My Publishing Experience

There is nothing like checking your email each day waiting for the first manuscript draft to come in. You know in your head that it will not be perfect and that there will be some changes to be made. With that being said let me tell you my story. Before I continue, for my book I sent them the manuscript, page illustrations (with page numbers), and a storyboard to follow.

My first draft... When I received the email I was SO excited. I could hardly wait to download it and print it out. Even after sending it to the publisher I never really felt it was real, until I saw the first page of the book with the title, my name, and copyright information. What a feeling! Then it all disappeared as I began flipping through the pages. As I got further into the book I noticed more and more errors and it was not with the manuscript, but with the illustrations. The main issue was that half the book was missing the illustrations. So, I called my editor and explained some of my concerns and she said to resend the storyboard along with the missing pages.

My second draft... I was just as excited to see this draft as the last, hoping that the talk I had was able to fix things. Well..... I still had some of the issues as before, text in the wrong spot. This time all of the pages had illustrations on it, but they mixed up some of the pages and I had a page at the end of the book that was blank and another page that was completely decorated and you could not see the words. Remind you they had a storyboard to look at. So, I called my publisher and we went through it page by page and she was noticing the issues. She is not sure why there were those errors. She expressed to me that both her and her assistant will look it over carefully before it is sent back to me. She also had me write a detailed email about what errors I found on the pages.

A little side note, whenever you get a draft returned to you and in your contract it states that you only get 2 rounds of corrections and then after that you have to pay. Not only do you have to pay but it is $25 per issue you have. I was a little stressed over that because there were still a lot of errors, so I asked my publisher about it. She assured me that I will not be billed for the extra corrections because it was on their end, not mine. So please do not worry about that fine print, if they see you need more they will work with you.

My third draft... It looked EXACTLY how I imagined it to look. They finally have the text in the correct place and the all of the illustrations are correct. I finally felt relief about my book again. This time I was told to look at the content to see if I needed to make corrections. I waited until now because my publisher wanted to get the illustrations correct before she worked with the manuscript. It was very little that needed to be changed. At this time I also changed the font style, she ended up emailing me to see which style I wanted.

My forth draft... I was very happy with the font choice and had no corrections to make. Well, I did have one, I asked to have Written and Illustrated by placed with my name.

My fifth draft... This was the FINAL one because I gave them an all clear that it is EXACTLY how I wanted it. I was so happy and relieved :)