Step by step, how are big-name novels printed?

Like a Stephen King or GRRM novel- once the author has turned in the final manuscript to the publisher, how is it physically, step-by-step, turned into a hardback and paperback novel for the market? Where (what cities, for example) does it happen? How long does it take?

  1. Book is edited and returned to the author.
  2. Author edits and returns to company–

Meanwhile:

Cover art is designed.

This can happen several times over several months. Then once the final polish is done–

  1. The book is laid out with QuarkXPress or some other big publishing processing software.
  2. A “proof” is printed, and distributed to the author (for corrections), major newspapers, review sites, radio stations, for pre-publicity.

This step can take as little as a week.

  1. The author returns the corrected proof, corrections are made.

I don’t know how long this takes. Another month?

  1. The final version of the book is printed, boxed, and shipped to major bookstores and libraries throughout the country, based on pre-orders (usually through Ingram)

This can take as little as a week.

1-5 usually take place in New York City, if we’re talking about the Big Publishers. Printing can be done anywhere, I’m not sure.

I’m a small publisher, and I can have the final manuscript’s PDF submitted and proofed in a week, and print and distribution done in 3 days after that, out of Tennessee. I suspect that second and third world countries like Ireland and China (Lulu?) do a considerable amount of printing as well.

The author has an editor who reads it and makes suggestions (though a very successful author will have very few and will get whatever he or she wants). The book is scheduled and the marketing department is given time to work up their campaigns. A copyeditor goes over the manuscript for typos and inconsistencies, and the editor sends the book (or a portion of it) to the cover artist.

Hardcovers are published first (if warranted). The publisher (usually in New York City) has a printer they work with (Lightning Press is a big one these days) and sets up when it will be printed and how many copies.

The marketing department is working on taking orders from wholesalers during this time. The wholesalers take orders from their bookstores, though regular clients will get a certain number of copies automatically. (Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com are their own wholesalers)

When everything is in place, the book is printed a month or three before the publishing date. The printed books are shipped to the wholesalers and then to the bookstores, arriving before the publishing date (though for a big book, they are kept aside for the official release dates).

If the book goes to trade paperback, the process is repeated. Timing varies, but six months is a good rule of thumb for a minimum. Some books go directly to trade paperback these days.

Finally, there can be a mass market paperback edition, though that market is drying up. Books can just be paperback originals, too, but the process is pretty much the same.

eBook editions, if any, follow the same process except for the printing. Major publishers use ebooks as a second revenue stream.

This assumes a traditional model of a major publisher, not a small press. There are variations in it, but the general outlines hold.

Ireland is a second world country now?

Yep that comment about second and third world countries was off base.
Anyhow… an alternate stream for an Authors income is to use a system that I’ve seen on a few alternative history fiction sites, essentially pay for, usually paypal, the authors work as a PDF and read.
Downside for the originator is of course that there is no-one concerned with protecting your intellectual copyright. Upside is that you aren’t paying for the above!
Peter

There are several large printers in Ann Arbor MI. Edwards Brothers did Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire.

I used to work in Prepress in the late 90s, and we did service some smaller offset printers

As of that era, to make a book it worked like this:

You take the document which is fully formatted, and you pour it into a typesetting program, which sets the pages into the right order and lays them out into groupings, each of which represents one printing plate. Books are bound from standard sizes of paper folded in various ways, so the order of the facing pages depends on what method of binding is used.

Then when the digital document is all squared away, you print to a film printer. This makes a set of large negatives several feet across (each containing one plate of pages). If there are four-color images 4 negatives are printed, one per CMYK color. The negatives are checked for alignment (called “registration”) and the color separations are stacked and checked to make sure they register together and produce a clear image. The approved negatives are sent to the printer, and the printer uses them to etch the plates that will go into the printing machines and print the book.

Up until the point at which the printing plates are etched, it is still possible to make changes in the book by mechanically cutting and pasting the negative (a process called “stripping in”).

From the time we received the files to sending the negatives to the printer would depend on the length of the book and the number of color images, but wouldn’t take more than a week at any rate. Most jobs we could turn around in 2 days.

SF author Lois McMaster Bujold has a website and she posts announcements about the progress of her new books.

July 24, 2009: She posted that her novel Cryoburn had been turned in to the publisher and was scheduled for a “late 2010, probably November” release. It was actually released on October 19, 2010.

November 23, 2011: She posted that her novel Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance had been turned in to the publisher. It was released on November 6, 2012.

While a year is probably standard, that’s not the same thing as necessary. Publishers could physically process a book much faster. Back before the Internet there were “instant books” in which a volume about some big news story was put on the market in a week or less to capitalize on the notoriety.

Publishers prefer more lead time for ordinary books, because it allows them to schedule the right number and the right mix of books for each season’s releases. Getting the publicity apparatus up and running for a book takes lead time: reviews are normally slated to appear in magazines at the same time a book is released so obviously it must be available much earlier to get it to a reviewer, have it read, and have the copy available for the months of lead time that a monthly magazine requires. (Today’s major sf magazines are published bi-monthly, which means that books for review must go out six months before publication.) Publishers also like to release books of prolific authors at about the same time each year so that fans can expect them on a regular schedule. Some books are thought to do better at certain times of the year, just as movies are scheduled for summer or Christmas releases.

All I know is that as an author, my expectations are that nothing will happen for long periods and then the publisher expects you to drop everything and work 24 hours a day on an edit or proof to get it back by the out-of-nowhere deadline after which nothing happens for long periods.

So when are the typos and factual errors inserted? Cause I know that authors aren’t responsible for those! :wink:

This describes sheet fed printing, common for brochures. But novels are printed by web offset, where the paper is on a giant toilet roll. I studied typography and had a tour of a paperback printing company years ago. Fascinating, and very different to a standard printers. Newspapers and high-run magazines are printed the same way.

The process I described was one I was personally a part of, and was used for hardcover books in the mid-late 90s. I am not claiming it was the only method, but it was one method of book production. If you look at a hardcover from the top, it’s made up of little sewn-in bundles. This gives the edge that desireable, uneven look. Paperbacks, which are “perfect bound” (cut even then glued) are made by slightly different processes. I have never been involved in the production of a paperback.

We’re talking at cross purposes – you’re talking about the binding method, I was talking about how the paper is fed through the printer. Which really comes down the the print run and the quality desired - sheet fed is better quality and suits smaller runs, so good for hardbacks. Web printing is usual for paperbacks, where quality is less important and the print runs are far greater (and the paper much thinner).

Binding is another story. Perfect binding, despite its name, is the cheap method and is why the pages fall out when we bend the spine back.

The process he described, whoever, it pretty much the same for both sheet-fed and web-fed offset litho. It’s also well out of date, of course, as pretty much nobody makes film or strips-in anymore. Direct to plate (DTP) is the industry standard now.

Web presses still use plates and print in much the same way is sheet-fed. The main difference is the fact that web uses a continuous roll of paper that passes through multiple units, each printing a set of pages for the book. Once the printing is done, the web is then cut into same-size sheets and folded into signatures, these are then bound in whatever way the job requires.

On the software end, pretty much everything is converted to PDF from the source files before being fed into the impositioning software.

I pretty much assumed this had to be the case nowadays, that’s why I was careful to mention the era. I loved developing and registering the color separations… it was like magic, do they even do that anymore?

Another thing that hilariously dates my memories of this job is that for advertising jobs, many people brought their files on ZipDisk. ZipDisk! Remember those!

And Tennessee isn’t?

Ireland and Tennessee are Communist now? 'Cause that’s what “Second World” meant.

If a reader sees a typo in an advance review copy, is it ever worthwhile to notify someone, so it can be fixed? How much time between printing an ARC and the final product?

It’s possible to make changes, but certainly not easy. An ARC will essentially be the final copy without the cover. It goes out on a schedule to allow the reviews to appear simultaneously with publication. While this means it appears usually a couple of months before publication, the printing, warehousing, and distribution of the final book is also taking place during those months. Unless the author has a lot of power or the mistake is particularly egregious there is very little incentive for the publisher to break into the process at this point.

Whether it’s worthwhile to make someone aware of a mistake so that they can correct it in a later printing is a different question. Realistically speaking, it’s unlikely to result in any change. And I don’t know how you would find out who to contact unless you were so close to the industry that you wouldn’t be asking this question because you already knew the answer.