(These are my lightly edited notes for a panel I attended at the ConFusion Fantasy and Science Fiction Convention in January of 2018)

PANEL: How a Manuscript Become a Book (19 January 2018, 14:00)

PANEL DESCRIPTION: “‘I’m just an MS…sittin’ here on an editor’s desk…I hope and pray to be a book someday, but today I am just an MS!’ There’s plenty of information on the web about how to write and sell a manuscript , but the process after the deal is signed is often opaque to new writers. We’ll walk through the steps a manuscript typically goes through between deal day and launch day, and what authors can do to help the process go smoothly.”

PANELISTS: Cherie M. Priest, Navah Wolfe, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Richard Shealy, Yanni Kuznia

NOTES

• On acceptance: It has to be a great book THAT THE PUBLISHER KNOWS WHAT TO DO WITH (Navah Wolfe)
• You never learn to write A NOVEL. You learn to write THIS NOVEL. The same goes for editing.
• Pointing out places that need fixing vs. recommending specific fixes. “This isn’t working” vs. “Maybe try this”
• When the editors do their job well, you don’t notice them
• “Junicode” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junicode) variation of Garamond with loads of diacritics. Created to fill a need in academic publishing
• “First pass” == “Uncorrected Proof” == “Galley”

My thoughts:

I mostly attended this panel as a sanity check to see if the rest of the publishing world did things similarly to how I did them. Therefore, for me, this panels was more about affirming than learning. Everything discussed jibed with my experiences as publisher and editor at Caffeinated Press. The notes collected here are the “aha!” moments of the panel.