The Publishing Process

If you’re a writer, you may have wondered: What happens after the contract is signed?

Every publishing house is different. There are large publishers, indie presses, hybrid publishers, vanity presses, and a whole slew of other styles of publishers out there. It’s likely that I will one day do a post breaking these down for you, but for today, let’s focus on how we at Mirror World do things.

mwpubsmallblackWe’re a small, independent, traditional-style, publishing house. What I mean by that is we’re sized to be able to comfortably publish three to five books a year, with a small staff of three people plus volunteers and contractors. We’re owned by private individuals (myself and Murandy Damodred) and we do pretty much everything in house, and we’re not say, an imprint of a larger publishing house. We also don’t charge our authors for any part of the publishing process and we pay them royalties as per a contract that is signed with them at the time of acceptance of their manuscript.

So, in our style of company, after a manuscript is accepted for publication, the first step is that a timeline is established. Looking at what other books we have slated for the year and at the schedules of our staff, I work out who would be best to work on the various stages of the project and what would be a reasonable deadline for them. There are a lot of little steps, but here are the main ones:

1. First Round Edit
Keep in mind, we already read the manuscript through once as part of the submission process, but now the book will be assigned to an editor who will read it through (again, if they were the one to have acquired it.) In this pass, the editor is looking primarily for content-related edits. This includes, inconsistencies with plot, characters, description, or world-building as well as things that don’t make sense or made need more clarification. On the other end of the spectrum, it may also be to look for parts that drag or contain too much exposition in an effort to tighten up the story.

2. Beta Readingimagesd
Once the author has had a chance to make the changes suggested in round one, the updated manuscript is then sent to a team of three to five beta readers. (See my discussion on beta readers for more information on this part of the process) The beta readers’ notes  are then forwarded to the author who then chooses what changes to make based on this feedback.

3. Line Edit
Once the author is satisfied with the changes made and has made the manuscript the best it can be, the editor makes one last pass through the story line by line and corrects all the grammar, spelling, punctuation, and anything else that may have gotten missed earlier.

4. Cover Art
While the above steps are taking place, I find a cover artist whose style reflects the book and the design for the cover that the author and I envision. While the editor and the author work on the content, the artist or designer creates the cover art.

5. Interior Formatting
When the line edit is finished the editor passes the manuscript on to me and I format it for e-book and paperback. This is also the point where any design elements such as chapter headings and page breaks are decided upon. I also gather and format all the necessary information for the interior such as the ISBN number, the author bio and photo, and the dedication.
Piratescoverlayoutyellow copy
6. Cover Layout
Once the interior format is complete and I know how many pages the final version of the book will be, I can design the book jacket. This is where the back of the book blurb is added, though it may have been created at any point earlier.

7. The Rest…
At some point early on in  the process a marketing plan is developed and it is now that it is really put into action. We plan the details surrounding the launch, whether it will be in person or online only, we create a press kit and a press release, schedule a blog tour and decide where best to advertise and sell the books. We also order inventory and encourage the author to do the same so they can promote and sell the books in their hometown.

I hope that helps give you some idea of how we operate and what process a manuscript undergoes once we accept it. If you have any questions about the publishing process, or Mirror World in specific, make sure to leave them in the comments below and I’ll be sure to get to them!

TNS Banner blog tourAnd as you know, our most recent  release, This Night Sucks is now available! You can follow the blog tour this week, or until the end of the month get the e-book ON SALE for only $0.99 in our store with the promo code: SUCKS

 

Advertisements

5 comments

  1. Thanks for explaining this. This might explain why the publishers I’ve been working with as of late have been slow in letting me know how things are.

    Let us know when you open to submissions again. You sound like the kind of house I want to work with on a regular basis.

    Liked by 1 person

  2. What a great article, Justine! Wow, you do a lot with just three staff. And to David, Mirror World is Great to work with. Anytime I have EVER had a question or concern, I get an answer pert near right away. You are never left wondering what’s going on.

    Liked by 1 person

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s
https://mirrorworldpublishing.wordpress.com/2016/06/21/the-publishing-process/
mirrorworldpublishing.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-26
77271
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:VYDQQOMCFLOWL72LXH6XY5XEF7F7LXLF
<urn:uuid:694e910e-3eea-4e12-bb3e-d4747c7f56ff>
2017-06-26T08:51:02Z
192.0.78.13
text/html
sha1:UANLVF6VBUO5LRNKKVOCC4YEK3RHM4KM
<urn:uuid:ee394310-b1d9-4ea2-9da5-3205e4d0cd55>
https://mirrorworldpublishing.wordpress.com/2016/06/21/the-publishing-process/
length
response
<urn:uuid:6978ec36-80b7-4f9e-8143-c03b7e9e1cd3>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-145-178-132.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-26
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for June 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf