In just a few weeks, Memories Flow in Our Veins has gone from a raw Word document-manuscript to a very real, very happening book-in-progress. In the last few weeks, the team has balanced a number of projects: we’ve pored over the manuscript in editing; helped to develop evocative, on-point titles for the sections of the book; researched the contributing authors to write bios and perform an author social media audit; designed some incredible collateral and compiled sales kits; undertaken revisions to our marketing plan; and commenced the XML tagging process. With the interior design already under way and only a few final pieces of the manuscript still outstanding, the Memories team is racing our way to the end of the term and the year.
One of the greatest challenges of this term has been the rapid turnaround required from manuscript to, well, everything else. As we’ve learned, there are some things that you just can’t do without a manuscript in hand (hello, editing!) and some that you do so much better with that manuscript at your fingertips in all its glory. Figuring out how to mobilize our resources to work through the most time-sensitive projects, while also making time for bigger-picture projects that require lots of long-term thinking and planning, has been essential to keeping Memories moving.
As we discovered, reading the manuscript for the first time brought out all kinds of fresh inspiration and ideas for collateral, marketing, and promotion (about which our current team and yours truly are pretty excited). We felt that there were enough brand new nuggets of inspiration brought about by the revelation of our contributing authors, by our direct access to their content, and in the experience of the book’s particular organization to necessitate a revision to our marketing plan, helping us to think more deeply about how Memories figures into current publishing trends and what makes it a truly unique book. Though marketing and promotion still seem like part of a remote to-do list at this point, cultivating plans for these long-term projects offered us some creative cushion and perspective as we worked through the intensity of copyediting and the rote mechanics of XML tagging.
It’s been a lot to do all at once, but I’ll dare to say it: we’re ready for more! Next up: delivering a tagged and complete manuscript to our designer, jumping into proofreading, and launching our blurb requests out into the world before it’s time to print those January galleys.