Yes, you should.

Number Eight [link]

Going Home

She’d been making this trip for eight months. When spring had started she had enjoyed the trip down from Rome: watching trees bud with life, the sprouting wheat, life burgeoning in the pastures. It was a joy to see her sister thriving in the little cottage outside Pompeii.

Now, she was going down to bring Rossana home. The baby was going to a nice couple in Naples, they owned a little pastry shop in the Piazetta Marinelli. They were grateful that their childless state was ended. Emilia hated them. They had the baby and all Rossana had was a casket.

I'm putting together a proposal. What are realistic time frames for the following and what are they called. (For an 80,000 word highly technical, heavily footnoted work) ( I know that all but the last are considered part of the editing process, but are there formal terms I should use?)

1) Fact Checking

2) Reviewing and determining revisions needed.

3) time frame for light, medium and heavy revisions to be completed

4) Copy editing

5) Formatting and graphics (very light to moderate on the graphics) - to end up with an electronic version of the actual book.

Gar, what exactly is the proposal for? Because all of that stuff, and how long it takes, is pretty much determined by the publisher.

Not a publisher. A institute is considering releasing my book as a study, and would obviously have to do these things. OK -so I won't put numbers on them. I'll let them fill in the numbers.

I'm still confused -- even if they release it as a study (in book-like form, I'm assuming), wouldn't they take care of that end of it?

I'm not trying to be argumentative, I'm just not sure what you need.

They would take care of that end. But they want estimates for what it would cost them. From their point of view, this is a grant. They are paying out the grant in staff time instead of cash. So they want an estimate of what they would have to put their staff time into.

Oh. Huh.

Do they have the staff in place to do those things, then? Because if they do, they should know what's involved. If they don't ... are people who have never edited what is essentially a book before going to undertake that?

Like I said, not meaning to be argumentative, but it's asking a lot of an unpublished author to guesstimate how long and what kind of revisions would be necessary, what copyediting would entail, etc.

Put it this way, the production process for a novel (which is a hell of lot different, and less rigorous, than any kind of academic or scientific text) can take anywhere from five months (in a rush) to nearly a year in the best case scenario (although that's including time for developing and printing the cover, sales lead time to booksellers, etc.).

The raw process of taking your manuscript and and producing a print-ready version after editing and copyediting, etc., would still probably take at least four months or five months, and that's if revisions are light and you do them quickly.

Note to self: Self-publish on Lulu.