Hurry Up and Wait, Part I
Timetables for Trad Publishing and Other Publishing Services
Good morning and welcome to Shelf Life, a Substack nobody asked for but hopefully everybody is glad to get. Today’s episode, as I alluded on Tuesday, is on why everything takes so hecking long in traditional publishing. Even if you don’t intend to dip your script into the turbulent waters of trad, I urge you to read anyway. When self-publishing authors avail themselves of editorial services like copyediting, page composition, cover design, and proofing, they may encounter some of the same delays that leave trad-publishing authors scratching their heads.
Let’s say you’ve put the finishing touches on your manuscript, polished it to the fullest extent of your capability, and sent it off to an editor at a publishing company. Nevermind that we skipped a few steps here like securing an agent. In this simplified allegory we’re just going straight to the editor. Good news! The editor loves your manuscript and is interested in signing you to a contract. The projected publication date? Two or three years hence.
It probably didn’t even take you two or three years to write your manuscript. I mean, or maybe it did. I’m not judging. But either way, two or three years from when the editor gives you the thumbs up to your book’s embargo date? What in the world can take that much time? If you were to self publish your book you could do it in literally 15 minutes, so what takes three years? I mean, you understood that trad would take longer because there are more people involved but that much longer?
Now, allow me to explain the title of today’s article: On top of the fact that it’s going to take years for your book to wend its way through the publishing process, every time the publisher sends the manuscript over to you for an author task, they’re going to want it back on a quick deadline that doesn’t take into account the fact that you have, you know, a day job, family obligations, a social life, and so on. If you’re expected to return your review of pages on an uncomfortably short deadline, then what’s taking so long? Is everyone at the publisher just sitting on your manuscript for months in between steps? Or are there just that many steps that checking off every step is going to take years?
It’s complicated, obviously; if it weren’t I wouldn’t be able to write a whole Shelf Life about it. When you hitch your manuscript’s wagon to a traditional publisher, there are two major factors that combine to determine when your book is going to come out. The first is process, as I discussed above, and as you probably already figured: How much time is it going to take to move your manuscript through all the editorial, production, and logistical steps needed to get it delivered to bookstores by the embargo date? The second is the editorial calendar: Taking into consideration all the other titles the publishing company is working on, when will the company’s production, marketing, and sales divisions have the bandwidth to launch your manuscript to market?
I’ll give an overview of the editorial calendar and how that works first, and then I’ll walk you through the likely editorial, production, manufacturing, and distribution steps and how long each tends to take so you can finish your morning coffee and start your day with a working knowledge of publishing timetables.
The Editorial Calendar
The editorial calendar is exactly what it says on the tin: A calendar of all the products the publisher intends to launch, and when. Products are slotted into the editorial calendar based on how long it will take them to move through the editorial, production, and manufacturing processes, but also based on:
Selling season: You don’t want to release a Halloween-themed book in May, right?
External competition: The publisher has to consider what books from competitors will be launching at the same time to compete for readers’ dollars.
Internal competition: The publisher doesn’t want to release your book too close to another book that has the same customers, as they will cannibalize each others’ sales.
Synergy: On the flip side, if there are complementary products or events on the horizon, the publisher will try to schedule your book to launch simultaneously. For instance, a publisher launching a Game of Thrones–themed cookbook to coincide with a new Game of Thrones–related television show debuting.
Imagine it’s August 2022 and you’re putting the final touches on the contract to sell your romantic fantasy manuscript, perfect for fans of Sarah J Maas and Jennifer L Armentrout, to your dream publisher. However, three months ago, another author just sold a fantasy romance manuscript to the same publisher that’s perfect for fans of Victoria Aveyard and Holly Black, and they set an embargo date for that book of September 2023.
That means the publisher will want to leave some space in the calendar between these books because, chances are, they’re going to share overlapping readership and the closer the books publish to one another, the more likely it is that readers will choose one or the other instead of both. Further, the marketing and sales staff only have so many person-hours in a week to design promotional campaigns and sell books. Publishing too many books at once splits their efforts too many ways and means lackluster marketing for someone, or maybe everyone. Finally, if one book really takes off and becomes a viral success, other books published around the same time are less likely to be noticed and sell well. Spreading them out is best for everyone involved.
The way the editorial calendar works is the publishing committee figures about how much time it will take to produce, manufacture, and ship your book, and then they start looking for a likely spot on the calendar that is later than that earliest-possible date. Sometimes—I won’t say rarely—the publisher looks at the editorial calendar and says “You know, we have a great window to sell this book but it’s sooner than production and manufacturing say they can be done.” That’s when we ramp up and do a rush schedule.
The Publishing Process
Most publishers have a set minimum amount of time it takes to produce a book. Six months, seven months, nine months, something like that. Now: Can a book be produced faster than that? Yes, absolutely. If we laid all the pieces of the process end to end with no breaks between and added up the weekdays, we’d have a much shorter schedule than the “default.” We can get even faster by moving a book through chapter by chapter and overlapping process steps.
For instance, let’s say we have a 50,000-word book in 10 chapters. I would give a copyeditor something like three to six weeks to copyedit the book, depending on expectations (eg, are we doing a light or heavy copyedit? Are they trafficking chapters to the author to review or not?). If I were really in a rush, I could break the book up into its ten 5,000-word chapters and send each chapter to a different copyeditor and have the whole thing done in a week or 10 days, saving significant time.
There are a lot of reasons why we don’t do this except in dire circumstances (like when there’s a Costco order waiting and they want the book yesterday; yes, Costco again). First, no matter how good those ten copyeditors are, they won’t do as good a job as one person editing the whole thing. There will be inconsistencies, and no one editor will have the whole book in their mind to notice things like text repeated in more than one chapter, a character’s name changing from one thing in Chapter 2 to another in Chapter 8, and so on. Second, managing ten copyeditors is ten times the work of managing one copyeditor, so the in-house project editor is using considerably more time and resources to produce this book than what’s expected and budgeted. Third, if I’m using ten copyeditors on one book, nine other books are going to have trouble securing editing services, or their editing services will be delayed because I’m tying up more resources.
When I say I will give a copyeditor three to six weeks to edit a 50,000-word book, does that mean it takes three to six 40-hour work weeks to edit 50,000 words? One hundred twenty to two hundred forty hours? No. The median pace of work for a copyeditor is 7 to 10 pages per hour for fiction (according to the Editorial Freelancers Association), and we calculate “a page” at around 270 words, so even a copyeditor at the slow end of that median pace would be done in about 26 hours, less than a full “work week” or five 8-hour days. Why does the editor need so much time?
Most copyeditors, book designers, page compositors, proofreaders, indexers, and cover designers are freelance personnel or vendors contracted by the publishing company. They are not employees of the publishing company. (Well, sometimes they are; but more often than not these are 1095 rather than W2 folks.) As a person who uses these kinds of freelance resources and also who has been this kind of freelance resource, I’m aware that most freelancers do not take only one project at a time, or handle only one client at a time. They’re usually juggling multiple projects with different deadlines and they need to get them all done in the time they have to work on editing. Some of these editors don’t make their full income freelancing and also have a part-time or full-time day job.
To sum up, it’s not reasonable to expect editorial and production freelance resources to work on your project exclusively until it’s finished—unless you’re willing to pay a steep rush rate or even a retainer.
Coming up in Tuesday’s Part Deux, I’ll go over each part of the editorial production process to help you understand how much time each part takes, why it takes that much time, and what is expected of you—the author—during each stage. I hope you have a grand weekend. Spend it writing something cool.
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