Publishing is a Turtle

Happy Turtle

It's true, the final product (a book) goes through a process the hare just does not have patience for. But beware the turtle, he may be slow, but he's oh so good and crosses that finish line with all pages in tact--and ahead of the hare, one would suppose, since Mr. Hare has to retrace his steps to find the errors of his ways. Or something like that.

First comes the manuscript. I liked the first few pages so I'll read some more. The following chapters are good so we have a contract. Now, let's start from the beginning and proofread the whole manuscript again. We'll look for typos, and punctuation and story line if it's fiction. For nonfiction we'll do the same and make sure that extras like other people's poems, or songs, or quotes are given credit and we have permission to publish them.

There's more editing, corrections are sent to the author who returns it with a lot of frowny faces. And sometimes the author will kick and scream and say "no, I'm keeping that." I don't argue too hard and then I change it anyhow. JK ... sort of.

The editing process will take five or ten more go's at it, we'll polish some more and make sure to keep the author's voice in tact.

Then we'll pick the color of the pages, white, off white, cream, purple, prune ... just kidding. Hopefully the author is happy with that color because it's a bear to get that changed.

The size of the book is important, as are the margins and the font: the spacing of the words, the spacing of the lines, the chapter headings are a major deal, as is the numbering of the pages, the page breaks if you want to start out with roman numerals and begin the actual book with normal numbers.

When all is said and done, we'll order a proof copy and, no doubt, will find a plethora amount of errors we somehow didn't catch while reading the manuscript a gazillion times. And of course, some illustrations are missing or fallen off the side of the page. What the heck? So we start over. Yes over. If we've caught these errors we are sure to find more. And we do.  

Finally, we are happy with it and we upload the file and press publish. For Amazon, it takes up to 48 hours to approve the files. I have no idea what they are approving. Oh wait, yes I do: you have pictures that fall below 300 dpi, some words go into or over the margins. What? We'll have to fix that and upload again. Another 48 hours (not usually that long though).

Another proof is ordered and viola--your book!