Getting Your Book Ready in Time to Maximise Christmas Sales
If you have a book in progress and want to self-publish it via Amazon KDP and/or Ingram Spark ready to hit the shelves for the Christmas sales market, when should you aim to have your manuscript completed?
It’s only July and your manuscript is already well under way, so you’ve got loads of time, right? Well, I don’t want to burst your bubble, but the reality is that if part of your sales strategy involves this year’s Christmas gift market, you don’t really have quite as much time as you may think.
To explain why, let me break things down for you:
Firstly, all industry professionals agree that every book should be properly edited (which is why proofreading is included as standard in our publishing packages). Editing is not something that should be rushed. It takes time for this step to be done right, and quality editors can get booked up pretty quickly, particularly in the run-up to the festive season. It’s not unusual for them have a queue of manuscripts awaiting their attention, so you may have to wait before this stage can even start.
Once the editor is ready to begin, for a 70,000 word book, you should allow at least two weeks for them to do their thing and send back an edited version of your manuscript with their comments. You will then need to go through the entire document to approve the text. Depending on whether you make further changes at this point, your manuscript may need to go back to the editor for a further check before being returned to you for final approval. As you can already see, even if you’re able to respond quickly to each round of edits, it can take a month or more before the final version of text is ready for the next step. So now we’re into August.
Next comes layout of the interior. Now, you may believe that you’ve already got this covered. You’ve taken care with paragraph spacing, chapters, etc., and have a beautiful looking Word file of your manuscript. Fantastic, well done! Here are some questions for you to consider.
1. Does your book contain any images or graphics?
Images and graphics need to be properly inserted into the document, not simply copied and pasted. They should also have a minimum resolution of 300 DPI (dots per inch).
2. Does your book contain any special characters?
Not all special characters are supported for print-on-demand platforms. You’ll need to check if your manuscript contains any unsupported characters or languages, and if so, correct them.
3. Have you used hard returns (use of the Enter button) to create line breaks?
Hard returns can change the way your published book looks, in ways you did not intend. Hard returns should only be used when you want to start a new paragraph, or create a space between paragraphs. The only exception is if your text specifically needs a line break (for example, poetry).
4. Have you used proper indentation?
Many people indent text by use of either the space bar or tab button. While this might look fine when viewing your document in Word, both of these methods can cause issues with consistency and the way the published book actually looks.
5. Are the pages in your Word document the correct size?
Most people start any new document in Word with a standard sized page (usually A4). This is fine for the writing and editing of your book, but even if you intend your print book to be A4 in size, this will not work when preparing your file for upload, as additional space needs to be allowed for trimming during production. Whatever size you want your printed book to be, pages need to be properly sized, and have suitable page margins, as well as allowing for trimming.
6. Do you want images to print all the way to the edge of the page?
In printing terms, this is known as bleed. If you want your book to include bleed, images will need to extend to the outer edge of the trim area.
This list is not exhaustive. There are several other important formatting issues to consider, to make sure your published book looks the very best that it can. Unless you have experience in creating book layouts, it’s recommended that you have a professional work on this for you.
If you decide to enlist the help of a publishing company, they will likely prepare a sample of the interior layout before working on the full book document. This gives you the opportunity to comment on things like font choice, heading styles, and image handling & placement. The sample is usually generated between one and two weeks after all content has been received. Once the sample is approved, it can take a further three to four weeks before the draft of the full layout is ready. This will also need to be checked by you, and either approved or returned for any necessary corrections or adjustments to be made. So, even if the full layout is approved without change it can take up to six weeks before the final file is ready for upload, and even longer if the layout is particularly complex.
Yikes! We’re now heading towards the end of September, and there are already Christmas-themed books being released.
Hopefully the book cover design was created and approved while editing and formatting were taking place, otherwise we’re potentially looking at a further couple of weeks before all files are ready to upload.
Even after the file upload is complete, your book will not be immediately available. Amazon KDP usually begin displaying new book details within 72hrs, however it can take up to 10 days before the sales page is fully complete and all formats of your book are linked.
With all of this in mind, and realising that there are a lot of incredibly well organised people who begin their Christmas shopping in September and October, you can see that in order to take full advantage of the Christmas shopping market the answer to our original question, “When should you aim to have your manuscript completed?” is by the end of July (or sooner).
If your manuscript is ready for editing and you would like some help preparing it for publication, click here to request a quotation, or send your questions to us here.
