Saturday, January 06, 2007
the final proof
The pre-corrected proofs of my book will be arriving at my publishers at the end of the week. That will be the first time I will have seen the manuscript looking like an actual book; its a mad and mysterious process the way an idea evolves into an actual book proposal and then over months and years those ideas are hammered out onto a laptop screen and then finally they emerge as a couple of hundred pages of paper bound together. I am in that strange limbo-land where nobody outside Bloomsbury and ICM has read the book so I do not know how it will be received: it could disappear without trace or maybe it will do alright. I am being inteviewed by The Bookseller in a few weeks for an article about this year’s new authors. Once the proofs are available then it will be sent out to people and then the first droplets of response will start trickling in.