How're the revisions going? "Not great, Bob!"

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Like Debs, I'm also recovering from surgery; in my case a knee replacement. Will this mean you'll see a lot of fiction in coming years featuring post-procedure protagonists? Probably not, as it's difficult to make someone who can't sit properly or drive the exciting center of a story unless you're Alfred Hitchcock. 

Fortunately, I handed in my first draft last month, so I'm feeling guilt-free and unencumbered. I told my editor and agent I didn't expect to be back to work until eight weeks after surgery, and while that seems to have been a pessimistic timeline, considering how well I'm doing, I'm still not able to sit at my laptop for more than an hour or get through the day without a nap, so I'm definitely not going to be knocking out revisions in the immediate future.

Which is fortunate because a few weeks after handing my ms in, my editor of many years, still dealing with a major cross-country move,  lost a close family member. Naturally, he's going to be sticking close to home and family for a while, thus a longer timeline for getting my revision letter. Life and death happen, and in an industry which depends largely on a chain of individuals all putting their stamp on a work, slow-ups happen.

Thus, my answer when asked when readers can expect to see AT MIDNIGHT COMES THE CRY: I don't know. Mt publisher won't schedule the print run until after I've turned in the revision. This isn't JUST because I'm notoriously late; the whole process of physically printing books for major publishing houses is a bit of a bottleneck these days. 

Publishers, you might be surprised to know, don't actually produce the object you buy in a bookstore - that thing with the attractive dust cover and paper pages you can riffle through. Those are created by book manufacturing companies, and over the last twenty years, the number of those companies has dwindled to three or five or seven, depending on what source you're reading. 

This aren't the smaller, more nimble printing presses that run off ten books per year at one thousand copies each - these are mammoth concerns rolling out tens of millions of printed books annually. Their various "runs" are more tightly scheduled than D-Day: SENSITIVE LITERARY DEBUT, with a print run of 35,000 fits in one day and time, while  A GAME OF MASSIVE FANTASY with an initial printing of 750,000 has another slot. They might be back to back for efficiency, or to save absolute quantities of paper, or to minimize ink usage.

Plus, they have to leave in some flexibility. In the publishing world, nothing is a sure thing, and if THE MODEST TALE OF AN ENGLISH SLEUTHETTE is unexpectedly featured on the Today Show and the original printing of 20,000 sells out overnight, you can bet the publisher is going to be screaming at the book manufacturer to get another 40,000 copies out STAT.

Which brings me back to AT MIDNIGHT COMES THE CRY. Once I have the revision letter, confer with my editor and agent, and work my way through the franken-manuscript, St. Martin's will be ready to add my novel to the queue of thousands. And the date will be well in advance of the time my editor says, "Okay, this is good." They need to leave time for copy edits, gallery prints, gallery edits and art and book design, the not-very-noticeable stuff that makes the book "feel right" when you read it: starting and spacing paragraphs, proper word breaks, avoiding widows and orphans, etc.

Thus the truism in the biz: it takes about the same time from conception to baby as it does from final draft to printed book.