Hurry Up and Wait, Part II
Trials, Tribulations, and Timelines of Editorial Production
Welcome to Tuesday, a day second in horribleness only to Monday. Today is a very special Tuesday, because I finished today’s Shelf Life last week and I feel really smug about it.
Last Thursday I discussed how the publishing company’s editorial calendar helps them plan their publishing itinerary months and years in advance, and then we talked a bit about how publishers go about securing freelance editorial services to get books through the production process in a timely manner so they don’t have to rearrange their editorial calendar every time somebody misses a deadline.
Today we’re going over the major parts of the editorial production process: The things that happen after your editor is happy with your manuscript, and doesn’t want any more revisions from you, and you’ve inked that contract and set a publication date. Let’s take a look at the stages your manuscript will go through and talk a bit about how long they take and what’s expected of you, the author, along the way.
Copyediting
Not all publishers handle copyediting deadlines the same. I’ve worked with publishers who followed a formula of 20,000 words per week, so copyeditor would receive a 5-week deadline for a 100,000-word book or a 10-week turnaround for a 200,000-word book. Other publishers I’ve worked with expect every manuscript back in 2 weeks as a general rule, with flexibility for unusually long manuscripts.
Depending on the publisher and the workflow, authors may be asked to review copyedits chapter by chapter, or they may be asked to review edits for the whole book at once when it’s done, or they may not be given an opportunity to review edits at manuscript (in this case, the copyedit review is combined with proof review and heavier proof corrections are expected).
Your production editor, project editor, or project manager—whoever is in this role at the publisher you’re working with—should let you know when to expect copyedits for review and how. Will the copyeditor work directly with you via email? Will the files come through your production editor as an intermediary? Will you get everything at once, or will you get one or a few chapters at a time? Will you review one pass, or two?
If the copyeditor or production editor intends to send chapters for review as they’re completed, you’ll start seeing content sooner then if they wait to send you the whole thing when it’s done. If you receive chapters, you’ll have short deadlines to turn around each chapter, and they may overlap. If you receive the entire edited manuscript at once, you’ll have a longer deadline. When you have returned all your comments, query answers, stets, and so on to the copyeditor, there’s usually a short wait of a few days or a week while the copyeditor “cleans up” the files—incorporates your feedback, clears all the redlining, and prepares the files for composition. You may be asked to review the clean files again, but it’s unlikely. Then the files are off to comp.
Page Composition and Proofing
Page composition means the same thing as typesetting. The text of your manuscript will be laid out in the design of the printed book pages. This involves importing the full text, applying manuscript styles (so your headings look like headings and your scene breaks are all where they’re supposed to be), and troubleshooting things like bad breaks, dropped text, and incorrect formatting.
The compositor has a pipeline of projects for multiple clients. Even though a skilled typesetter can sit down at 9am and have your novel typeset by lunch, there’s usually a queue of work that has to make its way through intake, prep, comp, and QC before the proofs make it back to the publisher. In my experience book proofs usually come back in about two weeks. It can take longer for a large or complex book (four-color interior, lots of graphics, and so on).
This doesn’t mean the author should expect to see proofs two weeks after copyediting finishes. There may be an in-house review process before and/or after page composition—someone is likely checking to make sure the work was done well and correctly before they let you, the author, see your proof pages. I’ve gotten all kinds of wild stuff back from comp. I would never pass book proofs to an author without checking them first.
The publisher will give you a deadline to review your proofs, mark any corrections, and return the corrected file. It could be a couple of weeks or more, depending on your book’s schedule and whether any of the prior steps ran late. While you’re reviewing proofs, one or more proofreaders is doing the same to help ensure there are no typographic, grammatic, or spelling errors in the text.
Printing and Binding
Printing logistics are trickier than you might imagine. First, there are fewer offset printing operations around to print large book runs than there are publishers, which means publishers share these resources. Second, the printing press never stops.
Guys, the printing press never stops.
It’s like the little girl from The Ring (2002): She never sleeps. Publications printing is three-shift work. The press runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, except when the binder breaks in December and everything goes to heck, which happens at every printer every year. But anyway, press time is scheduled by press logistics experts weeks in advance based on what publishers have said they are going to send for printing, to make sure there’s always something on press. The jobs run end to end, with the next job queued up and ready to start the moment the previous job finishes so there’s no wastage.
Say I’m printing 20,000 copies of Sherlock Holmes and you’re printing 10,000 copies of The Time Machine and Janet’s printing 2,000 copies of Moll Flanders. That means the last copy of Sherlock Holmes rolls off the press seconds before the first copy of The Time Machine and the instant the press team has verified that The Time Machine is running properly they start loading in Moll Flanders.
What you cannot do is rock up to the printing press today with a prepress package and ask them to start printing it tomorrow. This isn’t FedEx Office. Press is already booked for tomorrow. And the next day. And the next six weeks. You needed to tell them about your book two months ago. What you also cannot do is send your book to press one day late and expect to get it back by the original deadline, or perhaps one day later than the original deadline. They’ll have to reschedule it around everything else they rescheduled when your project was late.
All this to say, even though the offset press turns out tens of thousands of units per day, that doesn’t mean your 10,000-copy print run is finished the day after it goes to press and just sitting around waiting to be released. When we (we the publishing company) release a book to the printer, we expect stock to arrive in our warehouse between 4 and 8 weeks later.
Unless, of course, we get lucky and somebody at another publisher misses their press date and we get bumped up.
Distribution and Embargo
Your book is printed. It’s bound. It’s been shipped to the publisher’s warehouse, or the distributor’s warehouse if the publisher doesn’t have their own distribution. Now what becomes of them?
While all the above stuff was happening—editing, proofing, printing, et cetera—the marketing and sales team were doing their thing. Marketing was drumming up hype and sales was on the phone with book retailers securing advance orders. All that’s left now is to ship your books to retailers and then they go on the shelf.
That is, once they hit their embargo date. The movie theater doesn’t start playing the new Marvel tentpole the day the film reels arrive, right? They have to wait till Friday, or midnight Thursday, or maybe now it’s midnight Wednesday, I don’t know, but they have to wait for the official release date. They can’t just start showing it when they want.
Traditionally published books come out on Tuesdays (as do movies to home release). Generally speaking, Tuesday is the day you want to release your new thing because sales charts compile Tuesday to Monday. Books, like movies, have a release date or embargo date attached that means they are intended for sale beginning on that date. However:
Many small titles for which a large market release is not anticipated or which are not intended to be sold in bookstores just come out on any day of the week (for instance, textbooks).
If a title is not hotly anticipated, the publisher and/or the book retailer may not consider it urgent that the book be held in the back until its embargo date. I’ve often seen titles on shelves a few days ahead of their scheduled embargo (because the bookseller was getting ahead on shelving).
Likewise I’ve seen books remain in the back room on their embargo date because customers weren’t clamoring for them and they weren’t a high priority for the bookseller (this literally happened with 1Q84 at my local B&N, they didn’t put it out for the embargo date for some reason even though it was a major title and a bookseller had to go open a flat pack for me to get a copy).
Embargos are important because the marketing campaign will be focused around that embargo date. You don’t want customers rushing to the store for it before it’s out, and you don’t want them rushing to the store to get it on its embargo date only to find it’s not there—because in both cases, the customer is in the bookstore with money to spend and your book isn’t there. Chances are they’re going to buy something else.
Given your druthers, you always want the reader to buy your book instead of something else.
Alright, that’s it. I hope this was helpful and illuminated some of the mysterious inner workings of the publishing company. Someday soon I’m going to write about Costco book sales. Maybe.
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