Workshop on Author/Publisher relations.

Scott Steedman, well known children’s writer and now a publisher at Douglas & McIntrye hit the ground running with piles of information and answers to our many questions. Too much to summarize here. He focused on the fraught period of time between the submission by the author to the finished book.

There will be blood. Scott compares this Interim period to birth. The editor is midwife and the author is mom. Guess who gets the pain.

The manuscript is read by a reader, either in-house or free-lance, who prepares a report. The acquisitions editor pitches the book to the publisher and if accepted, an editor is assigned. This editor reads the book very, very carefully. His/her job is Janus-like; to represent the author to the publisher and the publisher to the author.

Scott says an editor has no difficulty seeing problems with the book but often has trouble figuring out how to fix them. Sections may not work, the thing is too long, etc. The author must revise.

Eventually the manuscript goes through several edits, to check for continuity, then grammar, punctuation, tiny disconnects (your hero starts with red hair but goes blond part way through). The proof reader, an anal type, usually finds many mistakes. This series of edits has the author considering work in a northern fire tower. The advance, worked out by a troll in the back room, is usually 10% of the retail cost of the hard cover book multiplied by the number of copies published. This money may be used for gin in the tower.

And we haven’t got to the marketing yet. Editors admire authors who run around getting famous, work on their blogs and web sites, write for other publications, huckster their fledgling book and in their spare time, produce another book so they can go through the process again.

To be fair, Scott gave a great workshop with super handouts. We all left exhausted.