Hi friends!
Publication Day
So, you’ve finally done it. You wrote a book. You edited it. You may well have scrapped it and started again, or even started a different book. There have been tears, and moments of joy, and probably a fair few times when you contemplated giving up completely. You’ve cancelled social events, missed box-sets everyone else was raving about, forgotten to go to the supermarket and had to scrape together a meal from some pasta you found in the back of a cupboard and a few vegetables that have seen better days.
But you did it. You’ve strung somewhere upwards of 80 thousands words together, one after the other, and they not only made sense, but they told a story. And you were brave enough to send that story out into the world, and it found some readers who liked it, and they decided it had the potential to find even more readers. You probably had to make some changes (assuming you’re traditionally published), and it might have felt like you were being sent back to square one, but you made them, and the editor who liked it a few months back not only still likes it, but while you’ve been busy looking at this character’s motivation or that character’s story arc, they’ve got someone to design a beautiful cover and someone else to come up with a marketing and publicity plan.
And then — oh day of days! — you’re sent an early copy of the book you wrote, and it’s called a proof (or an ARC1), and it’s still riddled with typos and the occasional grammatical error, but it now looks and feels like a book, and you can put some copies on your shelf and give others to your friends and family and tell them this is the reason you cancelled on them so many times. And, almost more importantly than that, at some point you’ve been given a date when the book will be out, officially published and (hopefully) free of typos, available to order, or download, and sitting proudly on the shelf in your local bookshop for anyone at all, even people who aren’t related to you! to buy.
You mark the date on your calendar. At first it seems an age away (because it is), but that time is eaten up with more edits, then copy-edits, then page corrections and so on, and it goes surprisingly quickly. Suddenly months away has becomes just weeks away, and then it’s only a matter of days.
Then, a bit like the way Christmas seems to creep up on you every year, suddenly it’s here.
But what’s publication day really like?