So now that the manuscript has been completed and edited, what’s next? Well, there are still a bunch of odds and ends that need to be done.
My first order of business was to produce a bound manuscript, meaning I took all the edited copy and made it look nice, put together a quick table of contents (sans page numbers), added the front and back cover, put some publisher-supplied legal language on it about it being an advance copy and not for sale, and took it to Kinko’s yesterday to have it copied and bound. I’ll have 18 copies back this afternoon.
What do you use a bound manuscript for? That takes us to the next two pieces of business: finding someone to write the Foreword and hiring a publicist. All these folks we’re talking to about the next stage of the project are going to want to read what we’ve written to see if it will be a good fit to work together. We have a short list of people we’d like to write the Foreword, and David has been working on making headway to approach a couple of them. While we’re at it, we’ll be looking for a few people to write blurbs for the back cover as well. In addition, we’re interviewing book publicists and requesting marketing proposals from them, so the bound manuscripts will be very helpful over the next several weeks.
(Publishers actually used to provide galley proofs of the manuscript, but now they go directly to page proofs, which I’ll be receiving later this summer to make any final edits before the book is published. So the bound manuscripts are usually now up to the author to produce – or at least midlist authors like us.)
Then there’s all the rest of the front and back matter that I need to write. That includes the dedication page, acknowledgements, and our author pages (which I drafted yesterday to include in the bound manuscript). Then we’ll be dealing with the copy on the front and back flaps. The publisher has a copywriter who drafts initial copy for that, and it gets circulated for revision/approval from us and the sales and marketing team. I also need to credit a few people on the flap, and include the approved language about our donation of royalties to Sloane-Kettering and FORCE, as well.
I haven’t made mention of it, but the book has been online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble for a few months now, and now that I have finished writing, I want to revise the promotional copy on these online sites, so that’s another project I’ll need to work on.
After that, I think I’ve earned a lonnnnnng nap on the beach!