Heed your submission deadline...

It's difficult to describe the feeling of vindication and relief when the hard copy of your publishing contract drops through the door for you to sign. Mine arrived on 4th November last year.

Of course I read it carefully, drafted a list of questions that were duly answered by my publisher, scoured the internet for cautionary tales and finally, reassured, signed on the dotted line and sent the contract on its way under a bright red, first-class stamp. 

Then I pressed on with the edits my commissioning editor had requested (little more than a rearrangement of paragraphs to slow down the transitions from one character's point-of-view to another in the first-third of the book). Once done, I submitted my final draft for formatting on 8th November. Then settled in to wait for the three-month-or-so lag between final submission and publication that my commissioning editor had said was the publisher's average.

But I'd misunderstood an important thing. My contract contained a clause where the latest delivery date for final manuscript was noted as 31st December. I'd assumed this was a deadline to stop procrastination and was quite proud I'd submitted so early. What it turned out to be was the date my work was allotted to begin its journey through the publishing cycle.

Of course I was happy with the manuscript I had submitted, otherwise I wouldn't have sent it in. Even so, what I'd done was waste an extra seven weeks I could've used to further shine the polish I had already elbow-greased.

www.melvynfickling.com
www.facebook.com/MelvynFicklingAuthor/