Business for Breakfast, ,

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The following is a chapter from Business for Breakfast, Volume 2: The Beginning Professional Publisher.

The ebook is available from Amazon, Kobo Books, Barnes & Noble, iBookstore, and the paper version is available from Createspace.

However, if you’re like most publisher (unwilling to spend money unless absolutely necessary) I will also be posting a chapter a week, so you’ll merely have to have patience to read all twelve chapters.

Chapter Two

Production 101

You’ve chosen your publishing name, set up your bank accounts, chosen the distributors that you want to publish with. Right?

Now what?

This chapter will walk you through the basics of what’s called Production, that is, taking a finished manuscript through all the steps necessary to get it ready for publication.

Other chapters will go into more depth about some of these steps.

First Step

Take off your writing hat.

Seriously. If you’re not physically wearing a hat, at least mime taking off that writing hat.

Now, put on your publishing hat. Again, mime the action if you don’t actually have a cool fedora that you use to get you in the mood for managing your publishing empire.

Go through that physical motion again, literally miming taking off one hat and putting on a different hat, whenever you find yourself thinking like a writer.

You’re no longer a writer. Now, you’re a publisher.

This is an essential first step. You’ll break this rule a lot when you first start. I know I did. Eventually, however, you’ll get the hang of it.

So put on your publisher’s hat, and let’s go.

Determine the Genre

Choose a project. Just choose one to start with. I would advise starting with a short story—it’s shorter, and theoretically, it will be easier to go through all the production steps with a shorter project.

First thing that you, as the publisher, need to determine is the genre for this piece.

The genre will determine so many other things about this piece, including the cover, the style of blurb that you write, the keywords, the pricing, where you distribute it, what markets you might send it to for reviews, etc.

So figure out the genre.

Sure, you might be writing some fancy sort of time–travel western that blurs a bunch of genres.

You still must pick just one.

Decide, as the publisher, if the book is 51% western and only 49% some other thing.

Why is determining the genre so important? Many reasons, but the first is discoverability. Readers have been trained to look for books by genre. Readers classify themselves as mystery readers, or literary snobs, or science fiction addicts.

Genre is strictly a marketing tool. It has no bearing on what or how you write.

Determining a genre is a publishing and marketing decision. You have your publishing hat on. This is not a writing decision. You are not currently the writer, remember?

You should also be aware of which genres trump other genres. For example, if you write a romance that follows all of the conventions of romance, and then you throw in robots, you may not have a romance anymore. Readers may consider it science fiction now, because science fiction tends to trump every other genre.

(If you want an absolutely excellent class to learn about genre, I can’t recommend Dean Wesley Smith’s Genre workshop enough. http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/online–workshops)

If you as the publisher can’t determine what genre a piece is, give it to a trusted reader to tell you what genre they think it’s in.

It’s okay if you get it wrong. You can always go back and change everything.

Most writers never know what genre they write in. Even when they think they know, they’re wrong.

So spend the time learning about genre and pick the right one. (More about genre later in Chapter Four: Basic Marketing, Part One.)

Form

For my publishing house, the rule tends to be that any piece longer than 10,000 words gets a print edition.

Other publishing houses choose to produce print editions for every book.

Others choose to produce print editions only for works longer than 40,000.

Perhaps you also want to produce an audio version of this book.

Perhaps you’ll also do a series of blog posts regarding this book.

Maybe this book will only be available in print, and not in ebook format.

It is up to you.

But you should decide what form(s) the book is going to be produced in.

Dates

It’s difficult to create a publication schedule when you’re first starting out and you have no idea how long the production is going to take.

Remember, however, that the production schedule is always written in pencil. Or on erasable white–marker boards. Or in your special, separate, Google calendar that you use to keep track of all your deadlines (very easy to move those dates!)

Production schedules change. Constantly. Be prepared for tossing out everything you were planning on doing in a quarter because something else fell into your lap. It happens more frequently than you think.

However, it’s considerably easier to change an existing schedule and to move things around then to have everything be amorphous and undefined.

So pick a date for when you want to publish this single piece you’ve chosen.

If you’re producing a print version, add six weeks. You’ll need that time to review the proof without having to pay crazy shipping costs.

If you’re only producing an ebook, give yourself at least three weeks, possibly more, because there’s a learning curve with all of this.

Now, write those dates down. Shoot for having a single date for all the forms of a book, but be realistic about it. Sometimes a different form for a book will come out later.

They can change. They probably will.

But write down the dates so you have something to shoot for.

More about building a production schedule in Chapter Six, The Production Schedule is Written in Pencil.

Marketing

What level of marketing support are you going to provide for this book?

Not all books receive the same level of marketing. Nor should they.

As a publisher, you have limited time and money. (Remember, you wear another hat, that is, a writing hat. Time you spend marketing is time you are not spending writing.)

You may choose to do a minimal amount of marketing for a project that’s not the same as your regular genre and what you’re best known for writing. Or perhaps it’s the first book in a new series. Or maybe it’s just a short story.

Whatever the reason, it’s your choice. Make a decision as a publisher.

More about basic marketing in Chapter Four, Basic Marketing, Part One, and >Chapter Five, Basic Marketing, Part Two.

Doing the Work

Now that you have the planning out of the way, you get to actually do the work.

These include:

 

  • Getting the piece copyedited if it hasn’t been.

 

NOTE: There are some writers who can copyedit their own work. Me? I’ll misspell my own name given a chance. I always have someone else copyedit my work.

 

  • Write the blurbs.
  • Create the appropriate covers. You’ll need a separate cover for each form, such as print, ebook, audio, etc.
  • Format the piece for print.
  • Format the piece for ebook.
  • Send to distributors
  • Bask in the glory of having published a book!

 

Of course, some of these steps contain a lot more steps, which I’ll go into later. (Much of this will be covered in Chapter Six, The Production Schedule is Written in Pencil.)

The steps aren’t difficult. They are work, however. There’s a learning curve. But it will get easier as you do more project.

In Conclusion

Here are the three things you need to remember about basic production work:

 

  • Take off your writing hat and put on your publishing hat.
  • Determine the genre for a piece, then decide the formats and the dates.
  • Do the work and publish that book!

The ebook is available from Amazon, Kobo Books, Barnes & Noble, iBookstore, and the paper version is available from Createspace.