Secrets of the Editorial Letter

Yes, I’ve just received my editorial letter for my first novel, Secrets of the Dragon Tomb. For those of you who don’t know about such things, you get an editorial letter after you’ve sold your book, as part of the publishing process. It’s where the editor goes through in detail what you need to change to make the book publishable. Pretty much every book gets one of these. Maybe there are a few bestsellers who don’t, but everyone else does. The edits can be minor or incredibly major (and if you self-publish, you’ll need to hire an editor to provide the feedback for you, because you always need it).

Anyway, this is basically the feedback I got in my editorial letter:

Or something like that… :)

As my book is a middle grade book, a couple of the things I’m having to fix are making the protagonist younger (he’ll be 12, instead of 14 as he originally was) and making the book shorter (it was 100,000 words in the first draft, 75,000 words in the draft that my editor bought, and will now need to be closer to 60-65,000 words.

I’m also going to have a map at the front of the book. I love maps at the front of books! In fact, it’s not really a book if it doesn’t have a map, right???

Luckily for everyone, a proper artist is going to draw the map, but I had to provide a rough version for them to work with.

So, as a kind of peek, here’s the map I sent to my editor.

I don’t intend to explain what any of the things are on the map. You’ll have to wait for the book. I did decide to alter the geography of Mars a bit, because I have the power.

Right. Now back to the rewrite!