The Production Process Part One: A Timely Delivery

Last year we brought you a couple of guest blogs from Louise, (to read them click here and here), Publishing Operations Director at HarperCollins. Louise knows just about everything you could possible wish to know about the journey from bits of paper to bound book, so we're delighted to welcome her back this year.

So, you’ve sold your book, the money’s in the bank and you are champing at the bit to see the finished product in the shops. That is if you’ve finished writing it; however if the book has been sold on the basis of a proposal, then you will have been given a contract delivery date and your first task, obviously, is to meet it.

First-time writers who have never had to meet an externally imposed deadline might find this quite difficult. And some ignore it (though that is an affliction shared by many writers not just the debutants…). After all, surely a few weeks or months over won’t make any difference? Sometimes it doesn’t; after all a publishing schedule must by necessity include a certain amount of contingency. But a schedule is still a schedule and every stage of the sales, launch and cover process depends on the delivery date (for example, briefing a cover for a novel if you haven’t read the finished manuscript is pointless). And a late-deliverer, though often indulged for a while, will undermine their reputation very quickly if the deadline is constantly pushed back. For example, a sales team will usually be full of enthusiasm for the books it presents to its customers (the booksellers) the first time round. But if it moves once or twice, or several times, the sales team and the booksellers start to lose confidence that the book will ever appear. I’m not going to patronise a community of writers by telling them how to meet a deadline but if you can’t deliver on time, the next best thing is to make sure your editor is kept informed. Remember you’ve signed a contract and, hopefully, been paid an advance. Authors who disappear may find themselves with a letter from the company’s lawyers, requesting that the advance be repaid. In the current economic climate, no publisher can afford a non-deliverer.

Enough of the warnings. Obviously everyone on authonomy who is lucky enough to get a contract will, of course, deliver on time and be perfect authors. Let’s assume that anyway!

Scheduling

The first shock for many new writers, once the book has been delivered and the schedule is in place, is the time lapse between delivery and publication. Currently the books that we are buying are being scheduled for publication in either late 2010 or early 2011. Exceptions are topical and political books (for example before Christmas every one was debating books about Bush and Obama, ready to rush them out off for January). To give you a sense of why it takes so long, we’re just printing March now, we are producing titles up to June, and the books that are being sold to customers are scheduled for publication from July onwards. Which means that, if you sold your book to a publisher today, it might not see a non-virtual bookshelf until Spring 2010 at the earliest. Often it’s longer. So why does it take a year?

The Sales Cycle

The easiest way to explain the beginning is to start with the end, or rather what is perceived as the end: sales. Although externally it might seem like the sales process would happen after everything else, it in fact starts at the same time and the sales team are involved from acquisition onwards. And the requirements of sales and their customers (the booksellers), followed by the required production times, dictate the required publication dates. Most books are now sold via presentations to key accounts (such as Waterstone’s and Tesco’s); very few reps pound the steps of bookshops with their wares any more. And that sell-in process (sell-in means that the book is sold in to the bookshops; sell-out means that it’s sold by the bookshop to the consumer) starts very early and is done in seasons. In April of this year, our team will be selling in books published between Sept and Dec 2010. In order to do that they will need a mass of information on the book, the subject, the writer, the target market, planned marketing and publicity and, if possible, a finished and completed cover.

Since we allow six months for a cover to be briefed, designed and approved (which sounds like a lot but not once all the stages are factored in; see the next blog), the process can start up to 14 months ahead. Unless there is a reason to publish a book very quickly (because it ties in with an anniversary, a TV show or something equally timely) then it is always better to allow enough time for the book to be properly presented to customers. I don’t know anything about the bookselling cycle (perhaps one of you does?) but with limited floor space (whether in our warehouse or theirs) every shop must plan stock accordingly. And the better equipped the sales team (for example the manuscript has been delivered and read, the cover briefed and designed) the more chance a book has of being allocated some of that precious space. A book that is sold in late, keeps moving, or is sold in without material will often be at a disadvantage because sales slots in each month will have been decided. However, this isn’t to say that a book that arrives really early will be better off: the buzz and the stages need to happen at the right time not just any time.

So timing is everything: delivering the book on time, selling it in at the right time, getting it into the shops at the right time. And the rest of the stages work back from that, in order to make sure that the book reaches its audience and potential and that everyone internally and externally has enough space and resource to allow that to happen. This is a massive simplification but hopefully the author that grasps that the publishing process is a closely monitored timeline, and that the different stages are interlinked and interdependent, will be much better prepared for it. Next we’ll move inside the building, to debate how a book starts its life internally and why whoever wrote the idiom ‘you can’t judge a book by its cover’ had never worked in publishing…