So the interior pages for The Dark Lord’s Daughter arrived last week, and they’re due on Thursday, which means I don’t have enough brain right now to talk about anything else.
First a little explanation: The interior pages are what they used to call “galleys” or “page proofs” back in the days before everything became electronic. They’re the formally designed and typeset pages, with the font(s) and formatting that’s supposed to be exactly the way the finished book will look when you open the physical copy or display the ebook.
One of the things you generally realize fairly early in a writing career is that every publisher has a slightly different system for handling galleys/page proofs/interior pages. When I was starting off, everything was done on hardcopy with standard proofreaders’ marks, but there were always differences, publisher to publisher.
Some sent uncut pages in what was essentially a long roll of paper. Some sent cut pages, or photocopies on normal 8-1/2 x 11” paper (as long as the size of the book was going to be smaller than 8-1/2 x 11”). One company sent me pages on legal size paper so that I got to see two pages side-by-side (but I had to take it to a copy shop after I finished marking the pages because the cheap home copier I had then couldn’t handle legal-sized paper).
Some publishers gave me “clean” copy—page proofs that didn’t have the technical typesetting changes already marked (things like “add a space after this em-dash” and “en-dash here, not a hyphen”)—and consolidated everyone’s changes when all of us were done (even at the galley-proof stage, multiple people go over everything). Other publishers send me a copy that included everyone else’s adjustments.
There have also been differences in what they want me to look at and how much I was allowed/expected to change. Publishers don’t like it when authors rewrite the entire book at the last minute; even today, it causes a lot of extra work. Back in the day, contracts set a strict limit on what percent of the book you could rewrite without having to pay typesetting charges. Apparently, some authors really wanted to jack up the title and drive a whole new book underneath it, even at that late stage of production.
Galleys/page proofs/interior pages were for finding places where the typesetter didn’t turn off the italic font, or where there were odd line breaks, or where four lines in a row ended with the same word (because that’s just how the lines broke). The author got asked things like where to hyphenate names at the end of a line (should it be “Ci-mor-ene,” or “Cim-or-e-ne”?).
Sometimes, though, things don’t get caught until this stage, and a paragraph or two needs to be added or deleted to clarify something or straighten out a plot point. Every once in a while, something has been duplicated—there’ll be two identical paragraphs in a row, or the exact same half page will show up in two totally different chapters (one where it makes sense, and one where it just got dropped in at random somehow). Or the reverse has happened—a couple of crucial paragraphs have dropped out for some reason.
When this happens, I always start by checking the last page of the chapter, to see whether adding/subtracting material will change how many pages the chapter takes. If the chapter page-count will change, I check the end of the book and consult the editor, because a change in page-count can mean needing to add or remove an entire signature (offset-printed books are still printed on giant sheets of paper that have multiple pages on each side; changing the number of signatures is a Big Deal that can seriously affect production costs, especially if it’s a relatively short book. This is not a problem if one is using a print-on-demand or ebook-only publisher, of course).
The interior pages I just got from this publisher are a *.pdf file that looks like a combination of final galleys (they have put little bat-like owl vultures around all the chapter heads! This makes me so happy…) and a really thorough line-edit (lots of seemingly small questions that need decisions, like “should this person’s title be capitalized? It’s used as a name here, but not on page 132…” and “can we rephrase this paragraph to avoid using three phrases that end in off—e.g., ‘He shooed the cat off the sofa and took off his coat before he remembered the errands. Five minutes later, he was off to the grocery store…’”—or are they OK here?”).
On the one hand, the editors have been amazingly careful in going over everything. On the other hand, I have over 500 comments/questions/changes to OK, “stet,” or make an alternate suggestion for, and it has to be done by Thursday. (They gave me a week, but that’s still 75+ decisions a day.) So this post is a little more rambly—and shorter—than usual, and that’s why.
Oh, and the book is due out next fall. I’m not sure which month yet; I’ll let you know when I find out.
I was going to ask if your “stet” stamp or its software equivalent currently gets any use, but you answered that toward the end.
And you also answered “when is it coming out?”
I look forward to reading it next fall!
(As you fight your way through the proofs, just keep remembering how many of us look forward to paying for the privilege of reading the story!!) 🙂
I have a book called Shakespeare’s Anonymous Editors.
It tells that when printing the Folio, the page group would be set in type and the proof copy run off. It would then be checked and the type reset. However, the printer would start printing with the type he had. Then they would make the changes and run off the rest of the pages.
But the original pages were left in the pile to be bound into books.
So there seem to be no two identical copies of the Folio.
Apparently once an entire scene was left out and had to be fitted in.
What’s even more fun is that the pages were randomly assembled. Therefore a thoroughly proof-read page could be with the first pass.
Makes it hard to determine which Folio to follow.
Thanks for the insight into the page-proofing process. I’ve done it for short stories; doing it for a whole novel sounds like… a lot.