I went online looking for information about when Lois McMaster Bujold’s next book was due out. I found her website where she said she had completed the manuscript and sent it to the publishers on July 24, 2009. She then said it was due to be released around November 2010.
That surprised me. Is it routine for a completed text to take over fifteen months at the publisher’s office? The contract for this book was signed back in 2006 and Bujold is an established and popular writer, so I’ll assume that the editing and marketing are going to be minimal.
You finish a book. The editor reads it and discusses it with you. Some changes might result. It gets sent to a copyeditor, then back to you to correct all the mistakes the copyeditor has put in. Then the editor marks up the manuscript. It goes to the designer to be set up for type. A set of galley proofs is made up and goes back to you for another round of error correction. The marketing department has its set of meanings. The art director has to find an artist and wait for the cover to come in. It goes to the printer and gets slotted in with the hundred other books waiting to be printed. Then there are seasons for release, set up in advance.
One to two years is the norm. Every step takes weeks and has to come back to you and interrupts your life at unpredictable intervals. That adds in more time. Publishers handle hundreds of books simultaneously. Agents and lawyers get involved. Everybody wants notice and preparation. It’s a big business that has to make room for individuals working at a kitchen table. It’s unique.
Exapno nailed it. And for nonfiction, it’s worse. The peer review process alone took a friend of mine 18 months (that was a university press). Here what had to be done to my most recent nonfiction book after I was finished with the manuscript (each of these steps included discussions, changes, arguments, etc.):
[ol]
[li]Review by the editor[/li][li]Review by legal department[/li][li]Layout[/li][li]Copyediting[/li][li]Proofreading[/li][li]Indexing[/li][li]Cover design (a lot of wrangling here)[/li][li]Printing of galleys for reviewers, etc.[/li][li]Corrections based on feedback from galleys[/li][li]Design & printing of marketing materials, etc.[/li][li]The printing itself[/li][li]Distribution[/li][/ol]
In my case, I did things like fact-checking, permissions for photographs, glossary, bibliography, diagrams, and so forth as I was writing. Some people do all of that stuff after the manuscript is finished.
Another factor that affects it is what else your editor is working on at the same time. I’ve done books where I had the editor’s sole attention, and books where the editor was assigned to half a dozen projects at once. The book I was talking about above (The Closed Captioning Handbook) is a highly-specialized book that the publisher only ever expected to sell a few thousand copies. As we were wrapping up that book, my editor was also working with another writer whose Photoshop book was expected to sell hundreds of thousands of copies. Guess which one had priority for resources?
If they’re printing the book offshore, the printing process alone can take several months.
There are no words sufficient to describe copyeditors. So why even bother?
I noticed after the fact that I wrote “The marketing department has its set of meanings.” You might think this is a typo for meetings. Wrong. The marketing department lives only to be mean. I once had a nonfiction book proposal accepted by an editor but rejected by the marketing meeting because they couldn’t decide which section of the bookstore it would be slotted in. This is not a friend of a friend urban myth. It happened to me for real. I hate marketing. I hated them even more when several other books later appeared with exactly the same idea.
I would think that the marketing for the new release of an “established and popular writer” would be more extensive than that for an unknown — think of how many ads there were for The Lost Symbol in the months leading up to the release. If you’re as cynical as I am, you might also wonder if the calendar is being padded by a few months to allow for a release one month before Christmas.
I can see how the routine might work but does it also apply to an author like Bujold? Her books have been best sellers and the book in question is the latest in her most popular series. Bujold is the best-selling author Baen has, so presumedly she’s getting their top priority treatment. And she’s an experienced writer who’s not going to need to do any major revisions. Being a novel, there’s not going to be issues of fact checking or photo rights.
So this seems to be literally a book that’s going to sell itself. All Baen needs to do is get it printed and on the shelves. It’s obviously in both Baen’s and Bujold’s interests to have the income start coming in. So I guess I’m just surprised that under what are presumedly the most favorable possible circumstances a book still takes over a year of administrative work to get released.
This is the biggest reason, I believe. All of the other things that Exapno mentions can be accelerated if there’s an incentive to. I was editor of the baseball encyclopedia for years, a book of ~1800 pages that had to go from manuscript submission to bookstores in about twelve weeks. Same with all of the fantasy baseball/football guides and the instant book genre.
Much of the work can be done before the manuscript is submitted… cover design, photo clearance, marketing, etc.
Thanks a lot. The authors who repeatedly ask for me to work on their books and thank me in their acknowledgments would disagree with you. We’re not all monsters. Some of us are even on your side. Any interest in trading that brush for a narrower one?
Hey now! Copyeditors rawk. They (we, once upon a time) can make you look really good, you know, and not like a self-pubbed vanity project writer at all. Just because it can be torturous to have a CE notice all the places you didn’t make sense doesn’t make it the CE’s fault.
Depends on what type of nonfiction, though. Academic presses are definitely at the slow end of the scale, but if you’re a well-regarded author who produces a manuscript on a hot-button topic for a popular press, there’s a good chance that your manuscript will make it through the whole process much more quickly. Publishers of non-fiction aimed at popular market often need to strike while the iron is hot, and excessive delays can sometimes mean that the subject matter has gone stale, and/or someone else has beaten you to the punch with a similar book.
You’re ignoring every step in the process I gave. Every book needs to be “marked up” or given instructions on how to typeset it. Every book goes through several rounds of review, error-checking and correction. Every book needs artwork. (All the best artists are bogged down with work and always running behind.) The bigger the author the more marketing gets involved. It’s new authors, not famous ones, that get zero marketing. And every editor is wildly overworked, having to handle dozens of books simultaneously.
And what about the books Bujold already has in the pipeline? She published a book in 2009. Why publish another one so quickly that it hurts the sales of that one? The proper timing of a book varies with every author, of course, but many authors don’t like to put out more than one book a year. What good does it do anyone to rush out another book on the toes of the current one? And there are other editions to think of. Maybe the 2009 book will now be put out by a book club. Maybe she’ll do yet another omnibus collection. It’s never about one book but how the book fits in to a busy ongoing career. And the process also alllows room if a writer gets sick or has life happen and loses a few months of writing. It’s just as hard to write the next book as it was the previous 20. More so, for many writers, especially if they’ve beaten a series into the ground but their readers won’t let go. That’s the time when they do need those major revisions you keep denying ever happen.
Books don’t write themselves, they don’t produce themselves, and they don’t sell themselves. Only somebody who’s totally outside of the industry can say anything that bizarro.
Scarlett67, emmaliminal, c’mon. Writers always tell jokes about copyeditors. They’re natural enemies. Of course every writer needs a good editor, good proofer, and good copyeditor. But every spouse in every marriage has endless complaints about the other and look how many of them end in divorce - even though they got to pick one another in the first place, with declarations of love yet. We’re in arranged marriages. How can it be surprising that most don’t work out?
Well, you’re entitled to your attitude. And I’m entitled to mine, which is to be annoyed by yours. I certainly don’t see my relationship with authors as adversarial, and I don’t enjoy seeing my entire profession maligned just because you had a bad experience. It doesn’t help.
I’ll freely admit I’m outside the publishing business. That’s why I was asking questions about how it works. I’m aware you’re a published author. But your post seemed to be saying “That’s the way it works. And I know this because I’m in the business.” That may be true but it explains nothing. I’m asking why it works that way.
Mhendo pointed out that some books are rushed to the press because they deal with some hot topic of the moment. So apparently it is possible to turn a book around at the publishers and move it from manuscript to bookstore in a matter of weeks. So explain to me why it is possible sometimes and not possible other times.
You talked about the difficulty of writing a book. I can understand that in general. But I don’t think that is the issue here. Bujold has discussed the effort she put into her early books and how she received outside input and made major revisions and changes in them. But that was twenty years ago. She’s in her groove by now. She knows how to write the books that she writes. She’s working with an editorial staff she’s worked with for years. I’m pretty sure that the manuscript that she delivered in July is pretty close to what will be published.
I also understand the issue of timing publications. But Bujold’s last book was released a year ago and it was in a different genre and from a different publisher. Her last science fiction novel was released in 2002 - I don’t think Baen needed to delay the publication of her new book to avoid hurting the sales on that one.
Exapno has it too. According to CJ Cherryh once upon a time, the publishers have a schedule - X books of this genre each month. Too many clog the shelves and hurt all sales. In this computerized and planned business era, the overplanning retailers have so much shelf space and so many titles allocated to each publisher. The numbers are more important than the actual product.
These slots are preallocated based on who’s working on what with a few left over for new discoveries. If you are late with a manuscript and miss your slot because there’s not enough time for copyediting etc., it ticks off the publisher who must scramble to fill that slot, and then reschedule your book for the next available slot many moons later. The delay you cite is not unusual.
Cherryh also mentioned computers are killing book sales, since the retailer can see exactly how well an author sold; so if you sell one book, ten copies; they order only 10. If one is shoplifted, then they think “don’t order any more, the computer says there’s one left”. If they sold out otherwise, they still think your potential is only 10 copies. Its a law of diminishing returns, and it actually pays to start over and be a new author name every few years. (Maybe by now Borders et al have fixed these issues).
Which new Bujold book? Is there magic one or Miles coming?
Favorite copyeditor story I heard was Anne McCaffrey’s Get Off the Unicorn. She titled it Get of the Unicorn (i.e. the unicorn’s offsping) but a clueless editor fixed her spelling mistake without telling her.
A work of fiction by a big name author will indeed take this long, for all the reasons given. Academic publications are even worse.
But a non-fiction work is often processed much faster, just because it has to be. Can you imagine if an instructional book on computers & the internet took 18 months before publication? – most of it would be obsolete before it ever hit the stores, and certainly wouldn’t sell very well.
Also books by celebrities – they have a short time period when they are in the public mind, and they need to reach the stores while the buying public is still interested. For example Sarah Palin’s book was in the stores just about a year after the election, and only 4 months after she resigned as Governor to make more money as an author/speaker/commentator.
Anything in any industry can be produced on a rush basis. That does not imply that everything in an industry can always be produced on a rush basis. I don’t know what you do but pretend that your boss walked in this morning and said that from now on every product you turn out will be out the door in one third the time it takes now. But you won’t get any more staff or money to do so. What would your response be?
You’re not just asking questions. You’re making pronouncements, and foolish ones. You said “So this seems to be literally a book that’s going to sell itself.” No it’s not. Styles, genres, authors, everything goes out of favor over a period of time. Baen may need a year to gear up to reassemble the audience for this book. In what other industry would you take a sequel to a product that hadn’t been released in eight years and say it was going to sell itself? Scribners paid $5 million for Audrey Niffenegger’s second novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, because her first novel sold 2.5 million in the U.S. alone and was translated into 33 languages and had a movie made of it. The book was going to sell itself. Unfortunately 95% of the people who bought her first book disagreed. It’s a legendary flop.
And Scarlett67, it’s exactly that famed sense of humor that copyeditors have that make writers love you so much.
Mostly it needs a blowtorch.