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Deadline Concerns© by Holly Lisle
All Rights Reserved
Your editor says the first draft is due in December
and the published book will be on the shelves a year later. So you
actually have some fudge time, don't you? You can be a few weeks
(or a few months) late getting the book in, right?
No. You can't. First draft is just the beginning
of the process of getting your book ready for publication. Once
you're done with it, the editor will read it---and she needs some
leeway on the time it will take her to do that, because yours is
not the only project she's working on. She'll make revision requests
(more on those in the next section). You'll need time to do your
rewrites. She'll read (and we hope approve) your rewrites, then
send the book to the copyeditor. The copyeditor will work on a tight
deadline, and get the book to the compositor, who will set in into
type. At some point in this process, you'll get typeset galleys
to go over and proof. Keep your rewrites to the bare minimum at
this point---it costs money, and usually a lot of it, to reset typeset
print. Look for typos, things that are just plain wrong, and typesetting
errors (like the last word of a sentence orphaned at the top of
a page, or a place where lines were duplicated or inexplicably put
into a different typeface.) You'll do galleys on an incredibly tight
schedule; I've had turn-arounds of one day before. The galleys go
back, the compositor finishes setting the type, the proofs are sent
to the printer, the pages are printed and bound, and a book emerges.
In this process, too, there has been cover design and marketing
work going on simultaneously, and perhaps the preparation of bound
galleys to go out to reviewers (usually prepared from the same galleys
that you proofed).
All of these things take time, and the one thing
that will screw up every single link in this long and complicated
chain every time is you being late with your first draft or revisions.
Take the deadline your editor gives you as being chiselled in stone,
handed down from on high like the eleventh commandment. In fact,
for writers, it IS the eleventh commandment.
THOU SHALT NOT BE LATE WITH THY BOOK!
If you are, assume that you will not be on terribly
warm terms with anyone at your publishing house for a while thereafter.
If you have a thereafter.
Revision Requests>>
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