2006 – My Great Publishing Adventure – Part 2 of 3

Who did the editing and design of my book? In the next few sections I will describe the steps I followed to get from a first draft manuscript to a set of electronic files that my offset printer would accept. Please read Part 1 for a description of how I got to this point in my publishing saga.

- Editing. Here's Rule #2 -- Don't Edit Your Own Book. Of course, you will do some initial editing, especially as you are writing your second draft, and subsequent drafts. And of course you will share your manuscript with your writing group and get feedback. You are probably doing all of these things. Right? However, that's not what I'm talking about. The kind of editing I am referring to here is the kind that would be done by a publisher who plans to publish your book. This is real editing by someone who is thinking of story structure and characters and commercial appeal and not about your precious words and the lovely scenes that you have given birth to, with great pain. This editor is ruthless and pragmatic, and has probably just finished editing an exciting manuscript with vampires and kinky sex, and your manuscript is putting him or her to sleep. The red ink is bleeding all over your pages. This the kind of editing you cannot do to your own book.

The first draft of my novel was about 73,000 words. I wrote second and third drafts and cut it down to about 62,000 words. This is short for a novel, especially a debut novel. Most publishers want first novels to be at least 80,000 words. This is partly because they want a hardcover book that can be sold for about $24.95. Therefore it needs to have some heft to it. However, since I was my own publisher and I wasn't producing a hardcover book I decided to forge ahead with 62,000 words, since it would keep down printing costs.

Once I had a stable draft and had received valuable feedback from several early readers, I knew it was time to hire an outside editor. This advice came from many articles and tips that I had read about self-publishing. I am amazed, now, at the number of self-published books that are not professionally edited, and it shows, glaringly, in terms of clumsy sentences, misspelled words, punctuation errors and problems with tense and pronouns. Catching those problems still doesn't address major revision editing, where an editor tries to improve your story by identifying whole scenes or chapters that need reworking.

I began by getting quotes from professional editors. The high quote was about $6,000. The middle range quote was about $2,200, and the rock bottom quote was a few hundred dollars. I decided to do the editing in two stages. I initially hired the low-cost editor to do two passes and look for anything that detracted from the story. He found problems with grammar, spelling and punctuation, even though I had gone through the whole manuscript many times and was "sure" I caught everything. More importantly, he made useful suggestions for tweaking the story so it had a better logical flow. I applied all of his recommendations plus a few others that I thought of and then had him do a second pass. He found more problems in the second pass. The editing process takes lots of different pairs of eyes and many passes through the manuscript.

My second stage of editing came late in the process when I was ready for my final offset print run. I hired a very talented and very expensive professional editor in Seattle. Fortunately, she gave me a good rate after looking over my manuscript and declaring it "fairly clean." By this point I would estimate my book had been read by at least ten different people, and I had personally read it twenty times. Yet, this editor found more problems. For example, she caught misspellings of the words "fluorescent" and "alstroemeria" that all of the other readers and the computer spell checker overlooked. She caught punctuation errors and pronoun mismatches and verb tense inconsistencies. She also made helpful comments about narrative and dialogue that improved the story.

In general, I believe editing is one of the most important investments you will make if you self-publish a book. And don't forget Rule #2.

- Cover art. Since I am not an artist or graphic designer, I knew early on that I would be budgeting for someone else to design my cover for me. As with everything else on this journey, I began by reading lots of articles and trying to understand how book covers are created. First of all, if you use artwork or photographs on your cover, the images must be 300 dpi (dots per inch) and must use a color scheme known as CMYK (Cyan Magenta Yellow Black). This is different from RGB (Red Green Blue), which is what you get when you take a picture with your digital camera. Also, the image out of your camera will probably be 72 dpi instead of 300. Furthermore, this 300 dpi CMYK image is usually submitted in a special format known as TIFF (Tagged Image File Format). To accomplish all of these tasks you can invest in a good software package, such as Adobe Photoshop, or you can hire someone to do it all for you. There are graphic designers out there who will design your book cover and prepare all of the files for submission to your printer, whether it is a POD outfit or custom offset or digital. But this is expensive; a graphic designer may charge by the hour or quote a flat rate. The estimates I got were between $2,000 and $3,000.

As with the editing job, I saved money by outsourcing part of the graphic design job and doing the rest myself. I began asking around for references and eventually found a wonderful graphic designer who, as it turns out, lived right in my neighborhood. I discussed the project with her, and showed her some photographs I had taken while writing the first draft of the book. She immediately began to think of combining images into a montage. I gave her a compact disc containing several dozen images and she came up with stunning front and back covers that I never would have thought of myself.

The part of the cover work that I did on my own was to prepare the cover files according to the printer's specifications, and to tweak the text on the back cover. If I had had to go back to the designer for each little change then my bill from her would have been twice as high. As it was, I ended up paying under $1,000 for the graphic design work. Now, here's an important caveat: I was able to do part of the cover design work because I had the same tools she was using, namely Photoshop and InDesign from Adobe. I had invested in those tools when I started my publishing business because I knew I would use them for many kinds of tasks. For example, you can use Photoshop and InDesign to create professional-looking brochures, cards and flyers to help promote your book.

- Interior layout and design. There is a step in the publishing business that is usually invisible to authors. You write your text in an ordinary word processing program, such as Microsoft Word, and then when you get your book from the printer your words are nicely laid out on the printed page. How does that happen? It's called typesetting, and like everything else in book printing it is time-consuming and expensive. Typesetting is the process of controlling the spacing of letters, words and lines on the printed page. Today it is done with special software, such as, you guessed it, InDesign from Adobe. There are other packages, but InDesign has become the industry standard in recent years.

As with the other steps I've described above, I started by researching and getting quotes. They were all in the $2,000 to $2,500 range. Again, I wondered how I could save money by doing part of it myself. What I discovered was that, with a little self-educating, I could do all of it using InDesign.

I first imported the Microsoft Word document containing the final draft of my story into InDesign and then creating the title page, copyright page, dedication page, acknowledgments page and a foreword. I also designed special pages for the opening of each chapter and for marking the beginnings of sections within a chapter. I experimented with many fonts and finally settled on Garamond Pro. I played with the spacing of lines so that they would not appear too crowded on the page. I played with the margins so that the blocks of text on the page appeared properly proportional to the size of the page and were within the printer's specifications. Margin settings also have an impact on the page count, which needs to be a multiple of eight. I ended up with a 256-page book. This took many days of nearly full time effort. But, I was learning the printing aspect of the publishing business so I didn't mind it.

The best part about doing my own layout and design was that I had control of the text all the way to the very end. This would not have been possible if I had been working with a consultant. As it was, I was able to do last-minute edits until midnight of the evening that the final files were due to be uploaded to the printer's web site. I printed a complete copy of the final camera-ready version and my wife and I read it at least three times each in one evening. After the book came out I went through it and did not find any mistakes.

Next:

Part 3: Finding people to buy your book


Sea Changes, my novel, published by One Sock Press