Making Book is Fun

by Hasimsyah

Isn’t it great if you could publish your book with your name on its cover? Your family and friends would be proud of you. Making book is not as difficult as you might think it is. It’s a challenging job. Before your book reaches its reader, there are some steps to go through:

1) Search of the idea.
In most creative works, having the idea is the most important and most difficult thing to do. Whether you’d like to write fiction or non-fiction, you must have the idea first. A famous book could be born from the simple idea. J.K. Rowling, the creator of best selling novels “Harry Potter”, got her inspiration from a name potter written on a school bag. Just remember, if you’d like to write a fiction, you must broaden your imagination. If you’d like to write a non-fiction, you must have as much factual data as you can get on the subject.

2) Story writing.
Once you have an idea, you must convert it to writing form. In writing a fiction, we can break up the idea into several plots. Each plot tells a unique story. The writer has creative ways in correlating those plots into one big story.
In writing a non-fiction, we can start by choosing the point of interest of the subject. Let’s say that you are an expert of some profession. You can’t just write all of things about your expertise. That would be boring. You have to focus on an interesting part of your profession. This part could be funny, sad, or even controversial things. If you don’t find any interesting point of your profession, you can write about somebody else’s or the success of a prominent person. You can dig up information of how this person has gained his/her success. You can find this through internet, printed sources, or interview.

3) Connection with publisher.
You have completed your book. What’s next? Publish it! But how? You have to contact a book publisher.
Book publisher usually receives many manuscripts every month. Editors of the book publisher have to examine each of it. They have their own considerations of what kind of the book worth publishing. More often they reject than accept the books. Be prepared of rejection!
If they accept your book, they usually have schemes of paying. They may pay you with full payment or royalty payment. Royalty payment is usually worth 10% of each book sold. If you are a famous writer, they may give you full payment. If you are a newcomer, you might get royalty payment. These schemes vary among publishers.
After the contract between you and your publisher is signed, the book will go through some editing process. You would be surprised when you read your edited book. There could be many alterations; and some illustrations might be added.

4) Dealing with rejection.
It would be great if your book finally got accepted by publisher. What if it didn’t?
Well, you could publish it by yourself. I remember a friend of mine. He wrote about interesting and weird stories happened on the train Jabotabek in a book entitled “1001 kisah di KRL”. He had submitted it to some book publishers. They rejected it. So he decided to publish it by himself. He withdrew all of his money in the bank for financing the printing. He hired someone to sell his books on the train. The books were sold out in a week.

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