "rules"!

List size

Art reps usually represent lots of illustrators, and literary agents often have smaller lists. The lines can get a little blurry though with large literary agencies who may collectively represent a similar number of illustrators as a small-to-mid-sized artist rep agency. If the agency's website sorts or filters illustrations by genre/market or with tags, that's a solid clue that they're an art rep.

Agency team

Literary agents tend to operate more independently than art reps. Literary agents build our own lists and work one-on-one with our clients – this means that at larger literary agencies where multiple agents rep illustrators, you'll often see specific agents mentioned when viewing illustrator portfolios.

Art reps sometimes also have a primary list (or "stable"4) of illustrators, but I think it's more common for artists to work with a broader range of the agency's staff – individual agents may focus on specific markets or territories for example, and promote the whole of the agency's client list within that market/territory.

Art styles

Because literary agents often represent a smaller list of clients, we have to carefully curate the types of art styles we sign up to reflect our own personal taste and the types of projects we tend to work on. Meaning that we are often a little more discerning and selective about signing up new clients than art reps, who tend to have larger lists with many types of art styles. 

Illustrator promotion & editorial development

Art reps tend to focus more time and energy on promoting and developing their clients' portfolios to get illustration commissions than literary agents do. And literary agents tend to get more involved editorially in projects, helping their clients develop and polish their own stories to pitch with publishers. Though both types of agents should be doing both types of work in some capacity in my opinion – unless it's made clear upfront that they don't!

Volume

Because books are big projects, it's only really possible to illustrate 2 or maybe 3 per year. So literary agents are usually focused on securing their clients fewer projects with the highest earning potential on each (i.e. high advances and favorable royalty rates and other terms), and it can sometimes take a while for that to get momentum. Art reps may be able to secure their clients a higher volume of commissions more quickly, with a wider range of scale and type of project.

Which type of agent is right for YOU?

Only you can decide! I recommend querying both types of agents if you aren't sure which approach is right for you. Everything I mention above are all great points to discuss with agents on "the call" once you start to get interest and offers of representation. I think it's best to make a final decision based on specific agents and agencies you have the opportunity to work with rather than a theoretical overview. For instance, don't discount art reps just because they have a higher commission – it might be worth it to you if you feel the agent/agency you'd be working with is a good fit for you and your career goals, and you'd be getting a lot of value out of it.

If you have any questions (or would like to disagree with anything I've said here, ha!), let me know in the comments. And please share this post with anyone you think might find it helpful!

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Now that we've covered the basics of what Airtable is and what literary agents representing illustrators do, we can start getting into the exciting overlap! Stay tuned for my next post, where I'll show you how I use Airtable to track the status of my clients' projects on submission.

Happy book birthday to A RAINBOW IN BROWN, my wonderful client Pavonis Giron's publishing debut! To celebrate, Pav and I hopped on a call to look back on their submission journey, how tie-dye inspired this story and the technique they used to create the illustrations, and lots more.

I originally intended for this interview to be around 15 minutes, but I have no interview skills (yet??), and time flies talking to Pav, so it wound up being twice that long! What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

You can also listen to the full, uncut recording of our call in the voiceover.

I hope you enjoy this chat as much as I did!

Jessica Saint Jean: Hi Pav! Thank you so much for joining me to talk about A RAINBOW IN BROWN. I'm so excited that this book is out in the world.

This is my first time ever interviewing someone, and one of my first posts for the new substack. And A RAINBOW IN BROWN is your first book! 

Pavonis Giron: This is also my first interview! So it'll be a learning thing for both of us.

Jessica: We'll figure it out as we go along. I really appreciate you joining me on my new substack adventure.

Pavonis: Thank you for having me.

Jessica: To start, do you want to give us an elevator pitch for A RAINBOW IN BROWN? 

Pavonis: A RAINBOW IN BROWN follows a young girl, Jo, as she searches for her favorite color in art class – but she can't decide. She's got all these colors on her palette and every single one of them seems to be her favorite. Right up until the moment where she finds out she doesn't really have to choose at all. They can all become one color that shows a lot of nuance and kind of encapsulates everything that she loves all in one. It's about finding something that you love through experimentation and potentially mistakes, and enjoying that process and the outcome as well.

Jessica: I also love that this book is celebrating a color that I think a lot of kids maybe have some negative feelings about. I love that you flip the script on that and show that some things we don't think of as nice are actually really beautiful if we think about them in a slightly different way.

Pavonis: Yeah, that was a huge motivator in wanting to pursue this story. Because I do think brown is a really beautiful color.

Jessica: I do too! All right. Let's talk a little bit about your submission journey to kick us off. It's been a couple of years since we were on sub for this book and I'm curious about how you reflect on that time now. And the way that this book sold isn't really the typical submission narrative. So I think maybe some other people will be interested to hear how it all came together.

I'll summarize it briefly: the first story we sent out was actually another book you wrote called ANGEL DISCOVERS HIS ART. It was on submission for about nine months. And in that time you did two R&Rs – which means "revise and resubmit" – that's when an editor really likes a story but wants the author to make some changes before they continue to bring it through the acquisitions process. And you also did a really smart thing, and you wrote another story, A RAINBOW IN BROWN. We shared RAINBOW with a select group of editors… and you ended up doing an R&R for that book, too. So in the course of this crazy nine months – your first time on submission – you're doing all these revise and resubmits.

The editor who worked with you on the R&R for RAINBOW was so lovely and gave you really good notes, but it didn't end up coming together with her. Of course, the story ends happily because ultimately we wound up selling RAINBOW, ANGEL, and a third untitled book to Jess Harold at Holt Macmillan. Jess was a huge fan of your work from the moment she saw it. So I think it all came together beautifully. 

But I wonder how you were feeling throughout the course of that nine months when you look back on it now? To me, outwardly, you seemed cool as a cucumber. You're rolling with everything, you're flexible, you're optimistic. But I'm wondering if you could walk us through your emotions during that time.

Pavonis: This is such a memory blast because I feel like this journey started in 2020 in pandemic lockdown. I was working on the untitled book and I felt really passionate about that one. And as you were saying, that one got revised, and then I was working on ANGEL DISCOVERS HIS ART which also went back into revisions. But I think starting with that untitled one and then having to pivot into ANGEL was the first step in realizing this is going to be a little bit more of a process than I might have expected originally. 

And this wasn't my first time trying to dip my toes into authoring and illustrating a children's book. I had tried a few years in the past and didn't really know exactly how to reach out to even an agent at that time. So there was also a little bit of patience involved in that too. I feel like that was the biggest takeaway, patience. 

I remember early on in our relationship you had said ‘don't quit your day job’ because it's probably going to be some time before you even get to the point of making books your day job. 

Jessica: Yeah.

Pavonis: So I had a day job! And then I started going back to school as well. I had both of these things to keep my mind occupied while I was working on this. You kind of switch gears during that waiting period, so that anxiety of, Do they like it? Are we going to progress with this? Is someone going to pick this up? That is alleviated. If I didn't have either of those things, I do think that it would have been a bit different as far as my emotional state goes.

Jessica: I guess one of the positive things about doing all of those R&Rs is that you are in perpetual motion. Glass half empty is, Here we go again. But glass half full is, I'm getting more feedback. I have another action step to move this forward. It feels tangible. It's concrete. And I think you also created that momentum for yourself when you started working on another story. ANGEL was out of our control while we were waiting for feedback, but you manifested something for yourself. You were like, Okay, on to the next thing. I'm going to work on the next book.

I think that you actually strengthened your pitch when we had both of these really lovely stories together. Getting a three book deal is pretty tough in the market right now, and you were able to do that. And I wonder if that's because seeing both RAINBOW and ANGEL helped editors view the long relationship that they could have with you as a creator.

Pavonis: Yeah, I do feel like the three stories really evolved hand in hand and it wasn't quite the expectation. I thought that A RAINBOW IN BROWN was going to go in a completely different direction from my first inception of the idea. So I do think that being able to bounce between those – especially the third untitled story – did help inform it to a degree.

Jessica: That's a really excellent segue, because one of the questions I wanted to ask you was if you thought the process of developing the other books – ANGEL and the untitled book that we worked on first – informed you creating RAINBOW and revising it during the course of those R&Rs that we did.

Pavonis: Originally the start of RAINBOW was almost like a scavenger hunt. It was a character that’s out exploring, and the environment is the storytelling factor and the draw. And it was starting off from that point of what we had mentioned earlier – of calling attention to the beautiful things that surround us that are brown. And sometimes how we overlook them.

You hear the saying brown is beautiful. And we use that when we talk about people primarily. Our hair, our skin, our eye color. Being brunette and having brown eyes, that was something that I experienced my entire life. 

But we don't think about it as much when it comes to the things that are around us. Animals or gemstones or parts of the natural world. And I think that that's something that's really important when we think about brown in another context. I wanted to encourage people to embrace that mentality. It's not just beautiful in one instance, it's beautiful in all of them. And there's so much nuance and so much that you can enjoy in that.

So working on the other books and the feedback from you and everyone that we had spoken to throughout this process really helped RAINBOW evolve from something that was environmentally based to something that was a lot more personal.

I remembered seeing kids trying paint and making the color brown over and over again. That was something that clicked in my mind and all of a sudden these two ideas – kids working with the color brown, and seeing it out in your environment – they just came together. It was magnetic. So I think that that really helped push the story of A RAINBOW IN BROWN forward.

Jessica: I love that. You've mentioned to me that real-life inspiration from teaching art to kids and how it inspired A RAINBOW IN BROWN. And I think that's probably why the story feels so authentic to kid-logic and kid-behavior.

Pavonis: My time teaching art to kids was at a summer camp. I was helping to facilitate activities that the kids would do while they were at camp. So it wasn't always about the art teaching process as much as it was doing a fun and engaging activity that kids could really find enjoyment in. And then at the end of their trip have something that they could cherish and enjoy that has all their memories in it. And one of the things that’s big I'm sure across all camps is tie-dye.

Every single session of camp, every single week and sometimes on the weekends, we would be doing tie-dye with kids. And especially with the younger kids, they've got a bottle of every single color in front of them.

Jessica: Maximalist tie-dye design.

Pavonis: Yes! There was a little bit of encouragement that you were to limit yourself to only a couple of colors, because you didn't want the children to experience when they unfurled their beautiful tie-dye T-shirt, these muddy colors. 

And I remember that myself and a couple of the other staff members were the most excited by the ones where all the kids went wild with all the colors. Where they could just not stop themselves from grabbing every single one and pairing the green with the orange and the purple with the yellow. And if you're not familiar with color theory, once you read this book, maybe it will help you out, but those colors make brown. And on tie-dye you get to see all of these nuances in the color. So it's not just like you've got a solid dyed brown shirt. You've got all of these mottled, beautiful shades. It's like looking at a forest floor. Being able to pick out a leaf that has a reddish tone in it versus a piece of moss that's a little bit more green but still has the natural neutral brown tones.

So I thought that those shirts were so beautiful, and it felt like a shame to try to encourage kids to limit that in order for them to have these solid bright colors. When it was a little bit more fun to find where those colors mixed and became something that was really interesting to look at and really nuanced. And I thought that it was nicer to encourage the kids to see that and appreciate what we might otherwise call flaws in their work. To be able to appreciate that and be able to see that this is something that is completely unique to what you've created. And look at how much beauty there is in all of these areas where these colors have overlapped.

Jessica: Did you find that the kids themselves would be driving a little bit of disappointment in that mottled brown, or do you think that was more us as adults projecting? Because one of the things I love is that in your book, Josephine herself is the one who discovers that she loves the brown after the paint palette incident.

Pavonis: I do not remember a single instance of a child being really upset with the colors that they had come out with. So I think that it was for the most part on the staff and that is kind of why I wanted this to be Jo's journey. I wanted her to be the one to make those decisions and to have the freedom to explore what she did and didn’t like. I didn't want to have a lot of external input for her muddying that.

Jessica: Let's talk a little bit about the technique that you used to illustrate the book. Because before you started working on RAINBOW, your children's portfolio was mostly illustrations that you created digitally. But you decided to go in a different direction for this book. Can you tell us a little bit about your process and the technique that you used for the illustrations? And why you decided to push yourself in that direction when you're creating the art for RAINBOW? 

Pavonis: Yeah, so the answer to this is pretty multifaceted. There was a part of me that was not as interested in the idea of sitting in front of my computer and not being able to look at the piece in different lighting and just kind of like being very stationary –

Jessica: Such a 2021 mood…

Pavonis: Yeah, and also there was a part of it that was really technical where I was like, my tablet that I used for digital art is about six by four inches. And I wanted to be illustrating a little bit larger than that. So didn't really want to be sitting at a computer and working on my tablet so much.

And I was also at the same time revisiting a lot of the books that I really enjoyed growing up, or a lot of the books that I would see on the shelves going into bookstores. And the things that I'm finding that really have stayed with me from my childhood, and the things that I’m most excited about when I'm seeing them on the shelves that are being published currently, are books that are done in traditional art mediums. And I feel like that has really grown a lot. I have a couple of books on my shelves now that are made with plasticine clay and photographs which is amazing to me. Or little shadow cutouts and stuff like that. There's so much that people are doing, but especially looking at the work of David Kirk who had done Miss Spider’s Tea Party and being able to see a nuance and color and this tactile quality to the work. I didn't want to lose that. And while I felt I could recreate some of those textures digitally, it felt like, if I'm going through all of this effort, why not paint?

Specifically for A RAINBOW IN BROWN, it was gouache and a little bit of watercolor and oil pastels. And that also kind of brings me to the next part of this: as I was playing around for more personal illustration purposes, I was doing a lot of gouache and acrylic with oil pastels being layered over at the top of them. And I was finding that the oil pastels, if you applied one color and then went over in another color you could see better than painting or sometimes even with colored pencil, the little flecks of the previous color used. 

And that reminded me of the tie-dye process where you're seeing all of these little eddies of color that you could use, but from a distance it's creating all of these new colors that you can see and enjoy. And I thought that thematically went really well with what was being discussed in the book.

Jessica: Absolutely. Yeah, I think that's the real stroke of genius with the technique that you used for this book. Especially when you get into the latter pages where Jo is combining purple and yellow to make brown for example – in that illustration that looks brown, you do see little flecks of yellow and purple. It looks brown, but it brings those colors through. And I think it will connect the dots for kids, as well as just being very beautiful and multi-dimensional, which is what the whole book is about, like you said.

I have another question for you. Do you have any favorite little moments or hidden Easter egg type details in the book? I have one that I'm wondering if it’s something I'm imagining or if it's real. Are these little figures Angel’s parents from ANGEL DISCOVERS HIS ART?

Pavonis: Oh my goodness. I was doing a lot of character design at the same time between the two books. So I don't know if it was intentional! Yes. I do like it there.

Jessica: Maybe it's a subconscious cameo.

Pavonis: Probably a little bit of a subconscious thing because I'm designing these background characters for BROWN, and at the same time I am working on the stuff for ANGEL. So It would make sense.

Jessica: Well tell me, what are your favorite details? There must be some little elements in the story that mean something to you that maybe readers won't pick up on unless you point them out to us. Is there anything?

Pavonis: The illustration that I'm most excited about, especially when I come back and look at it now that it's all printed and nice, is primarily the food page. That for me is my favorite. I guess that's my Easter egg – these are foods that I really love. There's a pumpkin pie in there, and I'm learning Spanish, but pan de muerto is one of the breads that's in there. It's a bread that's specific to The Day of the Dead, and it's this really soft loaf and it's got this cross on top that's made of other pieces of bread. And you can pull those off and eat those, and sometimes there's a little sugar coating on top.

I'm not a big fan of bread for the most part, but pan dulce especially, that was something that I feel very fondly towards. So I think that there is actually multiple pieces of pan dulce in there. But those in specific are ones that I'm really pleased with the way that they look illustrated – I think that the texture is just fantastic on those if I may toot my own horn on that. But also they're pieces that are really cherished by me because cultural identity is something that I wanted to embrace in this in  a way that’s recognizable for my audience but not too heavy-handed.

Jessica: Yeah. It's incidental. If it relates to readers' lives, they're going to pick up on it, but for everyone else it's just a beautiful spread of food.

Pavonis: And maybe if they see it out in the world in a grocery store or at a bakery, then it's like, I've seen that before! And now maybe I'm a little bit more curious about trying that. So that's something that I was really excited about. It's such a recognizable loaf.

Jessica: As a big snacker. I really love that your favorite part of this book is food. I relate to that.

For my last question, I was inspired by one of my favorite podcasts, Pop Culture Happy Hour. At the end of each episode all the panelists do a rapid fire list of random things that are making them happy this week. And it's one of my favorite things. So I wondered if we could do a quick variation of that, and if you could share something that's inspiring you right now. It could be inspiring your creative life; it could be inspiring you in any aspect of your life. What's something that is speaking to you right now?

Pavonis: This might be a little bit silly…

Jessica: Bring it on!

Pavonis: I'm sure that my partner is sick of me bring home rocks, but I've been really interested in specifically pieces of chert. And there are a lot of fossilized little pieces of crinoids that wash up on the shores of Lake Michigan, and that's really close by. So I'm always on the shoreline picking up these pieces of chert and pieces of little fossil things. So I'm really excited about those. I'm excited about chert in specific. Chert is related to agates and jasper and calcedony and flint. They're all pretty much the same material. And here’s a little science fact to whoever might be listening to this, but they're all made up of basically what creates sand. Which is little diatom skeletons. And diatoms are these tiny little plankton that live in the waterways and their skeletons are made out of silica. So it's the same thing that makes glass. And as the geological processes happen and the water permeates this it becomes what is called a siliceous ooze.

Jessica: “Siliceous ooze” is incredible.

Pavonis: And then forms these rocks. They're varying levels of precious stones, to functional objects with flint, and that's what I'm really excited about.

Jessica: Amazing, you're going to have to send me a photo of some of your chert so that I can include it at the bottom of the post, I'm very curious now. And I bet everyone who just heard you describe a siliceous ooze needs to see it as well.

Pavonis: Will do. I'll send you some pictures of my favorite rocks.

Jessica: Thank you again so much, Pav, for joining me on my brand new baby substack. It's been so wonderful to chat with you. And happy book birthday again to A RAINBOW IN BROWN! I hope it really makes an impact with readers. It's such a lovely book.

Pavonis: Thank you! Happy birthday to A RAINBOW IN BROWN!

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In short, it's a low-code cloud database software that's mapped onto a spreadsheet. It looks and functions like a leveled-up spreadsheet, but it's actually a database underneath, so you can do a lot of cool things with it that aren't possible in spreadsheet programs like Excel.

I think it's easiest to understand how Airtable works by seeing it in action. So let's take a look at some screenshots.

Here's a little slice of my Airtable base that tracks my clients' books. This is what's called a grid view.

We're going to unpack what “grid view” means further down so don't worry about that yet.  For now, just note that this looks an awful lot like a spreadsheet, yes? But a bit prettier and more elaborate.

Airtable's grid view is like its backbone. Every table needs to have at least one grid view1. I don't think grid views are technically where info is stored in Airtable, but I like to think of it that way in my brain. Grids are the foundation on which everything else in Airtable is built.

In the grid view, each row is called a record, and each column is called a field. This is where we start to deviate from normal spreadsheets and get into Airtable's database underpinnings.

Rows are called records in Airtable because they don't actually function like rows in an Excel grid. In Airtable (and in databases generally, I believe), each record is its own data set. Records are the building blocks of Airtable.

The left-most field (column) of a record is called the primary field. The primary field is essentially the title of the record’s data set. It describes the information contained within the record, and ideally there should be a unique name for each record. In my grid example above, the primary field is the title of each book. All the information in each record is describing that book.

Of course, lots of normal spreadsheets are organized this way too. So what's the difference between a record and a row?

The answer is mutability. With a record actually grouping a set of data together into a unit, that data can be transformed in all different kinds of ways. For example, in Airtable, each record can be expanded to display the information vertically in a list, instead of in the horizontal grid view.

I love expanding records, especially to input a lot of data about a particular record at once (like when I’ve sold a book and am adding it to my system), or when I'm trying to focus on reviewing the data for one particular record and I don't want to get distracted or confused by lots of other info in a grid view.

But expanding records is only one small way you can transform data in Airtable. There are 6 other types of views, in addition to the grid view. For example, you can transform your data into a gallery view:

… plot dates in a calendar view:

… or organize records in a kanban view:

And this is only the tip of the iceberg. There are lots more ways to view and organize your data in Airtable – even beyond the 7 types of views that you can see on the bottom left of all these screenshots. (But that's another post for another day.) Airtable describes views like this:

A view is just a different way of looking at the same underlying data. This means that if you edit the data in a record while in one view, it will change that data for all views since all views are looking at the same record. Whenever you're looking at your data in Airtable, you're always looking at your data through a view. Even if you're looking at your data through the default "Grid view" that comes with every new table, you're still looking at your data through a view.2

And that's the best part about Airtable: everything is connected. You can toggle between different views with a single click and update data in any view, and it updates everywhere. You can drag records around the calendar view to update date fields instead of keying in numbers. You can drag and drop records into different columns of a kanban board to change status fields. And so on.

Hopefully you are all thinking that this is pretty cool! And maybe you're getting ideas about how you might want to upgrade some of your own spreadsheets? Hooray! I have tricked you into getting excited about spreadsheets. Muahaha. Luckily you are in the right place, because I, too, find this very exciting3.

But before you run off and create your Airtable account, let me unpack a few more terms and features.

Anyone who cheekily scrolled down to the footnotes knows that tables are groups of records. They're the little tabs at the top of all those screenshots – basically the equivalent of an Excel sheet inside a workbook.

Bases are groups of tables. They create an ecosystem of data – basically the equivalent of an Excel workbook file. (What you're seeing in the screenshots above is my Books & Clients base.) Records and data in different tables within the same base can be connected, but information in different bases is separate and can only be connected with the paid plans of airtable4. (Let's not worry about that now though, and just consider bases as totally separate ecosystems.)

Workspaces are the top-level organization of Airtable. They contain bases, and that's it. Your payment plan is tied to workspaces. If your base lives inside a Free plan workspace, then that base has the capabilities and features associated with a free plan. If you have 5 bases within one Free plan workspace, then all 5 of them are on the free plan.

Each Airtable account can have any number of workspaces that you want, but in most cases, you probably only want to have one. The reasons are complicated, so I'll go into more detail in a future post. For now, if you're running off to sign up for Airtable as soon as you finish reading this post, just create a free workspace and stick all your bases in it.

Last but not least! I wanted to circle back to fields. I already mentioned that fields are the vertical columns of a grid view, but then I whizzed off and started talking about records and views before I could dig into what makes fields special and different from mere columns.

Fields are the containers that store your data within each record. There are many different types of fields that can be used to store and display your data in different ways.

There is of course, the vanilla/straightforward field type for text. But you can also set field type to store attachments (like the cover images in my examples above), dates, checkboxes, select fields, formulas, and lots of other options.

The magic behind setting fields to hold specific types of data in specific ways allows Airtable to transform your data into different views – for example, date fields can be used to create calendar views, and kanban boards are organized around single select fields.

But there are smaller benefits too, like being able to key in or adjust dates in date fields via a little calendar that pops up when you click them, or expanding long text fields to a pop up window where you can see all the text within that field.

There are dozens of types of fields, and we'll definitely dive deeper into many of them in future newsletters.

But for now, I hope this gives you the gist of how Airtable works. Drop any questions you have in the comments! And stay tuned for more scintillating spreadsheet content next month.

If you're reading this, then you've probably joined me right at the start of my substack journey. So I want to be honest: I'm not much of a writer¹.

I have a degree in Writing, Literature, and Publishing, but I managed to make that almost entirely about the Literature and Publishing. I think the last time I've stared down a blank page to write creatively was for my college admissions essay.

But I really love children's books and representing illustrators, and after working in children's publishing for almost 15 years, I've learned a lot that I'd like to pass along. (And I am not into social media or algorithms.) So I'm going to give this newsletter thing a shot! I hope I'll get better at it as we go.

There are a lot of smart people who are sharing their knowledge of the publishing industry in various places (including here on substack!). You should check out those sources too. Maybe one day I'll write a post about some of my favorite resources.

But I've found there isn't quite as much out there specifically for children's book illustrators. So that's what I'm going to focus on here!

Oh, and one more thing. I also really love making color-coded spreadsheets.

I've used airtable – a cloud software that's like a leveled-up spreadsheet – for a while, and I really leaned into it when I became a literary agent in 2020. I use it for just about everything now, and while I'm still constantly learning new things (I frequently have to call in IT support2 when creating new formulas) I know a few good tricks.

I'm planning to write about:

• How I use airtable in my professional life as a literary agent (though I may occasionally throw in some of my recreational spreadsheets to spice things up);

• Various information about traditional children's publishing that I want illustrators to know, from querying tips to advice on how to have a long career making books, and everything in between;

• And occasional interviews with my incredibly talented clients to celebrate their books!

I hope you'll consider subscribing! You can choose to get all my posts delivered right to your inbox, or only receive certain types of posts.3

Truthfully, this is as much a research project as it is a passion project. A number of my clients are substack-curious4, so I want to learn more about this new platform myself too. And what better way to do that than to dive right in?

So without further ado – welcome to art agenting & airtable. I'm really happy you're here!