What Happens After You've Written Your Manuscript

Imagine…

You finally hit that last period of your book. You have your first draft of your first manuscript done, and you take a long sigh, knowing that the hardest part is over. Because let’s be honest, one of the hardest parts is simply showing up and getting that first draft written. 

But now, you don’t know what to do.

So you sit at your computer, looking at pages and pages of a story that you wrote, wondering what comes next. How do you go from a first-draft manuscript to a finished book? 

That is what we are going to talk about today. 

GOING FROM FIRST DRAFT TO FINISHED BOOK

I want to start off by saying CONGRATS on getting your first draft finished. 

That is a HUGE deal and should be celebrated. Take a minute to do something for yourself to recognize what you just accomplished.

Your manuscript may be finished, but it isn’t ready for publication quite yet. And that’s okay. You should still be incredibly proud of getting this far. 

So what do you do after you've written your manuscript?

There are several steps between finishing your first draft and holding the finished book in your hands. From stepping away from your manuscript and editing it, to cover design, formatting, printing, and finally publishing your book, there is still work to be done.

I’m going to break down what happens after you finish your first draft so you know what to expect, and more importantly, what to do next. Let’s dive into the ten-step process to take your book from first draft to completed book.

STEP AWAY FROM YOUR MANUSCRIPT

You have been staring at that screen and that completed manuscript for months, maybe even years, so it is time that you close that computer and step away from it. I know, you are gasping to yourself right now because you have the momentum and you are ready to dive in completely. 

But the thing is, you need to take a step back. You need to give your manuscript time to breathe, give yourself a moment to breathe before diving into the next steps. This not only gives you fresh eyes to look at your manuscript with, but it also allows you to clear your head. 

When you are in the writing phase, everything feels important. You just keep writing and writing to put words on paper, and the moment that it feels complete, the moment that you stop writing, you are too emotionally invested to give it the love and attention that it deserves. 

So give yourself a week or two of a break once you finish that first draft. It will benefit you and the book you are creating.

READ YOUR MANUSCRIPT FROM BEGINNING TO END

This is not to edit the book. 

This is not to critique your book.

This is to just read it through. This will be the first full read-through of your first draft. I don’t want you to obsess over individual sentences or small grammatical errors yet. 

I want you to read through it and get a sense of the story that you wrote. Sit with it and read it. Relish in the fact that you wrote a book. Take your time, read it through, and sit with it once you have read it all. 

Write down what it made you feel. And then a day or two after you have read it, we can begin the transformation process. 

START THE EDITING PROCESS

This is one part of the publishing process where you are going to want to bring in someone else to help. 

Now, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t edit your own book. You absolutely should. Read through it, make changes, move things around, delete the parts that aren’t working, and add to the places that need a little more. 

But you shouldn’t be the only person editing your book. 

You are too close to it.

You know what you meant to say. You know your characters, your story, and what is supposed to be happening on every page. Because of that, your brain can sometimes fill in the gaps without you even realizing they are there. 

Having another set of experienced eyes on your manuscript can help you see the things that are difficult to see when you’ve been living inside your story for months or maybe even years. 

Now, there are several different types of editing, and you are going to want to understand the difference between them. I’m only going to give you a small glimpse into each one here because we’ll be diving much deeper into editing in a future blog post.

Developmental Editing: This is about the big picture of your book. Does the story make sense? Are there gaps in the plot? Are your characters developed enough? Is the pacing working? Are there sections that need more or sections that aren’t really adding anything to the story? Developmental editing looks at how all the pieces of your book work together.

Line Editing: This is where we start looking more closely at the actual writing. How does each sentence sound? Does the writing flow? Are there awkward or repetitive sections? Could something be said more clearly or have a stronger emotional impact? Line editing helps strengthen your writing while still maintaining your voice as the author. 

Copy Editing: Now we’re getting into the technical details. Copy editing looks for things like grammar, spelling, punctuation, word usage, and consistency throughout your manuscript. It helps clean up the writing and catches those little mistakes that are incredibly easy to miss when you’ve read the same sentence 47 times. 

Proofreading: This is your final check. Proofreading happens when your book is almost ready to be published and is designed to catch any remaining typos, punctuation errors, formatting issues, or other small mistakes that may have slipped through. 

And yes, your manuscript may go through several rounds of edits before it is finished. 

That is completely normal.

Editing isn’t about taking your story away from you or changing it into something that doesn’t sound like you. Good editing should do the opposite. It should help you take the story you’ve written and make it stronger, clearer, and ready for your readers. 

REVISE, REVISE, REVISE

Now, just because you have hired someone to do the editing doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t revise the book yourself. When the editor sends you the book back, it means that you need to reread it so that you can see if there is anything that still feels off or an error that the person may have missed.

Remember, the more eyes on your book can really make a difference. We are all human, and mistakes can slip through the cracks, so revise your book at every stage!

COVER DESIGN

Your cover is the first thing that people see.

They may not know your book.

They may not know you as an author. 

They don’t know the story you’ve spent months, or years, creating. 

All they have in that first moment is your cover, and it needs to give them a reason to stop and take a closer look.

I personally designed four out of the five covers of my own books. But when it came to Somewhere Between Us, I decided to reach out to someone else and have them design the cover for me. 

Real talk: I absolutely HATED my cover at first.

It wasn’t what I had pictured in my head. It was completely different from what my other books looked like, and my first reaction was that it just wasn’t me. 

So, at my day job, I brought the cover in and started asking the people I worked with what they thought. And something interesting happened. 

They started pointing out specific pieces of the design that they loved. They told me what caught their attention and what the cover made them think and feel. As I listened to their feedback, I started looking at the cover differently.

I realized that just because it wasn’t what I had pictured didn’t mean it wasn’t right for the book.

There is a difference between designing the cover you imagined and designing a cover that communicates what your book is actually about to a potential reader. 

Now, I am definitely not telling you this story because I think you should settle for a cover you don’t love.

I didn’t. 

My designer made a few tweaks, we worked through the things that weren’t sitting right with me, and eventually, I fell in love with it. 

What I learned from that experience is the value of having another perspective when designing your book cover. 

A good cover isn’t just something pretty to put on the front of your book. There is strategy behind it. Your cover needs to consider your genre, your audience, your typography, the imagery, how it looks as a tiny thumbnail online, and, most importantly, whether it gives the right impression of the book inside. 

You have spent so much time inside your story that you naturally have an emotional attachment to what you think your book should look like. A cover designer can step outside of that attachment and look at your book from the perspective of the person you’re trying to reach. 

That doesn’t mean giving up control of your vision. 

It means finding someone who can take your vision, your story, and your audience and bring those pieces together into a cover that makes someone stop and think:

I want to know what this book is about. 

INTERIOR FORMATTING

You have edited your manuscript.

You have a cover that you love.

Now it is time to make the inside of your book actually look like a book. This is where interior formatting comes in.

If you open up one of the books sitting on your bookshelf, you probably don’t think much about how the pages are laid out. And honestly, that is kind of the point. Good formatting shouldn’t distract you from the words on the page. It should make the reading experience feel natural.

Formatting takes your manuscript and determines things like your font choices, margins, spacing, chapter headings, page numbers, paragraph styles, and where each new chapter begins. It also includes those pages at the beginning and end of your book that you may not have thought about while writing. Your title page, copyright page, dedication, acknowledgements, and author information.

Your formatting is also going to depend on the type of book you have written. A novel is going to look very different from a workbook, a poetry collection, or a nonfiction book.

This is another area where the little details matter.

You don’t want your reader thinking about your margins, spacing, or page numbers while they are reading your book.

You want them thinking about your words. 

ISBN & PUBLISHING DETAILS

Now we get into some of the behind-the-scenes pieces of publishing that aren’t nearly as exciting as choosing your cover, but are still incredibly important. 

One of those is your ISBN.

An ISBN, or International Standard Book Number, is the unique number used to identify your book. Different formats of your book may also require their own ISBN. So, for example, your paperback and hardcover aren’t necessarily going to use the same one. 

If you are publishing in Canada, there is some good news: ISBNs are available to eligible Canadian publishers and self-publishers at no charge through Library and Archives Canada.

This is also the stage where you want to make sure all of your book’s information is correct. Your author name, book title, subtitle, description, categories, publication information, and other details need to be consistent. 

These aren’t necessarily the parts of publishing that you dreamed about when you started writing your book. But they are part of turning your manuscript into an actual published book.

And if all of this sounds confusing, don’t worry. This is one of the pieces I help my Oak & Ink authors navigate so they don’t have to figure it all out by themselves. 

PROOF COPIES & FINAL REVIEW

I know.

You have already read your book approximately 4,732 times at this point, and the thought of reading it again probably makes you want to throw it across the room. 

Read it again.

Before you order boxes of books or officially release your book into the world, get a proof copy whenever possible.

There is something very different about holding the physical book in your hands. 

Things you didn’t notice on your computer screen can suddenly stand out. Maybe a heading looks strange. Maybe a page break doesn’t feel right. Maybe the font is a little smaller than you expected. Maybe something on the cover is sitting too close to the edge. 

This is your opportunity to look at the book as a whole. 

Look at your cover. Check the spine. Flip through every page. Look at the margins and chapter headings. Check your page numbers. Read the copyright page. Check your author bio. 

And yes, look for those last little typos that somehow managed to survive every single round of editing. 

Your proof copy is exactly that, a proof. 

It is much easier to fix something now than after you have 50 copies of your book sitting in boxes in your living room. 

PRINTING & DISTRIBUTION

Your book is ready.

Now you need to figure out how you’re actually going to get it into people’s hands. There isn’t one right answer here.

For my authors, I like looking at a combination of location printing and print-on-demand distribution. 

Working with a local printer can give you physical copies that you can sell directly through your website, bring to markets, use at book signings, or take with you to events. And depending on the printer, you don’t necessarily have to order hundreds or thousands of books at once.

Then there are print-on-demand platforms such as Amazon KDP and IngramSpark. 

Instead of having hundreds of books printed and stored somewhere, print-on-demand means a copy can be produced when someone orders it. These platforms can also help make your book available through larger online retailers and distribution channels. 

You don’t necessarily have to choose one or the other. 

For example, I like having physical copies available for direct sales while also setting a book up through print-on-demand and distribution channels. It gives the author more than one way to get their book in front of readers. 

There is a lot more that goes into choosing where and how to print your book, and we will talk about that in another post. 

For now, just remember: Writing the book is only one part of the process. You also need a plan for how your readers are going to get it. 

YOUR BOOK IS READY TO MEET ITS READERS

And then, one day, a box arrives.

You open it, move the packing paper out of the way, and there it is. 

Your book.

Not the Word document you’ve been staring at for months. Not the PDF you’ve reviewed over and over again. Not a Canva mockup of what you hope it will eventually look like.

An actual book with your name on the cover. 

Take a minute and let yourself have that moment. Because YOU DID IT!

But publishing your book isn’t quite the end of the journey. Now you have to help people discover it. 

That might mean planning a book launch, sharing your book on social media, reaching out to local bookstores, selling directly through your website, attending markets or events, asking for reviews, or simply telling people that your book exists. 

You don’t have to do everything at once. 

And you definitely don’t need to have every part of your marketing figured out before you publish. What you do need to remember is that readers can’t fall in love with a book they don’t know exists.

You have already done something incredibly difficult. 

You took an idea that existed only inside your head, showed up for it over and over again, wrote the first draft, worked through the edits, made the decisions, handled all of those tiny publishing details, and turned your words into something another person can hold in their hands. 

That’s a pretty incredible thing.

And now it’s time to let your story go out into the world and find the people who need to read it. 

If you got to the end of this post and thought, Okay… that is a lot more than I realized, you’re not alone. 

Writing your manuscript is a huge accomplishment, but turning that manuscript into a finished book involves a lot of moving pieces. Editing, cover design, formatting, ISBNs, printing, and distribution. There are decisions to make at every stage. 

But you don’t have to become an expert in publishing just because you decided to write a book. That is a big part of why I created Oak & Ink Publishing. 

I want authors to stay connected to their stories while having someone beside them who understands the publishing process and can help them figure out what comes next. 

Whether you have just typed THE END on your first draft or you have had a finished manuscript sitting on your computer for years because you don’t know what to do with it, we can start there. 

Your story is written.

Now, let’s figure out what it needs to become a book.

Ready to take the next step? Book your clarity session today.