Well, today I began my last task in the production process. I am proofreading the typeset version of the book, also known as the first-pass page proofs. What this means, basically, is that I’m looking at the book as it will appear in print, searching for typos, errors in formatting, and any lingering mistakes that I might have made. It’s a rather tedious job, not least because I’ve already read this book through about five times, and frankly, I’m a little sick of it. Don’t get me wrong: I like the book. I think it’s one of my best. But it could be a masterpiece on the order of A Tale of Two Cities, and I still wouldn’t want to read it five times through in less than a year.

As I find mistakes, I correct them in pencil and then lay those pages aside. When I’m done, I’ll send those corrected pages — not the whole book — back to my editor. He’ll pass them on to Tor, where the changes will be incorporated into the final version of the book. The goal, of course, is a book without any typos or mistakes of any kind. In practice, this is virtually impossible to achieve. Why? Let me explain it this way: The book is 140,000 words long, give or take a few thousand. Each word averages about five letters. (Really: next time you do a word check in Word check out the other document stats. You’ll probably find that your average word length is about the same.) That comes out to approximately 700,000 characters. There are paragraph breaks, too, and also punctuation, spacing issues, etc. But let’s keep the number round for the sake of simplicity. 700,000. Okay, now let’s say that my editor, and the copy editor, and the proofreader, and I manage between us to make it 99.999% perfect. That would be pretty darn good, actually. And it would still leave us with seven typos.

The best piece of advice I had as far as writing goes came (like all the best advice) from my Mum. She has (and my father and my brother have) always read my stuff pretty much as I’ve completed a batch of chapters and given her honest and extremely well-read opinion. Invaluable criticism. On one occasion, early on, she read a chapter of mine in which I’d used some particularly trite expression (I forget what, now, there are plenty of contenders), and she drew my attention to it and said, you have to try to be honest. In every area of your writing. When you use a metaphor to describe something, you have to ask the question, ‘does that thing really look the way you’re describing it?’ or are you reaching for an easy cliche, for any old words to fill the space? When you write dialogue, you have to ask the question, ‘would this character really say these words in this situation?’ Everything that seems dishonest, that seems unconvincing, that seems untrue, weakens the effect. If you keep honest, you can’t go too far wrong.

As far as selling goes, there are some simple steps to follow that will give you the best chance (though your chances are always small with any individual submission, so prepare for rejections, possibly a lot of them). Finish a book, first of all, because no one’s going to buy anything without reading the whole thing. Find out who you’re sending material to, and ensure it’s a suitable book for them, then send them exactly what they ask for, in the format they ask for. Usually this will mean the first couple of chapters, or fifty pages of material. Err on the side of less, because they’ll probably know within a paragraph whether they are interested or not, and they’ll surely ask for more if they want to see more. Put a covering letter with your work that explains what is so special about it, why it’s something they need to have, and can sell. Spend plenty of time making sure the letter is good, because it may well be more important than the extract – if your letter is rubbish they might get no further. Remember that, even if to you this is your wonderful baby, to them it will always be, to some degree, a product. They may fall in love with it, but they still need to sell it.

Orcs – Stan Nicholls

The Riven Kingdom – Karen Miller

Hunter’s Prayer – Lilith Saintcrow

Debatable Space – Phillip Palmer

The Company – K.J. Parker

The Reality Dysfunction – Peter F. Hamilton

The Way of Shadows – Brent Weeks

Deep Water – Pamela Freeman

Shadow’s Edge – Brent Weeks

Orphan’s Alliance – Robert Buettner

Dark Heart – Russell Kirkpatrick

Beyond the Shadows Brent Weeks

The Neutronium Alchemist – Peter F. Hamilton

One More Bite – Jennifer Rardin

Hammer of God – Karen Miller

The Accidental Sorcerer – K.E. Mills

The Magician’s Apprentice – Trudi Canavan

Witches Incoporated – K.E. Mills

Matter – Iain M. Banks

The Naked God – Peter F. Hamilton

Hand of Isis – Jo Graham

This Is Not a Game: A Novel – Walter Jon Williams