Mind Body Spirit:
Transformation:
Christianity:
History:
Books For Writers:
Children & Young Adult:
Paganism:
Culture & Politics:
Unpacking the Editorial and Production Process
The Editorial and Production Process, Step by Step
In this section:
Congratulations! You signed the contract. What happens next? The editorial production process — when your manuscript gets copyedited, proofed and proofread, and its book cover designed — usually takes about four months. Upon completion, we set your Publication Date for 10 full months later. The entire journey takes roughly 14 months from the contract's signing to your book's being publication.
There is a sizable gap between production and publication because it takes 10 months (sometimes longer) for information about your book to circulate through the trade worldwide; this is essential to maximize your prospects of long-term success. We are represented by companies generally reckoned to be amongst the best independent sales teams around the world, and they cannot start selling your book until they have the finished information. Budgets for buying new titles in the chain retailers are set many months in advance — they will not look at titles coming out before then. Some key catalogues, such as the NBN sales catalogue in North America and the bumper Bookseller Spring and Autumn editions in the UK, cover six months of titles. They need the information on ISBN, page extent, price, sales copy, and cover three months before then. So 10 months gives us just enough time.
Your journey to publication entails 9 stages, what we call the Workflow sections:
After you sign a contract, the Manuscript Upload and Approval Workflow section will open up. After this first stage of the process is completed, the next stage, Copyediting, will open up, and so forth. The final workflow section is Book in Warehouse, which is completed shortly before your publication date.
After a stage is completed, it cannot be changed. A Workflow section is completed once the Approve/Confirm button is pressed, usually by a member of the CI team, sometimes by you, the author. You can monitor these stages on your Production page.
Each time a new Workflow section opens, an Expected Date (a tentative deadline for the stage’s completion) will appear. We aim to complete each stage by the Expected Date — though note that this is not a hard-and-fast deadline and can be adjusted as needed.
The Expected Date is guidepost, not a deadline set in stone. If your current Workflow section is red (overdue), it’s probably because the Managing Editor hasn’t approved it yet. Don’t worry! If something's been in red for more than seven days (and it's not in your control), then raise a query on the Author Forum.
Each section is a different colour, depending on where it is in the process:
Each Workflow section has a Notes for this workflow stage box where you can leave notes for your Publishing Team or, in some cases, change the Expected Date. If you do, please make sure that you click Save Changes.
Once you upload your final manuscript, production officially starts. Take your time. Before you upload your manuscript, make sure that you have completed all the tasks we have set for you here. We prefer that you give us a clean manuscript than a rushed book. You may change the Expected Date to give yourself more time if you wish.
Your MS is copyedited for grammar, usage, spelling, syntax, and punctuation and is put into a consistent style. When that is completed, it will be uploaded to the Copyediting workflow stage for your download and review.
Please note: We will follow your instructions where appropriate, but sometimes design requests aren't feasible or may not translate to print as well as you might think. Our designers are experts and will have the final say.
This is when you must go through your copyedited manuscript and accept or reject, one by one, the copyeditor's tracked changes.
Unless you request an advance manuscript proof for your review (which will be ready after proofreading), this is your last chance to change the manuscript! If you wish to make further changes to your manuscript after this stage and you have not requested an advance proof, then there will be a minimum £100/$150 charge for those changes (see Corrections below for more details).
After this is done, the Editorial Manager gives the manuscript one last review, including the deletion of markups, tracked changes, or any remaining comments.
Once your book and cover are designed and their files finalized, your Publication Date will be set to 10 full months later.
These two sections happen concurrently. The proofs are sent to in-house proofreaders who check for formatting errors, typos, and other categorical errors, but they do not rewrite or enhance the text. Please be aware that there is no author involvement at the proof stage. If you upload amended proofs at this time, the typesetters will ignore them; they are commissioned to work solely on proofs sent in by our Managing Editor.
The final decision is with us, but in most cases, the author's choice is upheld and our authors tend to be delighted with their covers.
We do not allow authors to design the covers themselves, and we seldom allow them to use their own designer. In our experience, more often than not, we end up with an amateurish cover, and the extra work involved isn’t worth the cost. We do not get into correspondence on the cover. It is too subjective an area, and corrections can be endless.
Your publication date is set for 10 full months later.
We will now distribute information about your book (with the AI/tipsheet) to the publishing trade, with the following timeline from when your book leaves Editorial & Production:
If any of these does not happen, please contact our Sales & Distribution Coordinator, Steve Wagstaff, via the Author Forum.
Your six free author copies are supplied around six weeks before publication. (Please note that if you live outside the UK or US, we now charge the delivery costs for these). You can order additional copies at a discount: See FAQs.
Your ebook is created two months before publication in epub format. You may download your own copy for personal or promotional purposes. We do not include indexes in ebooks, as a matter of policy.
Your first print run is done six weeks before publication. We use SDR Printing (short-run printing in the dozens or hundreds) to print the vast majority of our books. We usually keep initial print runs (before publication) small, somewhere around 130–200 copies across both the USA and the UK, but some titles can have significantly higher print runs. Reasons for this might include:
If you forecast higher demand for your title, e.g. for launches, PR programs, etc., please let us know on the Author Forum.
Visit your book’s Production page and scroll down to the Printings section.
You can see:
The date that the print order was sent is not the same as the date that the text and cover files went to the printer.
Your ebook is distributed to worldwide ebook sellers.
We bring out titles in print and digital in the same month of publication, and they both have the same official publication date. However, in practice, the exact date of release won't always be the same. The ebook goes for conversion a month or so before the publication date and then it is distributed. Different distributors take varying times to load the ebooks into their system. It will likely not show on sites such as Amazon for pre-order until a few weeks before publication. So if you see your ebook released on a slightly different day from your official publication date, don’t worry.
DRM (Digital Rights Management) is code added to an ebook file to limit its use (especially copying, printing, and sharing). It is a way to help fight copyright infringement. We distribute our EPUB through NBN Fusion, and all their agreements with ebook vendors require that they apply DRM to files distributed to them
Your book is printed and ready for bookshops and online customers to order.
All printers sometimes produce faulty books. Nineteen out of twenty times, it affects only a few copies — let us know as soon as you can if you come across one. After a few months, it’s too late to seek remedy from the printer.
Your last opportunity to make changes to your text during the production process is either before your approval of the Final Copyedit stage or after proofreading (if you requested to review an advance proof). It is vitally important that you review your copyedited MS thoroughly before approving its final copyedit. Once your book is printed, there are two ways to make corrections:
If you have sold 2000 copies in all formats and want to make corrections (or if you want to pay to have them done):
