In this section:
Congratulations! You signed the contract. What happens next? The editorial production process — when your manuscript gets copyedited, proofed and proofread, and its book cover designed — usually takes about four months. Upon completion, we set your Publication Date for 10 full months later. The entire journey takes roughly 14 months from the contract being signed to your book being published.
There is a gap between production and publication because it takes 10 months (sometimes more) for information about your book to circulate through the trade worldwide, and this is essential to maximize your prospects of long-term success. We are represented by companies generally reckoned to be amongst the best independent sales teams around the world, and they cannot start selling the book until they have the finished information. Budgets for buying new titles in the chain retailers are set many months in advance — they will not look at titles coming out before then. Some key catalogues, such as the NBN sales catalogue in North America, the bumper Bookseller Spring and Autumn editions in the UK, cover six months of titles. They need the information on ISBN, page extent, price, sales copy, and cover three months before then. So 10 months gives us just enough time.
Your journey to publication entails 9 stages, what we call the Workflow sections:
After you sign a contract, the Manuscript Upload and Approval Workflow section will open up. After that stage of the process is completed, the next one, Copyediting, will open up, and so on.The final workflow section is Book in Warehouse, which will be completed shortly before you publication date
Once a stage is completed, it cannot be changed. A Workflow section is completed once the Approve/Confirm button is pressed, usually by a member of the CI team, and sometimes by you, the author. You can monitor these stages on your Production page.
Each time a new Workflow section opens, an Expected Date (a tentative deadline for the stage’s completion) will appear. We aim to complete each stage by the Expected Date — though note that this is not a hard-and-fast deadline and can be adjusted as needed.
Expected dates are guidelines; they're not set in stone. If your current Workflow section is red (overdue), it’s usually because the managing editor hasn’t approved it yet. Don’t worry! If something's been in red for more than seven days (and it's not in your control), then raise a query on the Author Forum.
Each section is a different colour, depending on where it is in the process:
Each Workflow section has a Notes for this workflow stage box where you can leave notes for your Publishing Team or, in some cases, change the Expected Date. If you do, make sure that you click Save Changes.
Once you upload your final manuscript, production officially starts. Take your time. Before you upload your manuscript, make sure that you have completed all the tasks that we have set for you here. We would much sooner you give us a clean manuscript than a rushed book. You may change the Expected Date to give yourself more time if you wish.
Your MS is copyedited for grammar, usage, spelling, syntax, and punctuation and is put into a consistent style and when that is completed it will be uploaded in this section.
Please note: We will follow your instructions where appropriate, but sometimes design requests aren't feasible or may not translate to print as well as you might think. Our designers are experts and will have the final say.
This is when you must go through your copyedited manuscript and accept or reject the copyeditor's changes.
This is your last chance to change the manuscript! If you wish to make further changes to your manuscript after this stage, there will be a minimum £100/$150 charge (see Corrections below for more details).
After this is done, the Editorial Manager gives the manuscript one last review, including the deletion of markups, tracked changes, or any remaining comments.
Your book and cover are designed. Once this is completed, your Publication Date will be set.
These two sections happen concurrently. The proofs are sent to in-house proofreaders who check for formatting errors, typos, etc. but carry out no textual rewriting or enhancement. Please be aware that there is no author involvement at the proof stage. If you upload amended proofs, the typesetters will ignore them because they are commissioned solely to work on proofs sent in by our managing editor.
The final decision is with us, but in most cases, the author's choice is upheld and our authors tend to be delighted with their covers.
We do not allow authors to design the covers themselves, and we seldom allow them to use their own designer. In our experience, more often than not, we end up with an amateurish cover, and the extra work involved isn’t worth the cost. We do not get into correspondence on the cover. It is too subjective an area, and corrections can be endless.
Your publication date is set for ten clear months later.
We will now distribute information about your book (with the AI/tipsheet) to the publishing trade, with the following timeline from now:
If any of these do not happen, please contact Steve Wagstaff via the Author Forum.
Your ebook is created a month before publication in epub format. You can download your own copy for personal or promotional purposes. We do not include indexes in ebooks as a matter of policy.
Your first print run is done six weeks before publication. We use SDR Printing (short run printing in the dozens or hundreds) to print the vast majority of our books. We usually keep initial print runs (before publication) small, somewhere around 130-200 copies across both the USA and UK, but some titles can have significantly higher print runs. Reasons for this might include:
If you forecast higher demand for your title, e.g. for launches, PR programs, etc., please let us know on the Author Forum.
Your 6 free author copies are supplied around 6 weeks before publication. (please note that if you live outside the UK or US we now charge the delivery costs for these). Please note, you can order additional copies at a discount: See FAQs.
Visit your book’s Production page and scroll down to the Printings section.
You can see:
The date that the print order was sent is not the same as the date that the text and cover files went to the printer.
Your ebook is distributed to worldwide ebook sellers.
We bring titles out in print and digital in the same month of publication, and they both have the same official publication date. However, in practice, the exact date of release won't always be the same. The ebook goes for conversion a month or so before publication date and then it is distributed. Different distributors take varying times to load the ebooks into their system. It will likely not show on sites such as Amazon for pre-order until a few weeks before publication. So, if you see your ebook released on a slightly different day from your official publication date, don’t worry.
DRM (Digital Rights Management) is code that you add to an ebook file to limit its use (especially copying, printing, and sharing). It is a way to help fight copyright infringement. We distribute our EPUB through NBN Fusion, and all their agreements with ebook vendors require that they apply DRM to files distributed to them
Your book is printed and ready for bookshops and online customers to order.
All printers sometimes produce faulty books. Nineteen out of twenty times, it only affects a few copies — let us know as soon as you can if you come across one. After a month or two, it’s too late to seek remedy from the printer.
Your last opportunity to make changes to your text during the production process is before your approval of the Final Copyedit stage. It is vitally important that you look it over thoroughly then. Once your book is printed, there are two ways to make corrections:
If you have sold 2000 copies in all formats and want to make corrections (or if you want to pay to have them done):