Waving, Not Drowning

Well, I didn’t drown. My post appeared in the right place, and a couple of people even sent me nice messages about it, so I must have clicked all the right buttons. Fingers crossed it wasn’t beginner’s luck.

Soon after you read this (I’m reliably informed people do) I’ll be on my way to London for a launch event at a tiny bookshop with a very generous owner. I don’t know if shameless plugs are allowed in blogs, but here’s one anyway - Goldsboro Books, halfway down Cecil Court, a picturesque arcade not far from Charing Cross Road and the Coliseum. They specialise in signed first editions, mainly hardback but the occasional paperback original, which is what ours are; and tonight at 6.30 we launch Crème de la Crime’s shiny new Period Pieces strand there - historical crime by any other name.

That’s this week’s piece of excitement. But since Wednesday is my Dead Guy day and the event happens in the evening, I’m saving it till next week.

Meanwhile, since I’ve spent the last few days in editing mode, that’s the aspect of a small independent publisher’s life I’m exploring this week.

I do two kinds of editing. One involves working with an author, standing outside the trees in an attempt to see the entire wood, picking up the repetitions, continuity glitches and missing commas which creep in when you’re too close, polishing away the rough edges to produce the book s/he meant to write in the first place. The other is just a final dust-down of a book someone else has edited, before the manuscript goes to the typesetter, checking for house-style spellings and, again, the odd missing comma.

This week I’ve done both. The first is harder work than you’d expect. The line between This is a slightly improved version of yours and This is how I’d do it if it was mine is a very fine one. The second is arguably the second most rewarding part of the job. (The first is discovering something stupendously brilliant in the pile of hopefuls and potentials. That’s happened, oh, about nineteen times so far.) Someone else has trodden the fine line, the author has approved any changes, and mostly I just enjoy being the first to read the finished product. Give or take the odd missing comma.

I’d better get back to treading that fine line, or September’s title will be October’s. Coming soon: glitzy launch event, just like the big guys…