Hey, I'm 16 and have been trying to write stories for a while now. Now that I can talk to other writers on Notebook, I want to ask you all, what is the process of publishing/editing a book? I know I could google this but I want to get people's actual experiences and details. I want to know how to find someone to do a book cover for you. I want to know what you actually do while editing/publishing. Please explain this to me because I'm clueless. Thank you!
fair warning: i don't know the first thing about publishing. but i've been following the industry for a long time, so i have ideas.
first off, editing. you will edit your draft continuously. first, second, third edits. by yourself. you will likely rewrite your entire story by the third draft. before you even send it off to friends or family for them to edit. before you even think about getting a professional editor. the draft that you send to your editor needs to be the best one, and then they will tell you it's not, and you will edit it again and again.
then you send queries to publishers. and they will reject you. you will send hundreds of queries. they won't even see your final draft. they get an idea of what your story is about. and if they happen to like the idea, the pitch, then they might ask for a chapter or two. if everything falls into place, they will sign you on and someone will look at your story, and then…it gets published? i don't know how or who gets to design the cover, but at some point the publisher will think it's good enough to publish and then you have a book on the market. you'll probably get an agent before all of that. i don't know how that happens either.
if you want to skip all of that and just get it published, do it yourself. amazon has a pretty simple, easy-to-use self publishing tool through kindle. you just need to follow their formatting rules. getting someone to buy your self-published book is a lot harder, because you have to work on getting the word out by yourself (i believe publishing houses will do all the marketing for you, and you will have to go on tours, it's a whole thing, but like i said above, it's not easy to get a big publishing house to accept your book).
that's not to say you shouldn't try! i know a lot of authors who tried for DECADES to get their books published. who tried and failed and tried again. it's part of the industry. it's not fun. but oh so worth it. don't get discouraged. read up all you can about the industry and once you're certain you have a polished draft, send it off! but be respectful of the rules of the publishing houses you're sending it to (and agents and editors). some people won't accept unsolicited pitches or inquiries.
remember, i'm not an expert on this. i just know that, for a debut novel, it doesn't happen overnight (and if it does, then you are LIGHTYEARS ahead of the rest of us). but if writing is what you love to do, then the painstaking months/years of editing will be worth it! keep it up!
Thank you for helping me! It's totally fine if you aren't an expert, I at least needed a general understanding and you gave me more than that :) I will definitely look into all of this more. Thanks!