Publishing Process Part 3 – Proofs & Cover Artwork

This is the third in my series of posts about the publishing process (you can read the first and second here) with a traditional publisher. As I take you through my journey, I hope to demystify the process and give you an idea of the work which goes into getting a book ready to hit the shelves.

Proofs

Checking the proofs is the final stage in getting the text of a book ready for the printer's. The manuscript was sent to me and a proofreader simultaneously, and by now it was all laid out like a book rather than the word document we’d previously been working from.

Hodder sent me a physical copy as well as digital, which was really handy because I find it’s much easier to spot mistakes on a printed page. I picked up some little errors: missing speech marks or commas, the occasional word which had accidentally been left in after the copy-edit stage. Previously, these are the kinds of things that would have irritated me as a reader, but now I’ve seen how extensively a book is amended and tweaked, I understand how easily they can slip through. Hopefully, having been through the rigorous process of being checked and double-checked by different professionals, the text will be perfect.

The proofs were about checking the fine detail of the text, but meanwhile another team of people were working on a more creative element: the book’s cover...

Cover Art

This is the initial black and white sketch which my editor sent me, along with colour samples showing the wintery blue colours and warm glowing lights the team were proposing for a colour scheme. This layout was the work of the designer, Natalie Chen, and I was delighted to approve it.

An illustrator, Giordano Poloni, was then commissioned to produce the scene on the front and back of jacket. It focuses on the fictional English Cotswold village of Willowbrook, where my story begins, with the main characters depicted as silhouettes at the front. Again, I was thrilled with the design. My only request, when this came through, was would it be possible to incorporate sewing elements, since the main character, Evie, owns a patchwork and quilting shop? Sewing plays an important part in the story, and Evie’s quilts and handmade creations are woven into the plot, so I was keen for this to be included in the artwork somehow. The designer came back with this:

Isn’t it beautiful? My book is described as ‘cosy women’s fiction’, and I think this cover encapsulates that perfectly. And the buttons and sewing needle were a stroke of genius!

Here’s the back cover:

What do you think? Can you see how already a whole group of people have worked closely on preparing my book for publication? Their expert contributions have all helped to refine it and package it in the most compelling way possible, and I feel privileged to be part of the Hodder team. I can't wait to hear what readers think of it when it's released in September.

Sophie.x

The Christmas Holiday will be published 19th September 2019 and is available for preorder here

Related posts:

The Publishing Process: Part 2: Copy-Edits by Sophie Claire

The Publishing Process Part 1: Edits by Sophie Claire

Good Things Come by Sophie Claire

Publishing Process: Part 2: Copy-Edits by Sophie Claire

This is the second in my series of posts about the publishing process (you can read the first one here) with a traditional publisher. As I take you through my journey, I hope to demystify the process and give you an idea of the work which goes into getting a book ready to hit the shelves.

A few weeks after I’d completed the edits for my book, The Christmas Holiday, I received the copy-edits. These were totally new to me, and to be honest I wasn’t prepared for them. I'd heard writers talking about them, but what were they exactly? How did they differ from proofreading? I think I had expected a few scribbles here and there, pointing out repetition and the like, but not many; after all, the manuscript had been read in detail by four people now and, because I’ve done some proofreading in the past, I like to think my work is fairly polished. Oh how wrong I was!

Copy-edits involve so much more than just spotting repetition. ‘The copy-editor’s brief is to ensure the text is ready for publication in terms of grammar, syntax, readability and consistency,’ I was told. My copy-editor deserves a gold medal for how thoroughly she went through the manuscript. She had taken clumsy sentence structures and made them flow more smoothly, and removed unnecessary words (‘both’ and ‘suddenly’, for example).

She spotted that I overuse the word ‘shot’ (it’s not a crime novel, honest) and thinned these out, she also deleted a lot of raised eyebrows, and how had I never noticed that all my characters begin their sentences with ‘So’? These were pruned of course.

The eagle-eyed copy-editor also noticed inconsistencies. For example, my heroine Evie sometimes had two dimples when she smiled and elsewhere just one. I decided to make it consistent, and stick with two. In

one scene Evie lets the hero’s Dalmatian out into the garden, then in the next line the dog’s eating his breakfast in the kitchen: in the margin was a note saying ‘you didn’t let the dog back in!’ Evie then helped herself to tea, when the hero only had hot chocolate and coffee in the cupboard. All these tiny niggles were spotted and addressed so the book can flow smoothly and (hopefully) there’s nothing left in there to jolt the reader out of the story.

Of course, not everything was as straightforward as the examples above, and some amendments were a question of style or personal preference. Occasionally, I felt the suggested changes weren’t right for my book or my voice, and in these cases I wrote ‘stet’ in the margin so it would remain unchanged.

Because I was scared of falling behind on the novel I'm currently writing, I chose to do these edits in the evenings and weekends. It wasn’t as taxing as writing; in fact, I secretly enjoyed it. And by the end of the process I felt my novel had been checked so thoroughly that there couldn’t possibly be anything left for the proofreader to correct (ha!). Next month I’ll tell you about those proofs, and also how the artwork was developed for the cover.

Sophie.x

The Christmas Holiday will be published 19th September 2019 and is available for pre-order here

Related posts:
The Publishing Process Part 1: Edits by Sophie Claire
Good Things Come by Sophie Claire

The Publishing Process: Part 1: Edits by Sophie Claire

Last month I blogged about the publishing deal I’ve just signed with Hodder & Stoughton (you can read that post here), and the Novelistas have asked me to write about the publishing process. Although I had a book published before with a small independent press and a couple of short stories in anthologies, this is my first experience of working with a large traditional publisher. A lot of the process is new to me, and I’m very excited about getting input from professionals: I'm certain that my book, The Christmas Holiday, will be all the better for it. As I take you through my journey, I hope to demystify the process and show how much work goes into polishing a book before it’s ready to hit the shelves.

First up: Edits

I had heard terrifying stories about writers who were asked to completely overhaul their plots or rewrite a character, and often in less than a month, so I nervously awaited my editor's email. However, when it arrived I was relieved because there was nothing major and no structural changes. (I’m lucky that I wrote The Christmas Holiday in my own time without any deadline pressures, and my agent Megan had also been through it and suggested minor changes to improve it).

I was asked to add a couple of new scenes, but mostly, my edits were about deleting repetition and adding depth; that is, revealing little snippets of additional backstory which help explain characters’ behaviour. I was careful not to fall into the trap of adding too much: I’ve learned over the years that a couple of lines or a paragraph are usually enough.

What I didn’t expect in my edits were little comments marking the bits my editor especially liked – a passage that was particularly tense or an emotional scene she found moving. I was grateful for these, because it’s good to know what you’re doing right. So I made the edits, read through the book again, making sure it made sense (any writer knows, the smallest change can have a knock-on effect: no one wants their characters referring to an event that’s been deleted, for example) and sent the book back.

Then I waited to hear.

I had told myself I’d get straight back to writing book 5 (this one does have a deadline), but it was surprisingly difficult to concentrate until I’d heard if my edits were approved. I forced myself to sit at my desk each day, but my mind was elsewhere, worrying. Was what I’d done good enough? Should I have added more? Would my editor send me a second round of revisions? And if so, how many rounds should I expect?

After two days I couldn’t bear the waiting (I know, I really need to learn patience!) so I emailed the Novelistas asking how long does it normally take – days or weeks? ‘How long is a piece of string?’, said Trisha Ashley. Everyone agreed: it depends on the book’s schedule, your editor and their workload at the time. I knew I had to be patient.

Later that same day my editor got back to me (see? I should have been patient!) saying she was delighted with my revisions, and there were just a few tweaks left. I did these the same morning, and sent them off. The next stage would be copy-edits, which I’ll talk about next month, but for now I could get back to writing book 5.

Sophie.x

Getting it Done and Dusted by Cheryl Lang

I’ve finished my book, Lemongrass, a contemporary novel of approximately 85,000 words, set partly among the Greek Islands. I’ve read through and altered, deleted and added words and sentences I think might improve things. All this has been directly on the computer. Now I’m printing it out and going through it again. So why is it that reading the printed word throws up so many more anomalies?

I’m finding silly sentences like this: ‘The wind was stronger by the lighthouse and just offshore cormorants were drying their outspread wings on some rocks.’ It gave me a laugh, imagining the cormorants detaching their wings and putting them on the rocks to dry! There has to be some fun in the process. I have changed it now.

I also find that I have a bad habit of repeating a word, either in the same sentence or close by. The trouble is, I don’t always pick it up.

I’m also, hopefully, aware of continuity. It’s a bit disconcerting when you get halfway through the story and wonder if you’ve changed a character’s name or given too much information in one go.

Once I’ve been through the printed version, I’ll transfer it all to my kindle and read it on that for a different perspective. I hope to pick up any inconsistencies at this time and check the timeline is tenable. At this stage I hope to have a viable story.

And oh, the doubts! Is my male character strong enough? Likeable? Is the heroine's story interesting? Is the whole thing workable? Have I given enough background for the pair? Too much? Too little? Have I trickled it through the story and not as an information dump? It’s her story, told from her point of view, but should I make it dual points of view?

Doing the research is something I really enjoy. I'm drawn to exotic locations and love finding out facts relating to the area I want to write about. That usually leads me down further, diverse paths, but I have to be careful to only pick out details which are relevant to the novel I'm writing. There is so much information out there. I love it when I have a sudden question, like, where would I be able to dock a super yacht in the Mediterranean? Somewhere that has depth of water, sea room - a marina perhaps? Or a harbour big enough and with facilities. If I dig deep enough I usually find the answers I want.

Photos are particularly useful. When you’ve never visited a place and want to set a scene there, there are endless sources for photos and videos to help you out. However, travelling to a location is far better, as long as you make notes.

So, for my next novel, I’ll really need to visit Malaysia, or maybe, Vietnam or Mauritius! The list goes on.

Structural Edits for the Faint-Hearted by Juliet Greenwood

When I first started writing, it was simple. Write book. Go back over it, fiddling and twiddling, and perfecting those beautifully-crafted sentences. Check spelling. Send the finished masterpiece out into a breathlessly waiting world.

It wasn’t until I began to work with an editor that I realised why the world hadn’t been breathlessly waiting. Basically (and to be brutally honest) I hadn’t even started to write the book. I’d got a first draft, and it didn’t matter how much I fiddled at the edges, it was never going to make it past the first draft, before sailing into oblivion and my bottom drawer for all eternity.

I should have known. After all, I’d been successfully writing short stories for years, bashing them around and tearing them apart until they worked. The trouble with a book is that it’s so big, so unwieldy, and takes so long, and so much emotional energy, to write, that the thought of tearing it up and starting again is beyond depressing – especially if, like most of us, you are also trying to do the day job, run a home and family. Oh, and a life.

But, in the end, a long, cold hard look that finished masterpiece (ahem) is the only way to go. That was what I learnt with my first book for Honno Press, Eden’s Garden, and it’s a process that I’ve been learning ever since. The hardest thing is to step back from this world you have been passionately living in for months, even years, and put on the cold, hard, practical, head. But your reader will read the same thing in days, or even non-stop over hours, and they don’t have that world living in their own heads and their hearts, so you have to capture them and persuade them, and transfer that magic inside them. Ballet looks effortless, too.

That is what structural edits are about. It’s taking your book out of your head to hold it in your hands and look at it dispassionately to see what is working and what is not. It’s when you use all the skills you’ve learnt from reading books and knowing what makes you keep on reading or throwing it against the wall. Are there too many characters? Is the heroine a wimp, who throws a strop at the slightest excuse, or a doormat to all and sundry? Are there enough holes in the plot to swallow the Titanic? Everything is thrown into the air, and anything can be thrown out (however beautifully crafted, however long it has taken to write) to make the book as gripping and emotionally engaging as you want it to be – in other words, the story that lives in your head. None of this is destructive. It can feel brutal, but it’s the paring down of a book into the best it can be. It’s the painter going through version after version of the same subject, the dancer practising until their feet bleed.

Above all, you need to listen to your gut. When I sent in the first version of Eden’s Garden, I knew something wasn’t working. Deep inside I knew the Victorian element of the story needed to be far more vivid by being told in the voice of the Victorian heroine. I felt defeated by starting again, rewriting a whole new element of the book, and unceremoniously chucking out hours of work. And, to be honest, I thought I didn’t have the skill and was afraid of making a fool of myself. It was an editor who taught me that yes, it was a vital part of making the book work – and yes, I was capable of writing it. The story didn’t change, but that simple structural change made the book come alive. It was definitely worth it, and I learnt so much about writing, and the kind of writer I want to be, in the process.

I still made mistakes in my latest book, but not nearly as many, and most I spotted along the way. Writing is, after all, a process of constantly learning, developing and improving. And, at the end of writing The White Camellia, understanding how much I had learnt and developed as a writer was the greatest buzz of all.

Structural edits? Feel the fear and do it anyway. You’ve nothing to lose and everything to gain. Bring ’em on!

Juliet Greenwood is published by Honno Press. Her books are set in Cornwall, London and Wales in Victorian and Edwardian times, and follow the lives of strong, independently-minded women struggling to find freedom and self-fulfillment. Her novels have reached #4 and #5 in the UK Amazon Kindle store, while Eden’s Garden was a finalist for ‘The People’s Book Prize’. We That are Left was completed with a Literature Wales Writers’ Bursary.

Juliet’s great grandmother worked as a nail maker in Lye Waste, near Birmingham in the Black Country, hammering nails while rocking the cradle with her foot. Juliet’s grandmother worked her way up to become a cook in a big country house. Their stories have left Juliet with a passion for history, and in particular for the experiences of women, so often overlooked or forgotten. Juliet lives in a traditional cottage in Snowdonia, in the UK, and loves gardening and walking. 

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