I’ve just got my first set of notes back from my editor for the next Witches of Woodville book BABES IN THE WOOD, so this is a great time to take you on the journey with me from editing a book to publication. I run through what a marked-up manuscript from an editor looks like and how I plan to tackle over 500 changes and comments…
TRANSCRIPT:
Hello, folks, Mark Stay here.
The second Witches of Woodville book Babes in the Wood, is coming in October 2021, October 28th, I think, just in time for Halloween. And it’s March now, March the 5th. And I’ve just had my first round of line edits turn from my editor, Bethan, at Simon and Schuster. So I thought what I’d do on the ol’ YouTubes is start a whole new thread of the road to publication for Babes in the Woods, starting now. So where I am now, I’ve already written a couple of drafts which have gone to friends, beta readers who’ve made comments and sent thoughts back to me, and I’ve made changes before sending it off to Bethan. I’ve also had… This book involves Kindertransport children, so Jewish children fleeing the blitzkrieg and the Holocaust and coming to England. And I’ve already had a reader, a Jewish reader, go through that and give me all sorts of feedback and notes on that as well. So it’s in pretty good shape. Bethan has come back with a marked-up Word manuscript, which has got… 560 comments or changes, which I’m pretty happy with, actually, I think my first book Robot Overlords had well over 3000 comments and changes on there, so that’s doing pretty, pretty good. So, yeah, we got the first round of edits. I got this marked up manuscript of all sorts of little bumps in the road. So we have a look at some of these on screen. So Bethan’s… uh… Just if you’ve never done this before, we have a thing on Word and Pages and bits of software like that could tracked changes where any changes or comments that your editor makes is marked up so you can see it and easily recognise where a change has been made and accept or reject that change. And also, she’s left comments. And Bethan is brilliant because she doesn’t miss a thing. She notices all the little bumps, all the little things I got wrong,anything that bumps her out the story. But she also does the old “praise sandwich” as well, which is where you say, “Oh, this is good, this needs work, but this is great.” So the author’s poor, fragile, ego isn’t too bruised. What I’ve got now is what I call the edit triage, which is where I go through the comments. I make my own notes in a notebook. I try and take it off the page. And also Bethan has sent me a separate document as a kind of summary of her editorial notes of the big, big problems to solve, which is why the triage thing comes in. If you’ve got you know, do you think of your book as a patient lying on a gurney, you know, what do you have to fix first to save their life? You know, what’s the what’s the biggest injury? So rather than worrying about, you know, slightly… Any punctuation or grammar or anything like that, at the moment, you look at the bigger picture, start wide and move in and move in. So, yeah, really, really good notes. I’ve got a month to sort this out, which should be plenty of time. So we’re in March now. Book is published in October…
Yes, October.
Babes in the Wood is book two of the Witches of Woodville series and available to pre-order from retailers now. Visit your retailer of choice or go to the bookshop at WitchesOfWoodville.com and now back to your regular programming
… which if you’re an indie author thinking, well, why are you taking so long? Why does it take so long to get the book to market? Well, part of that is that we’re working to retailer critical paths. So someone like Simon & Schuster will be selling in two retailers, six, seven, eight, nine months in advance of publication. For some retailers, they ask for a lot longer ahead of publication or sometimes over a year. So, yeah, that’s one of the reasons. And of course, you know, a publisher Simon & Schuster will be doing it in forty, fifty, sixty books a month depending on the month. So the marketing departments, the publicity, the art departments, they’ve all got to you know, they’ve got huge, huge workloads to work through. So better to give yourself plenty of time to do it properly, then have it as a last minute rush. So, yeah, I’m looking forward to this. I’m going to I’m going to dig in and start figuring out the big changes I need to make. There’s a murder mystery element to this, which I’ve never done before. And what’s been great with Bethan’s notes is, you know, she just said: a bit of clarity here, a little bit more mystery here. Wouldn’t she have thought this here, stuff like that. So it’s it’s been very, very helpful. So, yeah, I’m going to jump in and maybe check in in a week or maybe two weeks to give you an idea of how I’m getting on. And then after that, we’ll go through the whole rest of the process.
Things like looking at bits of cover art, looking at the blurb, looking at how we might publicise this one, what with lockdown, hopefully not being a thing by the time this comes out. So, yeah, first step on the path to publication. I hope you’ll join me further down the road.
Mark Stay Writes 