In the process of writing a book, there comes the long time between when everything’s submitted and you hear nothing.In fact, writing a book is often about waiting.You spend years pounding your thoughts through a keyboard, send them off to some editor (guilty, as charged) who takes months to read and think about it.If they like it they’ll send you instructions on how to change it and you start banging the keys again.When it’s finally ready you submit it and wait while it gets transferred to production.This handover is a complicated process and can itself take a month, easily.Then the manuscript has to be copyedited.I’m at the post-copyedited phase of Nightmares with the Bible, and this is, it seems, the longest wait.
There were only a few changes to the proofs I received.These days your Word files (converted from Pages files for Mac users) get loaded directly into the production software.What you see is your own words, in a different format.You type your corrections directly onto the proofs.Hit submit.Then wait.In my head I know that my book is one of many waiting in a queue to be printed.I’m also a realist so I know the initial printing will likely be about 150 copies.(When I first started in the publishing world academic books routinely sold 300 copies, but those days are long gone.)At some point before then I’ll receive an email telling me the cover’s ready.That’s what I’m waiting for at the moment.
We’re constantly told, in the business, that electronic books are what people want.I can’t speak for others who write, but when I think of a book I think of a physical object.Not some electrons sharing a screen promiscuously with any number of other books.I haven’t published until I hold the printed object in my hands.That’s still at least a weeks away.Unless your book is anticipated to be a big seller, this is a period of absolute silence.You just wait, nervously checking the publisher’s website every other day to see if your page has been updated, all the while working on your next tome.Although it is priced expensively, I’m hoping Nightmares with the Bible will do reasonably well because of the subject.Maybe some people will even get curious about Holy Horror, which was the precursor for it.But for now, I sitting here with Tom Petty, waiting.
