All along, I felt confident that when it was time to send in
my final manuscript, I would be thoroughly sick of the whole enterprise. After
all, I had been working on the project in one form or another for more than a
decade.
I was wrong. To be sure, I would have been happy never to
see another footnote or page proof. But the idea of letting go—of never being able to fix anything ever again—filled
me with abject terror.
Conventional wisdom about academic publishing suggests that about a year passes between the delivery of an author’s final manuscript to the press and the book’s publication. In my experience, this was almost true—depending on what “final” means. More on the nitty-gritty of the production process after the jump.
A manuscript may go to outside reviewers at various points in the process; mine was reviewed after the first round of post-dissertation revisions, in the fall of 2008. I received the readers’ reports in December 2008, and responded in January; the press’s editorial board approved publication in February. Originally, my final submission date was set for September 2009. But what with all of the revisions I wanted to do, a seven-month gestation period seemed wildly optimistic. Add to that the fact that I was expecting a baby in July, and postponement seemed inevitable. Luckily, my editor was wonderfully understanding. We pushed the deadline off to June 2010. When a new archive (Justice Potter Stewart’s papers at Yale) was scheduled to open upon Justice Stevens’s retirement at the end of the Supreme Court’s Term in late June/early July 2010, the deadline shifted to late summer. In the end, I submitted the “final” manuscript in mid-August of 2010.
A few weeks later, the production coordinator contacted me
with a schedule. I would receive my chapters from the copy-editor in mid-October.
Then I would have three weeks to review the copy-edited manuscript and submit
changes. I sent the chapters back in early November, received page proofs in
early December, returned them just before the holidays, and then received the
indexed manuscript in early January. Toward the end of January, I had about
three days to review the second round of proofs. And then it was time to let
go.
Every stage of this process was more consuming than I
expected. During the final months of substantive revisions, I was incredibly fortunate
to have one semester of parental leave, followed by another semester of research leave. During the
production process, in contrast, I was teaching two courses while juggling a toddler and a
long commute. Unstinting support and help from my spouse, parents, child care provider,
and incredibly generous colleagues and friends were indispensable; rising at 4am became
routine.
Standardizing the formatting of footnotes alone required painstaking work, and that was with significant help from the copy editor. Indexing
entailed many hours of thought and labor; although a professional indexer
started the process, my experience was that it's virtually impossible for anyone but the
author to determine exactly which terms should be included, and moreover, to
identify each occurrence of each term. Proper names are fairly easy for a
stranger to the manuscript to index. Legal terms and concepts, on the other
hand, not so much.
For weeks after sending back the final page proofs, I would
wake up in the middle of the night, my heart pounding, certain that I had
forgotten to correct an error, or left an important person out of the
acknowledgements. (This still happens, albeit less frequently.) Fortunately, I never tired of the book’s topic, or of the characters who populate
its story. But for someone who has never run more than a mile at a time, the endgame felt like a marathon.
I'd love to hear about others' experiences with finishing a manuscript and seeing it through the production process.
