The primary goal of my second book, The Book Proposal Book: A Guide for Scholarly Authors, is to help prospective authors increase their chances of publishing success by (1) demystifying the publishing process and (2) guiding readers through the creation and submission of the proposal package itself in discrete, manageable steps.
I also had a sneaky secondary goal, which was to use the process of publishing that book as a case study that could further illuminate what actually goes on when you publish a book with a scholarly press.
I’ve written a series of posts offering behind-the-scenes peeks inside the process at various stages:
How to Get Interest from Publishers Before Your Book is Even Written
Between Advance Contract and Final Book Manuscript Submission
The post you’re reading right now is about what happens after you submit your final draft of your manuscript to your publisher. The details might vary from press to press and project to project, but I’ll tell you what happened in my case, which I believe was pretty typical.
I’m actually only going to cover about half of what happens after submitting a final manuscript. That’s because there are two important publishing processes going on at the same time at this point: production and promotion. This will be about production. I cover promotion in another post.
July 6th, 2020 was the date when I submitted the final draft of my manuscript—the one that had incorporated all substantive changes I intended to make based on the peer reviews and comments from my editor.
There was one major piece of the book still missing at this point: the title. For a couple weeks in July, my editor and I kicked title ideas back and forth. Here are a few of the ideas we considered and rejected:
The Book Proposal Handbook: An Instruction Manual and Reference for Academic Authors (the original working title from my proposal submission)
The First Pitch: A Book Proposal Handbook for Academics
The Big Pitch: A Book Proposal Handbook for Academics
Book Proposals with Power
None of those felt right.
Finally, I was talking to my spouse about the title in my kitchen one day, and The Book Proposal Book: A Guide for Scholarly Authors hit me. It feels like an extremely obvious title now but somehow it took over a year to land on it. I shared the idea with my editor and he liked it very much, so that was that.
Two weeks after I submitted my final manuscript, the senior production editor at Princeton UP reached out to me to initiate the copyediting stage. She would handle the first part of it, finalizing the formatting of the manuscript and prepping it to be sent to the freelance copyeditor the press had engaged. A few weeks after that, the production editor let me know who the copyeditor would be and what the timeline was, including the estimated release date for the book.
Two months after I submitted the manuscript, I received the copyedited files to review. I was given about three weeks to review the file and return it with my approvals and amendments to the copyedits. I ended up spending about 8.5 hours reviewing and responding to the copyedits, over the course of one week. (I think that’s definitely on the shorter/quicker side, but I wanted to share my numbers as a baseline for anyone wondering how long this part takes.)
At the same time that I was reviewing copyedits, I received an initial cover design from my editor, with a choice of two color schemes. I slightly preferred one of the color schemes, and had a few suggested tweaks to the design.
My editor strongly suggested going with the other color scheme and keeping the design as-is. Because he seemed so certain about it, and has decades of experience selling books, I decided to just defer to his judgment. Ultimately I think he was right about the color — I love how it turned out. To learn more about the cover design from the actual designer, read this post.
About four months after submitting the manuscript, the production editor let me know who the press had engaged to index the book (I had negotiated for my publisher to arrange the indexing and charge the cost against my royalties when I signed my contract).
I was told that I would receive the typeset proofs in about six weeks and would have a month to review and return them. Three weeks is typical — my month included the week between Christmas and New Year’s when most people would be out of the office at my publisher.
Around the same time, I noticed that my book had a webpage and preorder link on the publisher’s website. This was about eight months before the estimated release date.
Five months after submitting the manuscript, I received the typeset proofs and proofreading instructions. At this point I discovered a few relatively major issues that somehow no one (including me) had caught during the copyediting stage. The back matter was formatted incorrectly, which I should have noticed before that point, but it became much more obvious once the manuscript was typeset.
I also noticed that the one image in the book (a flowchart depicting the acquisitions process) didn’t reflect the final version the press’s designer had landed on several months previously. I also found a few passages of my writing that I thought were overly repetitive to the point where I thought they would seem like mistakes rather than editorial choices.
Because these could have been rather complicated issues to fix, resulting in pagination problems and inaccuracies in the index, I asked the production editor if we could have a phone conversation to discuss solutions.
I provided suggestions about how to alter the headings in the back matter so that the pagination would not need to change there. And I offered to double check the final version of the index myself before it was typeset to make sure that my removing the repetitive passages wouldn’t affect the page number references there. For the record, this is why authors aren’t supposed to make substantive changes after the copyediting stage! It costs time, labor, and money to create and update the page proofs, so I tried to do what I could to offset those costs myself.
A couple weeks after receiving the proofs, I received a draft of the index from my indexer. I reviewed it right away and we discussed (via email) the entries and subentries I thought could be added, as well as a few other changes and questions I had. The indexer made some of my changes and explained why others shouldn’t be made according to best indexing practices. Within a few days we settled on the final index and she sent it to the production editor.
In total, I spent about 14 hours over 2 weeks reviewing the proofs and index.
Six months after submitting the manuscript, I received the revised proofs. I took one last pass on them and found just a couple tiny lingering issues. I sent the corrections back to the production editor and that was it. The manuscript was finally out of my hands for good and on its way to the printer.
As you can see, this whole production process—at least the parts I needed to be involved in—took about six months. That wasn’t six months of constant work; there were really just a few weeks where I needed to be engaged and ready to spend several hours doing what needed to be done.
The estimated timeline the production editor shared with me toward the beginning of the process ended up being very accurate, which allowed me to plan my calendar around when I would need to work on the book.
It took about five months from final-final proofs to actual books being shipped in mid-June, about a month before the official release date in mid-July.
I hope this rundown helps you know what to expect when you reach this stage with your book. If someone at your press doesn’t give you an estimated production timeline when you submit your manuscript, this is definitely something you can and should ask for. This isn’t nagging — it will help you help them.
I received a question from a reader that I want to address in this post as well.
Here’s the question:
After the assigned copyeditor does their work, is there still time to make substantial edits (if something arises or if you find you really hate a particular section)? And what about after you receive your proofs (or is that only for making tweaks/corrections)? I'm about to enter this stage of the process, and don't want to bug my (very busy) editor during a trying time.
And here’s my answer:
My biggest tip is to communicate clearly with the production editor for your book. This person might be your (very busy) acquisitions editor, depending on how labor is distributed at your press. But answering questions like this is their job, and it’s much better that everyone be on the same page than for you to guess at what you can and can’t do (and inadvertently end up causing a big inconvenience for someone else who has their own deadlines to meet).
In my experience, you can make changes after copy editing, but you should only do so if you find something that’s a genuine error or could cause problems for you or your publisher if it makes it into the printed book.
The problem with making the changes after copy editing is that any material you change won’t get a full copy edit.
Personally, I would want to talk to my editor about the change I was proposing and get their perspective on it, just to make sure I wasn’t overthinking it. And also to give them a heads up that the manuscript you’re returning to them has changed, so they can review the changes if they want.
If you alter something substantial at this stage, it could necessitate another round of peer review, which is something everyone (including you) probably wants to avoid. So yeah, I’d run it by your editor before doing anything major.
My answer for changes at the proofs stage is similar. Changes at this point are even more serious because they can mess with the pagination of the typeset proofs.
Some of the pages may need to be redesigned, and if your book has already been indexed, you may throw off the page references there. That will all result in extra cost and time, because additional labor will be needed to accommodate the changes.
This isn’t the end of the world, and if you’re polite about wanting to make the changes and you offer solutions that will result in the least possible disruption to the production process, it’ll probably be ok. But really try to restrain yourself if you can and make as few and as small requests like this as possible.
I hope this helps you navigate the production phase of your book’s publication as smoothly as possible!