- Advance: The upfront sum of money an author receives before their book is published. Afterwards, authors only start earning royalties (see below) once that initial sum has been surpassed through sales. In The Ending Writes Itself, the invited authors are offered the remainder of Arthur Fletch's one million dollar advance for completing his final novel.
- Agent: A professional who represents an author by reviewing submissions, helping refine manuscripts, finding publishers, and negotiating contracts. Agents also handle subsidiary rights. Many publishers do not accept unsolicited manuscripts, making agents a necessary intermediary, and the agent gets a percentage off the book sales. In the novel, Eleanor Vandenberg is not only Arthur Fletch's agent, but the most successful literary agent in the world, her authors making up "half of the bestseller lists."
- Backlist: An author's or publisher's titles that have been on the market typically for over a year and that are still in print after a year—as opposed to the upcoming and newly published titles (which make up the frontlist). In The Ending Writes Itself, Fletch's backlist fills an entire library.
- Copy: Promotional material written to encourage readers and booksellers to acquire a book, usually containing a pitch of the plot. In the novel, a publishing assistant is asked to write copy for a manuscript.
- Copyeditor: A publishing professional that checks, corrects, and improves a manuscript's grammar, style, tone, and spelling before it moves to layout/typesetting to make sure it is accurate, consistent, and clean of errors. In The Ending Writes Itself, it's said that Arthur "would throw a fit if a copyeditor changed an em dash to a semicolon or, god forbid, questioned the potency of a line."
- Ghostwriter: A person hired to write a book that will be published under someone else's name, often a well-known figure. Ghostwriting is quite common in commercial fiction, especially in franchises—books by James Patterson and Tom Clancy titles are now written by (or in conjunction with) ghostwriters, for example. In The Ending Writes Itself, the characters are given the opportunity to act as ghostwriters for Arthur Fletch by completing his final manuscript.
- Manuscript: The complete draft of a book before it's edited, nowadays usually submitted to an editor or agent as a digital document. In the novel, the seven authors are presented with Fletch's unfinished manuscript.
- Midlist: Books that fall between bestsellers and the lesser-known titles. They generate moderate sales and usually receive less marketing and support from the publisher. In the novel, all seven authors are "stuck" in the midlist, described as a sort of "publishing purgatory."
- Pen name: A pseudonym used by an author to conceal their real name. While historically used by women disguising their gender in order to enter the literary world, pen names are now used for branding, privacy, or to write across genres. This novel itself is published under the shared pen name Evelyn Clarke, as are the works of characters Sienna and Malcolm, who write together as Penn Stonely.
- Proofreading: The final stage before publication, in which the laid-out/typeset text is checked for typographical and formatting errors before printing.
- Out of print: A book is out of print when the publisher no longer produces or distributes it. Rights may revert to the author at this time. In the novel, Malcolm's books go out of print, so he buys all the remainder (leftover) copies and stores them.
- Query: A pitch sent to an agent or editor to persuade them to read a manuscript. It typically includes a summary of the plot and key details about the work.
- Royalties: The percentage an author earns from each book sale, typically based on the retail price. Fletch's yacht is fittingly named The Royalty Check.
- Saga: A series of books (usually more than three) dealing with the same story, characters, or literary universe. In The Ending Writes Itself, Arthur Fletch dies before finishing the fifth and last book of his saga focusing on detective Julia Petrarch.
- Subsidiary rights: The rights to produce and publish a book in formats beyond its original print form. They are usually granted by the publisher or agent to third parties, for reasons including translation, film and television adaptations, audiobooks, merchandising, spin-offs, etc.
- Trope: A recognizable storytelling device, theme, or character type. The novel includes an article by Kenzo discussing common horror tropes, such as the "final girl."
In the novel, all seven authors have queried Eleanor Vandenberg at some point, which initiates their invitations to Skelbrae Island and ultimately sets the murder mystery in The Ending Writes Itself in motion...
The moral of the story—if you're an author, be careful who you send your manuscript to!
Person reviewing a proof page, photo by Ron Lach courtesy of Pexels
Filed under Books and Authors
This article relates to The Ending Writes Itself.
It first ran in the April 8, 2026
issue of BookBrowse Recommends.
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The Ending Writes Itself is a murder mystery, but also a sharp satire of the publishing industry. In its final pages, a character observes: "Publishing pretends that it cares about discovering talent, fostering talent, but it's just a machine, chewing people up, spitting out their work. If this weekend has taught me anything, it's that nobody's happy. Nobody wins."
