One of the challenges of having spent nearly twenty years working in publishing, and mostly working with people who tend to have some sense of how it works, is that it can be hard to step outside of your own context to explain it from scratch to somebody who really does not have a frame of reference for it.
I attended a careers evening at the school where my wife works recently, mostly to talk to the pupils about academic publishing and editorial work. The youngsters would come up to my stand and ask something like “so what do you actually do” and I found myself having to find the right place to start. I’m not entirely sure I succeeded in this, but I certainly came up with a few different approaches. Shortly after that somebody else, from neither a publishing nor academic background, asked me to explain the entire publication process from start to finish. I think what they really wanted was more of a flow chart diagram, but the more I tried to draw it, the more I found myself thinking “but what about if this happens?” and “well this kind of depends”. I still need to draw that flow chart one day, but in the meantime I thought writing something closer to a narrative might be more fruitful.
So rather than follow up on the last couple of weeks’ updates with something short and succinct, I’m going for something if anything even more sizeable. For the next three weeks we’re diving into the publishing process from start to finish. Except that as we’ll discuss there really is no discrete starting point, and in many respects no real end point either. Still, there is a process and that’s definitely something we can try to lay out.
Caveat emptor as always with this sort of thing, I can only really speak from my experiences in the academic and education sectors, and even then some things inevitably vary between publishers, so by no means should any of this be taken as gospel.
Overview
I’m going to begin by zooming out to the view from 10,000 metres and breaking the overall process down into three fairly discrete stages. Then we’ll look in more detail at what each stage entails. As you might anticipate, these three stages will then be the dividing lines for each of our updates over the next three weeks, with each post focussing on one of them in turn.
Origination
This is the stage that I personally was most involved with when working in Editorial for my various previous employers. I’m not calling it “editorial” here because it’s too easily confused with “editing”, which refers to a number of different parts of the publishing process, many of them actually under the Production stage. It’s probably easiest to understand this as the stage beginning with the first conversation between an author and an editor, and ending when the author’s final manuscript is complete and ready to be made into a book. We’ll be looking at this in more detail today.
Production
At most publishers everything that happens at this stage would be handled by the Production department. This is the part of the process where a “raw” manuscript becomes a book. It includes some very obvious elements, such as copy-editing and typesetting, and some slightly less so, like cover design, indexing and setting up ISBNs. We’ll look at this in more detail next week.
Post-publication
As the name suggests, this refers to everything that happens once the books (in whatever formats) have been produced. This would include promotion, marketing and sales, but also more back-end elements like inventory and corrections. You’ll have to wait until the week after next for us to tackle this one.
Getting into it
Where I’ve got into difficulty trying to describe these processes in the past, it’s been at least partly because I have described them in the abstract, so let’s take a specific example and look at how this specific hypothetical project would work its way through the pipeline. As previously I’m going to default to Terminator references, because they keep me amused, so our hypothetical author is one Sarah Connor, and she has an idea for a book provisionally entitled Resisting the Rise of the Machines: Will Skynet “be back”? We’ll use this book and Sarah Connor as our reference point throughout these posts, and I’m afraid there will be inconsistent use of tenuously Terminator-themed headings throughout.
Origination, in detail
Because it is by definition the phase in which something ephemeral becomes something material, this is the most abstract and least linear of the three phases. It is also the phase in which authors have to do the most work. I picture the process as a funnel, taking a wide range of ideas about premise, structure style, and bits of existing writing, and concentrating them into a single linear and consistent flow.
Ideas
Books can begin in many ways, but their genesis generally falls into one of three categories. First there are the books that start with an author who has an idea. This is the way things usually work for fiction books, but is not uncommon in other types of book publishing including academic books. Second, there are the books that start with a Commissioning Editor, who approaches a prospective author with an idea for a book they would like them to write. Third, there are the books that start somewhere in-between, for instance with a Commissioning Editor and an academic having a chat about possible ideas, with a firm idea then emerging from the conversation. I’ve written before about when to get in touch with a publisher, so I won’t retread that here. For our example we’ll assume that Sarah has approached us at Tithebarn Press with her book idea, looking for an independent publisher less likely to be in hock to Cyberdyne systems.
Planning
After an initial chat about her ideas, we’ll ask Sarah to put together a formal proposal (she could read about how to do this and how we’ll go about reviewing it in our previous updates). Aside from the quality assurance element of the review process, this also acts as a road map for the book, laying out its structure, its objectives and a timeline for writing it. Sarah has a hard deadline of Judgment Day, so she’s going to work backwards from there in setting her milestones.
This plan needs to be agreed with us, and aside from whatever feedback we’ve received from reviewers and discussed with Sarah, we might also have suggestions about any element of her plan. We want to make sure that the style and structure will meet the needs of Sarah’s readers, and we also want to ensure that the milestones in her plan will work with our own publishing lead time, and that the length of book she’s planning will be viable. We’ll also agree with Sarah when we’ll check in with her on those milestones.
There is also the possibility at this stage that we won’t be able to agree a plan with Sarah, which might be because our reviewers were particularly sceptical, or because we’re unable to agree on the particular direction of the book. This is a natural part of the process, it’s clearly necessary for both author and publisher to be confident that we have a plan we agree on before we can move ahead. Equally, a publisher deciding not to proceed isn’t necessarily a reflection of their view of the quality of Sarah’s work, only of their view on whether it meets their particular requirements and of their ability to sell it.
Contract
Also referred to as a Publishing Agreement, this is our formal written agreement with Sarah, which sets down the quantitative plans for the manuscript (length, final deadline and so on). It outlines how rights will be apportioned in the work, so that she retains fundamental ownership, but we have the right to publish, license and sublicense the material. It sets our key obligations to each other and explains what will happen in scenarios such as Sarah’s death, our bankruptcy, or either of us opting to terminate the arrangement at a later stage. I’ll no doubt write about Publishing Agreements in more detail in a future update. In the meantime what’s most important to understand is that this is the moment where Sarah and her publisher are formally committing to work together. From this point onwards, both parties are operating on the expectation that Sarah will write a book and that we will publish it.
Delivery
This is the stage with the most work for Sarah. It’s up to her to complete her manuscript according to the timetable and plan that she agreed with us. We’ll check in with her as we reach the milestones we agreed, and we’ll be available to give feedback on parts of her draft as it comes along. I’ve written more about this stage of things here.
This can be a lonely process, and it’s always easier to write when you know someone is waiting to read, so we make sure to both be in touch regularly and to respond to any drafts quickly. Once we have the manuscript in house, we move on to the production phase, which we’ll cover in some detail next week. In the meantime, I’ve written before about what we do with your manuscript here.
If you’d like to talk to us about potentially beginning a book project, do get in touch at proposals@tbarnpress.com.
