As Long As It Takes, Part II
To Make a Book
Why does it take so long for publishers to publish a book? They’re professionals, right? You’d think they’d be able to do it quicker than the author, who is most of the time not also a publishing expert.
The tailor says, the customer can have something:
Quickly
Inexpensive
Well-made
But they must pick two of three. The customer has to give up one in support of the other two. In project management, this is called the triple constraint. If you make a change to one—timeline (speed), budget (cost), or scope (quality), then one of the others must give to allow the necessary slack.
To get it done faster, what does the self-publishing author give up? Typically, the answer is—if not quality, then quality assurance. Most self-publishing authors are not making up for time with money. That is, they’re not paying a premium to get the book out quicker while still engaging in all of the editing and quality-assurance steps. Instead, they’re skipping those steps—steps like the ones I’m discussing here today—to get the book out more quickly than a traditional publisher might do.
Something to keep in mind about trad publishing is that most trad publishers would also love to rush your book to market. As book production staff, I was constantly badgered to shave time off the schedule here and there, to get the title to store shelves sooner.
The reason the publishing company doesn’t skip over the editing and production steps isn’t because they like book production to cost more money or to take more time. It’s because the publishing company’s logo is going on the spine right next to the author’s name and that’s the company’s seal of approval. That’s the company’s guarantee that this book is as well-made as we can make it.
In this brave new world of self-publishing advances, where skipping the publishing company altogether is more and more affordable and accessible, more people are coming to understand the publishing company as a gatekeeper rather than an enabler or authors. The publishing company does not exist to make books available to readers. The publishing company exists to hold back the flood of bad books from market.
When readers buy a trad-published book, part of the list price they pay is for the procession of agents, editors, and production staff who have vetted this book and found it worthwhile. That’s not to say no one vets indie titles—indies are instead vetted by the readership in the form of reviews, ratings, and social posts.
Reading a book is always a gamble, though. You don’t know that you’ll enjoy a book just because a procession of agents, editors, and production staff vetted and worked on it. A book can be editorially perfect and still not to your taste. There are pros and cons to every publishing model. I’m only arguing that, rather than seeing speed as a pro of self-publishing, authors should consider the speed of self-publishing as a trade-off.
So what all goes into producing a trad-published book that takes so long? Last Thursday, I went over the timetables for shipping, printing, proof corrections, and author/proofreader proof review. Today let’s trace the rest of the book’s journey at the publishing company backward to submission.
Typesetting
Before the author and proofreader review proofs, someone has to make the proofs. This is the typesetter (or compositor). The typesetting takes the final, edited Word document version of the manuscript and lays them out using software like Adobe InDesign or 3B2. The typesetter also creates the front matter, the table of contents, the running heads, and the folios (pagination). They style all the special elements like chapter openers, headings, and figure captions. They place any art, like figures and tables, according to best practices.
Did you know the best practice for placing art is to set it at the top of a right-hand page? This is so a reader in the store flipping through the book block will see the art (nobody flips through a book from back to front).
Typesetting typically takes two weeks in a non–rush scenario. Once a typesetter sits down to work on a manuscript, it may take them only work day or two to set the pages. However, there are never as many typesetters as there are titles, so there’s often a queue that books sit in until the typesetter is ready to work on them. Also, after typesetting, it takes some time for another person in the typesetting shop to review the proof pages for quality assurance.
Our imaginary book with its October 17 embargo date probably started the typesetting process at the beginning of June.
Copyediting
Typesetting begins when the manuscript is final. Final, final. Like manuscript_final_final_FINAL_USE_THIS_ONE.docx. No more changes can be made at this point. Typesetting may as well be chiseling the manuscript into a stone tablet. Of course, this isn’t true. Changes get made after typesetting all the time, for all kinds of reasons. But it’s a major operational pain in the backside to make changes after typesetting, so copyediting is the official last opportunity to make changes.
Copyediting is the process during which a copyeditor reviews the manuscript, edits it for style, organization, grammar, mechanics, flow, logic, and so on. Copyediting may or may not include an author review depending on how involved and substantive is the edit. Those criteria also determine how long copyediting might take. I’ve worked at trad publishers where the norm was to send a manuscript out for a light copyedit, get the edited manuscript back, and proceed to typesetting in a two- to three-week window. I’ve also worked places where copyediting included a detailed author-review phase and lasted two to three months.
Assuming an involved copyediting process that lasts two months, our book with its street date of October 17 probably began its copyediting journey in early April. As the book starts copyediting, it’s six months away from hitting store shelves.
Manuscript Preparation/Intake
Before the manuscript can go to the copyeditor, someone has to prepare the manuscript and make sure it’s “all there.” What do I mean by that? We have to make sure that
Any art (tables, figures, photos) called for in the text is included in the manuscript package.
All permissions to reuse material from another source have been cleared.
The manuscript is styled correctly and consistently throughout (ie, chapter titles are all styled the same—this is so typesetting can work with the manuscript later on).
The whole text is, you know, included—no missing chapters.
Necessary front matter is created, like the copyright page.
This is also a great opportunity for an editor or their assistant to apply for cataloging-in-publication data with the Library of Congress, to register the copyright, and handle the other administrative work that goes along with publishing a book. Oh, and, hiring a copyeditor—if the publisher works with freelance editors rather than having W2 editors on staff.
It might take an editor two or three weeks for a production editor to handle all of these items—more if there are issues like uncleared permissions or missing art. A book with an embargo date of October 17 probably transmitted to production and began intake in March.
Development
Before a book transmits to the production department for all of the above steps—plus all the ones from last Thursday—a manuscript may undergo development. Or it may not! Maybe the manuscript was good to go when it was submitted to the acquisitions editor for consideration, or maybe the acquisitions editor signed the book with the understanding that it would need more work before it’s ready for prime time. That “more work” is development.
You can read more about what happens during a developmental edit in What to Expect From Every Edit. But how long does a developmental edit take? It can vary widely depending on how much work the book needs and, critically, the author’s schedule. Developmental editing relies heavily on the author to respond to requests and prompts and is a highly collaborative effort compared with copyediting or proofreading. A developmental edit might take a month, three months, six months—or even longer.
Our title with its embargo date of October 17 probably began developmental editing in January of the year it will publish.
Acquisition
You did it. You (and your agent, if you have one) shopped a book to an editor at a publishing company, they liked it, pub committee signed off, and now it’s time for the publisher to officially acquire your title. It’s one milestone Michael—how long could it possibly take? Ten minutes?
During the acquisition process, the author and acquisitions editor will need to go back and forth on a number of items—not least is the contract, which needs to be signed and countersigned. Before signing, any final items that require negotiation need to be resolved, which may require a three-way conversation between the agent, author, and acquisitions editor. It can take time to get everybody in the (virtual) room at the same time.
Assuming everything goes smoothly, let’s plan on two weeks for the final acquisition to take place. That means our October 17 title was probably signed in December, before Christmas, of the prior year.
Publishing Committee
You might think that an acquisition editor deciding to sign your book means it’s on like Donkey Kong. But most editors will need to take the project to publishing committee (or pub committee) for approval by the publisher or imprint head.
Publishing committee is a meeting that takes place regularly—could be once weekly, every other week, or once a month—and to which editors bring the projects they would like to sign for the committee to approve. Once your editor has decided they want to sign your book, they’ll need to prepare a dossier to take to pub committee to demonstrate that your book is likely to be a strong financial prospect for the company. To prepare these materials, your editor may need to work with production, marketing, sales, and design to estimate the potential costs and revenue the company can expect from your title.
Putting together a dossier for pub committee can take several weeks. A book publishing October 17 of this year probably went to pub committee in early December of last year.
Submittal
We’ve traced the manuscript all the way back to its first foray into the publishing company—the day that the agent or author submitted the manuscript to the publishing company.
What happens when you submit your manuscript to the publishing company? That depends on whether your manuscript was slush or whether the editor expected it. If the editor solicited your manuscript based on a query, proposal, pitch, or any other prearrangement, then the editor could review your manuscript and make a decision on it fairly quickly—or they could be buried under a mountain of other solicited manuscripts.
The time it takes an editor to review and respond to a solicited manuscript can range widely—could be two weeks, could be two years. It’s unlikely to be two years if—again—the manuscript is expected and/or solicited. However, when people say it can take “three years” for a publishing company to publish a book—factor in those two years on the editor’s to-read list and the year of editorial work above.
If an agent submitted your manuscript to the editor, you hope they have a good working relationship such that your agent can poke the editor for a response if time starts dragging out. That said, editors have a lot of manuscripts to read—and they have tons of other duties besides.
Let’s say your editor is able to read your manuscript and make a decision about it within two months of when you submitted it to the publisher—at this point, your October 2024 title has been in trad publishing limbo since October 2023—a full year.
Next time someone asks, “Why does it take so long for publisher to get a book out when I can do it in 15 minutes?”—you have the answer.
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