The Final Push To Book Publication
How to prep your manuscript for delivery to your publisher
Had I received these instructions before I started work on this manuscript, I might have saved myself quite a lot of work at the end. For that reason, I’m going to share the most universal requirements here, in case they can spare you some headaches.
Hello Loreates!
For any number of reasons, I’ll jump quickly past the fact that this is July 4 weekend. What’s happening to this country today— especially the inexcusable passage this week of Trump’s Murder Bill — would sicken the Founding Fathers, and I hope their ghosts haunt every American who’s complicit in trashing the Constitution our leaders managed to protect for nearly 250 years— until the current regime seized power.
But that’s not what I’m here to write about. So…
This was also delivery week for the final manuscript of the book I’ve been ghosting for the past year-plus. As some of you might recall, I’ve shared some of my earlier publishing insights and tips from this project here:
Today I want to share some insider take-aways from the final process of delivery, which earned me this nice compliment from my editor:
“I have to thank you for delivering one of the cleanest manuscripts in all of my time at [this Big 5 publisher].”
What, you might ask, did she mean by “cleanest manuscripts”? What’s involved in making that final delivery to a major publishing house, and how do you prep for it? I’m going to try to answer these questions in today’s post for paid subscribers.
Thank you as always for reading, and… write on!
Aimee
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Final Delivery!
After 15 long months, the light was no longer at the end of a tunnel but shining within reach. My collaborator and I had first labored over a nonfiction proposal that went to auction and landed us a contract with our first choice of Big 5 Publishers and an editor I knew and revered from previous projects. Then we’d labored over a first draft of three chapters, which passed our initial editorial review. Next, we’d pressed on through four additional chapters to a full first draft of about 70K words, which went through another editorial review with overall praise and a number of choice notes.
Over the past month we pared that draft by a few thousand words and clarified some murky passages, sharpened and triple-checked our key points. And then came the final push.
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