“How do you know when it’s time to stop writing and start the publishing process?” I receive this question almost monthly from writers. There’s no single correct answer. If you have a deadline imposed by your publisher, you know when you’re supposed to turn in your manuscript—the decision has been made for you. If your publisher isn’t holding you to a schedule or if you self-publish and call all the shots, then there’s no contractual deadline that drives you. Instead, there might be a practical deadline: if you want to get your book out by October/November so you can take advantage of pre-holiday sales (which are almost always brisker than any other time of year, at least for most authors), you can work backward from your desired publication date to determine when it needs to go into the printer’s queue.

If you aren’t focused on making bank on Black Friday and the shopping-palooza of December, or if you’re currently seeking a publisher or agent representation, then when you decide to stop writing is determined by a feeling more than anything else. For me, it’s the moment when I realize I’m no longer improving my manuscript with edits. Instead, I’m making changes for their own sake—just to be doing something with the sentences—rather than creating a more satisfying experience for readers.

I once worked for a high-tech telecommunications company as a project manager. One of the higher-ups had a terrible expression when the engineers would continue to tweak their designs even though the system performance met the customers’ specs and marked improvements weren’t being made: “It’s time to shoot the engineers and go to production.” An awful image to be sure, but he understood that the creatives in this scenario could spend the rest of their careers fiddling with their circuit boards without making something substantively better than what they already had. When I catch myself doing likewise, it’s time to give the writer a rest and move on to publication, or when I was starting out, it was time to move on to querying agents and publishers.

Pre-Publication Book Details

How best to use that time between post-writing and publication? There are numerous activities, some of which every writer must do, traditionally published and self-published alike, and others that are usually out of the hands of traditionally published authors but that self-published authors must do or hire others to do. These include cover design, front matter, back matter, and editing. Marketing is a wholly separate beast and will be the subject of Part 2. In this post, I’m going to focus on the creation of the book itself: the final product with its many elements.

The cover design consists of the following:

  • Artwork/fonts/colors/layout on the front and back covers and spine
  • Back-cover copy/teaser
  • Placement of blurb excerpts (compliments from hopefully well- or at least better-known authors whose kind words could convince readers to take a chance on buying your book)
  • Publisher’s/Self-Publisher’s logo
  • ISBN block with barcode and price

Cover Art

If you’re self-publishing, you’ll be either creating all these details yourself or hiring one or more people to do this work for you. Either way, hopefully you’ve already started this process, as it can be especially time-consuming if you must queue up for a cover artist’s attention. Cover art is hugely important—we all judge a book by its cover as well as its title. Grabbing some nebulous clip art and slapping it on the cover with a bland font is a death sentence for your book. It pays to invest in a talented artist’s work if you don’t have those skills.

If you have a traditional publisher, you might complete a form suggesting some cover ideas and/or supply possible images to them for purchase or inspiration. In either case, listen to the opinions of professional cover designers. If they tell you the graphic you have in mind simply won’t work on an 8.25 inch x 5.25 inch book cover—let alone as the thumbnail size we’re used to seeing online—believe them and use that beloved picture instead on your website.

Blurbs

Big publishers might get some of their famous authors to supply blurbs for a book they’ve anointed as next season’s breakout hit, but most authors need to secure their own blurbs. Many self-published authors skip this step, which I think is a missed opportunity. I’ve sold any number of books because seeing Terry Kay, Joshilyn Jackson, or some other well-known author’s endorsement on the front or back cover convinced a reader who was on the fence to take a chance buying my work. Are blurbs hard to get? Yes. Are they worth the effort? I really think they are. Seeking endorsements also provides very good practice asking for something from other people, which authors need to get comfortable with if they ever hope to successfully hand-sell their work in bookstores or via social media posts. You develop a thick skin, become accustomed to being ignored or rebuffed, and cultivate a deep sense of gratitude that hopefully you’ll pay forward when some other author asks you for a blurb.

Back Cover Copy/Teaser

My publisher allows me to write the back-cover teaser for my books, but many authors I know submit a summary describing the main characters, primary plot, and the stakes involved (e.g., finding true love, life and death, fate of the world, good triumphing over evil) and someone in marketing or another department writes this copy. This is a sales pitch more than a summary, designed to intrigue a reader and make them want to know more. At my book signings, soon-to-be customers get snagged by the cover and the title, then they turn the book over and read the copy and any blurbs there. If they start randomly flipping through the pages, I know they’re going to buy—they’re just talking themselves into it. But the process starts with the front cover and then the back cover closes the deal (along with, if necessary, my streamlined patter about the book that provides additional selling points—i.e., award-winning, book club favorite, if you like X, you’ll like this, etc.).

Front matter is everything inside the book that appears before the first chapter or prologue:

  • Longer blurbs
  • Half-title page: only the book title, without the author’s or publisher’s name
  • Frontispiece: usually a list other books by the author available from that publisher or artwork on the left page opposite the full title page
  • Full title page, which includes what the half-title page lacks
  • Copyright page
  • About the author and acknowledgments (both sometimes included as end matter instead)
  • Dedication
  • And perhaps some items usually found in nonfiction rather than novels, including the table of contents, a foreword written by someone other than the author to provide credibility, and a preface or an introduction written by the author

These are a lot of pages leading up to the main body of the book (unimaginatively called “body matter”).

End/Back matter in nonfiction consists of a glossary, bibliography, and index. Some sci-fi/fantasy tomes include glossaries, too, and some fiction publishers put the about-the-author section and acknowledgments at the end, possibly along with an ad for other books by that author or other authors in the same genre.

Rewriting and Editing

One pre-publication activity common to nearly every writer is rewriting and editing based on an independent editor’s or critique group’s (or editing program) feedback. If you don’t have reliable critique partners, it’s worth the cost to have a professional point out things that don’t work, are grammatically wrong, or simply don’t make sense. One point of rewriting and editing is to remove all the speedbumps that could slow down or sidetrack a reader or otherwise spoil the immersive reading experience. Nothing kicks you out of a story faster than missing words, glaring typos, or contradictory details—all of which are hard to detect by the author because they know what the text is supposed to convey instead of what is actually in print. Another reason to rewrite and edit is to add details that submerge the reader deeper in the story and the point-of-view character’s mind. Seek to end every chapter on some kind of cliffhanger—physical or emotional. If your book fails to leave something at stake at each chapter’s end, the reader has a reason to put your book down and might never pick it up again. Don’t let them off the hook!

But when you find yourself moving words around or changing punctuation just to keep making changes, you know it’s time to send the writer to another project (no need to shoot anyone) and go to production with the current project. Hopefully this little guide tells you what to do then with the book itself. In Part 2, I’ll tackle pre-publication marketing.