Make the Dream Work
It Takes a Village to Publish a Book
Sometimes writing a book feels like the most solitary activity there is. Or a short story. Or a screenplay. Or a Shelf Life. Whatever you might be writing. It’s an activity you do in solitude by yourself in front of a computer. Or a notebook. Or a legal pad. Or a clay tablet and cuneiform stylus, I don’t judge. The main thing is it’s just you and the words.
But publishing that manuscript is just the opposite. It’s not at all solitary. People sometimes ask me if publishing is a good career for introverts. Answer: Some aspects of publishing are good for introverts but many aspects are highly collaborative.
Today’s Shelf Life is about how the team comes together, with each member playing their role, to bring a publication from manuscript to market and, thence, into the readers’ hands. We’re going to do this speed-dating style, just a sentence or two about each one.
Author
Point of view: You’re the person who wrote the book. If you’re reading Shelf Life this is probably you. You’re not just the person who wrote it—you’re also the person who owns the vision for the book. After writing and revising, when it comes time to turn editing and production of your book over to others, it remains your job to ensure that the other folks working on your manuscript share your vision for it. You’ll have the opportunity to review editorial changes others make to your writing. This is your opportunity to make sure that your intended tone and meaning are preserved.
Peer Critique
Your critique group (or partner)—if you have one—are likely the first folks who will have an opportunity to read your manuscript after you’ve done the hard work of writing and perhaps taking a stab at that first revision. Their job is to let you know about any big-picture craft issues: For instance, pacing problems, plot holes, flat characters, over-expositioning, and so on. Your peer critiquers are writers, like you, and approach your manuscript from a fellow writer’s perspective. They may offer advice on how you can fix some of the issues they identify, or they may not. Their responsibility to you (and yours to them!) is to identify those issues.
Beta Reader
The beta reader (or readers)—again, if you have one, this is an optional step—is the the next person to get their hands on your manuscript and provide feedback to you. The beta reader may be a fellow writer, or an editor, or just an interested lay reader; many beta readers don’t have writing or editing experience—and they don’t need it to do a good job! Their responsibility is to read your manuscript from the point of view of an average reader in your intended audience and then let you know whether they liked it or not and what worked for them or didn’t. Like your peer critiquers, your beta readers may offer advice on fixing what they find (for instance, they may tell you what they think would have worked better for them), but their job is to provide you with their unvarnished feedback as readers.
Agent
Once your manuscript is as polished and perfect as you can get it on your own, with the help of your peers and beta readers, you will hopefully secure an agent for it (presuming you’re going the trad pub route). An agent comes equipped with a variety of skills including editorial skills that will help you polish and perfect your manuscript further before they take it out “on submission.” Unless your novel is already pretty perfect, expect an editorial pass—or maybe more than one!—from your agent. The agent also provides a valuable service by negotiating contracts on the author’s behalf.
Acquisition Editor
When your agent takes your manuscript out on submission, they are taking it to acquisitions editors to consider. The acquisitions editor is the person who acquires your book for their publishing company—they read your manuscript (or one of their assistants does) and decides whether it will be a good fit for their “list” (that is, the full slate of books and authors they manage for the publisher). If an acquisitions editor signs your manuscript, then the publisher they work for has decided to publish you—congrats! The acquisitions editor may provide yet another editorial pass of feedback, or they may hand you off to a developmental editor on their team, or they may determine that your manuscript is ready for production.
Developmental Editor
The developmental editor is a professional who takes a detailed editorial pass (or passes) of your manuscript helping polish up major items like language use, prose, continuity, plotting, pacing, character development, organization of the book, and more. Many authors work with a developmental editor at their publishing company; many work with a freelance developmental editor before pitching to an agent; and many authors don’t use a developmental editor at all—sometimes the agent or acquisitions editor fills this role.
Production Editor
The production editor works for the publishing company and acts as a project manager to push the manuscript through the production process once the editorial vision has been executed per the author, agent, and acquisitions editor. The production editor often works with the design team for both the cover and the book interior; copyediting; proofing; prepress and print services; and maybe even with the logistics of shipping and warehousing stock.
Designer
A book may have one designer or more than one. Some designers specialize in covers while others specialize on interior book design and still others handle both. A designer may also be an illustrator, or may work with one, if the cover of the book will use an illustration like a drawing or a painting. The designer for the book’s interior will make decisions about how best to lay out the text and graphics so the book is readable, visually appealing, and similar to other books in the same market.
Copyeditor
The copyeditor may work for the publishing company, or may be a freelancer for the publishing company, or may be a freelancer who works directly with authors. Many authors who choose to self-publish work with a copyeditor before publication. The copyeditor’s job is to ensure that manuscript style is followed throughout, check for and fix any issues with grammar, mechanics, and usage, and fix any spelling or formatting errors they find. Although the copyeditor digs deep in the manuscript while doing their job, a good copyeditor always preserves the author’s voice and intent.
Composition
After copyediting, the text gets laid out according to the book designer’s interior design. The composition team—or compositor—uses software like 3B2 or Adobe Indesign to flow the cleaned up and edited text into the page template and style the pages for print—headings, indents, line breaks, justification, and so on. After flowing in the text, someone from the composition team will typically perform a quality-check of the newly created PDF to ensure that the pages look good overall, that no parts of the text were dropped, and that styles were applied correctly to elements like chapter openers and folios.
Proofreader
The proofreader comes behind the compositor and reads the proof—just like it says on the tin. The proofreader is looking for any lingering typos or spelling errors and is also, specifically, looking for layout errors that occurred when the compositor did their work: For instance, wrong page numbers in the folio, bad line breaks, hyphen stacks, missing folios, or incorrectly formatted text. When a book is being produced for electronic distribution only—when there are no print proofs—a proofreader may still do the job of looking for typos and spelling and punctuation errors.
Indexer
Not all books need an index, but many nonfiction books do. Indexing is a complicated skill and requires collaboration between specialized software and a trained indexer to do well. Sometimes an author creates their own index—indexing services don’t come cheap!—but if you can get a professional indexer to do the job, you should. A good index is an important part of many nonfiction books and it’s not easy to create a good one without serious training and practice. Many authors mistakenly believe that a word processor like Microsoft Word can automatically create an index, and they can—if you don’t mind a poor index. Software is great at indexing specific words but not very good at indexing concepts or variations on the same word.
Print Buyer
The print buyer is the person at the publishing company who works directly with the staff a the printing press to get books printed. Publishing companies—even the big ones—don’t typically have their own printing facilities. The print buyer works to collect all the book’s specs—like trim size, paper stock, and binding type—along with all the materials the printer needs (like cover and interior PDFs) and packages that up for the printer, signs off on the printer’s pricing, and books the press time. The publisher’s print buyer may be juggling schedules for dozens of books per month and their most important job is to make sure everything ships in time to make their publication date.
Marketing Manager
The marketing manager designs the promotion plan for your book and executes it with the help of their staff. The marketing manager will have an opportunity to weigh in on cover design, may work on the advertising and social media campaigns, and is the person who may arrange or suggest stops on a book tour. The marketing manager’s job is to make sure readers and book buyers are aware of your book before it comes out and ready to buy it and read it as soon as it publishes.
Sales Manager
The sales manager, who may work for your company or may work for a distribution company, is the person who gets the book on shelves in bookstores and libraries. Their job is to make sure wholesalers and retailers order enough copies of your book to meet the expected demand. They will work closely with the marketing manager to identify the most important places for your book to be stocked and will speak with retail buyers at companies like Barnes & Noble and Target and persuade them to buy stock.
In other words: It takes one creative soul to write a book but it takes a village to publish one well. Many of the roles above are found in the traditional publishing company model, but this doesn’t mean that self-publishing authors don’t have access to these roles—it’s just more likely that a self-publishing author will step into these various roles for themself or will hire freelance contractors to fulfill these duties.
If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.
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