The stages of a book

In a comment to an earlier post, Andrew G asked what a galley edit was. It's a good question, because unless you work on books it's unlikely to be something you encounter. By way of answering him (sorry, Andrew), I thought I'd explain the stages of a book.

First, of course, there's the writer's creation and editing/rewriting process. I'm going to skip all that, because I think I've covered my version of that process before. (If not, let me know, and I'll do so in a future post.)

I'm also going to assume that the book in question is already sold. Selling a book involves more steps, so I'll stick with a sold book. (Again, if you want more on selling books, let me know, though I warn that my experience in this area is minimal.)

The ultimate product of the writer's process is a complete book, which most folks refer to as the manuscript, or ms. In the old days, the ms. would be a big, weighty, paper thing that you'd pay to mail to the editor (and hope desperately that nothing happened to it along the way). Now, though, everyone I know just emails the file, typically in Word or RTF or TXT format, to the editor.

Depending on how you and your editor work, you'll then get editorial direction or queries or both from the editor. Your job is to address those in another version of the ms. and to keep doing so until you and the editor agree you're done. (The number of steps here is highly variable, from zero to many.) The result is the final manuscript, or final ms.--which is, of course, anything but final.

The book now enters the production process. Someone at the publishing house assigns a copy editor, who edits the book for basic consistency (e.g., of character names), grammar, house style, and so on. As I understand it, some writers need a lot of copyediting, and others do not. I consider myself to have failed each and every time the copy editor finds an error; I'm supposed to have fixed those. I do not consider myself to have failed when the copy editor makes changes to accommodate the publisher's house style (which might, for example, be to run together all compound nouns). I should note that my copy editors have always found some errors and improved my books.

The result of this change is the copyedited manuscript (I'm going to stop mentioning now that you can put ms. for manuscript as you choose). You may receive this in paper or online; my last one came on paper. This document is still in manuscript format, but it contains all the copy editor's changes and queries, with the changes usually in standard editing mark format. At that point, your job is to answer the queries and inspect all the edits and address them or change them as you want. I also take this opportunity to make other changes, including sometimes adding whole sentences; I'm an obsessive devil.

By the way, I should note that somewhere in here, usually before the copyediting process, the publisher will produce the advance reading copies (ARCs) that go to reviewers (though not all books get ARCs). Given that the ARC often reflects only the final manuscript, it really is an edition of the book that will never exist again. So, I get why some folks collect these.

Baen, my publisher, also offers the electronic ARCs, or eARCs, before the paper ones are ready, so those readers who love a book or series and really want to see it early can do so. (And, by the way, I love those readers!)

Now, back to the production process.

After you return the copyedited ms., which you typically do by mailing back the paper, the manuscript goes to the next stage of production: the galleys. These are pages that show your book's text as it will actually appear, with real page numbers and so on, though often on standard 8.5 by 11-inch paper. This is your last chance to change the book. The goal is for you to give it a quick read and make any minor changes that are absolutely necessary.

Somewhat predictably, and to the annoyance of my editor and production team, I use this opportunity to change anything I damn well feel like changing, up to and including adding whole sentences. Hey, I want it to be right! (And, as I said, I'm obsessive.)

You then send back the edited galley pages, they make your edits to the book (assuming all goes well), and the next time you see the thing it's a real book.

Andrew, I hope that answers your question, and I apologize for using your query as the excuse for writing such a treatise.