How to Deliver Your Book Baby

Umstattd baby number four is due any day. As you can imagine, I’ve been thinking about babies a lot.

Authors often refer to their books as “babies.” As someone who’s in the baby world and the publishing world working with authors, I’m starting to see a lot of similarities.

We can learn a lot about delivering a book baby by looking at the process of delivering a real baby.

Where do book babies come from?

Most authors have been asked, “Where do your ideas come from?” It’s a common interview posed in podcast interviews and readers trying to make small talk. But the truth is, many authors don’t really know the answer.

Where do our ideas come from?

As humans, we start dreaming at a very young age, and those dreams often take the form of narratives with symbolic meaning. Long before we’re writing stories, we’re dreaming stories. So, answering the question “Where do ideas come from?” is a bit like trying to answer “Where do dreams come from?”

But therein lies the answer, or at least an answer.

If I’ve been reading a lot of fantasy books, I tend to have fantasy-themed dreams. When I’ve been playing a lot of video games, my dreams tend to be set in that video game world. If I’ve been watching a lot of news, I start dreaming about politicians. And if I’ve been reading my Bible, praying, and attending church a lot, I tend to have more religious dreams.

Our bodies are made up of the calories we consume, and our mental worlds are made up of the media we consume. Your ideas are typically the synthesis of ideas already swirling in your head. Your mind cooks up ideas with the ingredients you stocked in your mind’s media pantry. As you read, watch, and scroll, you’re loading your mind’s pantry with the ingredients it uses to generate ideas.

If you want good ideas, read good books.

Back to the pregnancy metaphor, coming up with ideas is a lot of fun, but at some point, you want to take one of those ideas and develop it into a book.

The First Trimester: Writing Your First Draft

During the writing of your first draft, your story is most at risk of failing to take root, just as the baby is most at risk during the first trimester.

Some story ideas are not big enough to carry the whole novel. Others are not exciting enough to hold the author’s interest. Sometimes, the author gets lost in the world-building and forgets about the plot or gives up writing the story. Other times, the author enjoys coming up with ideas far more than working on them. Authors plagued by these pitfalls never really find success.

By contrast, pregnant mothers make many sacrifices for their unborn babies. For instance, they will typically stop drinking alcohol and avoid skydiving and other dangerous activities. Authors must also make sacrifices for their books. That usually means cutting back on social media, Netflix, and doom-scrolling in order to make time to write.

If you’re wondering where to find more time to write, the answer is often in your phone’s screen time report. Cutting your phone time will give you a lot more time to write.

If you want a fertile mind, you must be willing to allow ideas to take root. That means persisting in your writing even when it’s no longer fun.

Early Feedback

Writing the first draft is usually fun, but it’s punctuated by intense moments of self-doubt, just as that first trimester of pregnancy is punctuated by bouts of morning sickness.

That first trimester is also when pregnant mothers typically schedule their first doctor appointment. Authors don’t visit a doctor, but the first-draft stage is a great time to get early feedback by sending scenes or chapters to a critique group.

Write the Pitch

One of the best tips I can give you for writing a successful book is to write the pitch for your book as soon as possible during this first-draft phase, ideally before you even start the book. Develop your idea into a pitch before you develop it into a novel or an outline. A compelling sales pitch will help you in two ways.

Gauge People’s Interest

First, a strong pitch gives you an easy way to talk with friends and strangers about your book. As you pitch your book to people, you can gauge their interest. Then, you can tweak the pitch to the point where people love the idea so much they’re frustrated that they can’t buy it yet. That’s when you know you’ve got a good pitch.

Guide Your Writing

Your honed pitch will guide you as you write your book to deliver on the promises you made in the pitch. That’s how you set yourself up for success.

Most authors do it backward. They write the book and then pitch, and that makes everything harder. They struggle at the end and during the launch because they don’t know who their book is for or how to articulate why that person would find it interesting.

For more on pitching, see the following episodes:

Once your pitch and book are complete, your book enters the next trimester.

The Second Trimester: The Second Draft

In the second trimester of a baby’s development, all her organs are formed. Every part of the body is there, even when the baby is tiny.

The second draft of your book is the time to either bulk up or pare down your story, depending on the kind of first draft you wrote.

At this point, you’re in the swing of things and starting to feel good about yourself as an author. The book still has issues, and you may be battling insecurity, but you’ve already written the book, and that is huge. You have completed a book! Now, it’s just a matter of polishing what’s already there.

Sonogram: Developmental Edit

During the second trimester, the baby gets the anatomy scan, or what I like to call The Big Sonogram. The technician takes about 45 minutes to look at every organ and make sure everything is okay. Parents who want to know the baby’s gender ahead of time can find out the sex of their child during this scan.

The sonogram allows doctors to find out if there are issues with the baby and whether intervention is necessary. Amazingly, doctors can perform surgery on unborn babies with incredible results. It turns out the womb is an amazing place to recover from surgery. In fact, a famous medical photo was taken during an in-utero surgery, which showed the hand of the baby reaching through the incision and grasping the surgeon’s finger.

The equivalent of an anatomy scan for authors is the developmental edit of the story. It’s an edit of the beats, characters, and plot. Finding a developmental editor who fluently understands your genre and reader is important.

When searching for a developmental editor, be sure to ask them, “What books in my genre have you read recently?”

Ideally, they’ve read two or three recent and popular books in your genre within the last year. If they haven’t read any or struggle to answer, they’re not the right developmental editor for your story. You need a developmental editor who will guide your story in the right direction within the parameters of your genre.

Sometimes, during that anatomy scan, a mother finds out she is pregnant with twins. During the developmental edit, authors sometimes discover that their book is actually two books or even an entire book series.

A developmental editor may tell you that you have more than one novel and you need to break up the story. If your story is 150,000 words or more, you probably have two books.

Third Trimester: Edits

The third trimester is uncomfortable; there’s just no way around it. Both the baby and the mommy are big. The baby is strong enough to kick its mother hard enough to hurt her. Even sleeping becomes difficult.

The editing phase is also uncomfortable for authors. As an author, you know the edits are good, and you like the fact that your book is improving, but each round of edits seems to generate more issues and edits.

The nature of editing is that you spend the most time working on the parts of your book that are the most broken. After you worked and reworked your opening, it sings, and you’re finished with that part. But despite many rewrites, chapter seven still isn’t working.

During this process, many authors fall out of love with their books. Even professional, bestselling, award-winning authors fall out of love with their books during the third trimester.

Commitment to this process is what separates the professionals from the hobbyists. The only way through it is to go through. Hang in there. That is the way forward.

Showers: Crowdfunding

Having a new baby is expensive, and new parents need to buy car seats, cribs, bassinets, bottles, and so many diapers, and those supplies are in addition to all the medical expenses.

Western culture has developed a ritual to help offset the expenses of having a new baby, which we call a baby shower. Not everyone has access to banking, savings, or extra funds, but everyone with a community of friends has access to a shower.

At a baby shower, the ladies of the community gather to shower the expectant mother with gifts and advice. This tradition works even in communities without access to credit or banking and in places where people live paycheck to paycheck. When everyone chips in a little, a lot can be done to ease a woman’s transition into motherhood.

The author’s baby shower equivalent is crowdfunding. In a Kickstarter campaign, your community of readers gathers to preorder copies of your book so you’ll have the funds needed to publish your book. Your first Kickstarter is typically funded by your friends, family, and people who would typically come to your baby shower.

Your second Kickstarter is typically funded by your readers.

Nesting

Nesting is a maternal psychological urge to start preparing a place for the baby. For some moms, this lasts the whole trimester; for others, it is an intense whirlwind right before labor starts. When I was a kid, my would get intense nesting about 48 hours before she went into labor.

Interestingly, nesting is not focused on the birth but on preparing a place for the baby after the birth.

An author’s nesting is preparing for the book launch. When you’re preparing for the launch, nesting looks like marketing the book and getting the book in front of strangers.

You’ll do a lot of work to get the book published, such as getting an ISBN, cover design, spine design, back cover copy, and back cover design. You’ll make sure your KDP account is created with an email address that’s separate from your personal Amazon account, but all of that is the birth, not the nesting.

The key to a successful book launch is having a written plan. I have many episodes about book launching, but the following two will be a good place to start.

How to Create a Written Book Launch Plan (with downloadable template)
How to Build Hype for a Debut Novel

The Birth: Launch Day

This is the big day. Your book’s launch date is the moment you’ve been looking forward to since you had that initial book idea so long ago.

Before a mother goes into labor, she’s advised to have a written birth plan. This is a plan of goals, desires, and expectations written in the cool of the moment so that you have something to lean on once things get intense. It also helps you educate yourself ahead of time on the entire process so there are fewer unpleasant surprises on the big day. The delivery room is not the place to educate yourself on epidurals and Pitocin.

A plan is proof that planning took place. While it is important to be prepared, no birth goes according to plan.

Similarly, no book baby is born according to plan, and no plan survives contact with the enemy or real life. I recommend authors have both a launch plan and a publishing plan. The more prepared you are, the smoother things will go, and the more you can enjoy the process.

Giving birth to a book baby is not as painful as giving birth to a human baby, but it is still intense. It may even be painful, but it’s also incredibly rewarding. There is no feeling in the world like holding your book baby for the first time and seeing it on the shelf at the bookstore. Perhaps the only thing better is getting feedback from readers about how much they loved your book.

Those rewards make the hard work worth it.

My tip is to take the day off work on your launch day and host a launch party with your friends, family, and readers. Sell copies of your book at your party, and take time to sign them for people.

The Fourth Trimester: Your Book’s Early Days

Nursing mothers often refer to the months after the birth as the fourth trimester. Newborns are pretty helpless, and they require constant attention for their survival.

Nursing

Nursing helps the baby grow strong and healthy, it helps train the baby’s immune system, and foster bonding between the baby and the mother.

Nourishing your book baby means providing it with the money required to spread the word. If you want your sales to grow, you’ll need to spend money to promote your book. You could spend money on advertising, PR, cross-promotion, internal promotion, and more. Even when the baby is weaned, you still need to feed it. Just as a child’s appetite grows in proportion to its size, so will your book’s need for marketing funds grow in proportion to its age.

Having a book is a long-term commitment. Check out the following episodes that will help your book baby grow.

Recovery

A birth requires both physical and emotional recovery. Publishing a book is not as physically exhausting as giving birth to a human baby, but it’s still emotionally exhausting. Schedule some rest after giving birth to a book baby. Don’t rush into writing your next book the day after your launch. Enjoy the moment. Give your mind some time to recover.

Your recovery will be helped by proper nutrition, so nursing mothers are encouraged to continue taking prenatal vitamins, even after the baby is born.

As an author, you can continue to feed and nourish your mind by reading good books.

One great way to recover from a book launch is to read classics that have stood the test of time. Take time to read C.S Lewis, Mark Twain, Agatha Christie. Those classics will help you rejuvenate your mind, refresh your spirit, and perhaps prompt creative ideas you can work into your next book.

Take heart. Your next book will be easier. The more you write, the easier it gets. As you build that habit and lifestyle, you can eventually become a professional author.

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How to Deliver Your Book Baby

Where do book babies come from?