An Editing Timeline!
I’ve been very busy these past few months working on the final edits of THE REAPER. They’re finally finished! And the manuscript is being sent off to the typesetter on Monday . Typesetting is when the manuscript is printed and designed to look like a book, then compiled into those “pass pages” - that massive wad of paper that looks like a university dissertation. At that stage, we’ll comb over any typos or misprints, and then the book will get sent out to foreign presses for any additional rights deals, sent out to authors for blurbs, and sent to subscription box services. I’ve also been told the cover artist has made a few sketches, but I won’t see those designs for a couple months yet.
I thought it would be useful to show a breakdown of the editing process. Every publishing house has their own methods and processes and I’m sure these even differ between individual authors. As a reminder, I got this book deal through a competition, so the usual editing process that I would have gone through with an agent was skipped and all done in-house.
Additionally, I had a lot of extra time to work on this. I signed my book deal in October 2022 and was supposed to be published in 2024 (I’ll do a blog post about this soon!) but they pushed me back to 2025. When Del Rey UK (Penguin Random House) received THE REAPER, I had already done 4 drafts alone. At this final stage, I’m at draft 11. Somehow, I managed to do this whilst working full time, having a baby (he is now 3 years old!), running Black Girl Writers, losing my mum, being broke as fuck, experiencing homelessness, going through severe family mental health problems, settling my son into a nursery then taking him out due to issues, and moving into a new flat. My life is just a whirlwind so I’m really, really looking forward to holding this book in my hands and seeing it on shelves - after everything.
So here we go:
Early 2023 - first Editorial Letter (an overview of the good, great, and areas for improvement). I was encouraged to sit on this letter for a while, consider what I agreed or disagreed with. Afterwards, I had a chat with Sam about my ideas and thoughts on the letter.
Early 2023 - more detailed feedback. This is where I started to make macro changes, add in the suggestions made by Sam.
Mid 2023 - structural edits. We did a reverse-synopsis (writing a chapter-by-chapter overview of the whole, already-written manuscript). And then Sam provided feedback on areas where the story lagged, chapters that could be swapped or removed altogether, potential alternative endings/beginnings, etc. This is the longest process. During this time, I also found out the book was getting pushed back to 2025, a year after my expected release date. I was disappointed by the delay and also overwhelmed by the feedback, and this is where the whole publishing process seemed like a long chore. I felt pressure to stick to deadlines as religiously as possible as I was worried there was a risk of them pushing it back into 2026 or beyond. It was also difficult to contend with the volume of critique and the huge suggested changes. Of course, I didn’t have to accept any of it, and I did challenge some of the suggestions, but once I hit my stride and got accustomed to cutting the clutter, I found it to be quite addictive.
Christmas 2023 - final structural edits. At this point, Sam contacted some other members of the Del Rey team to also read the novel and give their own feedback to ensure as many new eyes were looking at it as possible. With this extra input, they suggested a slightly different beginning to add mystery to my main character. This feedback resulted in a prologue and the total removal of the first chapter!
March to April 2024 - copy edits. The book was given to a managing editor, Rose, who then connected me with Del Rey’s external copyeditor, Laura. This was the real nitty-gritty. Line by line, the book was dissected - even down to metaphor usage. For an example of just how surgical this is, I had a line somewhere about auras encircling and layering on top of each other like rings in a tree, and the editor noted: “rings in a tree don’t layer on top of each other”. This is the kind of invaluable feedback that pushes not only the book to the next level, but you as a writer. I’ve just drafted REAPER 4 and even my first draft is better than my sixth draft of REAPER 1, all thanks to this editorial work.
May 2024 - “Final Tweaks”. So the manuscript went back to Sam, who read it again along with even more people from the Del Rey team, paying close attention to the opening chapters as they’re so crucial for catching the reader’s attention. Based on their feedback, a few more line edits were made just to clear up any confusion or clarify some questions the readers had. Today, I’ve sent off my final amendments. These will be reviewed over the weekend and then sent over to the typesetter. This is when the book will start to feel like a book, with the fonts and layout provided.
Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about the lack of support given to debut authors. For a long time, we all believed that the massive advances automatically led to editorial support and substantial marketing and publicity, but sadly the discourse, articles, and candid testimonials have proven this to not be the case, with debut authors, regardless of advance, severely struggling to get publicity for their books, and therefore, little sales. The marketing phase of THE REAPER hasn’t started yet, so we’ll put a pin on this to see how much support I get in that area, but I have to say I’m really impressed by the efforts of the Del Rey team. At this point I have no idea how many people have read this book, but it’s encouraging to know they’ve done their best to get as much feedback as they could and put so many hours into this. I’m truly proud of the finished product, and if this kind of attention is replicated in the publicity area, then I’ll be satisfied.
For any future trad pubbed author, for whom all this is new, I have one crucial bit of advice: get used to Track Changes. As someone who has never had a manuscript edited professionally before, it’s my first time using this feature and therefore it took me a while to learn how to mark comments, reply to comments, and understand what happens to any changes that you “accept” (they seemingly disappear into nothing? And I just can’t see what I’ve changed, accepted, or rejected anymore??). Getting used to those features in Word now will save you a lot of headache in future.
ETA: I also thought it was worth mentioning a very strange and weird editing practice that you would only know about once you're traditionally published, and it pertains to speech marks. Since primary school (Britain) I was taught to use “sixty-six and ninety-nine” when writing dialogue, but when THE REAPER manuscript went through copy edits, I saw that all the dialogue had been switched to ‘single quotes’, which is apparently the standard in British publishing. As someone who reads a lot, I don't know nor care whether a book has been published in the US or UK unless it's relevant to the book itself (slang, idioms, dialect), so I wasn't expecting the change. Different publishing houses have their own styles and editing codes even down to the use of em—dashes and en - dashes, so if you've ever been distracted by an author’s use of punctuation, it's likely the changes were made by an editorial team in keeping with the publisher's house style!