In addi­tion to work­ing on copy edits for Venom, I also fin­ished up page proofs for Web of Lies this past week­end. So here’s a lit­tle bit about what page proofs are:

So after I sent my copy edits back, a few weeks later I’ll get what are known as page proofs — or the type­set ver­sion of the man­u­script. The pages are what the book will actu­ally look like when it is bound and put on the shelf.

Basi­cally, dur­ing the page proof stage, I’m just read­ing through the book look­ing for typos and punc­tu­a­tion errors. At this point, I can only make rel­a­tively small, minor changes to the book — no adding big chunks of text or any­thing like that. You don’t want the pub­lisher to have to type­set your book again because you added 20 pages to it — that’s a big no-no.

After I’m done with the page proofs, I mail them back to my edi­tor. A few weeks later, some pub­lish­ers will then send out what are called con­fir­ma­tion pages — or one final proof of the book before it goes to press. The point of the con­fir­ma­tion pages is to make sure that all the page proof changes made it into the book. For exam­ple, I got con­fir­ma­tion pages for Web of Lies and dis­cov­ered that a cou­ple of com­mas hadn’t made it in where they were sup­posed to go and a word had been mis­spelled. So they really are handy.

I don’t mind doing page proofs so much because they go a lot quicker than the copy edits — and it’s excit­ing to see the book type­set for the first time. Get­ting page proofs always means that the book is get­ting close to hit­ting stores and that you guys will be able to read it soon.

Got ques­tions? I’ll answer what I can in the comments.