The Publishing Process

Some of you have asked me about the process that I use to write my books. In the last newsletter, I described how I actually write the book. Once the book is completed, I can now submit it to the publisher and begin that part of the process.

My books are what they call “self-published.” That term is very broad in its meaning, but the bottom line is that it’s not traditional publishing. The simplest way to describe the difference between the two is that in traditional publishing, the publisher pays you to write the book. In all the forms of self-publishing, you pay someone else to publish your book.

Self-publishing can range from the author doing everything themselves through a publisher like Amazon, to vanity publishing, where the publisher does pretty much nothing except put your book in print, to hybrid publishing, where the publisher provides editorial support, design features, and distribution, and will also share in your royalties when you sell your books.

The publisher I chose to work with is a hybrid publisher called Newman Springs. They are located in New Jersey, and the product that I have received from them seems to me to be top-notch. The biggest “catch” with them is that if I want to get help with marketing, there are additional charges. I have found that there are plenty of other outfits that are willing to market my books, but here again, one has to be very discerning to make sure to get a book marketer who is legitimate and can actually help to successfully market your book. I’m still learning about that and am making mistakes along the way.

With Newman Springs, the following is the process that I have experienced with the first two books in my series. Once a contract is signed, they begin to edit the manuscript. This is a simple edit for punctuation, grammar, and spelling. It does not go into anything dealing with the story structure itself. With my first book, the edits took a month and a half to get the first pass completed. The second book took three weeks.

Then the fun began. For Book 1, we had five rounds of edits and I received the final version three and a half months later. For Book 2, I had six rounds of edits, which took three months.

Once the edits to the text were complete, they could now lay out the pages, creating the design of the book. For Book 1, we had five rounds in this stage, which took five months. Book 2 took three and a half months.

Then we moved on to the artwork. I did not like the artwork the publisher offered, so I decided to hire my own artist. For Book 1, I hired an artist three months after I signed the publishing contract. We worked together for two and a half months before I realized that he was not the right person for this project, so I dismissed him. Two weeks later, I hired my second artist, and this is the one whose art you see in the books. He sent me initial concepts for the cover in a week and a half, and I had the final cover art a month later. He also created the image on the back cover during this same time frame. It took him another month and a half to create the three interior pictures for Book 1, which he called “vignettes.” (Part of the delay with designing the interior pages above was in waiting for the artwork to be completed.) For Book 2, he had the cover completed before I signed the second contract, and the interior pictures about two weeks after the contract was signed, so that process went a lot more smoothly.

Once the cover art was completed, it was sent to the designers to complete the full cover design. Book 1 had 5 revisions and was completed in three months. Book 2 was completed in one month. Once the cover was finalized, both books were published about a month after.

As you can see, the process to publish a book is not a quick thing. So when I say that a book will be published “soon,” it’s not quite a biblical “soon”: “A thousand years in your eyes are merely a day gone by” (Psalm 90:4). But the moment when that first copy arrived and I opened the package and held the book in my hands for the first time, I knew it was all worth it.