Hurry up and wait

The first thing you need to know about getting published is that the process is best described as interminably long stretches of boredom and anxiety, punctuated by moments of panic and frantic activity. And this applies to the whole process, not just the submission part.

Most people who want to be professionally published figure out pretty quickly that the submission process is the poster child for hurry-up-and-wait. You get your submission package together (meaning, whatever the publisher says they want, in whatever format they say they want it – portion-and-outline, full manuscript, hard copy, electronic, carved onto the back side of a replica of the Rosetta Stone…whatever). You run around getting packaging and postage together, collecting publishers’ addresses and editors’ names. You send it out.

And you wait.

Weeks. Months, sometimes. Years, even – it took over a year for my very first rejection letter to arrive, and I found out later that at that time, that was a really fast response for that particular publisher (they were three years behind on their slush reading. They’ve caught up since then…).

The thing is, everything else in publishing is like that, too. You get your acceptance letter, and there’s maybe a flurry of email with the editor, and some tearing around to get an agent before the contract comes (if it’s your first sale and you don’t have an agent yet), and then you wait to get the contract. Once you get the contract, there’s a flurry of negotiations (most of which happens between your agent and your editor, but since it’s your book, you have to make the final decision about any compromises), and then you sign the thing and send it back.

And you wait.

Weeks, sometimes months, later, the check arrives. Some time after that (weeks or months, again), you get a revision letter from the editor. There’s another little flurry of activity – emails, usually – while you try to figure out how much of it you’re willing to do and which bits are deal-breakers for either side, and then you sit down for a couple of months of revising.

At least this time you have something to do.

You send off the revisions and, you guessed it, you wait. If you are lucky, this time you actually find out how long you are going to be waiting, because the editor tells you when the book is scheduled, and you can back up the next set of hurry-ups from that.

Eventually, about six to nine months before the book is due to hit the shelves, the copy-edited manuscript arrives. You then have somewhere between two days and two weeks to hurry up and review all the changes, corrections, and queries the copyeditor made, and accept, reject, and answer them. Invariably, a really good copyedit job that you can just sail through, nodding your head, will arrive with the maximum two-week deadline for returning it to the publisher, while the hatchet job where the copyeditor decided to change “Yellowstone National Park” to “yellow stone national park” will arrive with a two-day deadline (usually just as you are leaving the house for a week-long business trip).

You go over the copy-edit, send it back, exchange a few emails with your editor about any additional clarification that’s needed.

And you wait.

One to two months later, roughly, the page proofs or galleys arrive, and once again, you have between two days and two weeks to turn them around. This time, you’re checking for typos and places where the copy-edit changes didn’t make it through to the final print version. Again, the proofs invariably arrive at the worst possible time. If you’ve really been humming along (or if your publisher is very slow), you may get proofs for one book and editorial revisions for a different one both at the same time, or even galleys for one and copy-edit for a different one (which is a real nightmare, because they both have similar, very short, not-very-flexible turnaround deadlines).

And then you wait for the book to hit the bookstores, wait for the reviews, wait to find out if they’ll buy your next book…and the cycle continues.

Publishing is not for the impatient.