You’re happily tooling along, setting up marketing gigs while the designer is typesetting your book, when suddenly you realize . . . you need to print review galleys! You didn’t think of that before, and now you need them yesterday. You’re reading the guidelines of the media reviewers, and you discover that you must send them a review copy of your book three months before the release date!

Or you’ve arranged to print the book by a certain deadline. Then an editing issue holds the book up, and you don’t get the manuscript to the designer on time. But you still need the book printed by the same date as originally planned. Do you just send it to the designer and hope they can get it done faster (without charging you a rush fee)?

How the heck does all this work, anyway? What are all the steps involved in producing a book?

Sample Production Schedule PDF
The answer is in the production schedule. You create this with the designer AT THE VERY BEGINNING so there won’t be any surprises. Click on the link right above this paragraph for a sample schedule. This will show you the steps that a self-published book typically goes through, and how long each step typically takes. As the book goes through these steps, the dates are adjusted to reflect the actual timeline so you can see if you’re staying on track.