The publishing roller coaster

One of the hardest challenges that confronts an author entering the publishing process? Letting go.

You’ve spent months or years sweating over your manuscript, honing it, rewriting vast swathes of it. Maybe it’s the distillation of your innermost thoughts or your life’s work. At the very least it is most likely about a topic that is close to your heart, and you’ve worked hard to do it justice.

Writing a book can be a lonely job. But when you decide that your manuscript is ready to meet the world, that all changes.

Perhaps you have been offered a deal with a major publisher, or you’ve decided to publish independently and you’ve worked out who your team will be – editor, cover designer, typesetter, proofreader, printer (the list could and should go on). All of a sudden, other people have a stake in what you are doing. If you decide to rewrite chapter three now, that doesn’t just cost you some late nights: it also means that your editor has to un-stitch some of the meticulous work she has done. If you suddenly feel that the title doesn’t capture the essence of the book, there are a lot of contingencies riding on changing it: it affects the cover design, the marketing materials, the text itself if the title is mentioned or intrinsic to your writing.

Some authors (myself included at times) cling, white-knuckled, to their baby, quite unable to relinquish it into the hands of others. It’s a separation that few writers think about or are prepared for.

Yet one of the things that I love most about working in book publishing is the collaborative aspect, working with true professionals who know their field inside out. Seeing a designer transform a ho-hum cover into a scorcher with a few swipes of the mouse; reading a once-rough manuscript that the editor has polished into a glorious gem; listening to a publicist describe the PR campaign that will make a book next month’s media must-have.

If you are about to hop on the publishing roller coaster, get ready to let go.