The fine detail

In the last couple of weeks I've been going over the copy edits of the second Carter Blake book. As those of you who looked at the picture above will probably have worked out, the current title is The Samaritan. It may or may not retain this title.

The copy edit is one of the later milestones in a book's journey toward publication. In earlier drafts, both the ones I do all by myself and the ones I work through with my editor, it's mostly about the big picture: getting the structure right, making sure the characters behave reasonably consistently, giving key scenes more punch, stuff like that.

The copy edit is the opposite of that. This is the stage where a very diligent and detail-oriented person (i.e. the polar opposite of me) goes through the book line by line making sure the fine detail is right.

That means spotting the typos and grammar mistakes that no one else has noticed or cared enough about to point out. It means picking up on continuity mistakes (how come this character is bald on page 54 and has dark hair on page 226?). It means finding gaps in the research (Ford stopped making that model in 2003, so it ought to have a higher mileage). It also means picking up on sentences that repeat the same word too many times. These things happen more often than I would like to admit, and it's a little humbling having it pointed out to you via the marvel of Word's track changes feature, even though you know this is an absolutely standard experience for all writers.

So you take a deep breath and open the document, praying there aren't too many red lines and comment boxes. It's a little like getting an assignment back from a strict teacher. It's an incredibly useful but occasionally dispiriting experience.

I went along with about 99% of the changes made or suggested by the copy editor, and added a fair amount of new changes myself. The only real point of difference was whether to use 'website' or 'Web site'.

The worst thing about reading through your copy edit is when sloppy writing or really obvious mistakes are pointed out to you, and you wondered why the hell you didn't notice them until now. It forces you to read every sentence carefully and ask yourself if this is really the best way it could be written. One (mercifully short) paragraph in this book had me banging my head against the desk wondering what the hell I was on about when I was writing it. Thankfully, I have the opportunity to fix it before it gets any further. That's why this stage in the process exists.

The best explanation I can come up with is, when you're writing a first draft - when it's going well at least - you're not stopping to think about the small stuff. You're writing in the knowledge that this is but the first of many passes, and anything that doesn't quite work can be fixed later. That's the way it's gotta be, at least for me. If I got hung up on making every line perfect, I'd never finish anything. The problem is that some of those glitches you decided to come back to later (or didn't notice in the first place) inevitably slip through the cracks and make it into later drafts.

Even when I read a book over again for a new draft, I tend not to analyse every sentence individually, unless they're unavoidably clunky. That's because I'm trying to read it as, well, a reader. The number of amendments and perceptive questions asked by a good copy editor really makes you appreciate what a unique skillset they have - to keep the big picture of the novel in their head while simultaneously zeroing in on tiny imperfections that creep into the paragraphs and sentences and words and punctuation.

I know I couldn't do their job. Not just because it's painstaking and detail-oriented and it's impossible to go on autopilot. The other reason is because I wouldn't be able to prevent myself from changing things about the style: to write it the way I would have written it. A good copy editor leaves the style alone and makes sure the writer doesn't embarrass himself. It's a tough job, and one I'm grateful for.

But I'm still going with 'website'.

Grizzly murders and the perils of quoting The Boss

I've just finished going over the final page proofs of the book, which means (to my extreme nervousness) that it's now pretty much set in stone.

One of the few advantages of not having a publishing deal before now is that I was able to write The Killing Season entirely to my own timescale. That meant I could really take my time over it and make as many changes and tweaks as I liked en route to what I amusingly believed was a final version.

Lousy coffee purchased as table rental, pencil sharpened, ready to go...

I probably went through five or six drafts before it got to the point where I was happy to send it off to Thomas, my then agent. Since then it's been through another couple of rewrites with Thomas, and a further version with Jemima, my editor at Orion. It's been read by a copyeditor and a proofreader. A bunch of my friends have read it, as well as my new agent, Luigi. All of these people have fed back on it and helped to point out the little mistakes (as well as the not-so-little ones). All in all, you'd expect that it would be polished within an inch of its life by now, but reading the page proofs over this week, I still managed to find 37 new things I decided needed changing.

This ranged from minor continuity mistakes (such as referring to a 'cold October noon' which falls at the beginning of November) to minor formatting glitches to one embarrassing spelling mistake - on page 152 I found myself writing about a 'grizzly' manner of death. Since there were definitely no bears involved, I was glad to have caught this one.

One of the final changes was to remove a number of song lyrics. Another advantage of blasting out a publisher-less novel is the fact that you operate in a bubble of blissful ignorance of things like copyright law, and specifically how it gets complicated around song lyrics. Naively, I'd assumed you could quite reasonably include a line or two from a pop song in your book and it would be covered under fair use.

Not so. Quotations from song lyrics don't work quite the same way as literary quotations. For a start, nothing from the modern era (actually since 1923 or so, which is pretty much everything, pop-music-wise) is in the public domain. There is no fair use limit, so any part of the song other than the title is copyright. And the rights may be held by more than one party (songwriter, dead songwriter's estate, publisher etc). There's an informative article on the whole thing here, summed up by the author's advice: Don't ever quote lines from pop songs.

Orion flagged this up to me at the contract stage, and kindly offered to chase down the rights-holders to see how much it would cost to use the five or six song quotes I'd blithely tossed into The Killing Season. None of them were cheap.

So part of the process this week has been to surgically remove these expensive little samples and instead try to allude to the songs without directly quoting. There was one Bruce Springsteen lyric, however, that I couldn't bear to lose. It's from the song 'Nebraska' - I quote it in the epigraph and I like how it sets the tone for the book, so I decided that one was worth keeping. It worked out something like £36 a word for a two-line quote. Given the low-fi nature of that particular album, I've probably covered the production costs all by myself.

So the typos are fixed and the song lyrics have mostly been excised and I've made a few other little nips and tucks and now that's it. The next time I see The Killing Season, it'll be in a bookshop, which is exciting and terrifying and unbelievable all at once.

Thankfully, I won't have much spare time to worry about it. I need to get my basic website looking a little less basic over Christmas, and there's also the small matter of the revisions to Carter Blake book 2: The Samaritan, which my editor has now sent me. I'm told it's already in pretty reasonable shape for a Difficult Second Novel, but this time I'm under no illusions about how many more changes there will be between now and publication day.

And no, I haven't used any Springsteen lyrics in this one.

***placeholder for embarrassing pun***

I am really bad at coming up with relevant titles for blog posts.

 

For some reason, no matter the topic, I always end up reaching for the most obvious, groan-inducing pun. Maybe, somewhere deep inside me, there lives a frustrated tabloid journalist. Example: I came very close to calling this post 'The Proof of the Pudding', because it's about me receiving the bound proofs of The Killing Season.

 

Get it?

 

So from now on, I'm going to try really hard not to attempt punning titles in this blog. Apart from the name of the blog itself, which is a bad pun. If you catch me doing it, please feel free to slap me.

 

Anyway, now that I've got that awkward confession out of the way, I'll get to the point. The bound proof is basically the prototype. It's the version of a book publishers use to make sure it hangs together as a physical object; that the design, colour and any special enhancements on the cover work; that the typesetting for the interior pages is right. It's also a great way to spot any remaining typos or glitches in the text before it's too late. Finally, it's something the publishers can send out to advance reviewers that's a bit more manageable than a giant stack of paper, and a bit more special than an e-book.

 

The marketing team at Orion have really outdone themselves on these. As a complete newbie to all this, I'd assumed the proofs would be a rough mockup, thrown together as a fairly basic package. What I didn't expect was an exclusive promotional cover design, high-quality die-cut card and embossed foil... actually, I think it's technically debossed. (I only know the terminology because I bought a lot of comics in the 1990s.)

 

So we have a teaser promotional cover...

 

 

 

...underneath which is a secondary cover with lots of lovely quotes about the book...

 

 



 ...and then we get inside the book and... it's an actual book. Which I wrote. Wow...

 



Finally, the back cover of the proof displays the awesome cover art that will go on the real hardback when it comes out in April. I've gushed previously about how much I love this cover, so I don't need to do that again here, but suffice to say I'm very pleased with it.

 

 

The first thing I did after pawing the book for a few hours was to slot it into an actual bookcase. (I have a lot of work to do before I really belong among any of those names).

 

 



So that's it. It may be a dry-run for the real thing, but it sure feels a lot more like I'm a real author now. I can't get over how cool the experience of flicking through an actual, physical book and seeing pages and pages of stuff you made up is. 

 

Which reminds me, I still have pages and pages of stuff to make up for Carter Blake book two...