Today I sent back the Copper Road manuscript with the copy edits made. My copyeditor turned the document around pretty fast, I thought.
All in all, this process is much faster than “Aluminum Leaves.” There was a several-month gap between the time I submitted AL to my editor and the time she got back to me, based entirely on her workload. And there was a gap between the time I sent the revised version to her and it found its way to copyediting. Those gaps have been bridged, as Falstaff creates and codifies its procedures.
This time, they let my book jump the line because I sent it in a little early, my developmental editor Erin had a gap in her schedule and she thought Copper Road didn’t need any character, plot or structural changes.
The vast, vast majority of copyedit changes were to punctuation and punctuation-related things (I don’t know if three asterisks to indicate a section break is actually punctuation, but it seems like that’s the best category for it) to match the house style. In two or three places my copyeditor questioned word choices. Most of those I explained and didn’t change, but Melissa, the associate publisher, may push back on that. We’ll see. And in two places, the copyeditor thought the sequencing wasn’t clear and I actually rewrote a sentence or a paragraph.
For a 92,000 word book, I think that’s pretty good.
Some other documents went along with the manuscript:
- The dedication
- The acknowledgments. Along with all the people I thanked in “Aluminum Leaves” I added some more. You might be one of them!
- An About the Author statement
- An Other Works By list (a short list).
The next thing should be the cover. After that, page proofs. And after that, it’s real!