The Next Stage

I heard back from my editor yesterday, regarding the manuscript I sent in at the beginning of February. Her email started: “I thoroughly enjoyed The Secret Daughter!” and she went on to say what she particularly liked about the story. So I was very pleased with that.

In the next paragraph she mentioned something she thought might be a problem that I should address, and suggested a way I could fix it — which involved a lot of changes. But while editors are always right when they spot a problem, their suggestions as to how to fix it often are not. In this case, I could see a very easy fix, and when I wrote to her and told her what I planned to do, she said, “Oh yes, that would work.”

So now I’m going through the manuscript and double checking it all. She (my editor) sent it back with “track changes” and she’s flagged a few typos, made an occasional comment and noted where she thought I should change things to solve the problem I mentioned above.  I’m also making changes on my own account. It’s been almost four weeks since I saw it last, so that break means I can read it with fresh eyes.

So that’s the next stage in the book production process. After that, if she’s happy with the revised manuscript, it will go to copyediting. The copyeditor will go over it with an eagle eye and spot any mistakes — typos, places where Australian/English spelling has slipped in, mistakes where I’ve accidentally called a character by the wrong name or given them brown eyes instead of blue or green or hazel, and maybe I’ve calculated time wrongly — for instance on one page I might have said it’s a week later but reading it closely it turns out to be only five days. Copyeditors are very nit-picky, for which I’m always enormously grateful. (Photo by Daniel Thomas on Unsplash)

I’m not going to tell you anything about the story yet, because the heroine of this story is someone you’ll meet for the first time in The Heiress’s Daughter, which comes out on May 21st. 
I also can’t show you a cover because we’re still in the process of creating one. I say “we” but it’s the wonderful Berkley Art Dept that does the creating, and I just give feedback/opinions. But as soon as I have a final cover, I’ll post it here first.