My Publishing Story
On May 27, 2020, I got a direct message to my LinkedIn account. It was from someone who claimed to be a TA for a Georgetown professor who was offering a course to help people write a book over the summer. I laughed. “Sounds like a scam,” I quipped to my mother. (Many direct messages on LinkedIn are.)
But she wasn’t convinced. “But what if it isn’t?” she pressed. I looked at the direct message again. There were more details than I’d ever seen on a scam message before, and I Googled a few of those terms.
What I discovered was A) The Creator Institute is real and B) The Creator Institute has helped other people get published. But what is the Creator Institute? The Creator Institute is a program run by Georgetown University Eric Koester, primarily targeting college students, elucidating the world of publishing and the writing process so first-time authors feel empowered to write a book.
My thought process took a 180. Over the course of 24 hours, I went from rolling my eyes at a spam message to asking, “Well, if these other people can do it, why can’t I?” I was hooked.
Now allow me to answer my own question: The reason why 98% of people who start writing a book never finish is not because they have no ideas or that they aren’t intelligent or creative enough to do so. The reason why 98% of people who start writing a book never finish is because writing a book is not a sprint but a marathon: one with goalposts that aren’t necessarily clear.
When The Creator Institute program began in the month of June, they started me with one goalpost: Write a 25,000 word manuscript.
Many of my peers in the program were floored at this prospect. 25,000 words!? How many pages is that!? What about 20,000 — does that work? How long, exactly, do we have to reach that number?
The haunting proposition was this: We had until Halloween (October 31st) to have a 25,000 word manuscript. We had five months to reach the goalpost of 25,000 words.
And, really, we didn’t start writing until late July or early August. Why? Well, the first task that the Creator Institute had for us was not to write a book but to learn how to write a book. 25,000 words do not happen overnight, and, more importantly, 25,000 words do not happen without a plan.
So we were taught how to research — through interviews, to get the “human stories” as well as the statistics, which are easier to find through a Google search — and how to think about writing. The “author’s cave” is a myth: People do not retreat to a dungeon, disappear for a month, then re-appear with a magical tome. Authors chip away at their project, little by little, and editors help chisel it into a finished project. All of this happens in broad daylight: At home work desks, in spiral-bound notebooks, even on social media.
Did I say editors? I meant multiple people but also multiple types of editors (six, to be precise). And, come late July, I was introduced to my first editor: my Developmental Editor. The job of a Developmental Editor is to work with an author to create the strongest at-least-25,000-word (because 25,000 words is only the minimum word count for a novel) manuscript possible.
“Oh, so you’re not writing alone?” Yes and no.
Yes, you are writing alone because no editor touches your in-progress document. But, no, you are not writing alone because authors can talk about their works in progress, and editors will give many comments about your completed versions of scenes and chapters.
And, I think most crucially, editors help you get organized. My Developmental Editor, Melody Delgado Lorbeer, and I opted to use a spreadsheet, a “Content Index,” to place links to all of my manuscript documents in one place, create mini-deadlines for (a first version of) each chapter to be completed, and summarize the feedback given about each chapter.
I had a first version of all of my chapters completed by late September, and, going into the Halloween deadline, I had created a second version of all of my chapters, iterating upon flow and clarity.
“Well, I did it: I got 25,000 words.” That is a big achievement in and of itself, but, to borrow terminology from video games, reaching 25,000 words is only the first “world” of writing a book. It is only the beginning of the process.
Creator Institute partners with New Degree Press, a hybrid publisher (meaning that authors keep intellectual property rights but pay for the use of the publisher’s service, like their editors, up front) but that does not mean that acceptance is in a shoe-in. 25,000 words is a minimum word count, not an indication of quality in and of itself. New Degree Press’ website explains that, “Typically, less than 15 percent of unsolicited manuscripts we receive are eligible to move forward. For comparison, approximately 50 percent of authors who participate in the Book Creators Program with our sister-company Creator Institute are initially green-lit to publish.” 50% is much better than 15%, but it is still not a large number.
I suppose you can guess which 50% I was a part of, considering I’m writing this article. Yes, I was given the green light to go ahead, not everyone in my cohort did. Some got “yellow lights.” Others got “red lights.” But I want to clarify that a “yellow light” or “red light” does not mean “stop.” A yellow light means an author needs a little bit more time to flesh out the manuscript; this most often happens when a manuscript is not quite 25,000 words, but the smaller amount of content (~15,000–20,000 words) that is there is good. A red light means that the author is not on track to have a 25,000 word manuscript of publishable quality. That does not mean that the ideais not of “publishable quality.” That means that the author’s word count is too small or that the manuscript is not organized well enough. One of the main reasons why a publisher like New Degree Press partners with a program like Creator Institute is that they can “split the load”: Creator Institute teaches authors how to organize themselves, and New Degree Press teaches authors how to market themselves.
After an Acquiring Editor from New Degree Press read my green-lit manuscript in a cold-read (i.e: reading without any background information, unlike, for example, a Developmental Editor, who becomes very familiar with the project) to give guidelines on how to improve it, I partnered with two Marketing & Revisions Editors, Alex Futo and Emily Price.
A Marketing & Revisions Editor works a lot like a Developmental Editor, in that they also become very familiar with your book by helping you organize your writing process and giving feedback on the edits you make. Yes, even after the 25,000 word mark, you are both creating some new content and revising older content. Because great books aren’t written; they’re re-written.
At the same time as I was “re-writing” my book, a new component of the writing process was being introduced to me. You may have guessed it by the name of job title of my latest collaborator: I was being introduced to marketing.
And I was not happy about it. I didn’t sign up to sell things; I signed up to write a book! And, immediately, I had a hard sell to make: asking strangers to pre-order a book for $40 that will not release until April.
“Sounds like a scam,” you might say. That’s what I said too. But it isn’t because people are not pre-ordering a $40 book that will release later for about half that cost. People are pre-ordering a “director’s cut” of the book: a signed copy, an invitation to the author community, an invitation to the launch event (happening virtually because of the COVID-19 pandemic, actually making it globally accessible), an early look at the introduction, helping select the cover, a shout-out in the Acknowledgements section, and, for people willing to be even more generous, an author talk and even the opportunity to create a character for the book.
And, to my shock, people were willing to pay: I had a goal to raise $5,000 to pay my publishing dues (i.e: editors, cover designer, etc.). I ended up raising $6,602: 132% of my goal.
Ah, but the marketing does not end there: Modern-day authors are active on social media. I made an Instagram account specifically to promote my book! (I don’t like Instagram. If I can view the website on a computer, why can’t I post on a computer!? Here’s a pro tip from my Marketing & Revisions Editor: Write out your posts on a third-party app like Google Docs, Quip, which you canaccess on your computer, then copy and paste that content into the social media app.)
In January, as I had pivoted from content creation to solely content editing, I reached out to my fourth editors: Beta Readers. Beta Readers are a unique type of editor because they are not professional editors. And, technically, anyone can be a Beta Reader: As long as you are a select few friends/family/colleagues that are chosen to read a book in advance and give constructive criticism and a “layperson’s” advice. So why ask the advice of people who aren’t professionals? Simply put, books are read by a wide audience — although every book has certain “demographics” in mind–so it is important to see what “normal” people think! For instance, I discovered, from my Beta Readers, that I didn’t make clear that a character who asks my young (19 years old and 12 years old) protagonists to join her for dinner is, in fact, 18 years old herself. My Beta Readers thought she was much older and was creeping on the boys. Yikes!
After giving my Beta Readers a few chapters to read every week over the course of about four weeks, I took only about a week to incorporate their feedback.
It was time to hand off my book baby to the “preschool” of the publishing world: the Layout Editors and the Copy Editors.Layout Editors make sure that text fits on the page, that quotes are properly formatted, etc. Copy Editors make sure the book is as free of grammatical and syntactical errors as possible. (Ask any author: No published book is 100% free of errors.) Why do I call them the “preschool”? Well, they are the final editors. Once a book is sent off to copy editing, it cannot be edited again.
Why? Because my release date was coming up fast!
But just like a parent sending their child off to the first day of school, release opens up a new world of celebration: The aforementioned launch party and organizing to do things like speak on podcasts and write article series about the book.
Just like a parent, though, I am exhausted. Book children–like human children–are a lot of work, and they’re not for everyone. To those who are inclined to spend a lot of time at their keyboards, however, I implore you to ask what I did: “Well, if these other people can do it, why can’t I?”
I can be reached on these social media platforms. Kelly Coons on Facebook, Kelly Coons on LinkedIn, and @kellycoonswritesabout____ on Instagram.
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