The Copy Edits Are Done…

After two rounds, the copy edits on my fantasy novel The End of Magic are done. I was so happy to get Lisa Rogers as the copy editor. Lisa worked on Robot Overlords and I loved her attention to detail, her forensic knowledge of the English language and all its wonderful nuances, but most of all I loved how she saved me from looking like a complete and utter numpty on countless occasions.

A copy editor (sometimes known as a line editor) will check and format your punctuation and grammar, but will also highlight continuity problems, factual errors, inconsistencies and timeline issues. For this book, the timeline was the real bugger. I had characters having breakfast when they should’ve been having supper, I had a character sneaking into a camp to look through a telescope at the stars… in the middle of the day… and, in a first for me, I had a character wander around with their genitals hanging out for all to see after having a pee…

Next comes the proof read, where a new set of eyes will find even more errors. Writing a novel is essentially a process whereby you fail a little less each time, until you reach something that’s not quite perfection, but at least won’t be a tedious collection of typos.

Another exciting development was the cover questionnaire that arrived this week. Unbound’s art department asked me for details about the book, the characters, the settings etc. They also wanted a list of comparable books in the same genre, and a mood board of images. Luckily for me, I’ve been keeping a private Pinterest board for this book since I started writing it and I blogged about book covers a while ago, so I was able to ping these back fairly quickly. It’ll be fascinating to see what they come up with… don’t believe any of that “Don’t judge a book by its cover” nonsense. It will be crucial to get this right.

The good news is we’re still on schedule for a February release. Pre-order now and tell your friends!

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