Click Accept

Yesterday morning, 5 January 2012, I received the second and final printed proof of Chasing Innocence. At midday yesterday I clicked 'Accept' on the printer's website. About 20 seconds later the book was listed as being available for printing. Which means it's done, finished, good to go. Ready to be bought, shipped and delivered into the eager hands of Amazon buyers all around the world. Of course there would be the obligatory spanner in the works - I updated Nielsen's who manage book data in the UK, and brought the publish date forward from 31 January to NOW. But Nielsen's takes a few days to update and Amazon is stuck in the pre-order state. That will fix itself in the next few days, I had just hoped the pre-orders might get shipped for the weekend.

So, yesterday was full of a thrilling sense of jubilation, expectation and a huge chunk of hope. It was a marker for the end of a process and in so many ways, the beginning of something else. I look back to October 2007 when I first had the idea for Chasing Innocence, to the months and months of daydreaming and the uncertainty of how to even start a book, what should a first chapter contain? Who am I writing for? What style should I be writing in? Of Sunday afternoons in Borders reading through a stack of Chapter Ones while drinking tea. The uncertainty of it all really stands out. Of trying to find time to write as I started a new job and found myself commuting 3hrs a day, and then moving house. I did leave the uncertainty behind at 60,000 words in October 2008. I got my head down and finished the first draft in April 2009 - one morning after four months of 5AM starts. I felt then a sense of jubilation just as I do now, little knowing just how much of the journey still stretched before me. Just like it does now I suspect. The rest of that year and much of 2010 was spent taking the rough draft and making it as good as I could, while learning the very important and difficult art of getting feedback and taking criticism. I recall the endless mistakes and the steep learning curve. The very steep learning curve. The wasted time, the wasted months I spent preparing letters for agents, another lesson learned. Of trying and failing to give the whole book a consistent grammatical narrative.

Throughout the whole process I had been determined the book would be a product of my creative endeavours alone. I knew a lot of people that spent a lot of time TALKING about writing books, I knew a lot of people that spent a lot of time studying writing, researching and attending lectures and conferences. A lot of people that spent a lot of time involved in the concept of book writing without actually doing much of it. I never have been any good at studying something and applying the knowledge seamlessly to the real world experience. I would and did learn all my mistakes the same way I have always learned them - the hard way. I wanted the experience of actually writing a book to shape my knowledge. The process also gradually brought about a startling realisation - that I am a bit of control freak. Having lived 44 years as me, this had never once occurred to me. The irony being I know people exactly like this and often shake my head sagely and might even voice the thought that they need to, 'Let go.' Once I realised that was also me, I tried to understand it. I'm control obsessed, not because I don't think anyone can do it better, it's just that I doubt anyone to fully realise what I have in my mind to a finished product that matches my expectations. Others say I'm just driven, others say I'm mad. In Chasing Innocence this had led me to create a great story and great characters. I wasn't sure though. I mean I thought I had, but I was also full of self doubt. I spent the close of 2010 and early 2011 toiling over and over grammatical issues that were artefacts of many lessons learned, that I couldn't rectify because I'd been looking at them for so long. I realised if I was to progress, I did need to let go. I needed help.

I came to Daniel Goldsmith Associates via a literary agent recommendation and lots of research. There are a lot of companies willing to take your manuscript and make it a book, but too many of them are like production lines with limited capacity for quality. I wasn't even sure what the next stage towards publication might be, I just wanted to know what a professional editor thought of the book. I wasn't even sure what to expect.

If there was ever justification needed in my letting go, Katie Green is it. I contracted Daniel Goldsmith to provide editorial feedback on Chasing Innocence and in return I got from Katie a detailed and illuminating report. It turned out the story and characters were everything I thought they were, the epilogue didn't work and some of the chapter endings needed tweaking. Some things weren't clear. There were some real grammatical issues. I made almost all the changes Katie suggested and her second editor report confirmed that the grammatical issues remained. I wonder if she ever contemplated that she would be the one to eventually fix them? I got two colleagues to read Chasing Innocence. Others had gone before them but these were the last two. The first read the pre-Katie version, the second the post Katie version. The first confirmed what Katie said in less specific terms and the second reader gushed. I decided it was time I took the next step. I decided I would publish Chasing Innocence. There was no way I would hand it to the production line of self publishing companies. I wanted the control being my own publisher afforded me. I wanted the finished product to sit beside a 'properly' published book and look better. It seemed a natural move to use Daniel Goldsmith to help with this, they were a trusted commodity in an arena I knew little of. The service they offered also afforded me more interaction. As the publisher I would have final say at every stage.

The first step was Katie Green's great achievement, she heroically copy edited my whole book. Reading the manuscript for the first time after this process was a moment of triumph and utter relief that will be difficult to ever better. The copy edit was justification for the part of me that realised I could not fix the problems, over the part determined to belligerently do it alone. In return Katie had given a great story a consistent grammatical narrative and made it a great read. A huge difference.

The proof edit was done by a freelance editor who also works for some of the established publishers such as Transworld. Having never fed back to Daniel Goldsmith anything on a book's quality other than the content of the professional proof edit, she told them in Chasing Innocence we had a bestseller. The proof edit gave the manuscript a professional shine and highlighted two flaws that caused several late nights. In producing the book's front cover we surpassed my wildest dreams. I had provided Daniel Goldsmith with a stunning image. Getting that image was one of the most remarkable experiences and the combined effort of a photographer, make-up artist, model and my direction. The graphic designer turned it into something quite jaw dropping. He produced a cover that sells the book at first glance, for my mind, and puts questions in your mind that only reading the book will answer. You can't really ask more of a cover. The final stage was the mystical art of typesetting. Something I know a lot more about now. Daniel Goldsmith produced a layout that took the eye easily down the lines of text and from page to page. A typeset that was easy to read and very importantly, took my higher than average word count and made it 366 pages. A fact that becomes more important when you consider each and every page impacts the cost of printing the book.

In clicking 'Accept' yesterday and releasing Chasing Innocence for printing, I was completing another stage in a personal journey. Getting my book into the hands of lots of people, is the next stage. One that I need to balance alongside the two books I intend finishing over the next twelve months. Finishing this leg of the journey and putting Chasing Innocence in a position where people can read what I write, took learning something about myself, and embracing it. It was a lot of hard work, at all times a wonderful creative experience and through collaboration, I saw the book grow into a polished product through the input of many people. WE really did do it.

Book Cover - Back Cover (And the back cover Blurb)

I admit, I had very little idea for what publishing a book would entail when I started on the journey. I knew I didn't have the skills to do this alone, so I turned to a Literary Consultancy - Daniel Goldsmith Associates. I had already used them for the edit of the book and the feedback they provided made the story better. They would now be responsible for designing the cover, they would copy edit, proof edit and typeset the whole book and bring it to a print ready stage. Lorena Goldsmith of Daniel Goldsmith Associates would take my story and work with me to make it a book.

One of the many elements we spent a lot of time on would be the Back Cover Blurb - the text you read on the back once the cover has enticed you to reach for the book. As Chasing Innocence will unlikely appear in many bookshops, the cover blurb would also be important for the description page on Amazon and Kobo, the two main vendors. The back cover blurb is a perfect example of the many small pieces that comprise a completed product, and how something so innocuous can develop from a simple concept through the collaboration of several minds, to something that sends chills down your spine when you see the finished product.

Katie Green started with the 603 word final version of the synopsis. She took key none spoiler elements and gave them flow and and proceeded them with a question: 'What would you do if you saw a child kidnapped?' I took this framework and expanded in some places, contracted in others and made the blurb read as I wanted it. I deleted the initial question because it didn't work for me, it sounded too non-fiction. I pinged the changes back and received the grammatically corrected version. I accepted the changes and that version of the blurb appeared in proof copies of the cover. Seeing it on the cover though made it immediately obvious it was too long. About a week later I whittled it down and Katie took that version and did a great job in changing the balance of  paragraphs and description to make it an interesting read. It pulled you to the story. At this stage the blurb was 80% done, but it was missing something. Everyone kind of knew this and it kind of just sat there. But then we got nearer and nearer finalising the cover, and with that the need to finalise the back cover blurb.

It was Lorena that eventually nailed it. She said we needed some question or quote at the top to add context for how the blurb is read. I didn't see it for the great idea it was at first, because the words bouncing around in my head were: 'We need a quote.' How was I going to come up with one of those at the eleventh hour? I didn't want to use a question like Katie supplied at the beginning, as I had already discounted the only one I could think of. I wanted something that said: THRILLER FICTION. My mind spent every minute of that night buzzing through concepts and the different dialogues within the story. I guess I must have dozed but it didn't feel like it the next morning. But I did now have three quotes from the book. The first related directly to Sarah, it works in the book but didn't work with the blurb, it was a bit too Rambo. The second quote was a great scene setter, but once you had read the quote it kind of hinted at a twist that occurred in the second act. So that was ruled out. The third quote I didn't want to use because it is very creepy. It is one of those lines you write and feel a little dirty because you wrote it. One of those lines that you have to write because bad things do happen to good people, and for a book to be entertaining you have to make the reader want to look away, and then look right back. The third quote was perfect.

It was added and suddenly what the blurb said now had a very dark, thriller context. It was 95% done. There were a few niggling sections that needed altering, but now we had context with the quote, they were easily sorted. And here it is. The exclusive first look at the BACK cover including the finalised blurb. It sends chills down my spine at least.

Click for the full sized image

We now also have a finalised front cover too. It looks stunning but you will have to wait a few days for that. For those that have pre-ordered Chasing Innocence don't worry about the price on the back cover. This will be discounted by at least 40% by the time the book is despatched to you.

The Copy Edit

Somewhere in this world there is a woman named Katie Green. I have never met her but I feel confident right now I could pick her from a crowd, although quite probably she is currently sitting alone in a very dark room. Her hair is likely to be dishevelled and her eyes wide and vacant, her features drawn and a glass of something strong on the table beside her, maybe gin, but more likely whiskey, neat, straight out of the bottle. Katie's hands might shake as she holds the glass and she might even be rhythmically rocking back and forwards in her chair. Maybe murmuring to herself, doubting her career choices, bemoaning the decision to carve a profession in the literary world and wondering how someone could get passed mixed up with past quite so often, is wonder so similar to wander? And is there really quite the need to so seldom punctuate and for so many sentences to have no verb at all!

Yes, that's right. Katie Green just copy edited my book.

I know it was hard work for Katie because I spent thirty two hours over two days this week, going through the raft of changes she has made to the manuscript of Chasing Innocence. There were a lot of changes, but then that is what the copy edit is all about. In the lead-up to publishing a book, someone that has an eye for grammar, the flow of a story and continuity, goes through the whole text and highlights all instances where these are incorrect. When they are done they send it to you (the author) and you then decide which of the changes to accept or reject.

As I have never been through the process I was unreasonably excited to get the script and wasn't quite sure what to expect. To highlight the changes Katie had used Word's change tracking, so all I had to do was start at the beginning and make a decision on whether to accept Katie's first change or reject it, then move onto the next. The book in its A4 double spaced incarnation has five hundred pages and ninety eight chapters. For 75% of the changes accepting is a no brainer, these are punctuation, tense or word choice changes. This also included the need for indents. I had written my whole book without them. I also have a tendency to sometimes place my adjectives at the end of a sentence or miss out a verb. I typically don't use commas as much as I should. Mostly for the same reason I didn't punctuate dialogue properly, because I was busy writing the dialogue. I went back later and added the punctuation, but no matter how hard I tried I would end up reading the text and not punctuating it properly. I even edited the book from back to front at one stage and this helped a little.

I had originally written the beginning of the book without having a very good idea for who would read it. So the narrative was not consistent, this is disconcerting for the reader. I had worked hard fixing this in the edit and even re-written some of the chapters from memory to flatten the narrative. Except the version in my mind was so ingrained the re-written chapters were incredibly similar to the original versions.

On top of this there were unconscious errors. I love the writing style of Lee Child and had at times emulated it without knowing, usually after I had read one of his books. I also had my own idiosyncrasies that I littered the text with. Which meant I would often string too many 'and' into a sentence or start a sentence with Which, which is a big no no apparently.  10% of the issues were caused by me being too wordy, or not being wordy enough. Sometimes towards the end of the book I simply had no more words left to describe anything originally. This resulted in some bumpy scenes. For 5% there were paragraphs or blocks of text that I had struggled over repeatedly, trying to make what I wanted to say work within the context of the story and the requirements of grammar. Usually it meant something had to give. Often in my world that was sentence structure, which made the reader do a double take. 10% of the changes I rejected, simply because the viewpoint of the human editor is sometimes going to conflict with the creative viewpoint of the human writer. It comes down to preference.

The sheer volume of changes were quite bewildering at first. I would turn each page to find another swathed in blue underscore. It was incredibly daunting. I had two days to go through the whole book. After sixteen hours on day one I had only covered thirty three of the ninety eight chapters. Katie green had requested two changes that really threw me - I needed to refer to two characters by different names. I did one but not the other, but getting a sense for each and whether it would work and how that would ripple through the book chewed through a lot of time.

The simple truth is, this was my first book. While I am busy learning a whole bunch of new lessons as I work through book two, the learning curve was incredibly steep for book one. I made a huge number of mistakes in the first third of the book and a decreasing number for the last two thirds. I had fixed many of them during editing but there were a lot of artefacts left over. It took so long to go through the first third of the copy edit because most of the changes were condensed into this area. I got through the final sixty five chapters during day two.

During the course of the two days I went through the whole book checking each proposed change within the context of the sentence, paragraph, page, chapter and book. The two days went so quickly though, that I had conflicting emotions come the end. In one sense I felt like I was suffering from Stockholm Syndrome - Katie had often felt like a tormenting jailor. As I turned each page and came to a favourite section it would inevitably be scored through in blue, a plaintiff wailing 'Nooooo' uttered each time as I scrolled down to see what the proposed change was. At other times I felt an incredible sense of gratitude as time after time after time whole pages were freed from my tongue twisting attempts at wordiness and lack of grammar. The overriding emotion at the end though, was a mixture of elation and a horrible sense of unease.  A full book edit previously had taken me an average of four weeks, this one had flown by in two days. How many new errors would I have introduced? Certainly some. Katie and I are both human, it is inevitable. But would so many changes have completely messed up the whole book?

Before I sent it back I went through the completed edit looking only at grammar and spelling highlighted by Word. I found a total of five errors in the whole book, which were easily fixed. I knew if I held onto the book any longer after that, I might be tempted to start fiddling - I might get to thinking something might not work and try to fix it. Feeling slightly less uneasy I sent it straight back to Lorena at Daniel Goldsmith. I think this is why they give you such a short amount of time to do the copy edit, because if you didn't you would start to doubt the changes. The copy edit is one of the most intrusive parts of the book creation process, it's the first time someone other than you will make such wide ranging changes. You certainly don't want to be making many changes once it is done at all. And what a great decision it proved to be - to send it back straight away.

Four days after sending the book back I packaged the copy edited text onto my Kindle and sat down and started reading. I was heartbroken by the end of chapter three and disonsolete after five chapters. The text and dialogue read all wrong, the pace was out, the sentences read clunkily. I could have cried, what had happened to my book? I read another two chapters and it was the same disjointed and clunky read. It was at this point I was very glad the book had been sent back, because my first instinct was to sit down and fix it. Experience though had told me something else might be causing the problem.

The clunkiness that now existed in my book reminded me of something I experienced during the main part of the book edit process. While editing Chasing Innocence I had read a few books by my favourite authors and had thought they were rubbish - they had seemed unusually clunky. I would often say to people: 'it's like they were written by someone else'. The explanation for this is simple - in my mind they were written by someone else because my mind was still largely configured to reading my own writing. Other writers I know who write grammatically very well find they read other books and think characters are cliche or story points are dull, despite reading books established for their strong characters and story. The simple truth is we are seeing the failings of our own books in the well written books of others. Our minds are saying: 'this is how it should be done.'

It occurred to me that the clunkiness I was now experiencing in Chasing Innocence was simply because it was now properly edited and read well. The last thing I should be doing was 'fixing it.' I checked my despair and turned to my Oracle for all such matters: the good lady Prid. She read the same first five chapters in her considered impassive way, silently and painfully slowly, moving down the page while I clawed at the dining room table. She turned the final page of the five chapters and announced: 'It now reads brilliantly, like a proper book,' cheers for that Prid.

And she was right. The section I had spent the most time editing was the troublesome first third. This section's pace and rhythm was carved into my mind, so reading the words of my story in the copy edited version, that now had properly structured and punctuated sentences, with correct tense and the overly literary bits stripped out - was going to sound weird in my mind. Through the weekend I went through the whole book and my mind quickly re-aligned. On Sunday night when I turned the last page I had a list of ten errors from the whole book. TEN! That was amazing, and then only missing words mostly, that had been deleted mid-sentence that didn't mess with the sentence enough for Word grammar to pick it up. What I now had was a book that read flawlessly. For the first time I had read almost all of it and had been lost in the story, without frequently clunking to a stop at some weirdly structured sentence. Katie Green had fixed ALL this. It was incredible. I now had a consistent grammatical narrative. I can't tell you what a huge relief this is.

For me the copy edit, as with every stage of writing this book, was an incredible learning curve. It would have been easy to be precious about the copy edit, to believe the changes are detracting from the story's 'style'. I had travelled sufficiently along the editing path to know it was specifically my style in the first third that was killing it. That the changes needed in the second two thirds were making it better, not worse. Making the narrative work through the entire book is the accomplishment of the editor. Did I mention how relieved I was?

To stand out as an indie author I think the imperative must be to embrace quality. The driving force behind every page of Chasing Innocence has always been to match anything produced by commercial publishers. It's hard, it does cost, in time, effort and hard earned cash. I certainly don't eat out or drink so much these days. You've got to want it. Ultimately for me it's about the paying reader. Everything is about them turning the last page and wanting more. I'll let you know how that goes.