BobG wrote:It's a pity that paper still dominates the publishing process. I bet that if they were willing to publish ebooks before the paper ones, they could shave 2 or 3 months off the process. That's a real WAG on my part, but I guess that the mechanical steps of printing, collating, binding, and distributing are an efficient but not that fast pipeline, and tho I am a big DW fan, I doubt he is an important / popular enough writer for them to consider bucking the queue.
Damn.
-- Bob G
The printing of books is quite efficient these days, if the book is edited/set they can churn out a lot of copies in no time at all.
The problem lies in planning when to sell the books, the publisher doesn't want to swamp the market with a lot of different titles at the same time since then you are kind of competing with yourself. Also, there are certain times of the year when it's more beneficial to publish books (ie before x-mas, fathers day etc etc) and the publisher want to promote their "star" writers at those times, so that factors into the schedule and that is also why if a book isn't finished for publishing it will be pushed back a fair amount of time in the schedule.