Weekly Writers: Stages In Book Production
How an idea becomes an item
This is a sample of the Weekly Writers posts I plan to do every Monday, for paid subscribers only. These will mainly be of interest to authors. As the About page explains, I’ll compile short articles about writing, craft, publishing, and occasional writing prompts. I’ve made this one available to everyone so you can see the kind of thing that would reach your inbox on a Monday if you threw in a few quid to support me. Next week’s post will be for paid subscribers only, so if you want to receive it, or have an input into the topics covered, or even have your work critiqued, consider subscribing! It’s like a magazine but to your email inbox. :-)
The Fourteen Stages
It is worth being clear about the stages a book goes through on the road to publication, because they provide a mental framework of progress, a way to identify where you are in the process of transforming an idea into an item. Demystifying creation begins with breaking it down into steps. I’ll list the stages here, then dive into more detail on each one. I tend to divide them between those that lead to a finished draft; then those that take the draft and turn it into a published book.
Initial creation of the work
The idea
Research
Outlining
First draft
Pause
Rewriting
Publication stages
Developmental editing
Copy editing
Proofreading
Formatting
Cover design
Metadata
Marketing
Distribution
Initial creation of the work
1. The idea
This is where it all begins. The seed of an idea that takes root and grows into what will follow.
Something triggers the inspiration. Maybe it is a dream, or something you have read, or something that has happened to you.
And so you muse over the idea, and the possibilities it represents.
Sometimes it begins with a title. Or the first line of the book. Or even the last line. Ideas are shy, and don’t always approach you from the same direction.
2. Research
While you are writing a draft it’s best not to stop to check facts, as it interrupts the flow. But it is good to have a solid idea of important things before you begin writing. And that’s where initial research comes in.
The thing you research will vary by genre and story. If I’m writing a historical romance, I will need to research the time period when my book is set: the language used, clothing, technology, social structures and so on. If I’m writing sci-fi then technologies and advanced astronomy might be beneficial to study. If my book is strongly set in a particular place, then visiting or researching that place would be in order. So, when I was working on 2000 Tunes and Cold Fusion 2000, both set in Manchester in the year 2000, I spent a lot of time in Manchester city centre, visiting the bars and galleries that the characters go to. I also reread my diaries from back when I lived and worked in Manchester, and studied maps of the city as it was in the year 2000.
Some research might be tied to your story idea: investigating the feasibility of anything that your plot will hinge on, before you waste time on ideas that turn out to be mistaken.
Research is something that tends to happen again at later stages, especially fact checking, but immersing yourself in it before you begin writing is a way of helping to give vitality to the world you’ll set your story in. It’s fine to plaster your walls and desk with photos and diagrams that will help your mind shift into the fictional context when you write.
3. Outlining
Outlining is deciding on the main points of the story: what happens and when, what actions the characters take as a result, and what happens next. It is a summary of key elements of the plot, which is why it is also referred to as plotting.
Ideally the plot points should tell a satisfying story, lead to some change in the world or characters, and probably tell a secondary story backed up by themes which make the tale more universal.
See my previous post about plotters versus pantsers if you want to know more about both approaches to story writing.
4. First draft
This is one of the fun bits. Your enthusiasm is high. The concept is exciting. You have an idea of where you’re going. Now you just have to see through the page to the world beyond, and inhabit the heads and perspectives of your characters, and get as much down on the page as you can. It doesn’t matter if that is a real page of paper, or a word processor on a PC, or even recording it as audio while you pace in circles around the living room and drive your family batty. Just get the words out! (as I shout in my creative writing classes I teach).
You may not have the luxury of long periods of time to devote to this. You may have a family, or work, and need to steal moments wherever possible, such as on the train, or waiting for a bus, or sat in a hospital emergency room.
I was working full time as a university librarian when I began my first novel. In evenings and weekends I was teaching aikido or spending time with family. But I found ways to do the writing. In work I always got hungry early, so would eat my food during the morning break. Then when dinner time came I would wheel my chair to an empty desk and write for an hour. When the hour hand reached the top of the clock I returned to work, often with another few thousand words written. That is the little-and-often approach.
For another book – Turner – I went on holiday. The book was set on a remote Welsh island, so I stayed on a remote Welsh island for a week. Well, actually it was longer than that, as the weather turned bad and the boat was unable to reach the island to pick us up, but that’s another story. The house I rented had no electricity (or indoor toilet, or shower), so I took all my notes and just hand-wrote it. During my time on the island I finished a full first draft. See, that’s where a good outline comes in, it makes you much more productive within whatever limited time you have available. This approach is the all-at-once system of doing a draft.
Whether little-and-often or all-at-once, or a mixture of both, the secret to a first draft is simply to get the words down. Don’t worry about facts. If you don’t know something, just make it up. If you’re stuck, skip ahead. Don’t over-analyse what you write. Don’t keep tweaking it. All that comes in the rewrite. If you try to edit as you write, you’ll ruin your flow. Just keep envisioning the golden glory of a completed draft, and that will light the way.
5. Pause
The draft is finished. And it may be a mess. Crossings out and arrows and areas where you changed your mind and went in a new direction.
Your brain is buzzing. Your nerves are frazzled. You feel like you’ve run a marathon, or been on an epic bender. This is not the correct frame of mind to see the work with fresh eyes.
So congratulate yourself. Maybe even treat yourself. Put the manuscript in a drawer (or the digital equivalent). Make sure you have a backup (you do make backups as you go, don’t you? If not … oh boy, you have pain to come, pilgrim).
Now is the time to take a break from the book and just let it sit.
That’s not to say you need a break from writing. It’s good to always write. Just do something different. That short story you wanted to submit to a magazine? Polish it up and send it. That spoken word evening in your local cafe? Write the poem that’s been niggling at you, and rehearse it (a lot), then perform it at the event. Work on notes for another book. Do free writing. It doesn’t matter. We’re just making sure your mental machinery doesn’t freeze up from disuse before you get around to one of the stages some authors hate: rewriting.
6. Rewriting
When working on a book, we have most enthusiasm at the beginning (“This is going to be amaaaazing!”) and when we write THE END on the last page (“I did it!”). The time between them can sometimes involve a struggle to keep motivated. Surely it is all smooth sailing after the draft is finished?
Sorry. It’s called a draft for a reason.
We now need to polish it and make it fit our initial vision of excellence. To wrap up loose ends, delete the unnecessary, retie the arteries where we remove chunks of exposition.
This is the stage when we reread the book many times. We analyse it. We tweak. We rewrite sections and scenes. We edit. We do this as many times as needed. Maybe we use help in the form of friends or editors. That partly depends on the work, the writer, and their experience. Early in my career I did use editors to help me create the first polished draft. Nowadays I’ve learnt enough to shortcut the problems, so the first draft comes out pretty clean and close to what I envisioned. That’s just practice.
But this stage of reworking our words to make them both tighter and more impactful is an incredibly valuable learning experience. It’s also an important part of taking the work to the next level. If you try to jump from stage 5 to stage 7 and miss out stage 6, then unless you are amazingly wonderfully, unfairly talented (or so rich you can spend a fortune on trying to get other people to do this stage for you), then your book will fall far short of its potential.
A good quality draft has been completed. Long live the draft! Now we can look at what happens to a book from the point where a decision to publish has been made. This applies both to traditionally-published books, and to professional self-published books. They are alternative routes to market, but the steps to a successful launch of a good-quality book are remarkably similar.
So, steps 6-9 are all different types of edit, each building on the previous ones, acting as levels of polish on the road to glittering perfection. In an ideal world a book spends time at each level, but the reality is messier. Sometimes the types of edit are conflated, with a mixture of more than one taking place at the same time. There are cases where a stage can be skipped, especially if it is an established author writing something they are an expert in: I doubt if Stephen King needs a developmental editor to point out where a subplot needs strengthening. There are even opposite scenarios, where an editing stage may occur multiple times. One of my early books was so problematic that I went through many stages of rewriting it, then working with an external editor for a developmental edit. I would consider what they said and do further rewrites. The book I ended up with was better, but still not right, so a different developmental editor reviewed it and made suggestions. It took three developmental edits to restructure it enough to finally work as intended. The experience taught me a lot, but also meant in future I was much more organised with my initial outline, to avoid this situation from happening again.
Publication stages
7. Developmental Editing
“Wait, didn’t I do the editing already?”
You did some of it. As part of taking a rough first draft and turning it into a readable third/fifth/tenth draft. But it probably isn’t yet publishable, because only one person has worked on it. We all have a mote in our eye when it comes to our own work. Maybe like having a child. The flaws we don’t notice, because we’re too busy saying ga ga goo goo and brandishing our unruly stack of book baby pages at anyone who makes the mistake of asking you about it.
I’m going to list the three main types of edit separately, as it is handy to be able to visualise them as discrete processes. Step 6 was the self-edit. We not move on to the editing processes provided by other people (ideally professionals).
This step (7) has a few names. I usually refer to it as the developmental edit. You might also hear people call it substantive editing, structural editing, or literary editing. They’re the same thing.
I think of this as “big picture” editing. It’s not about the nitty gritty of punctuation and spelling, but the overall narrative. The character arcs, the subplots, the reversals, the way theme ties events and imagery together, and many other elements that affect the shape of the complete story. It’s often the kind of things that the author has trouble seeing for themselves, as they have been too close to the project for too long and can’t see it with fresh eyes. Work from a developmental edit often leads to moving content around in the manuscript, as well as deleting sections (and maybe writing new ones in other places). The changes can seem radical at first, but the end result may well be a smoother and more satisfying read.
We generally work with multiple editors during our careers. Although there are lots of benefits to working with the same ones – they get to know your work, there is trust, a communication shorthand develops – it may be that sometimes you internalise what they have to teach, and no longer make those mistakes. In those cases a new editor can be refreshing, as they pick up on different issues, and guide you to new techniques and story improvements.
It helps massively if the editor you work with is familiar with the genre or subject you write in. It is also good if you have a style and temperament that matches the editor. For that reason, a sample edit of part of the material is a handy way to assess compatibility.
8. Copy Editing
Sometimes called line editing. The copy editor isn’t concerned with the overall story arc, the characterisation, the themes. A copy editor checks for errors, and ways to improve the writing. They are focussed on sentences and paragraphs. Spelling and punctuation. Style. Repetition. Cliches. Rhythm. They will check facts and tell you that the date is wrong, or the minor character of Fred was called Frank in one scene.
Copy editing makes the book more readable, with no basic errors that will distract a reader and pull them out of immersion.
9. Proofreading
A proofreader assumes the book is complete. They check for final typos, grammar errors or spelling mistakes that may have slipped through. Bear in mind that in all the previous editing stages, changes were made to the manuscript. It is quite common for those to introduce new errors, hence the continual checks.
But after the proofreader has finished, the book is ready to go gold. In software parlance, we have a release candidate (and should not make last minute changes to it that could introduce new bugs!).
10. Formatting
The designer or formatter works on the way the words appear on the page (printed copies) or screen (ebooks). They make sure the book has a consistent and readable style. They deal with images, running heads, and page numbers, and put all the parts of a book in their correct place. The end files for printing and for ebooks will be quite different, as both formats have their advantages and disadvantages. For example, the ebook can have hyperlinks, but the printed book may need to have the URL written out as a footnote; ebooks don’t have page numbers.
This stage is all about the presentation inside a book.
11. Cover design
The cover designer is focussed on what goes outside the book. The wrapping. The thing that tempts someone to pick up a paperback or click to buy the ebook. They will be focussed on images, colours, fonts and layout. They will make sure things are in the correct place, such as placing the ISBN barcode on the back of the book, and the imprint logo on the spine.
The cover is more than just wrapping paper for words. It is a key marketing element. We tempt readers to pick up a book by the cover. Only after that do they read the blurb on the back, and glance inside the hallowed tome at the quality content within. (For an ebook the cover will be a thumbnail in lists, a larger image on the book page, and fulfil the same purpose: tempting readers to read the book description, then maybe click to look inside the book and read the first pages.)
The ebook cover can be finished at any point, but the final print cover files can only be done once formatting is complete, so the designer knows the exact number of pages in the book. The page count, multiplied by paper thickness, determines how wide the cover’s central spine element must be.
12. Metadata
Meta is Greek for “about”. Metadata is “data about data”. I’m familiar with it from my career as a librarian, but in essence it is anything that describes something else in structured ways, without being a part of the main content.
When viewed in the abstract like that it all seems a bit confusing, but examples will help.
Films have age ratings. In the UK we’re used to seeing PG, 15, 18. That’s an element of metadata about the film.
Computer games will tell you what systems you can play them on. Linux, Playstation, Wii, Atari 2600. That’s metadata about the game.
A tin of beans will tell you exactly what the ingredients are. That’s metadata about the contents.
In all those cases the information will appear on the packaging in some way, and also in online descriptions of the product.
Books have many categories of metadata. The title, author, publisher, and year of publication, for example. Non-fiction may have a library classification number, which tells a librarian where it goes on the shelves (e.g. 920 for biographies in the Dewey Decimal Classification system).
In a paperback this information, and more, goes on the back of the title page. Online, there may be headings with that information.
Other important metadata could include things such as BISAC Subject Headings, a US system that describes what the book is about, and can aid its placement on bookstore shelves or within the categorisation system of an online bookstore. Keywords provide a similar purpose. So at some point in the publication process for the book, someone needs to make decisions on this kind of metadata, since it ties in both to distribution, and to marketing.
The blurb (or book description – what you see on the back of a printed book) could be considered another form of metadata. It describes the book’s contents in a way that tempts you to buy a copy.
13. Marketing
Marketing, advertising, public relations: this is all the stuff about informing the world that that book is coming, and then that it is here. Tasks such as images and posts for social media, sending out review copies, informing fans, press releases, making use of your author platform and so on. Maybe it will include paid advertising, and interviews, and extravagant book launch parties. Maybe there will be potentially tacky elements such as “cover reveals”. Marketing advice isn’t the goal of this book, but just be aware that it is a key part of a successful book launch.
14. Distribution
The printed books need producing and shipping. Ebooks need to enter the online distribution chain as well so they appear on vendor sites. This is a complicated but vital part of the process.
And so here we are. The book is finished, and the idea has finally become an item you can hold in your sweaty hand, whether it’s a paperback or an e-book on a portable device.
If you are writing a book, what stage are you at in this process?