Publishing Process Overview - Book Launchers Deep Dive Replay Excerpt

We will cover at the end as well. So, so this is our, our process, if you will. And what, what I'm going to touch on today is I'm going to give you, I'm going to go pretty detailed into the process that we use. I'm also going to identify areas where, you know, you don't have to do it the way we do it. Some of the things we do, I would highly recommend you do in order to get a top quality book at the end of it. But there are things that are optional in the process. There's things that we do that you can do different. Do my best to kind of highlight those things, explain why we do it this way. But you know, our way is not the only way. There's other ways to tackle it. Our focus in our process is quality as well as marketing. Those are the two things that we emphasize. And so if you have other goals or different approach for a different reason, then that's totally fine. I always try to tell people there's no one answer when it comes to books. Like there never is. When somebody's like, how big should it be? Like, that's. There's not one answer. So this is going to be an overview and then I'm going to take you through some line by line things and kind of try to cover. But everything I talk about is going to assume the manuscript is written because writing the book is a whole process unto itself. November, which is next month, we're going to have a writing session. So it's NaNoWriMo. For anybody who is not familiar with that, it's typically it's write your book, write your novel month. That's kind of how it's always been, is a contest to try to. Not a contest, but like a push yourself a game. I don't know what you want to call it. You can register for nanowrimo and commit to trying to write your novel in the month. And in light of that, next month, our deep dive will be a writing session. So you can join me for two hours. We'll do writing sprints, we'll do some focus writing, and they'll still be Q and A and of course, prizes. But the process we're going to talk about today is going to assume you have a first draft of a manuscript. But I did want to bring up our kind of roadmap overview here because generally speaking, before we get into writing a manuscript, we like to spend a little bit of time defining the author brand. So that is something, you know, whenever a client comes in now that's the first conversation or one of the very first conversations we want to have wherever they're coming to us in the process. Because some of our authors come to us with a finished first draft of the manuscript. Some come to us partially edited. Others come to us with a bunch of random thoughts on a page. And then others come to us with just an idea. And so the first conversation we really want to have is about the brand. And if you're doing this on your own, I highly Recommend. I've got four or five videos on YouTube about your author brand. I would spend a little bit of time just thinking about it, about your personal brand, but also how it ties into the book that you're writing and how you're going to position yourself in the marketplace. You'll be marketing your book, but when you're doing marketing, a lot of it really is author marketing and understanding how you're a little bit different. What's different that you can talk about in the marketplace will really help you as you're writing the book because you'll have a little bit more clarity around your voice that you're using and who you're talking to and why you're talking to them. And you'll also have that, that sense of clarity around what makes you different than other people, because chances are you're not the first one to write a book about your topic. So that's the first piece. The rest of what we do here in these steps is getting to that first draft. So like I said, I'm going to scroll on ahead to the fact right here you've got a first draft. So congratulations, you've got your first draft. Now what do you do with this draft? What are you going to do to bring it to life? And there are decisions before you get to this point for a lot of authors. Because we're a self publishing service company, I'm going to assume that you're self publishing and that's why you're here. But of course, there are decisions as to how you're publishing it. Are you going through hybrid company, Are you going through a full service self publisher like us, or are you going to hire all the pieces yourself? So there's some decisions you'll need to make as you get to this point as to what your next step is, where do you want distribution? What's going to be important for you to reach your reader and reach your goals with the book. But first, stop for I think all authors should be a developmental edit. And for anybody joining in, we're Talking nonfiction. You know, I've heard from many of my fiction friends that this process and a lot of what we talk about is similar, but it isn't the same for both. So just if you are a fiction author and you're tuning in to grab nuggets, just know that it is not 100% the same for both nonfiction and fiction. But we are talking about nonfiction. So the first stop is a developmental edit or a content edit. And the way I like to describe this is that 30,000 foot view of your book. A lot of people think of editing. They get an editor and they don't specifically, they don't specifically seek out a developmental or a content editor. And what they typically get is a copy editor. A copy editor goes through your book line by line, going through for word choice, sentence structure, grammar, punctuation. They're really trying to think through words, right? Is that the right word choice? Is this the right grammar? Versus the content editor is thinking about your reader. Is this book a compelling story or does this book stick to the same point and make it clear who the book is for throughout? It's really the content edit is the edit that makes your book better. The copy edit is the one that makes it, that polishes it, that makes it grammatically correct and hopefully easier to read. It is also where the voice can be the most impact. So it's important to, when you get a copy edit to make sure that somebody is capturing your voice and not changing words that change your voice. And this is why in our process, we actually have a first look. So you'll get, you know, this first section of your book edited for your review. And it's really important to kind of give that a good look because you want to make sure the editor is, you know, doing it. Everybody has a preference, right? Some people want it to be really strict, really grammatically correct. Other people want their voice to be clear. And their voice may not be that of a grammatically correct, you know, that of a grammatically correct person. Most of us don't speak grammatically correctly, but as an example, we had a client that, you know, English is not their first language. And they're, they're not, they're not a polished English speaker. And the copy edit went too far into making it a really polished manuscript to the point where this author said, this doesn't sound like me anymore. So that's where I say, you want to watch the degree of editing to make sure that your voice doesn't change too much. Which is why we like to do a Sample edit to make sure that you know it's in line with what you're looking for. So the copy edit that there's proofreading. After that, you can see on this roadmap that we also start talking launch. And as I get into the more granular version of our process, you're going to see that we start talking about and thinking about marketing and doing research much earlier in this process than right here. But this is where we like to figure out how are you going to launch your book? And we have four overall launch strategies, although they get tailored person by person. And we have a YouTube video that kind of gives an overview of the four launch strategies. I don't know, Angela, if you want to try and track that one down, the four launch strategies for those of you who are interested in that piece. But then the next, the next major milestone on this process is a proofread. Unless you're getting a fact check. And a fact check we like to do. We do two rounds of a copy edit. We usually would insert the fact check in between those two. And so fact checking is an optional part of this process. It's really useful for people who have a lot of research in their book or if you're like me and you've written a lot of the book and you've stated things that you know are true but you don't have a source for those, a fact check can go through and find sources for a lot of those things. Like I had in Self Publish and Succeed. I had some stories, for example, about Rich Dad, Poor dad, the book which I knew to be true, but I didn't have a source because I actually had gotten firsthand information from somebody and things like that. But the fact checker actually went through and found sources to back up some of these things that I was stating. And so that was a really useful part of the process for me just to give it credibility. They also caught something that I quoted, something that actually wasn't. I attribute it to the wrong person. So the fact check was good for that too. They found that I was attributing something to incorrectly, which was not. Not just me like other people. Attribute, attribute, anyways, source the thing, source the quote to a different person. So. So that. That happens in between copy editing if you'd like. Proofreading is also something you can do a couple times or you could do it after it's gone to layout or you can do it before layout. We like to do it before layout and then sometimes after layout because in layout we don't like to have to do a lot of edits if we can avoid it because it introduces new errors. Editing in layout, it is not the same as editing in a Word document. Everything is coded, and adding a word here can cause flowing issues page by page. So we like to do a periphery before layout, but many people do a proofread after layout to catch those things. Like I said, we often will do both. Cover design is something that we do after the manuscript is written for our Platinum clients. But for our Platinum plus clients, we do it sooner. We do it while they're in editing. And I got a question by email yesterday which I have to respond to. I don't know if Stephen's here. Stephen, if you're here, I know I saw your question and it was about kind of when in the process to do a cover design. Now that's an interesting question because the theme of the day is going to be there's no one answer to that. Because the reality is you can do a cover design at any point in the process, right? And we have in the past kind of had authors that were struggling with motivation in the writing process. And we've said, hey, here's a cover like visualize this so you can see and get yourself to the finish line. But the reality is we find that titling the book is best done in editing and after the content edit, because the book can change when you're writing it, and the book can even change when you're going through that content edit. And as a result, the title that you start with may actually not be a good fit for the book that comes out of the whole process. So we like to get the title after we've done that part of it. And then you need the title before you can design the book, really, because we've talked about this before, how the title and the COVID really need to work together. They're what? They're the packaging of your product, and that's what's going to sell it or not sell it. And choosing one and designing the COVID independent of knowing what the actual title is going to be can really lead to a disjointed product. Product packaging at the end. So all that's to say we do the COVID design for. We don't ever really do a final cover design until we're through this edit, but we can start it while as soon as we've got a title, as soon as we're locked, we lock that title in, we're able to start that cover design. So it doesn't have to be at this spot in the process. So I'm just going to look. I saw a few comments come in, so I'm just going to take a look. Oh, Angela was posting the video on the four launch strategies. So thank. Jasmine is asking about the recording. Typically we don't post the recordings. What I do do is take clips from it and excerpts from the recording and share it later. But it's one of those things where I like to have people live. I would not want to be here on a Saturday if you guys weren't here hanging out. And so if I always promise recordings and guarantee them, then I might be sitting here talking to Angela on a Saturday and she'll be thinking she's got better things to do and I wouldn't blame her. So that's generally why we try not to encourage and post replays. But sometimes we do share replays after the fact. But I usually take clips from these and put them into YouTube videos as a way to give you guys the content anyways. But there should be a reward for taking some time on a Saturday to hang out with us. Right? That's what I think. We also give you T shirts and mugs and books and things like that too. So. Okay, so the layout, which you know, can be called typesetting, interior formatting, it goes by many names. We want the COVID design first because we like to take elements and I just. I'll pull this book. I don't actually know if this is a good example. Not. Not going to show very well on there. So we like to take elements from the COVID and use it in the interior. So you need to have the COVID first and. Sorry, I'm flipping through to try to find an example of what that might be. Yeah, I mean the font. Usually we look at the fonts from the COVID and we'll use it on the interior in the different choices. Sean, I got your book here too. I saw you there. At least he was on my screen. Did he leave? I know he was there. Anyways, Sean's might be a good example of that too. Yeah, exactly. Okay, perfect. So the COVID on here. Sorry, I've lost myself. So I can't see what you guys are seeing. Oh, there it is. Okay, so you can see this font here is the font that is used in the chapter top, the chapter title there. So that font carries through sometimes. This lettering right here that starts the chapter. That might be this font here. Sometimes there's other develop design elements. Like we had one book. Do I have Becca's book. Yes, I do. Here's another good example. So Becca's book, she's got this line down there, so you can see inside. Sorry. There we go. So you can see those design elements carry through creating a full experience for the readers. Which is why we don't do layout until we have that cover design. Because it's, it's fundamental to creating that full experience. If they're done separately or if you hire a layout person who doesn't ask for the COVID you're just probably going to get a template which is okay. And again, like I said, there's not one way to do this. But what we do is our books are at the standard of a traditionally published book. They can sit on bookstores. You know, they've, they. We have authors who've had their books in airport bookstores and that. And we have actually, we've had Ingram, the catalog that does all the widespread distribution. A couple of our authors are actually at their feature table as examples of how to do design. So, so that's a really, really important piece for us because of what we do in the standard that we're holding the books to. Then we go to pre launch. Once you're in layout, once you've got the final layout, you've got your final cover, you can now, you can load, you can set up pre launch at any time. But for us, we want to have all the elements in place to send out ARC copies in order to get reviews and all of those sort of things. And so our pre launch starts once we've got the book finished and we're able to use it to send to book reviewers, media, you know, people running events, people for endorsements. You can send a book earlier in the process for endorsements and for, you know, other, what do you call it, endorsements and early reviews and partnerships and things like that. If you have a relationship with somebody, I think you can do that if you're doing cold outreach. I think this is one area where when you self publish, you really want to send them the final version or the, you know, the closest to the final version to get endorsements and ARC and those early reviewers, those ARC copies in the past, you know, they would say it's an ARC copy, we're going to be editing it, you know, it's not fully edited and that's okay. You know, it's an industry accepted thing. However, we are self, you know, as self published authors, you don't have the name of that traditional publishing company behind you. That gives people that credibility and that reassurance that they are going to have, you know, they're putting their name on the COVID of this book, endorsing it, that they want to make sure that it's a really good quality. So that's why we like to do it at that stage. But we have authors who send out our copies earlier. They might not have the full cover. They just have like the digital image of the COVID and they'll send it out and then publication day and post launch. So this is the overview. I'm going to dive into kind of it at a little bit more granular level because I think this makes it look a lot simpler than it is. But I want to open it up and see if you guys have specific questions right now about the process about something that, you know, kind of pops up for you here. And then we'll go into it a little bit more granularly. And then while we're doing that, let's do a participation prize. So lots of people said hello at the beginning. So, Angela, today is what, the 15th? I think it's the 15th, right? Yeah. So let's let. Thank you. Let's take 15 from the. Let's. From that skill testing question that I threw out there. Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Trying to find my answer. Delay of delivery. Jack. Was that Jack's. I can't remember. Who was our winner? Gregory. It was. Gregory was our winner. So let's go 15 from Gregory. And that will be our next prize winner. And we do have mugs again. So we. For a while, we were out of stock on mugs. And then I was clearing. I was clearing out some of my husband's biking stuff out of my garage, and I found a box of mugs. It was buried under, you know, old tire tubes, a bunch of bike repair stuff. But I was like, what is this box under here? And it turns out it was a box of mugs. So I still have some mugs for folks. This is. I'm calling them the vintage because we've changed our logo a little bit since these. So we do have mugs to give away so that we can clear out our vintage logo material and make room for our new logo that we updated this year. Okay, let me just see what. If you guys have any questions. Let's see. Yeah, it was funny that they were buried.

Somebody.

Norman's sending his cover through. So you guys can see Norman's cover. Let's see. Somebody's asking about launch. We can talk about that at the end a little bit. And do folks have Questions.

I have the prize winner.

Okay, great. Yeah.

Now it is.

Jack.

Jack, you were the Jack Hollenbeck. In case there's more than one. Jack, you were the 15th comment up from the previous one. So I'll message you. You might already have all the things, but that's okay. You may not have a T shirt, so maybe that's an option. You don't have a T shirt. Okay, we'll mess. I'll message you, we'll get you set up.

Hopefully we have your size.

Yes, yes. There are limited sizes, guys, so right now there should be small and large. There might be a random size here. There's something else, but for sure, small or large.

So awesome. Congrats. And Tony, I saw your question. Is the audiobook part of your process? Yes. And that's where, when I pull up our more granular timeline, I'm going to show you where we do the audiobook. Generally, I recommend you doing it after the proofread and either in layout or before layout. You don't have to, but I wouldn't do it much earlier because you want your words to be really close, ideally to what gets published, so that the Whisper Sync function of Audible and KDP Kindle books is available because a lot of people will use that. And I never used to, but I've started to this year because I read on my Kindle and then I get in my car and I listen to the book and I've actually found it really handy to switch back and forth between the two. And so if you don't have your books close in the wording or if you're one of those people who likes to ad lib, when you record your audiobook, you remove the ability for Whisper Sync to be activated. And it's something that I, I've heard from a lot of people can result in the, you know, extra purchases of your book. And I think, I think actually that's something a lot of nonfiction authors underestimate too. If you have a really good quality book and somebody gets it in audiobook, a lot of times they will end up buying it in print to have it on their shelf as a resource as well. But if you're. If they're very different versions, this, this can be, you know, can be a good thing, but not always. So. So, yeah, so we like to do it at the proofread or layout because then your words are final. I like to do it when my book is in layout because I always catch things. There's like little things that you'll see in Layout that no matter how many proofreaders you have and how many editors you have, there's still little things that will come up. And so I like to read my book in layout as a final kind of check. But you can do it at either point. But you'll. If you're the kind of person who hears it out loud and then wants to change the whole sentence, I would do it before. Before you go to layout. So it's less arduous in the layout process to make those edits because in layout, making big edits is problematic. And it will, depending on if you're working with us or another layout person, it will add a lot of time and it will also add expense to that because it does. Cause it's not like word, where changes flow through. You know, if it can cause pages, all the page numbers to have to be redone, it can cause flow through issues with images and all kinds of problems. So, okay, that was the audiobook. So, yes, that was a very long answer to say. Yes, that is part of our process. Tony, I see you smiling. It's great to have you here, by the way. Good to see you. Okay. And then I saw another question. Do folks have to join at the beginning? What if you have a manuscript done already? So as far as the book launchers process, we will. Everything's an application. So to say that you can join at any time isn't accurate because we are looking for people who we feel like we're really good fit to help. And so there is an application and a review process. The further along your book gets, the more restrictive, I guess would be a good word to say we are in how we. In how who we accept. And that's just simply because of all the steps in the marketing process that we integrate in much earlier in the process. But if your book hasn't had any editing yet and it's, you know, it's a topic that I think we're a good fit to help and your goals are a good fit, then yes, we'll work with you. Because through the editing process, a book really evolves anyways. And so we're usually able to help you really get the marketing positioning the hook really strong, you know, reader clarity through that editing process. So. But we have taken people much further along than that too. It's just a matter of where they're at with marketing and some of the other pieces of what they've. What they've done and haven't done up to that point. Was there any other questions, Angela, that I yeah, sorry.

I've been trying to collect them all. I feel like there are several, but let me know if you've already answered these. So Jack had asked, what is Whisper Sync? And you may have answered it like he said. Is that an audible version?

Yeah. So Whisper Sync is an Amazon tool feature that connects audiobooks to Kindle. And so if you buy both you have in there and they have Whisper Sync, you're able to do exactly what I was saying, which is get out of my car, sit down at my couch, and my book will know where I left off from the audio version, and it'll pick up on the Kindle version, so I don't have to scroll through the Kindle to figure out where I left off. And so that's what Whispersync is. So thank you for the question, because a lot of people may not have known about that.

Okay. And then there were some specific questions about, like, just different pieces of the process. A couple from Efren. Did you answer those?

Yeah. No, I didn't even know. I didn't even know Efren was here. Hi, Efren. I don't. I don't see you.

Efren's never not here.

I know.

Okay. So his first one was about fact checking, and he said, is this the phase? Citations are nailed down and organized. Do the fact checkers find needed sources that might be missing or could use a better source?

Yeah, so. And this is. We do have a really good YouTube video on fact checking. Angela. If you aren't knee deep in collecting questions, you could grab that and post it too. The fact checkers do a few things. So one is that they are looking for the quality of source because, you know, and I've done this too, but Wikipedia is not a good quality source. You want to try to get to a primary or a secondary source as much as possible. So where Wikipedia can be useful is you could go to the sources that the Wikipedia site has for the statements inside of Wikipedia and then see if that's a secondary or primary source. So they'll address that. They do format the citations that you have. They check them as well. Like I said, I had attributed something to. To the wrong person in my book. So they'll check those kind of things. They also read through the manuscript and things that don't have sources. They, like I said some of my stories about rich dad, poor dad, the book in self publish and Succeed, the fact checker actually read through and went, is that true? And looked it up and tried to find something that said it was or was not true for some books. This isn't like, this isn't something some authors want. And so that's why it's a completely optional piece. And a lot of people, including myself, actually, before I got into this business, I assumed that all traditionally published books went through fact checking. I just assumed, you know, it's kind of one of those things where I thought that it's a published book. So it is, you know, of, you know, a high standard. The reality is, and I don't know how long this has been true, but the reality is a lot of publishers don't do it. The cost of doing it is higher than the risk of not doing it. And so they put the onus on the author. In many cases, if the author wants a fact check, the author pays for it. And so a lot of times an author will say, no, I'm paying for that. And so that it is an optional part of the process. And it isn't even something that is done with all published, with all traditionally published books. I mean, I'm sure they, they do some fact checking for the, the big names that they know everybody's going to read. But, you know, the vast majority of them are not fact checked. So.

Okay, we have another one from Megan and it says, why do people update versions of their nonfiction books? And when do you determine the time to do so?

It depends. So, I mean, I just updated. I just had my book updated, but it was a small update because an error. Speaking of audiobooks, there was an error in here that I found when I was recording the audiobook. And one of our lovely clients, I don't know if Andrew's here, Andrew Jenkins, but he emailed me and said, hey, like, did you know that this didn't have Bolding here and here? And you know, I was like, wait a minute. And so we updated the book. So if you find like an error that is something that you really want changed, you might want to do like just an update and load the new version, the updated version. When you talk revisions, like, if you want to, if you're talking like a bigger update than, hey, I found a mistake that should be corrected. And you're thinking, I need to add a chapter or I need to revise, that's a different question and a different decision. And it's one of those things that as soon as you start changing a lot of the content, you now are potentially getting into the situation where you're going to need a different ISBN and you would want to make it clear on the COVID that you have. This is a revised edition because you want to make sure that people know that you've changed this version and it's different than the other version and all of those things. So it's a bigger picture kind of question. If you have a specific scenario you kind of want to run by me, I'm happy to kind of talk about that a little bit at the end, if there's time.

Okay. Two more that I've seen come across and then we should be good to move on. This is the second one from Efren and it says are photos in the layout phase and by. When should they be submitted? That second piece might be more specific to your project specifically. Efrain, we can get with you on that. But going to the first one. Are photos in the layout phase?

Yeah, so photos are in the layout phase. And this is this. I'm going to make this question. And so for you specifically, Efren, contact the team to get your answer. For generally speaking, if you have a lot of photos, I would highly recommend going through your manuscript and noting like where the images are supposed to go. Do not put them in your manuscript file because that will. It creates a really large file that's hard to send around. It also makes word really glitchy and at the end of the day, the images might get compressed or they might not be the quality that is going to be needed for layout anyways. So your best thing is to just note image one. You know, if you want to put a short description, you can. And then have a separate file folder where you are keeping all those and just make it the same label. And then when you have an interior layout you're going to design, you send them the manuscript and that folder with all of the images and then at that time they can go through and make sure they. Well, a, you've got the rights to be using those photos. Excuse me. And then also that, you know, they're. They're the right size. They're. You know, there's lots of factors when it comes to images because color images may not work well in black and white. You may not want to print your book in color and so forth. So there's a whole bunch of pieces to that, but that. That all comes together in layout.

Okay, cool. And then, Trent, I think your question was specific for your project as well. If you wanted it to be a broad question, just let me know and I'll make sure we get to it. So I'm putting you and Efren on an action list so we can make sure to get y' all's questions answered. Aside from that last one was from Mylene, and it says, at what point do you recommend copywriting your manual scripts?

Yeah, so, I mean, I would recommend doing it after your book is. Is edited and pretty much ready to go to publish, because you're going to have to send in published versions of your book anyways in order to get the copyright finalized. So, you know, I wouldn't do it too early. You have copyright protection anyways. I mean, that's the thing a lot of people like the minute you take the idea out of your head and turn it into something physical, so write it on a page, you now have copyright. Now to be able to defend that in court, that's why you file it. That's why you would file the copyrights is in order to defend it in court. But you can always file. If some, if something did come up and you need to defend it and the book isn't published yet, you could file then. Like, you, you don't, you know, it's not like you have to rush to file in order to have this defense. You, you have evidence that you produce this work and the copyright applies to it, because, yeah, you're going to have to send the copyright office copies of your manuscript, your, your book anyway, so you might as well just wait until it's done. But before it's published, you don't have to. You don't have to. Like, if your book is published, you haven't missed the opportunity. You can still file copyright. The Library of Congress is a different story. But for copyright protection, you can file after published. And I think you have up to six, six months after it's published to still retain all the rights like that. There's, like, lots of layers to copyright, which also, I am not an attorney, also I am not an American. So there's even more complexities, to my knowledge, on that piece, because what we do in Canada and what I did in Canada is slightly nuanced to what. What you do here. And, and there is no such thing as international copyrights. And so if you want copyright protection in the United States, you have to file copyright protection in the United States. So. All right, you guys ready to go into the process? Yeah. All right.

Before we move on, you have to see Efren's comment. He said your English is very good, Julie. Classic Efren.

You're good to move on. On the question side.