You’ve finished your manuscript, now what? You’ve done all that hard work, all that revision, and now you want to publish your book.

Let’s take you through the next steps of the book production journey and the associated timeline so you can plan accordingly.

We’ll focus on hybrid publishing because traditional publishing houses are a different animal. They purchase intellectual property, thereby eliminating the author from much of the subsequent process, and they operate on a completely different timeline.

You may think you’re done writing, but, guess what, you’re probably not.

Timeline

1. Nine times out of ten, your title (and subtitle) is probably off. It may be too esoteric or clever, or generic, or confusing. A good title can take hours to create, maybe even days. If you’d like a few examples of excellent titles and subtitles, what makes them work, download them HERE.

2. Back matter (and flap matter, if you’re creating a hard back book) will take you a week or so to compose. This is the distillation of what your book is about. This is the advertisement. You’ll create at least two drafts to get this nailed down.

3. Book blurbs are the nice thing an important person says about your book, which often appear on the front and back cover, as well as in the first few pages. They take far more time to obtain than you’d imagine. Start the gathering process early. A publishing house will want these in hand before cover design. Look for a minimum of three, which can be placed on the cover of your book. More is better. The rest will go on their own page(s) inside the book. Expect to write blurbs yourself when dealing with busy people. What do you want people to say about your book? Put that down on the page. Give them a selection to choose from and allow them the opportunity to tweak the one they’ve selected.  Some people will want to read through your entire manuscript so they can give a blurb honestly, most will not want to take the time. (If you’d like an example of what to say to someone you want a blurb from, and some variations of blurbs, you can download it here.)

4. Disclaimers, which serve to limit your legal liability, and that of your publisher, is a written statement that specifies your rights and the limits of your responsibility. For example, when you take your kids to the neighborhood playscape, you’ll likely see a sign that says, “Use at your own risk.” This is a disclaimer for the owner of the playground. If something happens while you’re there — if one of your kids falls off the slide and gets hurt, for example — the owner of the playground isn’t legally liable for it. If you take the owner to court, you’ll likely lose because you saw the sign, and you knew that you were using the playground at your own risk. If you don’t know how to compose a disclaimer, model the disclaimer found in other books on the copyright page. This takes 20 minutes or so to compose.

5. Table of Contents, which lists your chapters (and sections) will change by the time you’re done. The page numbers, which you would naturally want to include, will be different in the formatted version. But put something in place for the time being. This should take you an hour. The formatter will make it look pretty, so just get something down.

6. About the Author will take you a couple of hours to compose. This can be pulled in part from the About Me page of your website, or from an assortment of your relevant bios. This section is written in third person. For examples, look at the About the Author page of other books, which is usually found at the end. Resist the urge to write your biography. Less is more.

7. Additional Resources often include suggested reading, including book titles and/or articles, as well as exercises or journaling prompts for the reader. These are usually listed alphabetically. To learn how to format them properly, you can see the next line item below.

8. When referencing other published material in footnotes, you’ll want to create a separate Bibliography, which is housed in the back beside Additional Resources. You must cite the sources appropriately. You can learn how to format these by clicking here.

9. Dedication, which is usually a few lines at the beginning of the book on its own page, tells the reader who the book is for. Dear old Mom. My children, who let me work during their soccer games. My best friend and mentor….that sort of thing. This is also a place where you can be creative. Case in point, these funny dedications.

Acknowledgments are different than a dedication. An author should list the people and organizations that made their book as good as it could be. This includes family members who lifted burdens from their shoulders, editors, designers, beta readers, researchers, mentors, agents, and friends who kept them moving forward when they wanted to give up. If you want to know an author, what kind of person he or she is, read their acknowledgements. You’ll understand their personality and their bent on life.

Step Two: Copy editing

The job of the copy editor is to make sure the text reads properly. To make sure that ideas flow logically from one page to the next, from one paragraph to the next, from one sentence to the next.

She then focuses on grammar and syntax. Is the sentence grammatically correct?  i.e. does the introductory clause correlate with the subject of the sentence? Is the verb tense consistent? Is there subject verb agreement?

She’ll pick up on overused words. We all have tics; we all rely on certain words way too much.  The glaring stuff needs to be pointed out, however, and fixed. She’ll also pick up on overused sentence structure. Does every sentence begin with a character name? Are all the sentences the same length without any variation? Do you begin every sentence with a clause? The more grievous stuff should be pointed out so you can fix it before publishing.

She’s also responsible for punctuation, and for properly formatting the bibliography, and alphabetizing the list of suggested reading. She focuses on capitalization, when to spell out the numbers, or leave them as digits, spelling in general.

She’ll also eliminate the extra space after punctuation because most of us insert two spaces after a period or question mark because that’s how we learned to type, but the industry standard is a single space.

Typically, she’ll make a first pass and includes a bunch of comments, explanations for what she did and why. Her changes will be highlighted (using track changes to edit) so you can see what she’s done.

Then the author will read through, decide if he likes the changes or not, catch some things that she didn’t notice, or that got messed up in translation.

The author sends it back to her for another pass until she has the thing ironed out. The changes get incorporated–accept all changes in track changes—into the document.

Timeline

1. Depending on the length and complexity of the book, expect a full week for first pass editing.

2. You’ll need several hours to go through her edits, answer any queries posed, and to formulate your own questions back.

3. The second pass should take a few days, depending on the copy editor’s workload.

Timeline

1. Depending on the length and complexity of the manuscript, expect a one-week turn around for the first pass.

2. Expect another one-week turn around for the second pass, post formatting.

Step Four: Interior Design

The proofread document is then sent to the interior designer (or formatter), who puts the document into a template, and incorporates the design elements requested.

The internal designer formats the manuscript, so it looks like a real book.

Before he begins, he’ll need to know the desired trim size, which we choose (KDP or any other printing company has a list of standard trim sizes).

Design elements he works with include Table of Contents, Chapter headings, subheadings, pagination—do you want the page numbers on the top of the page, on the bottom, in the center, or off to one side. Some authors want little design icons placed on each page, so he’ll design these and place them, either on every page, at the beginning of a chapter, or at the end of a chapter. He’ll design the copyright page, author’s bio, acknowledgements, appendices, and so on, making sure there are blank pages that separate these elements when necessary.

He has to make sure section pages begin on the right-hand side of the book, which is known as recto placement. He places blank pages to make sure the most important elements, like Table of Contents, begin on the right-hand side, that the appendices begin on the right-hand side, and so on.

He’ll also incorporate certain design elements, like boxed off text, or indented quotes, or bulleted text, or he’ll insert images or tables, that sort of thing. You’ll want to tell him precisely where you want these things.

Timeframe

1. Choice of trim size will depend on the printing company we go with, their options and associated prices. An hour to discuss and weigh the options and aesthetics. (KDP has standard trim sizes that work well.)

2. Design decisions including where you want the page numbers to go, if you want boxed off text, whether you want the first letter of every chapter to be one of those fancy big letters, or not, if you want images or graphs included, icons at the end of the chapter and such….this requires a few days and is best done looking at other books as models. It’s good to have a list of book models and the specific elements you’d like to incorporate to give to the designer.

3. First pass from the interior designer is usually seen in a week’s time.

4. Review of choices and a list of changes will take the author/team an hour or two to decide.

5. Second pass from the interior designer incorporating changes will take less than a week depending on the designer’s schedule.

Timeframe

You can expect to go back and forth with the cover designer until you have something that you really like. It helps to reference other book covers that you like, pointing out the elements you most specifically want. Plan on two weeks of continual back and forth.

Step Six: Uploading cover and formatted manuscript to the printers’ site

The formatter will create a specialized pdf version of the manuscript for upload; in other words, he’ll create a version KDP (or any other printing house) can read.

In tandem, the book cover designer will also upload the cover—front and back, with or without flap matter. (For a soft cover produced on KDP, the back cover will have a hole where the ISBN Number and barcode will automatically go.)

At the same time, the formatter can also create an electronic version of the book (Kindle for KDP) for upload. The book cover designer can also upload an electronic version of the cover. (Note: there are several “shops” for electronic books. Each has its own quirks and specifications. Separate formatted manuscripts and covers need to be created for each. What works on KDP will not work on Smashwords.)

KDP will print and send a galley for physical review, so any adjustments can be made before official printing.

Timeline

1. One or two days between upload and online view.

2. Ten days (or longer) for printed galley to show up on your doorstep if using KDP.

Timeline

1. If you’re using an outside printing company, expect the uploading, checking process, physical print run, and shipping to take two and a half to three months.

2. If you’re using KDP, you can have 100 books printed and shipped within a week. This is a print-on-demand service.