As the title of this post tells you, the galleys are here.  Now the hard work begins. Three-hundred pages of text to sift through, page by page, line by line, word by word, looking for errors.  The possibilities are endless; it could be an omitted word, or too many spaces between words in a sentence, or maybe not enough spaces.  It could be the author has decided to amend the prologue, the epilog, or heaven forbid, a kiss or a love scene.  If there is anything the author wants or needs to delete or add, now is the time to do so.

I read the galleys last week as if I was reading the story for the very first time. I was ever alert for errors in the text, whether mine or the publisher. I got wrapped up in the story. I laughed with my characters, and then I cried with them. Thanks to my wonderful editor, I only found three things out of 100,000 words that needed to be corrected.  One was not her fault as I decided to delete three entire pages from the epilogue. You know the old saying, “less is more.”  In this case I decided that was indeed a true statement.  The second error, I felt belonged to the printer.  The other two errors included a dropped word and one wrong word.

Next, came modifications for the book jacket. I’ve mentioned before how important the jacket is and how it came into being.  So you know I want this all important outer ware to be eye catching and contain as much information as possible.

I don’t think I would be wrong in saying when I saw the jacket, I was somewhat speechless. To say there had been miscommunication between Art Director and Author would be a gross understatement.  Was I happy? NO!  When I say changes, I mean not only in design, but the text, the font, the color, et cetera. Along with the jacket design, the production department sends a list, called a modification list and a mock up of what the book jacket, or dust cover looks like unfolded and lying flat, outside up.  Needless to say since I wanted to change just about everything on the cover, it took me awhile.

Well, finally all corrections including text and dust jacket are notated and changed. The Jacket Modification List and The Galley Modification List filled out, and I’m excited to say both are winging their way back to Author House Publishing via, the great invention, e-mail.  Now we play the waiting game one more time.