The publishing nitty gritty: all the hoops to self-publish or publish
OK, folks. A lot of people have been asking me for advice in recent years about either how to publish or how to self-publish. In the past year alone I’ve had four conference calls and half a dozen “coffee/tea” dates with people asking the same questions again and again, and I find myself telling the same things over and over again.
I figured I should make a post or two about the subject.
If you’ve asked me for advice about publishing or self-publishing, read this first, so you know what the hell I’m talking about when we actually talk, and we can skip to the things you actually have to ask ME about, and not the things you could have probably just Googled. I know, I know, you can’t believe everything you read on the Internet, and you want to hear from someone you trust. I’ll try to keep that trust by being smart and coherent here, and not an idiot. One caveat: the world of ebooks and publishing changes very fast and so something that is true and correct here today may be obsolete by Christmas 2012.
The first thing we should get out of the way is covering what steps a publisher takes to go from raw manuscript to finished salable product and how many people it takes to do so, whether the product is an ebook or a printed book.
A lot of people think, oh, it’s all computers now, so the author hands in a Word doc and bam they put some covers on it and it’s a book. Well, that might be true of some of the absolute worst examples of clueless or crap-grinding publishers, but that’s not what any professional publisher does.
(Related to this, my six-part posts on the basics of typesetting and book design. Read ‘em here.)
PAPERBACK PRODUCTION PROCESS
Traditional Print Publishing: minimum steps
1. Raw manuscript
2. Editor reads it and gives feedback to the author
3. Author rewrites it, makes corrections, sends it back
4. Manuscript is copyedited.
5. Author makes corrections based on copyeditor queries.
6. Manuscript is typeset by designer
7. Typeset proofs are then proofread by both author and a proofreader.
8. Corrections are made to the typeset proofs.
9. Proofed design is manufactured into a book.
You’ll note that the above process requires a minimum of five people: the author, the editor, the copyeditor, the proofreader, and the designer. In reality it may be as few as three or as many as seven depending on time, budget, and expertise. For example, in small press publishing, the editor often functions as editor, copyeditor, and proofreader, which results in errors slipping through that wouldn’t be as likely to if three separate people each brought fresh eyes to the project each time.
In self-publishing, the author might do all five roles. However, you can usually tell. If you want a professional product, pay professionals to do those jobs of editing, copyediting, proofreading, and design.
An abbreviated version of the above might look like this:
1. Raw manuscript
2. Editor copyedits it and gives feedback at the same time
3. Author rewrites it, makes corrections, sends it back
4. Corrected, revised manuscript is typeset by desiger
5. Proofs are read by author and third party and corrections made
6. Corrections are made to the typeset proofs.
7. Proofed design is manufactured into a book.
This version takes only four, not five, people.
A REALLY abbreviated version looks like this (not recommended):
1. Raw manuscript
2. Editor copyedits it and gives feedback at the same time
3. Author rewrites it, makes corrections, sends it back
4. Corrected, revised manuscript is typeset AND PROOFED/CORRECTED by designer (author does not get to approve final changes)
5. Proofed design is manufactured into a book.
This version takes only three people.
ANOTHER really abbreviated version looks like this (recommended only for material that doesn’t need much work to begin with):
1. Raw manuscript
2. Editor copyedits it, proofs it, makes changes directly in manuscript
3. Designer typesets the manuscript into page proofs
4. Author sees changes/corrections for first time in page proofs & approves/disapproves of each one
5. Author changes are incorporated
6. Proofed design is manufactured into a book.
This version takes only three people.
The cover also needs to be designed, by the way, so add an artist or art director to the list, unless the person who designs the interior handles the cover, too.
Many freelance production houses, by the way, handle ALL those functions AND interface with the actual printer for you, too, much of the time. Back when Circlet Press could afford to do so, we used to use Windhaven Productions (Nancy Hanger http://www.windhaven.com) and Swordsmith Productions (Leigh Grossman http://www.swordsmith.com/services.html) as one-stop shopping for all copyediting, proofing, design, and production support. A typical price back in the 1990s for such services for a 200 page paperback book was about $1000. I don’t know what the going rates are now, but they can be based on a per page rate or per book. Both Nancy and Leigh are still in the biz and I recommend you contact them if you have the budget to hire out.
But that was “traditional” paperback publishing we were talking about.
Now let’s compare the ebook production process:
EBOOK EDITORIAL AND PRODUCTION PROCESS
Digital-only production flow from raw manuscript to ebook
1. Raw manuscript
2. Editor reads it and gives feedback to the author
3. Author rewrites it, makes corrections, sends it back
4. Manuscript is copyedited.
5. Author makes corrections based on copyeditor queries.
6. Manuscript is proofread one more time after author corrections are input.
7. Corrected, revised manuscript is output into all viable ebook formats.
Why look, that’s already two steps shorter than the full nine steps to traditional paperback. But it still takes five people: author, editor, copyeditor, proofreader, and the person converting the manuscript to ebook formats.
And if we cut corners and consolidate some jobs, it can be a lot less:
1. Raw manuscript
2. Editor copyedits it, proofs it, makes changes directly in manuscript
3. Author approves/disapproves changes
4. Revised manuscript is output into all viable ebook formats.
This version takes only three people, and is how a lot of digital publishers do it. But it’s really really recommended that at least one pure proofreading pass by a qualified third party be done. This “quick and dirty” way is really cutting corners and it will show.
Now, where it gets complicated is, what happens when you want to make an ebook AND a printed book of the same material?
There are a million technical blog posts on this out there, but here’s the simple version. You have to figure out what workflow works best for you, your budget, and your goals.
Ebooks are much easier to make from the manuscript stage (i.e. when it’s still a Microsoft Word document) than from the typeset/designed stage (when the book takes shape in a production program like Quark Xpress or Adobe Indesign). The problem is that effective proofreading nearly always has to take place in the typeset version. So you have two choices:
1. Start with completely edited and corrected manuscript
2. Typeset it, including formatting italics, etc
3. Proof it, fix typos etc, and input the corrections into the typeset version
4. Output PDF for both digital sale & printing from this corrected version
5. Extract text from the typeset version to convert to ebook formats, redo italics if needed
6. Convert to ebooks
OR
1. Start with completely edited and corrected manuscript
2. Typeset it, including formatting italics, etc
3. Proof it, fix typos etc, and input the corrections into the typeset version
4. Output PDF for both digital sale & printing from this corrected version
5. Go back and duplicate all the corrections from the typeset into the manuscript document
6. Convert the corrected manuscript document to ebooks
In one version you have to do the corrections twice, in the other you have to wrestle to get a clean corrected manuscript out of InDesign or Quark that is suitable for conversion.
RIGHT NOW these two things are about equal amounts of pain in the ass. Until Quark or InDesign makes their autoconversion tools a LOT better, the epub they output isn’t of salable quality. (I’m currently using Quark 9.2 and InDesign CS6, which are the latest as of this writing.)
By the way: epub isn’t the only format you need. You must make mobi/prc also, for the Kindle. There’s an easy script that Amazon provides that converts epub to mobi (it’s called “kindlegen” and you can get it free on Amazon). In the past four years of selling ebooks, I can tell you that 99% of all ebooks sold by Circlet Press were epub, mobi, or PDF. The other 1% were .pdb and LIT formats and at least half of our sales in those formats were purchased mistakenly by people who wanted other formats.
(in my humble opinion…) AT THIS TIME THE ONLY THREE FORMATS YOU NEED ARE PDF, EPUB, and MOBI. (Note: .mobi, .prc, and .amz are all identical files, just with different suffixes.) All the other formats: lit, lrf, pdb, etc… are dead. I’m talking 99.99% Circlet’s ebook sales have been in epub, PDF, and mobi/prc/amz. When you combine all the other formats together they make up about .001 of our sales.
This is nitty gritty stuff, but if you’re going to self-publish or publish the work of others, there’s no magic wand to make it fly from the author’s head into the reader’s. These are the steps you have to go through to make a product the reader can purchase.
You don’t have to do all the steps yourself, in fact it’s preferable if you don’t. But someone has to do them and you likely have to manage the process. A recent study of ebook sales showed that books that had received editing and design help (even if it was provided free by a friend or family member) sold better than those where the author tried to do everything. Why? We don’t know: that’s just what the data shows. Presumably some number of readers recognized better quality and felt better about recommending the books to others, rated them higher, and/or purchased other books by the same authors once a quality expectation was set.
If you want to keep up on news like the aforementioned study, get on the Digital Book World daily email list. While you’re at it, you should be subscribing to the free e-newsletter Publishers Lunch. Ebooknewser is another good source online for keeping up with changes in the ebook landscape. No, I’m not giving you links to these things. Just Google them and you will find them. You Googling for them will no doubt help you learn the landscape better than me spoon-feeding you the links.
The final part of the nitty gritty we haven’t talked about, of course, is how to get the salable product ON SALE somewhere.
Self-publishers have a bunch of easy DIY options:
1. Amazon Kindle Store via KDP
2. Barnes & Noble Nookstore via “Pubit”
3. Apple iBookstore via iTunesConnect
4. Smashwords (who distribute to Apple, Kobo, Sony, & more)
Those are the “big four.” Fictionwise used to be up there but after they got bought by Barnes & Noble we’ve seen our sales there almost disappear. YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY. Smashwords is good because they wholesale to a bunch of other places like Kobo, whose direct upload instructions/standards are so insanely difficult to meet it’s not worth the bother. Smashwords is bad because their own file prep standards are pretty ridiculous and I don’t like the quality of the ebooks they create. (Smashwords has you–or your ebook conversion professional–prep a Word doc in some very specific ways and upload to them and they spit it out again in various ebook formats for sale on their site).
The big three above all have similar self-publishing set ups. You open an account as a publisher, enter and verify various bank account info and the like (this can take a day or a week depending), and then for each book you log in to your account and create a new entry for each one, uploading the ebook files and the cover design and filling in all the metadata necessary including the description of the book, price, etc. Each one has a completely different interface, which is a pain to learn, but it’s not rocket science. You basically fill out a big online form for each. I recommend writing up all your metadata on a book in a single document (what would be called a ‘tipsheet” in traditional publishing) that includes all the following:
Title and subtitle of book:
Principal author name:
Other contributor names (i.e. if multiple authors or contributors):
Ebook price:
Ebook ISBN:
Print price:
Print ISBN:
Word count:
Number of pages:
Principal genre:
Secondary genre:
Other tags/categories/genres:
Short, targeted description of the book (100 words or less):
Longer, more detailed description of the books (300 words minimum or MORE):
Optional info for the tipsheet depending on the book:
Author bio:
Author hometown:
Table of Contents:
Related titles: (i.e. other books in same series or by same author)
Comparable titles: (i.e. books that would appeal to the same reader as this one)
You’re going to need to compile that information for your book and use it over and over again, as you list it for sale in places and as you send it out for review to bloggers and review sites. Publicity is a whole different ball of wax I’ll tackle another day. For now, the checklist above is all the hoops you need to go through from raw manuscript to having the ebook on sale to the public.
