Keeping with the alphabet theme of the moment, I’ve found three words that describe the year that I would like to have.

Attend–This year I will be present and pay attention to the things that matter. It means that I will tend to the things that need doing everyday to work towards that goals I’ve set for myself. It also means I’ll show up at the gym, at networking events, and for social functions.

Breakthrough–I’ve spent the last few years untangling, learning things, and learning about myself. This is the year I’ll figure out how to be in business for myself finally. The preparations are nearly complete and it is time to get going already. It’s time for the training wheels to come off.

Cavort–This silly word means to frolic and dance. It comes from a lucky coin given to me by a friend. This year is about lively, boisterous fun…with others. This year I won’t be doing it alone. Perhaps I’ll wear more pink. Join me in the play.

Attend * Breakthrough * Cavort

When I’ve worked with authors in the past, there is always the temptation to revise and revise and rewrite, but once you’ve turned your work over to the editor, it is necessary to step back and let go. When I’ve worked inside of a publishing company, I’ve been able to use the compressed timelines and budgets of the company to make authors stop, I’ve found that the publishing process for self-published authors tends to be more prolonged and difficult. Simple projects go on for months longer than they need to as authors continue to revise.

How do you know you are finishing writing a book?

Have you read the piece back, preferably out loud? Did you fix all of the minor typos and spelling mistakes? Then it is done. Move on to the next task.

Here are the obvious finishing places in your writing process:

Stop Here #1. Send the book query to agents and publishers. What you need to have completed: A summary and a chapter or two. At this point in the writing process, the publisher looks for authors with strong ideas and talented writing, not manuscripts. Stop and get feedback. In my experience, that it is most likely that editors need a book that is like yours, and they might offer you a chance to write the book they want rather than the book you proposed. Likewise, if you get no nibbles for the book, you can start again with a new concept much more quickly. Perhaps you want to spend your newly found days on market research?

Stop Here #2. The finished manuscript. Sometimes (OK, most often) the day to stop the writing process is the day that the manuscript is due. Ideally, the time to stop is about two weeks before your book is due. It will not be perfect, but it should be finished to the best of your ability and good enough. I wish all authors had the willpower to abandon the project down for a little while, and re-read it one more time before you submit. You know you are done writing a book when the manuscript fulfills the promises of the summary and you have the requisite number of chapters and word count. The bane of my existence as an editor were authors who re-submitted rewritten manuscripts one or two weeks after the first one. Once you’ve submitted the manuscript hold tight. Maybe you want to work on your blog?

Stop Here #3. The editorial review. Once your manuscript is edited, your job is to assess the edits and make sure that no meanings where changed or errors inadvertently introduced. Authors experienced with the publishing process know to wield a light pencil here. Focus on the edits, Please don’t revise the manuscript or portion of the manuscript unless the editor has dictated it. On several occasions, I’ve received re-worked books from authors at this late stage in the writing process, which means my investment in editing was a waste. Perhaps you should be working on your next book?

Stop Here #4. Review of pages. At this stage in the publishing process, authors get to see what the book looks like in the final layouts. At this stage, authors shouldn’t be editing or changing anything, but rather looking for misplaced captions, missing words and the like. Remember, you were done writing the book when you submitted the manuscript, and experienced editors and designers have been helping with the publishing process, doing what they do

Stop Here #5. The book is at the printer. What are you thinking? You are totally finished writing a book! Go work on your Twitter feed.

Until, after graduating college into a rough market to be an architect, I landed a sweet job as an editorial assistant at an architecture magazine. I loved editing, primarily for the reason that it gave me access to so many interesting people and ideas. I’d had a liberal arts education in architecture, and I was amazed to meet and interview the most prominent architects of our time. Instead of going to graduate school in architecture as I had planned, I stayed in  publishing, following a chain of progressively more interested and responsible editorial jobs.

It takes a village to edit a book.

There are several different kinds of editors that I know:

Acquiring, Acquisitions or Commissioning editor. This is the taste-making editor who brings new books and their authors to agreements with a publishing house. The acquisitions editor is responsible for shaping the proposal, working with agents, shepherding the proposal to the publisher, marketing, and sales teams. As a gatekeeper, the acquisitions editor is often the primary contact between the publishing company and the author. She is also and is the book’s internal champion and will defend the books budget and marketing priority. At some publishing companies, the acquisitions editor receives signing bonuses and has clearly defined signing and revenue (value) targets.

Development Editor. A development editor, often a freelancer, helps the author to create a complete manuscript. This often means detailed re-organization and even re-writing. The developmental editor might also help the author to secure any rights or permissions for illustration or photography or quoted text. Depending on the number of books in a publishing program, the Acquiring editor may or may not be responsible for the development of the manuscript. Some publishing companies have development editors on staff who actually write and create books as they go.

Once the manuscript is approved by the publishing team and is considered complete, the manuscript is “transmitted” to the publisher’s production department.

Managing Editor. The managing editor is typically in charge of the book’s production process. The keeper of the schedules and production budgets the managing editor provides an estimate for the cost of producing the book and assigns the book to the editorial and design staff. The managing editor sets the house standards for editorial and design, and makes sure that final editorial files are ready to go to the printer. Because the managing editor oversees the publishing program as a whole, she is rarely very involved with any one particular book.

The Copyeditor. This is an amazing picky, detail-oriented person who carefully checks the manuscript for typos, grammatical errors and problems with consistency or logic. Often, the copy editor also “tags” a manuscript for production, which means she marks up all of the headlines, quotations, sidebars, boxes, captions, lists, footnotes and other book elements. The copyeditor may also provide the book’s front matter according to the publisher’s style. (There are also editors who specialize only in tagging, and I imagine that the copyeditor’s role will expand as e-book elements will also have to be specified.)

The Indexer. Not every book has an indexer, but these are specialized editors too who decide which items are important enough to be called out and who compiles the books’ index.

The Proofreader. When everyone else is done with the book, a proofreader provides a fresh set of eyes to make sure that all of the previous edits did not introduce new errors when the old ones were corrected. If the copyeditor marked up the manuscript by hand, she’ll also make sure that all of the corrections were incorporated into the final version.

My first product as a boxed set of fitness cards, adorably packaged for the busy mom with waterproof cards, a pop-top lid, and even a robe lanyard to hold the right cards together for your workout. The author managed to secure an article recommending the boxed kit in a national  Magazine. I had a warehouse handle storing and shipping the boxes, but I didn’t have any retail distribution—not even on Amazon. So, amazingly all of the sales came directly through my own little website that I’d put up myself using Squarespace and a simple cart by Mal’s E-commerce. The future looked bright.

Within a year, I’d signed a contract for a national distribution deal for the card box and three more  products. In order to keep up the distribution, I needed to be able to create new books for each season, and I spent most of my time just managing that and not nearly as much on pursuing direct marketing. As soon as my books and set became available on Amazon.com, they were also available for at rock-bottom prices. The press was still not profitable, so I kept digging into my own resources. I wish I would have just said “enough,” but I’m too stubborn for that.

There are so many costs associated with distribution: printing the inventory, managing the marketing, keeping the PR machine running, and the distribution fees that included paying for catalog printing, freight, miscellaneous warehouse charges, and the very worst of all—returns.

Looking to find sales everywhere led me to find very few sales anywhere. Nothing reached its potential, and I burned out.

If I were to do it differently, I would look to create products that could find limited distribution in a single channel, or better yet, direct-to-customer. With the growing ebook market, almost all fees and costs are gone, and print-on-demand is a miracle that allows a small publisher to make a book without making a warehouse full of books. Several print-on-demand services offer low-risk distribution services through the major wholesalers, but keep in mind that although your books are available to any bookstore or library, there is no one out there actively selling your book. The success of marketing is still up to the person who holds the greatest stake in the property, typically the author.

The best advice that I didn’t take was from a wise editor at a well-known publishing house. She suggested that I should create mock-ups for brilliant products and sell them exclusively to a major retailer for the holiday season. It’s both the guarantee of one big buy and the concentration of your effort. The same tactic would work for any kind of special sales: a corporation, an organization or exclusively online. I’d start again here and then build block-by-block, market-by-market, expanding my list and product line as I secured the markets. Not the other way around.

That little mark on the spine of a book (typically on the bottom of the spine) relates to the publisher’s name or brand. Professional bookshelves sport rows and rows of similar publishing marks, but the more generalist the reader, the  more variations in the colophons.

Sometimes the mark is typographical, typically a combination of the publishing company initials, and other times it is a little image (like Penguin). My favorites cleverly combine the two.

I like this example of a set of Penguin books by designer Coralie Bickford-Smith. In this example, the branding colophon appears at the top of the spine, and she’s added a symbol to represent each title at the bottom. What if each spine had the author’s Twitter avatar at the bottom?

Working in publishing means that I can’t help but pay attention to these brand marks: they are immediate signals to the quality that I will find inside. Year after year, industry researchers suggest that readers have little interest or awareness of these brands—publishing company colophons signal nothing to the average reader.

Is there a need for a colophon to be anything more than a brand? Is there something exclusively literary about it, or does it just serve the role of anything else? As the market for ebooks grows, there may be far fewer spines, but the colophon becomes the icon for the app, the company Twitter profile pic, and your imprint’s “face” on Facebook, the favicon on your website’s browser, and the app icon on your smart phone.

Browse your shelf. What do the symbols on the spines on your shelf represent? What do the icons on your iPad mean?

If you were to create a publishing company of your own, what would your colophon look like?

To start a publishing imprint of your own, you need only to register with a block of ten ISBNs (International Standard Book Numbers, available online via myidentifiers.com). You can register the imprint in your own name, but it is much more interesting to think of a brand and your future colophon. Businesses often bill themselves as MyBusiness Publishing or MyBiz press, use the owners’ initials or a street or city name that has some meaning to the owner.

What do you want the name to signify? Humor, trustworthiness, deliciousness, charm, wisdom, nature? What imagery comes up? Is there a natural image to go with the words? Is your idea better expressed in type? Is there a typeface that has just the right personality? Will the colophon work when the spine is tiny, and will it work when the spine is large. What happens when you line up all of your books in one tiny row. How does it look as an icon or in a web banner? Does your mark tell a story?

10 Steps to Successful Self-Publishing

1. There is really no such thing as self-publishing. It’s simply publishing. A publisher is someone who decides what the world needs to read. With the internet and digital publishing, there is no longer need to develop a wholesale network or to print 25,000 copies of your book just to start. All you need is a digital file that you can upload to an online publishing service.
2. So don’t act like a modest self-published author who couldn’t score a publishing contract. The truth is, you aren’t patient enough to wait for that meager contract, and besides, you have the vision and skill to do it better. Register yourself as an Independent Publisher. Give your press a big, audacious name or a name that reeks of must-readingess, and go buy yourself a set of 10 ISBNs (International Standard Book Numbers) at MyIdentifiers.com.
3. Make your books look as good as or better than the big guys’ books look. You can hire the same editors, designers and marketing freelancers that the big guys use. If you need funding for this, make a video and go on Kickstarter.com or Indiegogo.com or make a prototype and find a company or a catalog or a generous relative who will pre-order enough copies to make your venture worthwhile. (From experience, I do not advocate a spend-first, sell-later approach.)
4. If you want to be in bookstores, appear on national TV, and get reviews your favorite magazines, you need to abide by the known rules and timelines of traditional publishing. 1) Make sure your book looks and reads as if it belongs in a bookstore. 2) Be ready six months ahead of time to give the press and bookstore buyers enough time to review your book and make a timely purchasing decision. Even better, start a year before that to begin to community of devoted readers who will have a hard time waiting for your book to arrive in stores.
5. If you want to publish for other reasons than being in Barnes & Noble, let the rules slide so that publishing the book fits your own goals and budget.
6. If your aspirations are literary or vampire-related, you’d do well to find a community of life-minded writers to join your indie publishing venture. You have 10 ISBN’s and the know-how to this; why not help others too? Read each other’s manuscripts, critique each other’s covers, and share the responsibility for marketing and promoting each other’s works. Bonus points if you can recruit a graphic designer, an eagle-eyed editor, and shark-like salesperson into your publishing co-op.
7. If you want to publish a book for your business, forget the bookstore or literary route to start. Consider your book as a marketing expense and not a profit center. Real content-dense and helpful books are so vastly underpriced for the value they impart to readers, you should think of the book as a convincing case for hiring you or your company. Considering that Amazon is the web’s top expertise-finding site, you might find that having a book there gets you found elsewhere.
8. Embrace technology. Consider publishing a short e-book first. It can be as short as 10,000 words and still feel like a book. Consider a print-on-demand provider like Amazon’s Createspace. These services print books as your buyers buy them.
9. Use social media to find your community of readers. Seek out book reviewers, other writers in your genre, booksellers, and the media. Befriend them and review and promote their books, articles and services so that you can ask for the return favor when the time comes. Find your natural community of “if you loved her book, you’ll love mine too.”
10. Ask questions, find the help you need, and keep score.

My Essential Publishing Resources:

The Independent Book Publisher’s Association

Book Expo America

Tools of Change

Digital Book World

Writer’s Digest

Publisher’s Marketplace

Publisher’s Weekly

If you love the smell of new books, plan a vacation to visit a book printer and bindery soon, lest they disappear for good. The good news is that even as e-books become ubiquitous, people still love the feel and utility of paper, but the bad news is that more and more books will be printed digitally instead of on large presses.

Today’s books are printed in two ways, either via offset printing or digital printing.

Offset printing means an image on an inked plate s transferred (or “offset”) to a rubber blanket, then to the paper. Most books are printed in a single run of black ink, but for four-color printing jobs, the paper goes through four impressions: black, cyan (blue), yellow, and magenta in combinations to create nearly any color. Extra plates can be added for custom or even metallic colors. For large quantity printings, such as 2,000 or more copies of a book, this is the most cost-effective way to print books. The labor-intensive set-up of the press, which involves making the plates, is the largest expense in offset printing.

For the most part, color books and the larger runs of black & white hardcovers are printed in Asia where both the paper and labor are less expensive, which means that it is at least two months between the time a book is printed, put on a boat, and arrived in U.S. stores. Basic paperbacks are still most often printed in the U.S. and Canada, and they take three to six weeks from the time the publisher sends the final files to the printer to the time the books arrive on shelves.

Digital printing, however, works just like your computer’s desktop or laser printer — ink or toner is applied directly to the paper from a digital image–no plates involved. The costs of this kind of ink and the equipment make the per-copy price of the book higher than the price of each offset-print book, but books can be printed in small quantities on an as-needed basis, saving the need to keep inventory. Black & white printing is reasonably cost-effective, but the price of color printing at about $.10-.20/page quickly becomes unfeasible for books larger than 24 pages.

Digital printing is not making an ebook; it is printing a digital file as a regularly printed book. Almost all the digital printers (and a few of the offset printers), use a high-resolution Adobe PDF file as the source for the printing.

There are two types of digital printers: Digital Short-run printers that will typically print a few dozen to a few hundred copies at a time. These printers are great because they can offer quality control and custom paper choices. With digital short-run printing, you can even combine color and black & white pages (and those color pages can be throughout the book and not in just one section.). Print-on-Demand printers (often called POD), such as Lightningsource, or Amazon’s Createspace, print books one at time, book after book. Each book goes through the same machine, so you don’t get much choice about paper. Because these machines are running all day and all night, book after book comes out of them. All of the paper is exactly the same. Over the last several years, the quality of digital printing has improved substantially. It’s just the run of the mill paper that makes it look the same, but many major publishers are using print-on-demand services for their older or more obscure books. It’s quite likely that you’ve recently read a digitally-printed book and didn’t recognize the difference.

Once books are printed, they are put together as block, and cut to the right “trim size,” and then they are bound. For good-quality hardcovers, the sheets are sewn together which creates a loose, pliable spine. It’s sturdy, and rare that the pages in a smythe-sewn book will fall out, and sewn binding is a recognizable mark of quality. Paperback blocks are glued with a pliable glue. Then the covers are applied by machine.

These printers can print and send any book in a matter of days, but the amazing Espresso machine prints both any book and its cover on the spot, cuts it down to size, and binds the book in a matter of about 10 minutes. Espresso machines are appearing in bookstores and libraries with greater frequency — it’s almost as good as an instant download, and with a glass enclosure that lets you see what it happening inside, almost as good as a field-trip to the bindery.

the Espresso Book Machine

A book acquisitions editor always has her antennae up for new and interesting ideas and authors. She also knows what she wants to publish before she sees any manuscripts. This is more true in a small, specialized publisher and less true for those who publish to the mass market. Each acquisitions editor is responsible for a “list” — a collection of  books in her subject area. Each publishing season (Spring and Fall) she needs to add a certain number of books to that list. For instance, when I was an editor at the Taunton Press, I was in charge of all the home-building and home improvement books. Late, as the Architectural Graphic Standards editor, I was responsible for architectural reference works based on the publishing company’s classic reference title, a much more narrow list.

Over time I spent acquiring books, there was no one model for how books and authors came to my attention, other than the fact that I was always looking for them. I wasn’t looking for talented writers so much as people who knew their stuff, and could be counted on to “get it done,” because writing a whole book is a pretty big deal for a busy professional. Over the years, I spent a lot of time going to professional conferences and reading trade magazines to find my experts. Now, I go online. I look for people who already have something interesting to say and haven’t yet written a book on the subject.

At the Taunton Press, we looked to the magazine, Fine Homebuilding, to give guidance in direction. Some of the magazine authors were natural book authors. Even more valuable was the monthly research conducted on each issue of the magazine. Which articles were the most popular? Those were the subjects we needed to go after. First-time author Sarah Susanka fit both bills: she had a regular column in the magazine, and the research showed that designing and building small houses was the top-ranking home design topic in the magazine. A perfect combination that worked out very well.

Sometimes an author does come in “over the transom,” such as Redwood Kardon, known as the “Code Check” author. I remember the great waves of manuscripts and proposals that would come into the office and grow in ever-more teetering piles, until someone ordered pizzas and all the assistants and editors mined for any gold-plated manuscripts. I remember seeing interesting things, but never anything that was I was particularly looking for.

Authors who have previously written a book are always good bets, especially if that book did at least all right, and if the author was easy to work with and took direction well. I was never eager to offer a second contract to authors who were late or didn’t understand what the publisher required.

Because I worked in a niche market, I didn’t often get queries from agents, and over the years, only signed a handful of agreements that did include one. I’d almost always work directly with the authors.

Most of the books I did for Reader’s Digest and Wiley were on Work-for-Hire agreements, which meant there was no individual author on the books. We hired freelance editors to manage the content creation, and then signed contributor agreements with each of the writers who contributed. At the Digest, these contributors were paid professional writers; whereas at Wiley, these were professionals who were willing to be published for the prestige. I think they got a free copy of the book, but that was the extent of their compensation.

One publisher tried to get as many books as it was possible to get for zero dollars. (I’ll explain that when I get to the letter Z.) That didn’t really involve authors at all.

If you want to get published, find your editors, and let them know that you (and only you) are exactly the expert want to discover.

I hadn’t thought about it that way until I went to @ReyInsurance | Linda Rey’s “Confessions of a Twitterholic” workshop at the Watercooler last night. I was an early twitterer. In early 2007, when Twitter not even a year old,  I quickly built up a tidy following (at the time) of 2400 followers and gained a place on early lists. I stuck with it for a couple of years, became known in local entrepreneurial groups as a twitter guru, but then I gradually let it go. What I’d enjoyed the most was conquering the technology — finding applications that would make twitter easier or faster or would help me find and follow interesting tweeple.

I pretty much stopped tweeting because I really didn’t know what I wanted to say. I’d half-heartedly promote a book I was working on, but never really felt invested because I wasn’t the author, and to tell the truth, the audience for each book was not the audience of writers and business people I wanted to reach anyway. When someone criticized a link I posted to a nice review of one of my own new books, I pretty much stopped all together. (I had only sheepishly posted that link anyway, knowing it was a dumb tweet at a time when I wasn’t tweeting enough volume to hide the dumb ones.) I felt that my tweets were just too random, and I couldn’t handle being random. I need to have a plan for everything (even if that plan later unravels).

But I’m ready to return to tweeting. I’ve re-incarnated the julieink blog so that I can write about all the subjects I’m interested in one place: writing, publishing, entrepreneurship, and web tools and apps that help the process. And that feels like enough of a plan too me.

While I’ve been gone, the twitterverse has changed a lot — more than 300,000  . That means that by now, probably anybody I would want to talk to is either on Twitter or just a few degrees separated from someone who is. Although I can’t find a real twitter feed from George Clooney, I can find the leaders and thinkers in the brave new publishing industry, not to mention the writers and the entrepreneurs who are really to make great books happen. How could I not be there too?

Join me at @JulieTrelstad