How to Get Published

by Al Kalar

Okay, so this has nothing to do with getting published.  I just thought you’d like to know what happens to your manuscript in the eBook publishing world of AKW Books.  This is our in-house cycle from inquiry to published work. We’ll assume you are sending in a work of fiction (non-fiction is slightly different, but many of the skills required and our procedures are the same).

When you send in an inquiry, it arrives in the same email box with all our other correspondence, so whoever opens it up will route it to one of our editors.  With this act, we assume you have read and agreed to our standard contract (Standard Agreement).

The editor will read it quickly and send you a “boilerplate” note asking for a short excerpt from your manuscript (the first 1000 words or chapter, whichever is longer) along with a general summary of what the work is about. S/he’ll give you a special, authors only email address for your response so it will go directly to the editorial pool. The goal of this exercise is two-fold:

1. We want to see if you can really write. If the opening is vapid, has grammatical and/or spelling errors (more than usual), then it will be rejected.  However, if the opening grabs the reader (shows you can tell a story and know better than to start “slow”) and your English skills are obviously acceptable, the editor will read your summary.
2. We want to know what the book is about. If it’s obviously a copy-cat story or covers a subject that’s been beaten to death (like the horrors of so-called “Global Warming” without anything new or intriguing), the editor will probably dump the project. We’re not interested in spending time on a work that has little or no chance of selling.  If your project is something new and refreshing, we’ll be interested. Niche works get rejected by the big houses, but not necessarily at AKW Books. That’s where eBooks shine.

The next step is to request your complete manuscript along with any artwork that’s needed. An editor (not necessarily the same one) will review the work and pass final judgment on the project.

If s/he accepts the project, you’ll be notified, told about any contract modifications (to fit your project), asked to agree to the changes, and the editorial process begins.

From here on out, you’ll probably work closely with just one editor. Your editor will check for English errors and make small changes without your input (correcting spelling, poor word usage –”to” instead of “too”–, that sort of thing).  If s/he thinks there is a need for more substantive changes, s/he’ll correspond with you over the subject before making them (converting passive sentences to active, deleting unnecessary passages, changing scenes, cleaning up vague or confusing references, etc.).

Edited Manuscript by Nic McPhee

During this period, you should send in any missing pieces, such as artwork, cover art, advertising blurbs (short and long versions), dedications, your pen name if you use one, an “about the author” piece and photo if you want it included, promotions for other books you’ve written and published, any unusual copyright language you want, etc.

After editing, your package goes into our production department where the following things happen:

• Your artwork will be edited for size and pixel density (computer screens and the like don’t use a very high density. 72 color dots per inch is most common).
• Your cover art will be finished up and missing pieces added (title, author, sub heading, and our imprint).  Then it will be produced in several different formats to fit various presentation devices as well as our catalog. Most will be taller than wide, but two formats are actually wider than tall.
• Your manuscript will be “normalized” to make sure everything displays correctly after conversion. Chances are your style sheet is a mess, you’ve used tabs to indent the first line of a paragraph, you may have underlined italics, and used double spaced lines.  All of this has to be fixed by the production specialist.  When s/he’s done, your manuscript will use Georgia font (unless another is needed such as in headings), first line indented by 0.17″, single spaced, section breaks will have a short line of asterisks (*****) centered instead of a blank line (one of our converters squeezes out blank lines), 4″ x 7″ pages with narrow margins, and some other standards that reproduce well.
• If your work contains a table of contents (TOC), your headings will be normalized to produce the type of TOC you’re looking for. Any TOC you include will be used for the Acrobat version only, the other converters produce their own dynamic TOC since the output text can “flow” as the reader may change text size or font used at will.
• When everything looks good, the operator will convert your project into the eBook formats we support. As each format is produced, the operator will review the output to make sure everything converted properly. If not, s/he’ll go back and correct the source of the mistake and try again until it comes out right (or as close to “right” as the converter is capable of).
• Your finished project will be uploaded to our online database and an Internet specialist will add it to our catalog along with your advertising blurbs.  A special “sample” page will be created with an excerpt from your work to aid in sales and will be linked to the book’s sales page in the catalog.
• At this point your book is ready for sale. Someone will send you a note about the event along with a direct Internet address to your book’s sales page.
• The specialist will also add your work to the appropriate category pages as a “featured” item where it will remain until it gets bumped by newer works in the same category.  We feature five books on a category page.  We’ll also feature your book for a short time on our website home page.

Your book will be added to whatever book review sites we deem appropriate (such as Nothing Binding).

We may post your book at various eBook resale sites (those that don’t want to hog most of the sales price and aren’t devoted to free and self-published materials - we want your book to be in “good company”). At this time, we no longer send books to GoogleBooks. We may in the future if we become comfortable with their business model.

At the first of the following month, your book will be featured in our monthly book club emailing along with a discount coupon (amount agreed upon with you) for book club members to use during that month only.

As soon as we tell you your book is available for sale, you can start whatever marketing efforts you deem appropriate.

Oh, by the way, if you haven’t been up until now, you are no longer a “writer”; you are now a published “author”.

Tags: accept, eBooks, manuscript, production, publication cycle, reject

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 at 2:00 am and is filed under AKW Business, Editors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.