It’s been a dog eat everything week here at the
Hautman-Logue-Gaston residence, and not a lot of work getting done. Mostly we
have trying to convince the puppy to chew on things we want chewed, and to
perform his evacuations outside.
But I did finish reviewing the first pass
pages of The Klaatu Terminus and
making about a hundred small corrections.
“Pass pages” are the stage just after copyediting, when the
copyedits have been incorporated into the manuscript, and the work is set in
the font and layout that will appear in the final book. They look like this:
This page has one correction, of a typical pass page typo.
When I first went through the publishing process I was
amazed by how many rounds of edits, corrections, and proofs are necessary to
produce a professionally published novel. The first edition will probably have been combed
through by no fewer than six readers, multiple times. And still, there will be
mistakes. There are always mistakes.
The first edition of my novel Rash,
for example, contained a spelling error in the first sentence.
First pass pages are a critical stage for the author,
because usually this is the last time he or she will have any significant input
into the content of a book before it goes out for review. After that, the book
will go through one (or two, or three) more sets of pass pages, and then into
ARCs, or “Advance Reviewer Copies.” These are the bound, paperback copies that
will go out to Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and other industry
publications for pre-publication reviews.
ARCs often contain errors that will be corrected in the
actual book, but it is fervently hoped that such errors will be minor, because
the pre-pub reviewers will be judging the book on the basis of the ARC.
Anyway, I am glad to be done with these first pass pages,
and I’ll be taking them to the post office this afternoon. I think. It always
feels a bit like stepping out of an airplane and hoping the parachute opens. Maybe
I’ll give the manuscript another read-through. I’m sure I missed some stuff.
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