Guess what I got in the mail? The book­marks for Web of Lies. Huz­zah!

And believe me when I say that these are some pretty nice book­marks. They’re 2-by-8 inches on thick, sturdy, glossy paper. Kudos go out once again to Kel­ley and the other folks at Iconix, the com­pany that prints my book­marks. They really do put out a qual­ity product.

As always, the book­marks are free to read­ers, librar­i­ans, book­stores, or whomever wants a cou­ple. How­ever, I do ask folks to send me a self-addressed stamped enve­lope (SASE) to get the book­marks. This helps me out with postage costs.

So if you want to get some book­marks, send me an e-mail at jennifer@jenniferestep.com, and I’ll tell you where to send your SASE. I’ll also be get­ting book­marks made for Venom later on dur­ing the sum­mer when the cover art is finalized.

In the mean­time, I’m going to enjoy the boomark good­ness!

So I’ve talked about copy edits and page proofs, and now, I thought I would share a rough time­line of when I get them in regards to when the book is pub­lished. So here’s an exam­ple of a rough time­line of a book based on Web of Lies, which comes out on May 25.

When I turned the book in: Winter/spring 2009, or about one year before the pub­li­ca­tion date.

Revi­sions from edi­tor: These arrived about two months after I turned the book in.

Copy edits: Arrived about six months before the pub­li­ca­tion date.

Page proofs: About four months before the pub­li­ca­tion date.

Con­fir­ma­tion pages: About two months before the pub­li­ca­tion date. Note: Not all pub­lish­ers send con­fir­ma­tion pages to authors. A lot of pub­lish­ers just send the page proofs, and that’s the last time the author sees the book before it goes to press.

Final book: Usu­ally, the fin­ished book goes to press about a month or so before the actual on-sale date, so my pub­lisher will actu­ally start print­ing copies of Web of Lies around the last week of April. Books will start ship­ping out to store usu­ally about two weeks before the on-sale date.

The pub­li­ca­tion date: This is when I’ll see the fin­ished book for the first time, either by going to the local book­store and find­ing it on the shelves or get­ting my author copies in the mail. I don’t usu­ally get any early copies.

Peo­ple often won­der why it takes so long for books to be pub­lished. Well, this is part of the rea­son why. Each one of these steps takes about two months, which includes giv­ing me time to do my part of the process and mail the book back before my edi­tor sends it on to the next step. So even if I don’t have a book hit­ting shelves, I’m work­ing on some­thing all the time, even if it is all this behind-the-scenes stuff.

So there you have it. A lit­tle bit about pub­lish­ing time­lines. Got ques­tions? I’ll answer what I can in the comments.

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.

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.

The folks over at All About Romance did a cool post about 10 Things I’d Like to Tell Pub­lish­ers. I agree with a lot of their com­ments, espe­cially the one about the cheesy romance book titles. (Seri­ously, I think some­one has a lot of fun com­ing up with some of those groaners).

Inspired by them, I thought that I’d do a post about 10 Things I’d Like to Tell Read­ers. Here goes:

1. I have very lit­tle input/control when it comes to the cover art for my books. If you think the cov­ers suck, there’s noth­ing I can do about it. (And yes, I know the cov­ers for the mass mar­ket ver­sions of the Big­time books suck — they suck out loud, espe­cially the one for Karma Girl. Believe me, I know and have spent many hours bemoan­ing that fact.)

2. I do not know every­thing there is to know about pub­lish­ing. I can­not find a cover artist for your book, or a copy edi­tor, or tell you why no one wants to pub­lish the anno­tated his­tory of your belly lint. Well, I could on that last one, but you prob­a­bly wouldn’t like what I had to say about it. I get a lot of ques­tions about pub­lish­ing and writ­ing, and I’m happy to help when and as I can — but I can’t get your book pub­lished for you. Only you can do that. And yes, it is much harder than it looks.

3. Fake even a lit­tle bit of inter­est in my work, and I will sign books until my fin­gers bleed and smile for pho­tos until my face hurts for you. Buy one of my books, and I will shower you with all the book­marks and good­ies that I have on hand. Tell me that you read and enjoyed one of my books, and I will wish you joy and hap­pi­ness for all of your days.

4. I look at reviews for my books. Good ones make me happy, bad ones make me sad. Reviews where folks call my books the worst things ever writ­ten after read­ing all of two pages of said books and never fin­ish­ing them bring out my inner Hulk, who can only be con­trolled by eat­ing mas­sive amounts of straw­berry cheese­cake ice cream. Or to sum up, authors have feel­ings too, folks.

5. Get­ting asked where the bath­room is while I’m doing a book sign­ing is depress­ing. Pop! Did you hear that? That was the sound of you just deflat­ing my ego. Now, I want to crawl under the table and whim­per while I eat a candy bar — or three.

6. I don’t care what for­mat you buy my book in. Paper copy, e-copy, heck, I don’t even care if you get a copy from the used book­store. All I ask is that if you like the book, you tell your friends about it — and maybe take a minute or two to send me an e-mail about it (see 10). If you don’t like my book, that’s okay too — just be polite about it. Dif­fer­ent strokes for dif­fer­ent folks, and all that.

7. I’m a reader too, and I’m just as happy to talk about other authors’ books as I am about my own. I can prat­tle on and on and on about my favorite authors and books all day long. Seri­ously, I can make your ears bleed, folks. My sig­nif­i­cant other knows bet­ter than to get me started wax­ing poetic about my favorite books. Every­one else, you have been warned.

8. Yeah, I know that my books are not per­fect. There are typos and con­ti­nu­ity errors and some­times I repeat phrases in books. But you know what? It’s hard com­ing up with 100,000 words that cre­ate a coher­ent story, and it’s even harder to ensure that every sin­gle one of those words is per­fect. Man­u­scripts go through a lot of edi­tors as they are turned into books, and we all do our very best to catch all the mis­takes. But we’re human, and some errors are going to creep in. It’s not because I don’t work hard on my books — that’s just life.

9. My inner fan­girl squees with delight every time I see my book on the shelf at the book­store. That weird woman you see tak­ing pho­tos in at Wal­mart? That’s me, ogling my book on the shelf for about the hun­dredth time.

10. A pos­i­tive e-mail from a reader telling me that she liked my books really does make my day (see 6). Know­ing that peo­ple enjoy my books makes all the hard work and long hours in front of my com­puter worthwhile.

So there you have it. Some of my (hope­fully amus­ing) thoughts that I’d like to share with read­ers. What about you guys? What are some of the things you’d like to tell authors or pub­lish­ers? Share in the com­ments. And keep it polite, please.