Your story deserves to be published beautifully

The copyedit was the part I resented paying for and the part that changed the book most. I got the manuscript back with about nine hundred tracked changes and a letter explaining the four habits behind most of them. I have not made those four mistakes since.

I had a keynote date and a manuscript that was thirty per cent too long. They planned backwards from the date, told me in month two which chapters had to go, and hit it. The honesty about what would not fit was worth more than the encouragement.

Nobody had explained the storyboard stage to me. I thought illustration meant sending a manuscript and getting pictures back. Sitting down and deciding where every page turn fell was when the book actually became a book.

My editor asked what the book was about underneath the births, and I did not have an answer for two weeks. When I found it, I cut eighty pages without minding. I would not have got there alone.

They would not let me approve the book from a screen. The first physical proof came back and the blacks were wrong, which I would never have seen otherwise. We went round three times. That insistence is why the book is what it is.

I sent a collection with unusual spacing and expected a fight. Instead the typesetter asked which line was longest so the measure could be set from it. That one question told me the book was in the right hands.

The index is why libraries picked it up, and I would not have commissioned one on my own. The scheduling was slower than I hoped, though they warned me it would be and explained why each time.

What I valued was being told what they could not promise. No sales projections, no talk of bestseller lists. Just a list of what would be delivered and a report afterwards showing it had been.