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Welcome to another episode of the book people where there's no guests, just me. And I take a particular topic or a burning question that all of you have, and really, really dissected from all angles to get to the core of it. Question that I'm going to be answering today is why do books takes so long to get published? But before we answer that question, I have an exciting announcement to make. What do India's top publishers and creative companies look for when hiring people for jobs? Number one, how much do you know about the industry and the publishing ecosystem? Number two, do you have any previous experience or certification to show that you're able to understand more about this industry and this job and this company? Number three, proof of skill that you can actually start doing your job from day one, and they don't have to spend a lot of time training you teaching you on the job, so that you're able to work. And number four, really, really good, strong English language grammar skills. Now, I can't help you with number four. But if you need help with the first three, then we have something very exciting for you. So bound is launching the bound publishing course. This is a three month online certificate course, where you're going to learn from India's top most experts about every aspect of book and magazine publishing, test your newfound skills in a capstone simulation, and interview and land your dream job at the biggest companies in India, we have recruitment partners, such as Penguin, Random House, notion press, cactus, communications, news, laundry, and many more on board to immediately get into interviewing you for Job and Internship applications. So this course starts on 15 September, check out the link in the description to get more information about the course and to kickstart your creative career today. So imagine, your favorite author that you love more than anything in the world announces a new book will tell you that a new book has been picked up that it's gonna get published, this could be a friend of yours, and this is their very first book. And then you wait for a few months, you wait for a your, you wait two years. And then finally, that book is out into the world, it's into your favorite bookstore, and you finally get to read it. This is a common scenario that most writers and readers don't really think about it. We think that writing the book is what takes the longest amount of time. And writers think that you know, as long as they spend a lot of time writing the book, once the book is ready, it's gonna get published like this. But that's not really the case. Books often take a very long time to get published, sometimes a year, sometimes two years. And so today, we're gonna dissect why exactly that happens. And what the publishing process actually looks like that takes this amount of time.
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So why does publishing a book take so much time? Now, you might think that publishing a book is just about printing those 200 odd pages. But that's not true. A lot goes into the book, from the moment that a manuscript is ready and has been written to the final output that is the book and we are going to go into the depth of that process. The main two reasons that publishing a book takes so much time is number one, that publishers are publishing multiple books at the same time, right. So a publisher might at the same time be working on 10 books, 20 books, 30 books, which are in different stages of the publication process. And so since the resources are divided, and publishing teams are small, the timeline for each book can vary and differ based on priorities based on what is happening around them. And based on what other books are sheduled to kind of go out before or after. So even when a publisher picks up a new book, The publishing date or the launch date that they will keep in mind will be a your one and a half years down the line. The second reason is that each book goes through a particular publishing process. And you can think of this publishing process basically like an assembly line, where a book needs to go through certain series of steps kind of like manufacturing, in order for the book to be ready as a saleable sellable product that can go into a book
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Don't and that people can buy. And let's look at some of the steps, right. So once a writer has written the manuscript, the first step that a book goes through is obviously the editing stage, which is when your editor, commissioning editor or any other editor works with the book, the book goes through multiple stages of editing, you have your structural or developmental edit, you have your copy line edit, once, you know printed version is available, you have your proofreading. And that's only when the publishers and the writers and everyone involved is happy with the final draft of the manuscript is that the book goes to the next stage, which is your production stage, right. Until then, even though you have signed a book deal, even though you have finished your manuscript as a writer, the book is still very much a work in progress. And this editing stage can take months, right, the next stage that it goes through is your production stage, it sets the stage in which a lot of decisions about literally the material of the book are made. So whether the book will be small or big, whether it will be hardcover, which is your, you know, cardboard books, which have a jacket,
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or whether it will be a paperback, which are your sort of more bendable kinds of books, right? So these kinds of decisions, then what the cover will look like, what kind of fonts do you want to use, what the material of the paper will be? All of these decisions are made at the production stage. So once the book is ready and has gone for print, is when your marketing sales and distribution decisions come in? When do you want to launch the book, what's a good day to do it, you want to make sure that it's a day that sort of maybe ties in with the theme of the book, or that it doesn't clash with any other super big books that are coming out at that point. So timing becomes a really important factor. The other important factor is your PR, right? So where is your audience? Does your audience know that this book exists? Have you generated some sort of, you know, hype and excitement about the book by sending it to authors to influencers, who have already started talking about the book, but the most important part is distribution. So when a book is announced or launched, right, the first thing that your reader is going to do is go to the nearest bookstore and try to buy the book. So what you have to make sure as a publisher, is that your book is already available in the bookstore before you even announced the launch. Because otherwise, you will just have a lot of people trying to buy the book where the book is not available. So these kinds of timing decisions could really go into deciding the publishing date of a book and making sure that the book is then available on that date wherever people might want to buy the book. So essentially, what all of this means is that each book has this very tailor made process and deadlines in place for it. Now, obviously, these deadlines can change. Most of the times things get delayed for some of the other reason. But this is why books generally do end up taking a longer time for this process to get over. So basically, what this means is that each book has a publishing schedule that is tailor made for it. And publishers try to make sure that the books are published within that schedule. A lot of times there might be delays for some unexpected reasons. And when that happens, publishers also kind of then have to figure out whether it makes sense to delay the launch by a couple of months, due to unforeseen reasons and figure out how to launch. For example, when the COVID pandemic hit, a lot of launch dates for books had to be pushed and postponed further, because there were a lot of unexpected delays in printing and distribution, and publishers sort of trying to figure out how to go about publishing these books. So books are put on the back burner, there were delays. And so these kinds of unexpected things can happen, which can again push the publishing timelines further back, but there are some exceptions. Now I know what you're gonna say, you're gonna say, hey, but I heard of this XYZ book, which was published in six months or nine months. And let me tell you, those books do exist, but they are the exception. And I'll tell you why these exceptions happen, there is a very good reason for them.
09:15
Books can get published faster if the author already has a huge fan following. They've already published many books. And so there's a ready demand available for their next book. For example, another show of hands, who has written some amazing books, including The Zoa factor. So when she wrote and published those pricey taco girls, that publishing timeline was super super short. Another reason for short publishing timelines is that the book is time sensitive, right or a supremely urgent, for example, again, taking the COVID pandemic as an example. So during the pandemic when Odin Mukherjee wrote a short story collection, called essential items, right, which are short stories about different people trying to deal with the pandemic and the low
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done when it happened. So he wrote that book within around three to four months. And so publishers piled up the timeline of publishing that book, because they wanted to be one of the first publishing houses to publish literature and to publish fiction related to the pandemic, right. So trying to be the first or trying to be super timely, again, was what led to that decision of shortening the timeline for that particular book. Another reason why books can have very short timelines is if the author is was really fast at writing them, because they know the source material so well, for example, as a trainer, so she wrote The L Word, Her most recent book in about two months, right. And so that in itself, again, shortens the overall writing and publishing timeline, because she has also published so many books that the publishers kind of know that the book doesn't require a lot of editing, and it kind of goes through all the stages really fast.
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So is self publishing faster? Well, it can be it depends totally on the author, right? On one hand, because it's the author driving the publishing, and the author is just dealing with their book and not a whole list of books, it can be a much speedier process. But often, because the author is also doing a lot of trial and error and trying to figure out what is the best way for them to self publish, that can also take some time and can lead to a little bit of mistakes, which can lengthen the overall publishing timeline. If you want more details about self publishing, you can check out my conversation with Naveen balsa Kumar, the CEO of notion press, who I talked to in a previous BookPeople episode.
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In conclusion, whether its traditional publishing, or self publishing, books often take a longer time to get published than, say, an article or a newsletter, or some of the other formats of written or really any format of content, right? But it's worth, right, because when you buy a book, you want to have a book that doesn't have mistakes, that is error free, that has no typos, grammatical errors, where everything is extremely perfect. And it takes time to create perfection, right. And one is obviously perfection in terms of details. But the other thing is also the depth, the kind of depth and care that goes into creating a book kind of makes it worth the long wait that people have to do in order to buy the book. So can publishing timelines be faster, probably, maybe AI will change that drastically. Maybe you know, the surgeons of new AI will lead to quicker timelines, maybe the process will be faster, smoother, and that would lead to shorter publishing timelines. But definitely, putting something out as soon as possible shouldn't come at the risk of reducing or diluting the quality of the book or the content in the book. Now, whether AI can actually speed up publishing timelines completely depends on the publishers themselves, how much they are willing to accept AI work with AI, or whether they reject AI. And that will kind of define what we see in the future. But overall, it will be interesting to see how it unfolds. So that's the end of another episode of the book people. I hope you found this insightful, and I have been receiving a lot of new questions that I should cover in these shorter episodes at the end of these episodes, and also as a part of the newsletter. So in case you don't know this, this month, we've also launched the BookPeople newsletter, which is a weekly newsletter that comes straight in your inbox. So the link for that will be in the description below. And as a part of that, as well, if you have any questions that you want us to answer, if you have a question that you think I should cover in one of these shorter episodes of The BookPeople, you can let me know and I'll make sure to do that. In the meantime, as always, you can follow us at bound India on all social media platforms. And if you're looking for consultation or something specific about publishing, you can reach out to me personally at Aishwarya at bound india.com. And don't forget to check out the publishing course. Right. So the bound publishing course which we're super excited about, which is going to start in September. If you want to work in the industry, I think this is one of the best opportunities that you will get to do that. So definitely check that out. And I will catch you next week with a new episode of The BookPeople