This is such basic advice I thought it would go without saying. But at least half a dozen times in less than a year, I’ve encountered writers who no longer had a word processor document containing the manuscript for their book. These are all folks who had their book published some time ago, but then it went out of print. Now that they have their rights back, they are looking for a new publisher or planning to self-publish. But they don’t have the original document from when they wrote their book.
The reasons for losing the original files are varied, often having to do with hard drive failures, but in some cases it seems like they thought they just didn’t need it anymore once they had a published copy of the book.
You need those files! Save them!
Here’s how the traditional publishing workflow usually goes:
- The author writes the manuscript in a word processor and sends it via email to a publisher. Now they each have a copy of the document.
- Once the editor completes perhaps several rounds of editing, their version of the document no longer matches the author’s version.
- The editor sends their version of the document to the designer, who imports it into a page layout program to design a print edition.
- Galleys (pages for proofreading) are sent to the author and to proofreaders. These days, a galley is usually a PDF rather than printed pages.
- The designer incorporates the author’s and proofreaders’ corrections into the page layout version. Now the page layout version doesn’t match either of the word processing documents.
- The page layout version is sent to print and exported to e-book. This is the final copyrighted version.
The first problem is that the final copyrighted version does not match the document that is still in the author’s possession.
The second problem is that some authors apparently are either losing or even deleting the pre-publication version, so all they have is a PDF or a print copy. For many, many reasons, this is not ideal. Publishers go out of business or cancel contracts all the time. When this happens, the rights revert to the authors, who then seek to re-publish the work, either themselves or through another publisher.
But a new publisher or self-publishing platform will require a clean copy of the manuscript. When the author only has a PDF, the text can be extracted, but this often results in artifacts like page numbers and hyphenation being brought into the text. It’s an imperfect copy and will take time to clean up. In cases where only a hard copy exists, the writer may have to re-type the entire book, taking up time that would be better spent on new projects, or hire someone to do so.
The solution to the first problem is for you to keep a word processor document that is as close as you can make it to the text of the final copyrighted version. Let’s call this the prime document. At each stage of editing, the editor should be sending you the changes that have been made to the manuscript for your approval or correction. When they do, incorporate those changes into the prime document, and add the date to the file name, e.g., Book Title YYYY MM DD, where YYYY is the year, MM is a two-digit number of the month, and DD is the two-digit number of the date. So for example, 2025 07 04 for July 4, 2025. This way, when files with the same name are sorted alphabetically, they will also be in chronological order. That will help you distinguish between, for example, the first-round copyedit and the final proofread while avoiding the dreaded Book Title final vs Book Title final after editing vs Book Title final proofread FINAL. (We’ve all done it.)
Minor proofreading corrections are usually made without author verification, but if your editor is not having you approve major edits, that is a red flag. And in that case, you may need to check the published book against your prime document line by line. It is worth taking the trouble to do so.
The solution to the second problem is for you to keep redundant backups of the prime document. You should have one copy on your computer (or whatever device you write on), one onsite copy (on an external backup drive), and one offsite copy (on a cloud storage platform). For details about keeping redundant backups, see my article, “Your Hard Drive Will Crash.”
Then, if a time comes when your rights revert to you and you need to re-publish your book, you will have the prime document available for the purpose.