What does it take to finish a novel and get it out to the public for sale? In two words, A LOT! If you are doing all the work yourself, or have hired someone to help you complete your novel, there are so many pieces to put the book together. Most of them you know about, like editing, putting the book into the finished template, adding the copyright page, getting an ISBN #, getting a Library of Congress #, adding a Table of Contents (if needed), a preface - if you decide your book needs one, an acknowledgement page - there are always people to thank, deciding on the dimensions of your book and getting the cover design centered on front and back and the spine dimensions, also. And I have no doubt I've missed a few items.
Each item I mentioned also needs time to complete and add to the book. This could take weeks, even months, particularly the editing part which for me, always takes the longest. My process is to make the changes from my editor, then he reviews it again, and a final review with both of us reading it outloud, making changes as we go. Then we send for a galley copy of the finished book for both of us and once again, read through the entire book. We are always so surprised to find that we missed a comma here or there or some other punctuation. At least the bigger issues had all been worked out by then but still, we wonder, how did we miss this or that? When we are sure that the copy is clean we sign off on it and send for my copies to sell or bring to book signings or other events.
And I haven't even talked about writing the book!!! For me, that is the easy part since I have so many stories in my head. But putting the entire book together, and in particular, editing the entire book, page by page, line by line, word by word, is the most time consuming part of writing and bringing a book to life.