I was just offered a 500-page book that was due back on Monday.
I wouldn’t have gotten the book until tomorrow. It would have had to ship out on Saturday.
Yes, that means I would have had two days to copyedit 500 pages. (And yes, you can tell from the tense I didn’t take it.)
Five hundred pages is roughly 50 hours of work. There aren’t enough hours in two days to copyedit 500 pages properly–not even if you skipped sleeping and eating and bathroom breaks entirely.
I don’t know the reason this particular book was in such a rush, but I can tell you, folks, that the usual reason for such a rush is that the author was late with the manuscript.
You need to think about that before you decide that your deadline is malleable.
Yeeeow. *winces and goes to add that to the mental list of Writerly Things*
Deadlines are deadlines for a reason, people! ;)
I don’t think writers are quite aware just how many people are involved in the production of a book – I certainly wasn’t until recently. The schedule above is madness. Even if it had been a possible schedule – say, a week to put those 50h in – good professionals are expected to have a schedule that’s filled, aren’t they? I wouldn’t think that _anyone_ could just make room for a week’s work like that.
I’ve certainly vowed to try and be more considerate towards everybody involved in book schedules.
How dare that lowlife author try to inconvenience you that way! Give me his name and I’ll rough him up for you. (Talk about your late penalties.)
You slacker. :-)
Let’s not entirely blame the author. If they are asking for it back this fast, they knew long ago that the book was running this late. Why didn’t they move it to another pub month/season?
(Of course, the author may have been playing “No, really, I’m almost done” for the past three months.)
Deanna, just out of curiousity, can you email me privately and tell me who (author, publisher)?
The managing editor might have split the book up amongst several copyeditors. That can be bad for continuity, but at this stage they should be happy just to avoid misspellings, typos, and bad punctuation.
Why is it that when an author blows his or her deadline, the *editor* is always expected to make up the difference? That drives me crazy. We are not simply spell-checkers, we actually have some valuable skills that need time to complete the task!
And ooh, I *hate* it when they ask for work back on Friday or Monday. On Friday because, honestly, NOTHING will get done with it over the weekend, can’t I have that time to work? And Monday because, duh, it has to be shipped on Saturday, and can’t they make it Tuesday morning so I can work another 2 or 3 days on and ship it out on Monday night?
Sympathetic whining! I share your outrage at even being asked to do it.
E: I’m not blaming the author. I said quite clearly that I don’t know the reason this particular ms. was in such a rush. In my experience, though, the usual reason is that the ms. was late–particularly if the book has to be out by a certain date, as with a media tie-in, for instance.
I’ve had to split up huge textbooks among different CEs before, but I would hate to split up a fiction book that way. A rush is best avoided altogether, but if a novel has to be done in one, I’d truthfully rather have one person edit the whole thing quickly than three people edit separate parts of it, because plot inconsistencies will go completely by the wayside if split.
Editgirl: Well, and then the copyeditor is the one to take the blame if the copyedit isn’t up to par–regardless of the rush. I won’t accept a project if I don’t feel like I can do my best. A lot of copyeditors don’t have the wherewithal to be able to turn down the extra money offered by a rush job, though.
And I’m with you completely on return dates–Tuesday is so much better. Sometimes the in-house people just don’t think about the fact that we work most weekends.
That’s terrible.
I’ll never forget one of the first things Nalo told me when Warchild was being published: “Never hand in a manuscript late.” I’ve taken that to heart. I’ll only do it if the editors clear it ahead of time, and for my last book they did… but it wasn’t hugely late. Maybe a couple weeks IIRC. And the only reason I handed it in late is because I had to scrap 50-100 pages of it at the last minute. Which I would prefer not to do at all, but the story messes with you sometimes… :)
Here’s what will happen with that book: Someone (or more than one person) will rush copy edit it. Then the author will see it briefly, maybe doing some more rewriting, and then it will get typeset.
Then it will go to the proofreader, who will perhaps find a lot of things the copy editor[s] (being only human, and insanely rushed) missed. If the production editor handling the book is good, they will give it to the sort of person–more than a proofreader, less than a copy editor, in this case–who can sort out this kind of mess–like me. Feel free to give them my number–if they don’t already have it…
Incidentally, one shouldn’t necessarily blame the author for the delay. How many times have I known editors to sit on MSS. for months, till they’re finally badgered into giving them up? Maybe they think, I’ll get around to it…and never do, or only do at the last minute. A lot of editors are overworked, too.
Karin: Yes, discussing a situation like that with your editor ahead of time makes a lot of difference.
Robert, unfortunately the proofreading will undoubtedly be just as rushed as the copyediting. It is on books like that that they really do need a local like you who can come by and pick up the ms., then hand-deliver it back–the two extra days would make a world of difference. I am sure they tried the locals first, though.
And I said I do not know what caused the rush in this case. Here are some other situations I have witnessed that impacted the schedule of various books:
1. The editorial assistant let the ms. sit on his shelf for more than three months before transmitting it. (In that case, with that publisher, the schedule was altered rather than rushed.)
2. The assistant manager of production whose job it was to assign manuscripts let them pile up in her office for two months before giving them to production editors.
3. The manuscript was first given to a copyeditor who a) failed to meet the deadline so badly or b) did such a terrible job that the whole project had to be pulled away from her and given to someone else to copyedit again.
Or, what happened with a nonfiction book I just did the second-pass read on: the first copy editor apparently did a decent job, basically, but missed a couple misspelled names of real people. The author hit the roof and insisted that it be copy edited all over again–even though he himself had amny things wrong, and in fact totally missed an embarrassing factual error that no one else seems to have noticed–which, all by itself, would have made his book a laughing stock.
I once heard the writer Simon Green at a convention talk about his experience writing the tie-in book for Prince of Thieves years ago. By all accounts, it was extremely rushed to be out at the same time as the movie, and for some reason the people paying Green to write the book felt it would somehow be more authentically ‘English’ to have characters say ‘bollocks’ all the time.
Only problem was, the publishers (and here my recollection about the process becomes somewhat more vague) didn’t put it through a copy editing or proof reading stage (or something). It went straight to press with only a quick run through a spellchecker … which turned every incidence of ‘bollocks’ to ‘bullocks’.
Writer, beware. Green mentions it in passing in an interview I just googled – http://www.scifidimensions.com/Nov00/simonrgreen.htm