\tMy editor told me, \u201cit doesn\u2019t look too bad.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tI heard: \u201cOh, what a cute baby.\u201d Long pause. \u201cDid you notice it had an ugly wart on her nose?\u201d<\/p>\n
\tOkay, maybe it wasn\u2019t really so harsh. In fact, the bulk of the queries were regarding issues of spelling, or terms to use, or the occasional typo. Sometimes she had questions along the lines of, \u201care you sure that\u2019s what the Bible says?\u201d Or, \u201chave you considered this other way of looking at things?\u201d And then sometimes she thought it would be good to give a reference.<\/p>\n
\tOf the hundred Bible characters that make up my book, less than half had generated any comments from the outside expert hired by Reader’s Digest, and so it took me only a pair of eight hour days and skipped meals to respond to all the issues and email them back to my editor in London. Her take on the queries was \u201cI always find queries like this a bit frustrating, and am tempted to answer, \u2018No, I just made it up for the fun of it\u2019 when faced with a query like \u2018True?\u2019 over and over again. But then sometimes inaccuracies are caught that way, so you have to bite your tongue.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tI was pleased to learn that I wasn\u2019t alone in feeling annoyed with some of the queries. My editor in London was pleased with my responses, which she then forwarded to Reader’s Digest in New York. Three weeks would pass before I\u2019d have to face any queries again. <\/p>\n
And they did come, and I once again spent time fixing them; one requested change–in a single sentence–by the Reader’s Digest “expert” was nonsensical and my editor and I spent most of a day figuring out how to say what I wanted to say, while satisfying the so-called “expert.” We were ultimately successful.<\/p>\n
After all the queries were satisfied, the galley proofs of the book were printed in China: the actual printed, but unbound, pages of the book. Reader\u2019s Digest in New York then received them from my editor in London, and I also got a set as well (which I still have on a shelf in my office). Our task at that point was to pour over them carefully, mostly checking for typos. Proofreading of that sort is not a whole lot of fun, either, but instead of doing plastic surgery on your baby, at that point it\u2019s mostly just checking to see that her clothes are not on backward and that her hands and face are clean\u2014and perhaps dealing with that odd smell coming from her backside.<\/p>\n
A few months after that, the book was printed, distributed and in January, 2008, appeared on bookstore shelves. It was subsequently published in 13 languages, including 2 Dutch editions–and it was reissued in 2012 in English.<\/p>\n
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Send to Kindle<\/span><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Before I got published, I only knew one meaning for queries: a one page letter that a writer sends to a book publisher or agent, describing a book and asking if the publisher or agent might be interested. That sort … Continue reading