: Re: How exactly does a book go from typewritten pages into an actual mass-produced unit ready for the consumer, and do authors have any control? I want to be clear that I'm asking about this both

@Samaraweera193

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I have written somewhere between a dozen and a score non-fiction books, going back to the 90s, for several different publishers and imprints. All of these involved a contract before writing started. The process was:

write the text, in Word with particular styles applied that the publisher uses. Eg for a chapter title, or a picture caption.
prepare the illustrations, generally screenshots.
send these electronic files. I have uploaded to BBSes, emailed, FTPed, and Dropboxed.
in the past I would also courier a hardcopy of each chapter, both the printed out text and the illustrations with hand written cropping instructions on them.
some time later (weeks or months) I would get the chapter back in electronic form as Author Review with markup from at least 3 kinds of editors

the technical editor, one of my peers who would double check everything: is the button really Ok, or is it Apply? Is that how this system works? Is that list complete?
the copy editor, who would fuss about which and this, or rearrange sentences from time to time, and leave queries like "please clarify whether A or B" if they wanted me to rewrite a sentence.
an overall series editor who would leave queries like "this is too many paragraphs in a row, can you put in a diagram or a bulleted list", as well as re-styling certain things to be pull quotes or sidebars or other things the series used a lot of. This editor would also say things like "this chapter is supposed to be 40 pages and you have only submitted 8" (I had a co-author do this and it was a Big Deal) or "the outline said this would include XYZ but there's no sign of it" and ask for major changes like that.

I would respond to all these queries (generally by doing as I was asked, sometimes declining.)
someone would clear away all the revisions and queries and produce final PDFs in which you would see page breaks etc and send them to me.
I would have a VERY short time to review these and only major issues could be reported at that time (like the highly-regarded publisher that put hyphens and line breaks into code, as well as capitalizing i in code, AFTER our final Author Review was complete. Grr.) This often included reviewing the index as well.
the book would go to print.
a box of books (the author copies agreed on in the contract) would arrive at my house.

If you were writing fiction, there would be less "I think you need a bulleted list or sidebar here" and you might not have a technical editor, but there would still be someone making sure your which/this were ok (and various other often-imaginary rules copyeditors like to enforce) and that the book is readable. This would no doubt depend on whether this was part of a series (like young adult fiction or western romance and so on) and whether the publisher had rules about swearing, sex, violence and similar things being depicted. You might get a chance to roll back some of these changes and you generally get a chance to see the final PDFs before it's all put to paper.
In any case, the publisher should explain all this to you before you sign the contract. You're not going to put your only copy of the typewritten manuscript into an envelope, mail it to a stranger, and wait for the money and accolades to come rolling in. Even if you think the book is finished when you contact the publisher, there will still be plenty of work left to do.

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