bookpublishing

It’s a very important part of the book process: making initial contact with the author. As a project manager, I get in touch with an author after I’ve seen her book and read 3-5 chapters to get a general feel for what its about and her style of writing. The author has already worked with the acquisitions editor (or several) so occasionally the author wonders what I’m doing in this whole process. But she quickly figures it out. If all the materials is in and the manuscript is the right length, we’re off to a good start. If it doesn’t fill her contractual obligations, that’s a fun little situation I prefer to deal with after it’s been copyedited, if possible. Authors need a chance to understand the process and they should be aware that they must answer queries after copyediting. Many times they have a payment coming to them when it’s successfully completed, so it’s helpful to have that incentive.

Here is an example of an introductory email to an author:

Hi Jane,*

My name is Jess Haberman and I’ll be the project editor for your book, The Best Book You’ll Ever Read.* I’m very excited about your book and after reviewing it, I’m confident that this will be a very enjoyable project.

Your manuscript is currently with a copyeditor and I expect to be able to send it to you to respond to queries within 2 weeks. You’ll have about a week to respond to those queries.

Please let me know if you any questions or concerns arise as we work together on this book. You can reach me via email or by phone (see contact information below). If you know of vacation time or time you will be unavailable, I’d appreciate it if you could let me know so I can plan around it.

Thanks and I look forward to working with you!
Jess

* Names and titles above other than my own are completely fictional.

If the book is already back from the copyeditor, I will include instructions for how to answer queries, usually in MS Word using the Track Changes feature.

Then I typically get a return email. Sometimes it is difficult to tell right away what kind of author I’m dealing with. Usually the truth comes out after the book has been copyedited. However, there are some red flags that typically appear early in the process that make it clear I might be dealing with a difficult author: immediate disagreements about the book process or expectations; no response; when the author feels personally affronted by the copyeditor’s change; missed deadlines; excuses for late work or few responses.

Here’s an example of an email from an author that indicated to me right off the bat that she’ll be a pleasure to work with (and so far, so good!). In this case, she received the copyedited text with my introductory email.

Hi Jess,

Wow! I’m amazed to have this so quickly, and with so few queries to answer! Maybe I was exceptionally sloppy with my previous book, but there was a lot more flagged in it during the copyediting stage.

After quickly looking through the ms, I have a couple of questions before I get to work.
1. If I disagree with a change that the copyeditor has made, should I simply change it again, or mark it for you? I noticed two words that he consistently changed, but they’re actually correct the other way.
2. For the recipes, your recipe style sheet said to number the steps, though I prefer them without the numbers for the sake of consistency, since the yogurt recipe was tricky to number. Is it okay to omit the numbers on all of them?
3. Corrections from my tech reviewer arrived over the weekend, and I’d like to incorporate them. Most are simply a phrase here and there, but a couple will require the addition of a paragraph. Is there any problem with making those changes at this stage?

Thanks so much for getting this back to me so quickly. I’m delighted to be working with you, and I can’t wait for the next round, with all the lovely photos incorporated!

Best,
Marsha

Here’s an author who is certainly not as easy to work with. She writes while reviewing the copyedited manuscript (copyedited by Jason). Can you count the red flags?

I’m a little confused about who does what in this book revision process. What is your job, and what is Jason’s?

Jason has made some comments that I take issue with. He wants to omit the Rainforest Restaurant, which is in the Mall of America, his reason being that it isn’t Minnesota specific. That’s bogus and picky.

He also questioned whether outdoor stores should be included with the other businesses listed at the end of the chapters, commenting that they might not be in business any longer. That also is bogus. Seems his comment would also apply to restaurants and motels. Any business can quit operating or change management at any time. I spent much time last winter and spring checking all these phone numbers and updating them. All our revisions were due June 1. We can’t possibly check them again in the short window before you want our corrections returned to you, never mind the holiday thrown into next week. And never mind that our book has been out of date since it was published in 2002. None of it makes sense to us.

Jason also made fun of our description of the falls in the Minnehaha Falls section. If he takes issue with our writing, he should write his own book. I don’t think much of him as an editor.

Just thought you’d like to know. And by the way, what will the revised edition be called? And with the photos, there were a few that were mine.

Betty Ann

She’s just a gem, isn’t she?

There are, of course, the authors who sit somewhere in the middle of the spectrum and typically I’m just fine with that! For some reason, I tend to find that I work very well with male authors and I have very few problems with them. Female authors can go either way. First-time authors are almost always easy to work with. Authors who have published many books with us tend to be the most demanding and have the hardest times adjusting to changes in our process. This is overgeneralizing in all cases, and every editor has a different experience. I can tell you one thing for sure: It doesn’t get boring no matter who your authors are.

In case you’re interested, I’ve changed up my “About” page a bit (there’s a link on the upper right hand corner of my blog page, and can also be found at http://bookpublishing.today.com/about). It will feature books I’ve edited. It won’t feature all the books I’ve worked on, but the ones that I think would be most interesting to my readers and ones that I did a significant amount of work with. Right now it features mostly sports books, but those will be less and less common as I move more into local interest books. But local interest is still a lot of fun–definitely the case with Massachusetts Troublemakers by Paul Della Valle, which I mentioned in yesterday’s post.

This is a short piece I wrote for to be distributed in my department–it was the featured book at my company for the week of Monday, December 29.

Paul Della Valle, the author of Massachusetts Troublemakers, and I got along right off the bat. My family is from just outside of Boston so I was familiar with many of the sites mentioned in his book. I could tell I was on his good side when I told him I had spent my weekend watching the Boston Red Sox and New England Patriots win their respective games. He replied that he was a Sox fan too and had named his dog Yaz after the famous Carl Yastrzemski (I even spelled the name right on the first try this time).

The book process, too, went very smoothly. The only major issue was that some of the photos we thought were okay actually weren’t okay. The replacements would show up fine on my computer, but would not appear the same way on Ann’s [Sr. Pre-Press Associate] machine. How that was resolved, I’m not totally sure, but I think Lori [Prep-Press Team Leader] stepped in and waved a magic wand. Thanks to Ann and Lori for their help on that! Josh [Copyeditor] did some excellent copyediting as well, finding many errors that the author and I had both missed.

There’s a lot to enjoy about this book. I learned that the picture that appears on the bottle of my favorite beer is not actually Samuel Adams—it’s a likeness of Paul Revere (because, apparently, he was more attractive… in a manly, colonial way, I suppose). The author was even nice enough to send me copies of CDs featuring music from the bluegrass band he started. If only every book went this way, with the author acknowledging that I’m a “wicked smaht editah.”

Massachusetts Troublemakers is available at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Borders, independent bookstores, and wherever books are sold.

I’m telling you: a very sizable chunk of the work I do on a book is on the front matter (everything that occurs before the first page of the first chapter). Most of my work today dealt with the front matter on one book. I feel like I spend a whole lot more attention on the front matter than even a very curious reader would when reading the book. Consider a few crucial things to work out in the front matter when editing a book:

-Deciding if it is going to have a half title page and a blank to begin the book (sometimes for aesthetic reasons, other times to make form).
-Making sure the title page has the correct title, subtitle, author(s) name(s), illustrator/photographer(s) name(s), name of other writers (writer of the foreword, for instance), the correct imprint, logo, location.
-All the junk on the copyright page really stresses people out. Who even reads the copyright page? Oh yeah, lawyers do. You need the correct copyright year and owner, all rights reserved, photo credits, text copyright credits, text design credits, layout credits, editing credits, map credits, trademarks, logos, and imprint information. Then there’s the ISBN and Library of Congress Data, location of printing, and printing line. And probably a dozen other doodads.
-The TOC (table of contents): Where does it start? How many pages is it?
-Dedication. Acknowledgments. Preface. Foreword. Introduction. Sometimes a mix of those.
-Another title page? or part opener? What about photos?

Of course it’s also important that the front matter is paged with roman numerals. That makes it easy to change, move, delete, and reorder material in the front matter without causing reflow in the text. (”Reflow” means moving main body text to a new page or changing page numbers in the main text.)

It all has to be planned so it’s the right number of pages and that everything falls on the page it should. Then the book is designed and you find out you’re six pages over form. So you change the front matter all around again. What a waste of time!

You may remember this post about standard proofreading marks, including all the essential notations for anyone in an editing field. Apparently, there are some others worth learning and I’d argue some of them are even more useful than the standard ones!

Heh. A little publishing humor for ya… We are such dorks. I know that “remove permanently from your lexicon” and “pls paraphrase—obviously stolen from Web” are marks I would be using a lot. But if I were to use “Pls don’t eat Pringles while you work,” I’d have to mark it on way too many pages!

Anyway, that came from Geist—check out the original and forward to your friends. Better yet, send them to my blog!

I noticed a great discussion that began on the Creative Byline Facebook page including Joyce Carol Oates’s words on creating and listening to characters in writing:

“…[my students] say, ‘We don’t know these people.’ And I say, ‘Well, you have to listen.’”

Joyce Carol Oates says that only after hours of writing will writers discover what their characters really have to say, and that they “won’t know what it is in the beginning.” This plants fear in the hearts of many young or new writers, but they are not alone: Oates describes the first six weeks (!) of writing a new novel as “like hell” for her. Because she has a very broad definition of what constitutes a “character,” her comments are useful for writers of both fiction and non-fiction. Characters’ personalities must become known to a writer, and that only happens if he or she is “listening,” and even then it happens only slowly.

When have you given up? When have you paid the same attention to a new character that you would a new acquaintance? What similarities have you found between getting to know a person and getting to know a character? What differences have you noticed in the depth or complexity of your characters when you approach them this way?

I’m certainly having struggles with the personalities of my characters. Some are so vivid and easy to write that they take on their own story and run with it whether I like where it’s going or not. Others are so stagnant and so unattached to any kind of vivacity that I constantly struggles with them. I do agree with one post-commenter, Holly Larocque Bodger, that, when written well, “your character dictates where they want to go and what they want to do (sometimes to your own frustration!).” But I don’t necessarily agree with what another commenter, Allison Fant, that “Its always easier to relate to the characters and to know how they will react in certain situations because you have experienced it in real life”–running with the argument that characters who are based on someone you know are more real and more impactful. One of the strongest characters in my story is not based on any real person and probably has more in common with other literary characters; yet that doesn’t detract from his effectiveness.

What do you think about characters in writing? What makes a good and effective character? How does a writer make a character “more real”? Do you run into these struggles in your own writing?

p.s. If you’re not familiar with Creative Byline, see my previous post about their writer services.