Here’s a sample. I sent Intruder off to my agent in the form he asked for on January 2-?, this year. Last night I got a strange e-mail relayed to me by my publisher/editor from the cover artist asking where the book was and complaining it was going to run him against the wall because he didn’t have it. My publisher asked if I’d ever turned it in because she couldn’t find it in files nor find any e-mail about it. And I know I haven’t been paid yet. Which is not uncommon. I turn it in, and get paid when somebody gets around to reading it—or it goes into production, whichever comes first.
Well, it seems my agent didn’t ever send the book to the publisher. So I transmitted it myself last night on the spot.
This means the publisher won’t get a real chance to read it, because it will simultaneously go to the artist, and probably simultaneously go to the copyeditor, and everybody is going to be in a frantic rush, because this book seems to be in production already, meaning it’s slotted for September and the wheels are turning despite the fact they had no book and the artist had no book and cover design has no art, book design has no text, and there was NOTHING in that folder but a name for the book. The editor/publisher was deep in the throes of another book in the heat of production with its own crises, and hadn’t realized that there was a thundering silence surrounding a book she had every reason to believe was in the folder and coming along as per normal. The copy editor doesn’t have the editor’s notes and probably never will have—it’ll make schedule, because books don’t fail schedule without major stuff—but! Small wonder I hadn’t been paid yet.
And by the time it does come out, I’m sure there’ll be some errors you get straight from my keyboard, because staffs aren’t as large as they used to be, and instead of paper standing in stacks on shelves where you can SEE there’s a spot with no paper stack on it, it’s all transmission of files.
Welcome to the totally paperless way of doing things.
I’ll try to be hyper-careful checking galleys on this one, but things get by me for the same reason I made the mistake in the first place.
Well, worse things have happened. Far worse. The time much of the whole production run got stuck in a snowbank. The time the cover got the wrong ink mix. The time they didn’t glue the cover on. The time a copyeditor corrected all of Jones’ ‘ain’ts’ to ‘isn’t’s and it went to press that way on my first hardbound. The time a piece of paper stuck on the printing plate so neatly square that half a critical page was missing for most of the run, in a place that looked like a ‘finish’ to a scene.
We’ve survived them. But there are times being an editor OR a writer means an extra large bottle of Excedrin.
Time for a new agent? That’s a pretty major blunder.
I can see how it happened: I have often but not always transmitted to my publisher to save time. He’d made such a deal of the new all-electronic thing that I assumed he had a new protocol and would handle the part agents traditionally do, which we always risked screwing up by going around that formal hand-off; and he assumed I would send to her as I had been doing because of time crunches. In this case there was no time crunch, and I didn’t; but he thought I would. So we each say ‘oops’ and wish we’d said what we were doing instead of assuming. It’s at least half my fault.
“The time a copyeditor corrected all of Jones’ ‘ain’ts’ to ‘isn’t’s and it went to press that way on my first hardbound.”
Oh no! That would have been a shocker cracking that book open for the first time and seeing hundreds of those swapped. Wouldn’t they realize a writer would have picked that intentionally if it were ever used? Must have been an intern.
For me the worst are when it is in an intense scene and suddenly you are wondering what the word “foot” means in context of whatever it is and it takes you a moment to realize it was a typo. Or when there is a word replacement issue with a sex scene. That can lead to lots of lols.
It was no intern. It was a guy of some experience—who then, after that screw-up, which had to be totally redone for the paperback, told Warner he was ‘my regular copyeditor’ and got the job of copyediting Cyteen. That all had to be undone. I had over 200 stets on one page, you couldn’t see the text for the corrections, and I was on the phone to my editor saying: “Go straight from my typescript and it’ll save us both from a rubber room.”
Ow, ow, ow. A decent copyeditor should have sense enough to realize that, in dialogue especially, it should suit the character. It’s characterization. It’s style. It’s… not hard… and yes, Virginia, people do talk that way. (No, I don’t know why I’m picking on poor Virginia. 😉 ) In narrative/exposition, too, there might be reasons for contractions and non-standard speech. (Mark Twain, for instance. e.e. cummings.) …That copyeditor sounds too hidebound on English usage/grammar, and… not accustomed to science fiction and fantasy either, which have special considerations. :evil-grin: I suppose if you threw “hit” and “hem” at ‘im or ‘er, the copyeditor wouldn’t have known what to do with perfectly goode middle englische….
The next time I read through the Chanur series, I’ll check for instances of Aia Jin instead of Aja Jin. I know it occurs in Pride at least twice. Confused me at first, wondering if it was a typo or another ship. But the last run-through of the series, I got so caught up in the story, I forgot to note it. Only perhaps the fourth or fifth time I’ve read all five books. (Pride and Downbelow Station were my first exposure to your books. I was hooked.)
I just finished Foreigner 1 last week, and noticed Maigi vs. Maighi kept happening. I decided to hand-wave and say it was a common Ragi sound feature, 😉 which added texture. Heheh.
(Unrelated: By the end of the book, I was really curious to know what “dowager” is in Ragi. “aiji-dowager,” there must be a word in Ragi for it. (And I guessed “dowager” goes after, and not before, aiji.)
— The wrong ink mix on the cover? Now that must have been curious to see. The covers coming unglued? Well, gtst perhaps has days like that. One sympathizes….
A generation or so ago, idiosyncratic spelling to represent dialect was much more common that it is nowadays. Modern copy editors seem to have trouble handling it when it comes their way. Zane Grey often had characters saying ‘thet’ for ‘that’. I imagine that the editor under discussion would have ‘corrected’ thet. If you want to see a proof reader’s nightmare, go to Project Gutenberg and browse the Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris.
I noticed ‘Aia Jin’ also – I can mentally correct things like that (most of the time, anyway), but what stops me is continuity errors. Which do happen, every so often. (Two of the aiji-dowager’s young men being killed at Najida in one book, and the next one refers to one dying, in a couple of places.)
I can see that Cajeiri is going to be a formidable aiji, if nothing happens to him before then.
The back of 40,000 in Gehenna was supposed to be pumpkin, to go with the cover: the note got reversed, which produced magenta.
For a real proofreader’s nightmare, try Iain M. Banks’ Feersum Endjinn, which has whole chapters that read like this:
It’s the sort of thing that makes people who’ve done any amount of proofing wake up in the middle of the night screaming.
With the presses rolling in September, when will the book be released?
I suspect that’s FOR a September release, which should mean actually mid-August. So if the artist can make it without running mad in the streets, and they can get it zipped through copy and production, it should make it.
One hopes the artist works well under pressure. One also hopes that one’s paints or inks… no, no, not even going to write that down; eegads.
Magenta instead of pumpkin? Heheh, ouch. (Saaaayyyy, you could have a lovely magenta cov– um, no, won’t even play with that. Unless, of course, it looks good.) (Hmm, dark magenta background, light colored but bold text for the blurb…. Oh dear, there I go thinking again!)
Printing in August and releasing in September will cut it fine. One hopes they do well.
One also hopes for ebooks. 😉 Maybe by Sept., I’ll have another couple of the books read, at least.
Someone stand the Captain-Author a pint of the best grog. Or a decent cup of gfi. Assuredly safe tea? Huh, tough crowd.
I think I’ll go for grog.
Here you go — official Royal Navy Grog:
1 shot dark rum
1 TB lemon juice
2 cloves
Sprinkling of cinnamon
Put in mug, top off with hot water. I can hear Jane in the background demanding “WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO MY CAPTAIN MORGAN!?!?”
Heh. That’s prolly not far from the actual recipe for the good Captain.
I suspect Jane might view adding hot water as barbarism, unless she was fighting off a cold.
This puts into perspective something that happened to another author’s book. I won’t name names (it wasn’t your publisher either). There were typos on literally every page, words that were clearly supposed to be substitutions for words that were still there, and worse. I felt so bad for the author…none of his previous books had had anything like that happen. Must be one of the most frustrating things that can happen to an author.
I was reading another author’s book, and it had pages bound out of order, as well as paragraphs that seemed to have been not-edited-out in the mix. Effectively, it required rewriting about six pages of book, in order for it to make sense.
Well, there seem to be more and more typos in the books nowadays. It definitely felt like there were more in Betrayer than the ones before.
And you probably get those offers all the time, but just in case you should ever need a proofreader… I love doing that. And I have a pretty high rate of catching typos.
I disagree that there are more typos now in printed books (at least paperbacks); I used to joke that my proofreading skills had been damaged by indiscriminate reading in my youth.
There did seem to be many typos in Betrayer, though. I know how hard it is to proofread my own work (and briefs rarely run over 25 pages text), so I’m not particularly critical about it.
And – September? Really? [Squees in delight.]
September is fine by me! That’ll means I’ve already got TWO things on the XMas list for this year (BETRAYER and INVADER)!
Just read BETRAYER (got it out of the library) – another great read! One feared for the porcelains when you gave Cajeiri that sling-shot . . . now I’m wondering if Banachi will need to get him a Guild license!
Speaking of the Foreigner series, I’d pay $15-20 each for the latest 3 on Kindle or iBooks. :/
I noticed that slingshota ended up as slingshot (yet another clueless editor).The number of aiji-dowager’s young men being killed changed from 2 in “Deceiver” to 1 in “Betrayer”. Hopefully that is fixed for the paperbacks. I am thrilled that September will bring another in the series. Do you sign a contract for a set of 3, or one at a time? I ask as I wonder how you can plot not knowing when you have to end the series. I have read several series that just came to a halt with no closure and live in fear we won’t get Bren to retirement due to the state of publishing today.
usually 3 at a time. And a new contract is upcoming…though there may be a Regenesis follower within that number.
Ooh, a followup to Regenesis? My mouth watered when I read that. Seriously. Yes I’m strange.
Depressing comments on copy editors — my novel has dialogue in semi-Scots and also Scottish Gaelic word-ordered English. In addition I try to use Scots-style prepositions and other “hey, this isn’t modern English our characters are thinking in” description at times. One of my fantasy worries has been how a copy editor would cope with the idiosyncratic writing style I have very deliberately cultivated in this book. It’s only a fantasy worry because I am at least an optimistic year+ away from even being able to have it looked at professionally, but this blog exchange is stoking those fantasy frets. Any advice on how to ward off ignorant edits, CJ?
(I also indulge in fantasy author interviews, where the reporter asks such delightful questions as “how come none of your Scottish characters ever answer “aye” and the like?” Answ: Scotty’s “Aye, aye Captain” would not have occurred until the 19th C. On the other hand, “wow!” was used from the late 15th C. onwards. Such are the reveries of an academic dabbling in fiction.)
Include a style sheet, ie, a list of the ‘standards’ for your novel. That becomes the go-to list for odd words. Occasionally when I use a structure that’s odd, I write ‘sic’ next to it, which means, in Latin, ‘thus,’ or ‘leave it the way I wrote it or I’ll come find you.’ I live in fear some child of the new age will simply typeset ‘sic’ right into the text. If you look in the Donald Grant hardbound of 40,000 in Gehenna, you’ll see they typeset the page number of my original map—as it was in my typescript.
Thanks very much for the style sheet suggestion — that is exactly the type of concrete information I needed in an answer. And, creating a style sheet will force me to be more consistent rather than winging it ‘because it sounds good.” Discipline in writing, I suspect, is no bad thing.
One: I wouldn’t worry about the artist. If we survive art school (which is more or less an institutional version of an abusive relationship), we’ll survive a deadline.
On paperlessness: I’ve taken to setting up alerts a week later for things I expect to have but might be too busy to track myself – so having iCal pop up and tell me to hassle someone about it is a lifesaver.