Q: Why Does It Take so Long to Publish a Book?

Q: Why does it take so long for a publisher to publish a book once they’ve bought it from your agent?

A: For traditional trade publishers, schedules are built around the selling cycle of key account retailers.

Start backwards. Pretend your book hits the shelves at Barnes & Noble on September 5. Why did it take a year to get there? (And yes, publishers would prefer to have a full year from the point when they purchase a manuscript from an agent until the time it hits the shelf.)

Month 12
To have a book on the shelf on September 5, B&N probably needs the book to start delivering to their distribution centers on August 5. It will take them a week or so to get it organized to ship to their 700-something stores; another week or so for it to arrive at all locations; and the next two weeks for local stores to get on the shelf. Remember, they have only so many inches of book shelves dedicated to your book’s category, so it’s likely that some slow-selling titles are getting removed from shelves and returned to publishers. If you have a real, bona fide marketing plan, you now do your thing this month and in the next few months. Pray that the retail buyers believed the sales person who told them what the marketing plan would be so that books are in the market when you tell people about it on radio interviews and internet blog tours.

Months 10-11
Printer ready files of your book were sent to the printer. The printer needs a week or two for the make-ready process. They will have ripped ‘blues’ of interiors and covers that were sent to publisher for approval. They were probably forwarded to you as well – or at least a pdf file was emailed to you to read over. It takes each of you a week to do your final quality checks. It can sit a week or two in a long line of projects before it hits the print line and it might even get bumped because a new novel by Stephanie Meyers or John Grisham is selling so fast that the printer gave your spot in line to another publisher. (Sad to say but true – it happens.) It takes another week or two for the book to get shipped to your publisher’s warehouse or distribution center and yes, it takes them a week or two to ship it to B&N.

Months 8-9
You might find out that your editor is now assigning you to a copy editor. A copy editor gets into the nuts and bolts of grammar and syntax and punctuation. You get an edited chapter every day or two and you are given 24 to 36 hours to respond! Not fun. Finally, in week 7, you see a final cover; you like it better; you might love it; you might have Exhibit A when you explain 16 months later to your family and friends why your book really didn’t sell. You get a final edited manuscript and are told you have three business days to make any final changes. A week later you get a typeset copy of the book. It’s amazing how much better your material reads when it is professionally typeset. You have another three business days to mark any mistakes or changes.

Months 6-7
You don’t hear much the first three weeks but the publishing team is very busy getting sales and marketing tools prepared for sales conference. In week four you get a cover you don’t like. You protest. You might even have won the argument but you have a friend who comes up with an even worse cover and you tell the publishing team how much you like it because you had more of a say in it, ruining your credibility. The publisher finally says that catalog drop dead date is here and they’ll have to use what they’ve got but they’ll consider revising prior to publication. An improved version gets used with the sales sheet. You wonder why a publisher does a catalog if the real presentation is done with a sales sheet. He or she doesn’t know why either. In addition to key account presentations, your manuscript is sent to trade and consumer outlets by the publicist. We’ll come back to this time period later.

Month 5
No one is real happy with the state of the manuscript but someone from the marketing department needs to write catalog copy and uses what they have. Another marketing person calls to get your list of influencers who need a pre-publication manuscript. You tell them that it’s not ready to be read by reviewers but the marketing person explains that everyone in the publishing industry understands it won’t be a final edited copy.

Month 4
In the second week of this month you’ll get a long conciliatory call from your editor with a list of things you need to rewrite. You have two weeks to get everything done.

Month 3
You turn in your manuscript and hear nothing. You start calling the editor who has been assigned to you and don’t hear back. After a couple weeks of this you call your agent. Your agent calls the publisher. The publisher assures him or her that you’ll hear from your editor in just a couple more days. Six weeks later an assistant calls and sends an email and lets you know that you’ll hear from your editor in the next couple days.

Months 1-2
It takes the whole month for you to get a first draft of your contract, which is probably 13 to 15 pages long and is organized with the logic and layout of a 3,000 square foot house that started out as a single-wide trailer. You have a bunch of questions that your agent will patiently cover with you. Your agent wants to impress you with his or her knowledge of arcane publishing nuances and negotiating acumen so he or she will start insisting on contract changes. After a couple of center lane head-on chicken rushes, the parties will finally settle on the few things that actually have to do with business. Your agent will tell you the story and you’ll be impressed.

Bottom line, go back and look at months 6 and 7. This is what is driving the schedule. Reviewers need their review copies and this is when retail accounts, like B&N, Lifeway, Family Christian, Wal-Mart (and their book buying distributors A-Merch and ReaderLink), BooksaMillion, Mardells, and others expect (and demand) publishers to present new lists. There are three main selling seasons:

• Fall books (August through December release) need to be presented by March;
• Spring books (January through April releases) need to be presented by August;
• Summer books (May through July) need to be presented by the middle of November.

Are there exceptions? Yes. They are called ‘drop ins’ and that works great with big, time-sensitive book concepts. Emergency land a plane in the Hudson River and save a couple hundred lives as the captain of an airline and be assured someone can and desperately wants to have your book in the market in the next two months. But there needs there to be a compelling reason to rush to press. Otherwise, you can do a lot more harm than good and seriously damage your sales.

Maybe this long-winded A to your Q will make the wait for your book to reach the market seem more bearable!