The publishing process for any book, whether submitted through a commercial publishing house or just knocked up by somebody sitting at the kitchen table and then uploaded to Amazon, should follow similar routes, albeit with some obvious differences.
You, an author without a publishing contract, should read through your finished manuscript slowly and several times. This is because you’ve actually written the book so you know what’s coming – or you should do, I hope. So you tend to see what you expect to see, and read what you expect to read, rather than what is actually there. That’s why it’s so critically important to take your time and read every single word, preferably aloud, because for some reason reading the book that way seems to identify errors that you’ll never find simply by looking at it on the screen of a computer.
Ideally somebody else, a person who normally reads books in that genre and not for example Auntie Gladys who only ever buys romances by Mills and Boon, unless the book is a romance of course, should then cast his or her eyes over it to make sure it hangs together as a book. Then it’s a really good idea to pay a professional editor look at it to eliminate the typos, punctuation mistakes, incorrect spellings and the like that will immediately mark the work as self-published.
Then a cover needs to be commissioned and paid for, and this cannot be done cheaply because a cheap cover again screams ‘self-published’ at the reader, and that can be the kiss of death for any book. Publication day is when the book, or more likely the e-book, is available from Amazon and possibly Kobo and elsewhere as well. And then the hard bit starts: marketing and promotion.
One slightly sobering thought about the roughly 8-9 million books currently available on Amazon is that about one third of them do not have an Amazon rating. And they don’t have an Amazon rating because nobody has ever bought one. Not even the author. And because they don’t have a rating the chance of anybody happening upon one of these books by accident is somewhere between nil and nil. That’s why having a professional cover and an error-free typescript and a proper marketing and promotional plan, and the money to follow it, are all so critically important.
Commercial publication follows broadly the same route except that Auntie Gladys will be replaced by at least one and possibly several professional readers and editors, after which the manuscript will be returned to the author for the suggested changes to be incorporated. Copyediting follows that, again with the manuscript winging its way back to the author for final approval. Typesetting follows, and the author will be invited to approve the proof pages before printing starts.
One of the things which has always puzzled me about this last phase of the process before the book goes to print is the way that unexpected errors creep in. Logically, the conversion process from my Word file to whatever exotic program the typesetters use should be electronic, a straight 1:1 digital conversion. They should take my text and simply insert it into their program, which should mean that the integrity of the text will be preserved. But actually, it isn’t. I’ve lost count of the number of tiny errors – a letter dropped out of a word, a punctuation mark that mysteriously vanishes – which appear at this stage. One that I remember is ‘what’ being changed to ‘wat’.
Very odd, and another reminder, if one was needed, that this final check of the manuscript is just as important as all of the other checks that preceded it. And the other niggle, I suppose, is that having first written the book, then gone through the editing process, then responded to the copy editor’s comments, by the time the proof pages arrive, most authors will be heartily sick of the sight of thing, and just want to see the book on the shelves in Waterstones and WH Smith.
It’s also interesting that, even after all this exhaustive editing, checking and proof-reading, both by the author and by numerous other people, there will still be mistakes in the manuscript.
In my first novel for Macmillan – Overkill – I not only had one of the characters looking through a triple-gazed window, the ‘l’ having gone missing somewhere, but I also had one of the minor characters writing something on a ‘wipeboard’ rather than a whiteboard and a ship calling at a town located some fifty miles inland thanks to my misreading of an atlas. That book took me almost a decade to get right and to a publishable standard, and Macmillan took eighteen months to revise and edit it before it hit the streets, meaning that it been read and re-read by countless people, and still nobody spotted those three mistakes.
And it’s not just me. On one of the cruises on which I was a speaker, one of the other lecturers was Jeffrey Archer, and he reminded me that it was only when one of his books had actually been published that it was discovered that he’d got the capital of Switzerland wrong. He’d said the book that it was either Zürich or Geneva – I can’t remember which – but of course it’s actually Bern.
An author cannot possibly ever spend too long or too much money on editing. And on fact-checking.
