Last week I finished looking over the galley proofs for Lovecraft Country—my last chance to catch typos and other mistakes before the novel goes to press. Per my usual m.o., I spent some time fretting that I’d missed some minor factual error that would ruin everything, but there really wasn’t much to fix, mostly just punctuation issues that survived copyediting.
Anyway, after rereading the entire text more times than was strictly necessary, I sent off my handful of corrections, and as a reward got my first look at the bound galleys. I really love the design (those wear marks you see are simulated, as if the book were an old pulp novel you found in grandma’s attic). I think it’ll be even prettier as a hardcover. Soon.
In other news:
* I’m still 50 years old.
* I have a new editor. Maya Ziv, who saw Lovecraft Country safely through copyediting, has left HarperCollins to go work for the Dutton imprint at Random Penguin. From here on out, I’ll be in the capable hands of Jennifer Brehl.
* There will be a new edition of Fool on the Hill soon. For a while now I’ve been getting emails complaining that the ebook edition of Fool is riddled with typos. Because the original novel was published back when the state-of-the-art computer was a Macintosh IIx, there were no electronic files to convert, and the ebook had to be generated by scanning physical pages. It turns out that even in this century, OCR technology is not perfect, hence the typos. It’s taken me way too long to deal with this, and I apologize, but I finally got in touch with Grove/Atlantic about fixing the ebook, and they figured as long as we were doing that, we might as well reset the print edition as well. There won’t be any changes to the text (other than fixing a couple of 30-year-old spelling errors), but it’ll have new fonts and a new layout. I’ll post a notice here once the new edition goes to press—and, more importantly, when the corrected version of the ebook is available for download.