This is the 4th blog based on a talk I gave at my book signing of “Too Soon For Sunset” in Mesa, AZ. In this article, I outline the publishing process
Becoming your own publishing company is pretty daunting. Let me briefly tell you what goes into it. This is the publishing process: After a manuscript is written, and after several drafts, it goes through an editing process.
Kaine talks to one of her favorite fans.
The writing must be crisp, without extraneous adjectives. There must be no misspellings or gross grammatical errors. The pacing of the book must cause the reader to keep turning pages. Any redundancies, factual errors, or dropped plot points must be addressed. When you put a book in a reader’s hands, it should honor that trust.
Once the manuscript is polished and ready for production, it must be formatted into book form. The author or publishing company must make many crucial decisions on how the book will look.
To design a book for publication, the manuscript is taken apart and composed of a title page, a second title page, a copyright page, a dedication page, a table of contents, the individual chapter pages, and possibly a bibliography or chapter notes at the end of the book.
Each page has a page number positioned at the top, the bottom, upper right/left or center. Each page has a header or a footer with the author’s name and the name of the book or maybe the chapter title. Each page must eliminate all widows or orphans – the bane of every publisher.
The final product – the book — must be pleasing to the eye, with a dynamic cover that can be reduced to the size of a postage stamp on someone’s iPhone and still be readable, if the author wants their book available as an e-book as well as a print copy. The pages and binding must be of good quality and have an aesthetic appeal in the presentation of chapters and words.
Do you want the chapter to start at the top of the page, or at half a page down? Do you want continuous text or a page break between chapters, so the chapter always begins on the right hand side? Do you want the text to be justified or ragged right? Do you want indents at every paragraph or space between block paragraphs? The type font (the way the letters look) must be easy to read without looking tired or overused. The space between the lines must make it easy to read. In my murder club books, I use a serif font that is 2.5 picas larger than standard print.
Publishers have to make a choice about each of these publishing parameters.
You can see that publishing a book requires a very special skill, which is absolutely necessary, but completely taken for granted by most readers. I spend 8-16 hours a week on formatting my books. It is labor intensive, but nothing can compare to how it feels when you get your book sent to you from the printer and it is in your hands. For a publisher, it is extremely rewarding; but for an author it is like Christmas morning.