“I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.” Mabel Chiltern in Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband
“Oh, great, a clip show. I hate clip shows. They’re just a lazy way for the writers to cash a paycheck while recycling old jokes.” Homer Simpson
Over the past ten months or so since our website went live I’ve posted a number of pieces offering unsolicited advice on a range of aspects of book publishing. While I have tried to integrate some of these into the core pages of our site, and the blog archive is available and searchable for anyone who wants to, I nevertheless thought it might be helpful to put together a bit of a roundup of our highlights so far. This isn’t wholly comprehensive, even at the time of writing, but I’ve tried to organise things a bit so they’re a bit more logical than “whatever it occurred to me to write about that week”.
The Initial Stage
Back in February I wrote a series of pieces covering the entire publishing process step by step. In week one I wrote about the early stages of the process from initial discussions with your publisher to completing your manuscript.
This piece in turn relates to several other pieces I’ve written covering these pre-production stages of publishing your book:
- Why write a book in the first place?
- When to talk to a publisher
- How to choose a publisher
- How (not) to Write your Book Proposal
- How to think about responding to reviews of your proposal
- Some thoughts on how to approach writing your manuscript
The Production stage
Because this is the stage where your publisher should be doing much of the running, there’s been less call to write about this. However, the second part of my series on the complete process covers this period in soem detail, and there are other pieces that also refer mainly to this aspect, including:
- A description of what we at Tithebarn Press do with your manuscript once it arrives with us
- A three part series on all the issues to be aware of when putting images and tables in your manuscript (and on your book cover)
- And you might be interested in looking at the realtime week by week updates on the progress on Eden’s Alternative to Appeasement as an example of a real project going through our production process —
- Week One (the manuscript was in-house and we’d begun copyediting)
- Week Two (we were on to proof reading and planning the index)
- Week Three (we’d settled on the cover design and editorial blurb)
- Not a great deal happened in weeks four and five. We were largely waiting for things to happen and didn’t post updates on the project
- Week Six (we submitted the first round of files to the printers)
- Week Seven (we sent the book to press)
- Week Eight (the ebook went live)
- Week Nine (the paperback was available)
The Publication stage
As this is where we are now with Eden’s Alternative to Appeasement, it’s the stage I’ve written the least about in the abstract. I imagine I’ll have rather more to say about it in the coming months. That said, I talked about it quite a bit in my third piece on the publishing process and several of our other updates are concerned with the more public-facing elements of publishing, and so I’ll list those here:
- Coming up with a good title for your book is a critical part of promoting it later on
- Similarly, being able to write a compelling description of your book (or better yet, multiple compelling descriptions of different lengths) is valuable when it comes to trying to sell it.
- With Eden’s Alternative to Appeasement key promotional methods we’ve experimented with are:
- Putting together a video interview with the author, Malcolm Murfett.
- Offering the first chapter of the book for free.
- Engaging readers and reviewers directly.
I hope this piece proves to be a helpful index of our publishing advice. I expect we will come back and revise it over time as our coverage expands.
In the meantime, as always, if you have a book project you would like to discuss, please get in touch via proposals@tbarnpress.com.
