Making a List and Checking it Twice – Publishing Like a Pro

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Following on from the last post, I mentioned two focus areas to assist with preparing your manuscript to be converted to a published book. These were the Word Document and the Design Brief.

This raised the critical question ‘Is my manuscript ready to be converted to a book?’

As promised, below is a checklist that can assist to avoid costly mistakes and to keep your book on track, on time and on budget by ensuring your word manuscript is ready for design.

Here’s a Checklist:

Each person that you collaborate with in preparing the publishing of your book has a slightly different view on how and what you should do. This said, there are some simple points to that you can check to ensure you are keeping your book publishing on track, namely:

1. Is you manuscript actually in final format? There are times when an author thinks that the manuscript is final however key components such as the foreword, calls to action or testimonials have not been included in the manuscript.
2. Are all chapters clearly marked?
3. Should you include any of the following:
   • Dedication page
   • About the Author page
   • ‘Learn more’ page
   • Other published content that you want to share
   • Disclaimers about the content
   • Any other contributors that you need to acknowledge
   • Bibliography
   • Index
4. Are there images to be added during the formatting? Are they clearly marked and labelled to make the job easier for the formatter or designer.

A book designer may have a separate checklist that they will supply to make the process smoother. Sometimes items that seem unimportant to you, could make all the difference to making your book production smoother.

Professionals don’t ask questions to be painful.

They ultimately want to make the process as smooth as possible and reduce the need for a back and forth repeating loop of questions.

If you can answer all the above points in this post then it is likely you are ready to proceed to the next step in the publishing process. That is, finding and engaging the best person/people to convert your manuscript to a book. In other words, a book designer.

The checklist and potential places to find a book designer are essentially the same as noted in a prior post about choosing an editor (Top 5 Questions To Ask When Choosing an Editor For Your Book), it is imperative to do your research before engaging a book designer to convert your manuscript to a book.

Until next month, happy researching.