NEWBIE AUTHOR LEARNS THE TRUTH ABOUT BOOK PUBLISHING!

How many of you thought - like I did - that to get a book published you:

1. Sit down and write the book
2. Edit your book – once – after you’re done
3. Find a publishing house
4. The publisher edits your book one final time and gets it ready to publish
5. The publisher promotes your book
6. You make a lot of money from your book sales

If you have never published a book before, you wouldn’t know any different, and you can join the “oh my god there’s so much more to writing a book” club. In fact, there are many more steps, and half the steps above don’t even happen anymore!

Here’s what I learned (and am learning) about what it takes to get a book published:

First, let’s start with the untruths..

Publishing houses don’t promote your book for you. Wah wah. They expect you to have a following (and if you don’t, you better start building a following before you even try to find a publisher because they probably don’t want you without one!), and to do your own promotion.

Publishing houses don’t necessarily edit your book. They usually have a professional proofreader on staff (which is a final step after numerous edits). They might format or design the cover. All these things are ‘maybe’s that you need to check out before deciding on a publisher and knowing what you are spending your money on.

And speaking of money, unless you already have a huge following or are a famous author, you are not going to make a lot of money off your book. You will get anywhere from 5-70% of sales (called royalties), depending on the publisher (which could be YOU, that’s how you get those higher royalties), your contract, and if you received any money from a publisher up front.

Now on to the half-truths...

It is true that you do need to sit down to write your book. But you don’t write it from start to finish. You just write stuff. And write. And write. And write some more. At some point, you say “I’m finished.” But you’re not. You have to review, and revise, and add some here, and take away (a lot) from there.

At this point, you could send your manuscript to beta readers for their review, input, and edits. Or you could wait until after your developmental edit (see next paragraph). Beta readers are a group of folks who like to read, and may or may not be your target audience; they are often friends and acquaintances who are willing to do you a big favor. You have to beg them to not be nice to you, and to give you honest feedback on what works and what doesn’t. They also catch all your bad grammar, spelling errors, and typos. Basically, beta readers are angels.

Most of the big editing is done by professionals, who have enough distance from your book (and expertise) to tell you what is good or not. A developmental editor will help you develop your book into a cohesive masterpiecemanuscript. That means it will flow well, the characters will be well-developed, the dialog will be tight, the story arc is intact and complete.

You will revise some more based on their feedback.

And by now, perhaps earlier, you will start to promote this book of yours that still isn’t close to being done.

How do you promote a thing that doesn’t exist yet?

You start building interest in it. You tell all your friends and family. And you start doing things to attract your target readers – things like posting on social media, blogging, offering free chapters of your book in exchange for getting on your email list, running contests, appearing on podcasts or YouTube or Oprah!

After you do a few more rounds of reviews, you send it back to your beta readers for their final input and make it as good as you can get it. You are now ready for your copy or line editor. These professionals go through your manuscript line by line and whittle it down to just the right words, said in just the right way, and hopefully no more. They are supposed to refine your manuscript into a masterpiece.

Cool. Are we done now?

Nope. Now your book gets proofread. Then it is formatted with fonts and headers, and illustrations and side boxes, so it looks clear and organized and interesting on the page.

And you get your cover designed; that part is fun! You want it to look and feel good in the reader’s hands, right?

Now can it be published? Yes! But who did you choose to publish your book? Learn about the process of choosing a publisher in next week's blog post...

Carrie Kenner is a first-time author of a forthcoming book on how to be a birth doula. The first draft of her book is complete and she is now in the revise/beta reader stage. Her book will be published in 2022. Click the orange link below to get newsletter updates on her book's progress.