September 17, 2009

When Random House decided to issue a paperback edition of Swish, my editor asked me whether there were any changes I’d like to make to the material as it was in hardback. There were in fact some changes I wanted to make—at the last minute I made some corrections that in retrospect I ought not to have made, and there were problem spots I’d realized since the book’s publication how to fix. So I told her I’d look through the book and give her a list. Some time went by, and then we had the following e-mail exchange:

From: Faustus
Sent: Monday, October 27, 2008 10:27 AM
To: Faustus’s editor
Subject: edits for paperback

Okay, so after promising these to you for like weeks and weeks and weeks, I finally have the edits I’d like to make for the paperback. Do not be alarmed at the length of the document—I think I counted 186 edits, but at least half of them are things like “change ‘the’ to ‘a’ ” and at least another quarter are things like “add a comma after ‘and.’ ” The rest of them are mostly things like “switch the order of these phrases” or “add the word ‘official’ .” I worked very, very hard to make sure that there be no shifting of text from one page to another, and I think I succeeded in almost every case.

Let me know what you think.

From: Faustus’s editor
Sent: Monday, October 27, 2008 4:56 PM
To: Faustus
Subject: RE: edits for paperback

Wow, you are one thorough guy. I wish I could reward your diligence with the news that we’d be able to make all of these changes, but I’m afraid I didn’t give you the best instructions about this. Even though these are tiny and most won’t cause reflow, they still cost money, and we can’t absorb the expense of making 186 changes. The guidelines are usually that we will make a change if it’s required for accuracy or to correct a grammatical error, but we won’t make dozens of changes that would just sharpen up the writing. We do indulge the occasional aesthetic improvement, it’s usually on the order of four to six changes, not 186. I’m sorry not to have given you the sense of scale earlier, but, well, not all authors are as conscientious as you. Could you please cull this list into the changes that are necessary to make the book more accurate or grammatically correct?

From: Faustus
Sent: Monday, October 27, 2008 5:07 PM
To: Faustus’s editor
Subject: RE: edits for paperback

Whoops.

I’ll get back to you.

In the end I was able to pare my list down to fifteen or twenty corrections, which turned out to be an acceptable compromise. Acceptable to my editor, that is.

Me, I’m just waiting to become really, really famous so they can put out another edition and incorporate my corrections. It’s taking a while, though, so I’m considering mass murder as a quick means to notoriety. At the very least it would draw attention from the currently missing commas and “and”s where there ought to be “the”s.