Since I’ve just recently published a book, I thought I would let you in on my publishing process, just because I think this is a side of writing that isn’t talked about much.
The first step in my publishing process is finishing the novel I want to publish. If you’re interested in my writing process, I made a different post about that a while back. Picking which novel to write and finish is more challenging than one would think, but once the novel is done, the publishing process can begin.
I always try to leave my finished manuscript for a while before I start editing it as a way to try to make myself as impartial as possible on the content I’m editing. I will say, I do like having deadlines for my editing, and I’ve recently discovered that I would rather sit down and edit three or four chapters in one sitting once a week as opposed to editing one chapter every couple of days.
My first round of edits is me reading the book, and making comments on anything I think I should change, whether that be grammar, any inconsistencies, or if a sentence reads badly. I’m not actually making any changes to the novel at this point, I’m just leaving reminders for myself of things that could change. If you annotate books you read, it’s like that.
My second round of edits is me going to all of the comments and applying them to the novel. This round of edits requires the least amount of focus for me and takes the shortest amount of time, since I’m just applying my comments, and not looking for any problems.
My third and final round of edits is me doing a final readthrough of the entire novel. Just a final sweep through the novel to catch any additional mistakes, and to tweak sentences that could look better. I also make sure that the lines of text look good, and what I mean by this is making sure that the above sentence is long to cover the indent of the sentence that follows after it, because I actually hate the way it looks when it doesn’t.
Once the main content of the book is done, I move onto the synopsis and cover. For my latest book, I actually had to do these first, since I needed them for a writing festival, but I normally do it after my editing is done. Now, writing a synopsis is really challenging because you want to share enough about the book to catch people’s interest, but not enough that you’re giving the whole thing away. Of the eight books I’ve published, there have been three that I really love, and felt like they were flowing nicely. The cover is an entire other ballgame. For almost all of my covers, I use a copyright free website where generous photographers upload their pictures, and people like me can use them for whatever purposes they want. I always edit the pictures by messing around with the colours, contrast, and light leaks, but that’s where the pictures come from. There will be another post coming soon about picking covers, so stay tuned for that.
Next comes the playlist. Now, I’m the type of person that loves it when books have playlists in them, so I decided I was going to do that for my novels. If you’re interested in listening to those, check them out here: Book Playlists . Most of the time, the playlist is already made, but I use Apple Music, so I have to add them to Spotify so more people can listen to them. I usually include a partial breakdown in the back of the book about the playlist, so keep an eye out for those.
My next step is all of the extra inner content. What I mean by this is the table of contents, dedication, and acknowledgements. The table of contents definitely takes me the longest, but I prefer when books have them, and so I will continue to make them. The dedication is quite easy once I figure out who the book is dedicated to, and the acknowledgements I copy and paste from a document on my computer and tweak as needed.
The final step is to upload everything to Amazon. Since I’ve done it eight times, I’m quite proficient at picking everything from their settings to make my book look exactly the way I want. However, Amazon reviews your book before it’s published to make sure it isn’t filled with hate speech or anything horrible like that, and this can take up to seventy two hours. “Cora” and “Jack” both took nearly seventy hours, whereas “Love Through Agony” and “Healing x3 Part One” took around eight to twelve. That’s why if you look at the publication dates of my novels on Amazon, they’re rarely the day I say the book is actually released. I make sure to upload the files three days before I say the book is ready to be purchased just in case.
I’m sure this was incredibly technical, and maybe not something you’re interested in, but I thought I would share it with you nonetheless.
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