You finally landed a book deal, and your friends and family are full of helpful comments and congratulations. “So that means you’ll have a book out by the end of the year?”

Your smile turns into a grimace. “Not…quite.”

It’s a shocking revelation to pretty much everyone on the outside: publishing takes forever. It’s very normal for a contract signed in one year to project a publication date three years down the road. (That, by the way, is one very good reason not to quit your day job over a big advance. That money is going to be spread wayyyy out). Why does it take so long? Let’s take a look at everything involved.

Traditional Publishing Schedule Workback

I’ll take you through a scenario for a full-colour nonfiction book. Like most full-colour books published in North America, it needs to be printed overseas.

Production Schedule

This is what the bare minimum schedule looks like before you factor in marketing.

April 4, 2028—Publication Day! Hooray! Bookstores across the country, the continent, or even the world open for business with your book sitting on the shelf.

March 10, 2028—It’s your book’s ship date. The distributor must be ready to ship it out to all the bookstores that have ordered it.

February 11, 2028—Four weeks to the ship date. The distributor’s going to start breathing down your publisher’s neck if the book hasn’t arrived yet. They need to time to process the delivery, add it to inventory, and get everything straightened out in their system for a smooth ship date here in Canada and the US. Of course, if your distributor is international and they want the same edition to release around the world on April 4th, they’re going to need three months instead of four weeks.

January 10, 2028—The managing editor is getting grey hairs. The books that your overseas printer put on a container ship with ample time (at least six weeks) to cross the ocean has been sitting in customs and she can’t find out why it hasn’t cleared. This step is an aggravating mix of urgent hands-on intervention and helpless waiting. Then there will be the overland transportation by train, truck, or both, and she’ll probably have to be poised to schedule the delivery window at the warehouse.

September 15, 2027—This is the date your publisher scheduled with the printer, allowing time to set up the files, print proofs, approve the proofs, make changes if necessary, print the books, bind the books, and pack them up. Around 2020, these dates became fixed in stone and impossible to quickly reschedule because there are simply not enough book printers for the demand.

September 5, 2027—In a perfect world, you and anyone else who needs to formally sign off on the files will have them by now.

Marketing Schedule

A major question for your book’s pre-publication marketing is this: How early will you have a finished book to do publicity and marketing with? Your publisher has a few options here.

1. They can start the production schedule early enough that the full shipment of finished books will be at the warehouse in time for them to start pulling publicity copies months ahead of the publication date. This would be much earlier than the schedule described above. The downside of this is that they will incur extra storage costs. It also adds months to the time during which they have to bear the cost of the producing book without yet seeing any profits from it.
2. They can get finished books a month or two earlier than the main stock having some shipped by air freight from the printer. This is extremely pricey, but it can be worth it if the production schedule is down to the wire.
3. They can print a short run of advance reading copies closer to home, leaving the main production schedule unaffected. Because they’re done on a short-run digital press these are much more expensive to print per copy and will be a lower-quality format than the final book, but one advantage is that they can acceptably be printed before the final proofread if time is tight. Another advantage is that they can be produced early enough to send out seeking blurbs for the final edition.
4. The publisher can depend on digital files alone until the final books are in stock. This is more and more viable as more reviewers are accepting (or even preferring) digital files, but they have limitations. Nothing really compares to holding a book in your hands, especially one with an expensive format and lots of illustrations. Some opportunities will require a physical copy.

Here are some of the key steps in pre-publication marketing and publicity:

Nine Months Ahead—Major chain retailers and online giants like Amazon expect your book’s basic metadata to be available online (title, trim size, publication date, etc.), and they expect a sales rep to present it to them not too long after that.

Four to Six Months Ahead—Your publisher creates a catalogue for the season and holds a sales meeting to equip their sales team to pitch the book to retailers and wholesalers. The cover image and marketing copy have to be complete at this time.

Five Months Ahead—The major review journals require review copies with enough time to choose a reviewer, send them the book, receive and edit the review, and schedule it in their publication.

Throughout the Pre-Order Period—Copies may be sent to bloggers, independent reviewers, podcasters, and others who can provide reviews and interviews.

Rights and Editions

As publishing becomes more conscious of accessibility needs (and as more readers embrace audiobooks and ebooks for a wide range of reasons), it’s become much more common to release ebook and audiobook editions simultaneously with the original print release. This adds time to the production schedule.

In some cases, your publisher might also have (or seek) opportunities for another company to co-publish another edition at the same time as theirs. This might be:

• A book club edition
• An audiobook edition licensed to another company
• A translation
• An English-language book published and distributed in another country

This requires that your book be ready with enough time for that deal to be struck and for the other company to prepare their own files.

Editorial and Design Schedule

This timeline is going to vary quite a lot by book, but here are all the processes (and people!) that may be involved in the editorial and design phase:

• If you submitted a book proposal instead of a finished manuscript, you need to finish writing the thing!
• Your editor needs to review the draft, give feedback, and wait for you to apply it. There may be multiple rounds of this.
• A cover designer needs to design a cover in time for the marketing team to approve it and add it to the metadata and catalogue before pitch meetings with retailers and wholesalers begin.
• Once the structure is sound, a copyeditor will comb through the text for line-level issues, some fact-checking, and a whole lot of consistency-checking.
• Some books will need to go through one or more fact checkers, and some will need to be reviewed by an authenticity reader.
• If the book is illustrated, the text is handed over to the art director to work with the illustrator. In children’s picture books, this is the bulk of the schedule.
• When the text and illustrations are ready, a text designer lays out the interior of the book.
• Nonfiction books may need indexes, glossaries, citations, and other back matter.
• If someone else is writing a forward, the text will need to be shared with them.
• When all the final elements have been added to the design, the files are sent to a proofreader. The main editor checks over the changes and may run some past you.

There are, of course, occasions when an extremely timely book is rushed from acceptance to publication. That happens when it’s more important to catch a cultural moment at its peak than it is to prime the market for it in the usual way.