Publishing a Book Can Work Your Last Nerve

(sometimes....)

Back when I was trying to get my first book published, a novelist friend warned me: "The only thing worse than not being published is being published."

He wasn't joking, and it sounded like something wise and mysterious Yoda might say if he taught a writing workshop. I wasn't sure what it meant. But I soon discovered.

Bringing a book out can be filled with hazards and can open you up to a whole new set of disappointments and frustrations. You might hate the book cover the publisher comes up with. There's the possibility of bad reviews.  Really bad reviews. The kind that lodge like a splinter in your brain.

You could be plagued by miserable turnout at readings and signings.  And readers or prospective readers can say weird things to you that leave you amazed.

Someone else could publish a similar book that gets way more press attention than yours. And of course, there's the quicksand of weak sales.

But before the book even gets published, you enter the strange world of production. When the book comes back to you from a copy editor, it's been transformed into something very different, almost alien. Your labor of love is now just a product. As you work through the corrections and suggestions page by page, the book can feel very much less than the sum of its parts.

Your baby is reduced to markups relating to spacing and capitalization, and what can seem like an endless series of queries. Sometimes the copy editor isn't tuned in to your material. In one book I mentioned the Temple in Jerusalem (not the capital).  The query was: "What's the name of that temple?"

I resisted the temptation to get snarky, but when I had one copy editor completely rewrite the style of my memoir My Germany, I said No way.

Of course, a good copy editor will catch repetition, a mistaken quote, imprecise or awkward phrasing, and other problems that would embarrass you when the book comes out. But whether you agree or disagree with suggested changes, seeing it marked up with countless notes can make you feel like Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians. And you can't tell anymore if the book is what you wanted it to be or not.

Next you get the page proofs, by which point the book you thought you loved can feel like an albatross and you just want to be rid of it. Especially if you've moved on to writing or researching something else.

The examples above are possibilities, not firm realities, and I’ve thankfully had mostly good-to-great experiences with almost all my publishers. That being said, it's ultimately better to have these problems than to not have them. Just be prepared if you haven't had a book published yet that all may not go as smoothly as you had hoped.

Lev Raphael is the author of Writer's Block is Bunk and twenty-six other books in genres from memoir to mystery. With forty years of experience in publishing, editing, and teaching creative writing at the university level, he coaches and edits writers at www.writewithoutborders.com.

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