Impatience 31st October 2010.

I’m amazed at how impatient some authors can be, especially novice ones. Mind you, our worst experience with this came with a relatively experienced author.

The publishing industry as a whole is not the nimblest in the world and in fact an author I know just received a rejection slip. Nothing in any way unusual about that, but this was for a book proposal sent out three years ago!

Now I know some publishers are slow but this is the longest delay I’ve heard of... so far.
Of course, because we’re a new, and not only new but also internet based, people expect us to be nimble and quick too. What they don’t necessarily understand is we are fairly quick, believe it or not. LOL.

Consider the amount of work involved between getting a book submitted to getting it published. Okay, to be fair, at least with something of novel length, you’ve already spent a long time actually writing it. You might have written sections of it quickly, but on the whole it has been some considerable time in gestation. Even if you cut the elapsed time out of the equation, and just counted the minutes spent writing it, you probably spent anywhere up to several hundred hours writing it, and then hopefully the same amount, or more, editing and polishing it.

Why then should you assume the editing process we go through on your book is going to be any quicker? After all our editors aren’t already intimately acquainted with your characters, and the plot. Aren’t our editors also allowed time off for comfort breaks, coffee, sustenance and sleep? Even if you allowed for that, why should you assume there’s nothing else in front of yours, or that simply signing your name to the contract entitles you to jump to the front of the queue?

Of course, designing the cover, preparing the web pages, double checking the bio, the blurb, the dedication and the actual production of the book, in four formats, plus another for print, don’t take any time at all. Distributing it to the bookshops and aggregators just takes a snap of the fingers.

Everything takes time, and having witnessed and experienced problems with other publishers, we’ve applied those lessons to our processes. Some things, can be done in parallel, some can even be done in advance. We don’t queue jump work, we don’t play favourites and we don’t give a release date until the book is almost ready. It’s better right than on time.

Other, slightly bigger, publishers may be quicker, but as Nancy found out (above) the bigger they are the slower they become. Three years for a rejection is quite a leap. I gather the book is now finished and published by someone else in any case.

Patience is a virtue. Publishing ... now that is anything but a virtue..... LOL

Anyway, Happy Halloween everyone.