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14 What to Expect from Your Editor (and When) FINALLY! YOU’VE FINISHED THE ENTIRE MANUSCRIPT, proofread it fastidiously, keyed all your illustrations to the appropriate pages, packaged the entire precious cargo, and sent it to your editor. Your job is done, you think; can you relax? Hardly! Only the first part of the work on your book is finished. Let’s hope you can get your editor to include you actively in one decision after another during the book’s manufacture. If not, once you see the finished book and then your royalty statements, you may regret not having insisted on checking every detail. Nobody knows your book as well as you. That’s why you should look discreetly over editors’ shoulders to ensure that your manuscript is faithfully translated into print. All too often, the title, blurb, art, and even the text of a book get distorted beyond belief—not generally out of ignorance or malice but out of pure haste. So we devote this chapter to describing the editorial steps that take place after you turn in your manuscript and to suggesting how you can keep your eyes on them. Editing Your editor will probably be the first nonintimate to read your completed manuscript . Until she does, you’re not likely to get the final payment of your guaranteed advance, which is contractually contingent upon your turning in a satisfactory book. Don’t wait at the phone to hear whether she likes it or you’ll wait anywhere from weeks to months. Since the day she excitedly signed up your book idea, she’s probably taken on several dozen other book ideas she’s liked at least as much, and maybe a dozen previously signed-up manuscripts have also arrived at the office, like yours, ready to be published. Her energies and loyalties are divided. In addition to all those demands on your editor, she wrestles with the fact that her office competes with Ringling Brothers for noise and razzmatazz. Tom Congdon, who edited Jaws when he was a managing editor at Doubleday and was later chief editor at William Morrow, shared with an 167 Authors Guild audience a bit of the flavor of the typical editor’s workday: “Editors by and large never do in the office the two things you think an editor does. We never read in the office and we never edit there. The office is for telephone calls and for visits. And it’s for making the lunch appointments and then recovering from the lunches. It’s for running down the hall and saying, ‘My God, you printed page 211 upside down.’” If your editor is like Congdon, he’ll take your manuscript home—eventually—and read it there. If he’s the get-involved type, he’ll read it with a pen or pencil in hand doing what’s known in the trade as line editing. That includes making marginal notes questioning uncorroborated statements, fixing clumsy language, suggesting deletions of paragraphs he considers extraneous, and drawing lines through every one of the eighteen cute phrases you so cleverly coined; in short, doing everything possible to strengthen the content of your epic. Congdon figured he could line edit about ten or twelve pages an hour. Divide a 350-page manuscript by ten pages an hour and you’ll see why your editor may unconsciously forget to shove your manuscript into his briefcase as he rushes to catch the Friday evening 5:18. But it’s not very gratifying to finish your job on time only to wait months for a reading. Indeed, editors don’t expect that you’ll sit by patiently. They assume that you’ll persistently nudge them into editing this one more book. We begin our nudging about a week before we mail the completed manuscript . One of us calls the editor to say, “Hey, we’re putting on the finishing touches right now and you can expect to get it in the mail by next weekend.” Inevitably the editor rises to the bait: “How is it?” she asks. “Boy, it’s even better than we expected,” we inevitably respond. “During our research we discovered . . .” and then we share a few genuinely sensational oddities we’ve dug up since our book proposal was written. Our excitement comes easily, now that months of mind-deadening work are approaching a halt. We’re hoping to rewhet the editor’s edge of excitement. When we ship o...

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