Writing is easy enough, or not. You do it until you’re done and you trust that your skills are good enough to pull your readers through it all. What you have at that point is a manuscript.
Books, regardless of whether they’re physical or digital, require certain steps beyond writing per se. One of these steps is production. Obviously the production of a digital book is different from the production of a physical book in a lot of ways. You don’t have to decide on trim size or paper quality, for one thing. And page design in an era where you are trying to be device-agnostic is pretty much plain vanilla, so that people can play with the type size themselves, adjusting to their own taste or needs. A physical book can be a gorgeous item. A digital book is its content. Or at least that’s true when you’re talking about a novel. You can tart up the design a tad, I guess, but otherwise it’s all about the words. In nonfiction, things might be different as the technology develops. I’m reading a book on Da Vinci at the moment, and when I originally bought it I thought long and hard about what format I wanted it in, and decided that, because of the illustrations, I had to go physical. The basic Kindle just doesn’t have the chops yet to deliver good graphics. This will no doubt change over time, and electronic publishing will come to rival print publishing for design and illustration. The iBook app can already do this, but honestly I prefer the passive Kindle screen over the iPad for reading. This will all sort itself out, sooner rather than later. Electronic reading was around for a while before it took off; the arrival of the cheap Kindle made the difference. Henceforth it’s simply a matter of evolution. The revolution is over. For a long time if you wanted to read a book, that meant reading a literal book, period. No longer. Digital publishing won’t put literal books completely out of business, for a variety of reasons, but instead of being the only game in town, the printed book will find niches where it will continue to make sense. I can’t predict the particulars of all of this, but I have my thoughts. Anyone in publishing will tell you roughly the same thing. The amount of wisdom you will hear from them will vary from publisher to publisher.
In any case, while digital novels are, as I say, vanilla, vanilla still needs to taste good. The documentation from Kindle Publishing tells the budding writer to do things like spell check and use Word’s grammar checker. Well, yes to spell checking, of course, but the grammar checker is not only painfully slow but it’s also not particularly useful, at least not for me. My writing, if you ask the grammar checker, is virtually unreadable. My sentences are too long, my use of subordinate phrases and parentheses is mind-numbing, and my word choices are inevitably incorrect.
What’s wrong with this picture?
There might be someone on earth for whom the grammar checker makes sense, but probably not the average fiction writer. Let’s say you’re writing in the first person. Well, then you’d want to mold your writing to reflect that narrator’s thoughts. If your narrator is not a copy editor at heart, he or she will probably not think entirely in perfect grammar. End of grammar checker. And if your writing has any personality whatsoever, first or third person, the grammar checker will simply scratch its head and shake its finger at you and annoy you until you turn it off. I turned it off the first week I had it in the very first version of Word I ever owned. I haven’t turned it back on since.
Some folks tell you that you should hire, A, a professional editor and B, a professional copy editor (and more, which we’ll get to eventually). I don’t necessarily disagree with this, but I didn’t do it. I can do these things myself pretty well, and since, as I explained yesterday, it’s easy for me to distance myself from my work, I’m pretty confident that I lost nothing by not having them. Having, as a writer, dealt with professional editors, and as an editor, dealt with professional writers, I have to say that while editors are great as sounding boards and fresh eyes, it all comes down to the writer sooner or later. “Uh, Mr. Joyce, I was thinking, maybe, that you’d want to clarify some of the writing here. I mean, shouldn’t riverrun be capitalized? And I think it’s two words. And I’m not quite sure who Eve and Adam are in the context of the paragraph…” Or, “Well, Hermie, I like it, don’t get me wrong, but let me tell you, whales just aren’t selling in today’s market. Have you thought of going with Cthulhu? Or maybe zombies? Great White Zombies has a real nice ring to it…”
So I have, to my mind, completely created the book and, following the elementary instructions from Kindle on page breaks and chapter heads and the like for Word, come up with the "production" copy of the book, short of the step of porting it to html and checking it in situ. I have not had to resort to any sort of typesetting, page design, copy editing, galley reading or query answering, which in the normal process of physical publishing can take two or three months. My production work took an hour or so. That’s one real benefit of digital publishing. Regardless of whether the end product is good, bad or indifferent, there’s no question that creating it is a quick business. It takes just as long to write a book, but producing it is virtually instantaneous. This leads, of course, to the availability of way more bad books, since all the expense of production is removed and the means placed in the hands of anyone with access to a computer, but so it goes.
My manuscript it ready. I have a production copy. Onward.
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