I Just Sent My Book to Routledge — On Time

This week, I did something I have helped dozens of authors do, and had never quite done myself in this particular way: I submitted a full book manuscript to my publisher. On time.

The book is with Routledge now. It is about synchronicity in grief — those strange, meaningful coincidences that so often arrive when we are missing someone, and what they ask of us. It has been a long road, and I want to be honest about that, because honesty is the whole reason I am writing this series.

For fifteen years, I have sat on the other side of this desk. I have edited other people's dissertations, journal articles, and books. I have walked clients through reference lists that would not behave, formatting that broke at the worst possible moment, and the particular kind of doubt that shows up around chapter seven. I have learned to say, gently and truthfully, that the discomfort they are feeling is not a sign that something is wrong — it is usually a sign that the work is real.

And then I had to take my own advice.

Finishing this manuscript meant editing the reference lists for all nine chapters myself, by hand, against APA 7 — the same systematic pass I run for clients, now turned on my own pages. It meant protecting the deadline when a dozen other things wanted the same hours. It meant sitting with a subject that is personal to me, and trusting that care and structure could hold it.

I am sharing this for a simple reason. When you hire an editor, you are trusting someone to understand not just the rules, but the experience — the slow, patient, sometimes lonely work of bringing a piece of scholarship into the world. I have now done that for my own book, start to submission, and I want you to be able to watch the rest of it unfold: peer review, revisions, production, proofs, and finally a finished thing on a shelf.

That is what this series, The Patience of Publishing, is about. Over the coming weeks I will take you step by step through what actually happens after you hit "submit" — the parts no one explains, the feelings no one warns you about, and the small practices that keep a manuscript (and its author) intact.

If you are working on a dissertation or a book of your own, I would love to have you along. I will share the real version, not the polished one.

To follow the journey, subscribe to my newsletter below. And if your own reference list is the thing standing between you and a deadline, my free APA 7 reference checklist — the same one I use — is yours to download.

More soon. Patience is part of the work.

Warmly,

~Jennifer