Proofs and Other Preliminaries

A few months ago I received my proof copy of White Horse to Bucharest from the printers. Never having laid eyes on a galley proof, I was surprised to find a stack of mini booklets stacked on top of each other, the printed cover folded neatly around the stack and secured with rubber bands.  

Those booklets are called signatures. My print shop prints in full signatures of thirty-two pages and can do half or fourth signatures as well, so my page count had to be divisible by four. 

​The diagram at left helped me understand why. It helps me visualize the process called imposition, which is the way the pages are arranged on huge sheets of printers’ paper. (Not in numeral order, as you can see!)

​(By the way, White Horse to Bucharest ​has 264 pages.)

I went over the proof copy again and found some formatting errors. My husband read it (first time for him to read the entire book) and marked a few typos. I mailed the proof back to the printer and emailed them my corrections.

That wasn't the end of proofs though. The printer made the corrections and then emailed me a PDF proof. Surely this one was perfect, right?

Nope. I found two missing page numbers (I somehow eliminated them during my last edits) and two other errors. 

But now it's done. All I can do is wait for the final product. (When I read that version, I will most certainly find mistakes it's too late to fix. That, my friends, is a  picture of life.)

White Horse to Bucharest ​doesn't have a release date yet, but I'll announce it on this site soon. Until then, I've added an excerpt to my books page.