The Waiting Game

 I signed a contract with a publisher for my novel.

Thrilled to work with eSpec Books, I announced it to the world!

And now the world wants to know, "Where's the book?" I even had someone ask, "Send me a photo of the cover and the back blurb." 

Ah, the publishing world. It's a waiting game. 

No, there's no physical book printed out yet. And no, you can't get an electronic version anywhere yet.

Yet. That's the key word. Publishing is a waiting game. Publishers don't just take a word processing document and dump it into a machine that spits out books. I'm not on that side of the desk, but I figure it takes a bit more.

First, the editors edit it. I use a plural because I don't know how many editors it takes to go through a manuscript before approval. I challenge any proofreader (that's the person who finds mistakes) to find something to kibitz about in my submissions. However, other editors are there to challenge word choice (did I really mean to say "Caucasus"? Oops, no, I meant "Carpathians"), sentence structure (did she bite the cheese violently, or violently bite the cheese?), and story structure (shouldn't Angelique visit the home and leave the note before the scene where Jacqueline finds it?).

I'm also overly fond of adverbs, which many editors say is a no-no. I hate cutting adverbs, so some editors will have a field day plucking out my weeds. I sometimes go into greater detail than some editors might prefer, so they'll want me to cut out whole phrases.

All that takes time.

You know those reviews on the back covers of brand new books? How did they print the review on the book if the book hadn't come out yet? That's called Advance Review. They find respected authors or publishers, usually in the same genre, to read the book in advance (that's called the ARC, or Advance Review Copy) and provide a review of it. That's a huge asking, interrupting a writer's work to read a novel AND write a promotional blurb for it.

All that takes time.

And what about that cover? It doesn't design itself. I can't imagine what it takes to provide appropriate artwork for a book cover. I guess I'll learn!

So, in short (not to take up more time), publishing a book is a waiting game. 

That doesn't mean I'm sitting around waiting. Book 2 of the series is already finished, and I'm 9 chapters into Book 3 and two chapters into Book 4. I'm researching the pants off Faraday and Tesla, as well as the 2-2-2 locomotives of 1843, the Rebecca Riots, and the potteries of the Vale of Glamorgan (one of which dates back centuries and is run by the Jenkins clan, who are probably my own distant relatives).

And all that takes time too.