As Long As It Takes, Part I
To Publish a Book
Today and Tuesday in Shelf Life I am going to answer two common book publishing questions:
How long does it take to publish a book?
Why does it take that long to publish a book?
There’s a prevalent misconception that after the author has completed their manuscript, the hard work is over and publication—if the author intends their book for, and it is selected for, publication—is imminent. That is partly true. It’s true that the hardest work is over. Having written books and produced books for others I am very confident that writing a book is much harder. However, just because the hardest part is over doesn’t mean that all the work is over. There’s still time-consuming work ahead.
When an author chooses to self-publish a book, their book can be online and for sale in just a few minutes. It’s simple and quick to upload the manuscript to Amazon, fill in some metadata, and start selling your book. When an author publishes through a traditional publisher, on the other hand, they are likely to wait a year or more between when they hand their manuscript off to the publishing house and when that book hits shelves.
This discrepancy is one of the big selling points of self-publishing: Why wait another year—or two? Or three?—for your book to come out when you’ve already waited all this time (while you’ve been writing) to share it with the world? Why not take the speedier route?
It’s logical to assume that the reason it takes longer to publish through a trad house is because they do so many books at once, while the self-publishing author is working on just one book at a time (most of the time). You may be envisioning a queue of books, which your own darling must make its way to the front of in order to be published.
This is not the case. All traditional publishers have a pipeline of manuscripts in process and may be actively working on hundreds or thousands of titles at a time at various stages of acquisition, development, and production. Everywhere publisher for which I have worked signs books at approximately the same rate that books publish to keep a steady pipeline. For instance, if the company publishes about 100 books a month then the company signs about 100 new books a month.
All those books are moving toward publication all the time. No one at the publishing company is sitting on books, unless it’s to hold a title back for a specific embargo date, for instance, to come out on a particular date to coincide with a special event. This might happen for something like a movie tie-in releasing around the same time as the movie, or a holiday-themed cookbook publishing just ahead of the holidays.
Otherwise, the books are marching steadily to their eventual publication date. What’s taking them so long? Let’s start with a hypothetical book publishing on October 17, 2024, and track back through its production schedule to see how long it might have taken to get to this book birthday.
Embargo
A piece of media’s embargo date is the date it’s on sale, on shelves, in the wild. If a book doesn’t have a firm embargo date specified by the publisher, then when stock arrives at the bookstore it goes right out onto the shelves. If a book does have an embargo date specified—and if the staff at the bookstore take notice and respect that embargo—then the book may sit for a week or two in shipping boxes in the back room of the bookstore before it is placed on shelves.
Why would it just sit back there? If it’s ready sooner, why not make the embargo date sooner? For books with a coordinated marketing campaign, that embargo date is decided months or even years in advance, and production will try to ensure the book is in stock before that date to the best of their ability. Given the unpredictability of shipping during some times of the year, that means trying to beat the embargo date rather than hit it dead on—so that the book can be lovingly placed in a prominent location in the bookstore on the day the publisher originally promised it would be for sale and all the marketing folks told people “go out and get this book!”
A book with an embargo date of October 17 may have arrived at the bookstore as early as September 30 or October 7.
Shipping
Books ready to go to the bookstore and be placed on shelves for sale may be coming directly from the printer or they may be going to a central warehouse first to be shipped. The decision to ship to the publisher’s or distributor’s warehouse versus drop shipping depends on how many places the book needs to be, and where those places are, and how soon—oh, and, who owns the printing press. Some distributors, like Ingram, have their own printing operations and handle printing and shipping together on behalf of the publisher.
Assuming a situation like that, where stock is ground shipping directly from the printer to the retailer, the books will be in transit for about a week if they’re going to be sold in the continental United States. Our book with its embargo date of October 17, probably shipped in mid-September.
Printing
The printing press, like the publishing company, is always moving books through. Actually, when I said the publishing company moves books through “all the time,” I meant during business hours—9ish to 5something, Monday through Friday, excluding holidays.
Large-scale printing presses run around the clock. Operating the press is three-shift work. The printing press never stops running. By the time it finishes printing the last signatures of a given book, the next book is already prepared and queued up to start running immediately. The last signature of Book A comes off press and the first signature of Book B comes right behind it with no break. A printing press only stops running for maintenance, or when something breaks.
What this means is that a book may wait on queue at the printing press before its actually printed. When a manuscript and its associated materials are sent off to the printer, there’s a whole string of operations that happen there to create finished books. Prepress, printing, collating, gluing, trimming, packaging. There may be handwork involved, like three-hole drilling or spiral binding. A book doesn’t simply go on press and then come off press. There’s a whole assembly line operation.
That said, though most books are “at the printer” for two to four weeks in my experience, they’re not “on press” that whole time. When the publisher tells the printer “We’ll send a book to you for printing on August 21,” the printer will promise a ship date two to four weeks out. The printer then slots the book into their printing schedule to have it done in time to ship by the promised date.
A book with a publication date of October 17 was likely sent to press in mid-August to allow four weeks of press time plus shipping time to get it to stores ahead of the embargo date.
Final Proof Corrections
Before a book is released to the printing press, a production editor (PE) will check it over one last time for a number of things. Mainly, the PE is looking to see that the final text changes sent to the typesetter—changes requested during the author’s proof review and the proofreading process—were made correctly and didn’t introduce new errors when they were made.
The PE will also check for the things that most commonly get messed up during typesetting corrections. They’ll check folios on each page and on the table of contents to make sure each chapter begins on the page the contents say it does. They’ll check the half title page, title page, copyright page, front cover, and spine to make sure the title and the author’s name are spelled right everywhere. They’ll check running heads throughout the book. They’ll read the back cover carefully to make sure the most visible elements are perfect.
Making final proof corrections, checking them, and then releasing the book to the printer usually takes three to four weeks. A book with an October 17 publication date probably completed proofreading and author review in mid-July to make that pub date.
Author Review and Proofreading
These two stages happen simultaneously: The author and a proofreader review the proof pages, reading them and marking any last corrections that need to be made before the book goes to the printer. If the book is going to be indexed, either the author or a professional indexer creates the index at this time, as well. Proofreading and indexing can’t happen any sooner than this, because they rely on the typeset pages being near-final—no more changes to pagination of the book are allowed at this point. That means, while the publisher can still fix typos and make minor changes, major changes like adding or removing text or rearranging elements are not allowed at this stage.
Proofreading typically takes two to three weeks. The author is given the same amount of time as the proofreader to review their proofs, but might need more time depending on their schedule. The publisher is aware that the author has a day job and a personal life they need to attend to, too. For a book publishing October 17—assuming everyone had time to turn to their proof review responsibilities—proof review probably began at the end of June.
Phew, we’ve already backtracked through four months of production time and we haven’t seen anything that looks like a raw manuscript yet. How much further back will we have to go to find the author’s original submittal to the publishing company? Stay tuned next Tuesday to find out.
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