Since I just fin­ished up the copy edits for Venom, I thought that I would talk a lit­tle bit about what the heck copy edits are in the first place. Here goes:

Basi­cally, a man­u­script goes through a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent stages as it is turned into a book. First, I turn my man­u­script in, and my edi­tor reads it and sends me a let­ter with revi­sion requests. I do the revi­sions and send it back to her.

Then, if the revi­sions are kosher, a cou­ple of months later I get what’s known as copy edits — or my man­u­script pages that have been marked up in red ink by a copy edi­tor. The copy edi­tor includes notes about every­thing from typos to what words should be ital­i­cized to where the chap­ter heads and scene breaks go. The copy editor’s job is basi­cally to get the man­u­script ready to be type­set (which is the next step in the process).

My job is to go through the man­u­script page by page and answer any ques­tions that the copy edi­tor has. For exam­ple, if she doesn’t under­stand how part of the magic sys­tem works, then I go in and add a cou­ple of para­graphs to explain it bet­ter. I don’t have to make every change that the copy edi­tor sug­gests, but I usu­ally fol­low her advice the major­ity of the time.

I usu­ally get about three weeks to do the copy edits and send them back to my edi­tor. I won’t lie to you — it’s not my favorite thing to do. It’s a long, painstak­ing process made even more so by my obses­sive ten­den­cies. The copy edit stage is the last chance that I have to make sub­stan­tial changes to the book, and I tend to really ago­nize over every lit­tle thing at this point in the process just because I want to make sure that the book is per­fect as it can be. Alas, I know that it will not be per­fect, but I do the best that I can.

So there you have it — a lit­tle bit about copy edits. Up next, I’ll talk about the next stage in the process — page proofs.

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