Photo from The Ultimate Guide to the Largest Cats on Earth

TIGER TIGER is coming from Samhain Publishing in July, 2013. We’ve signed the contract and will start edits in January, after the holidays. We decided to share a bit about the process for those of you who are curious.

First, a short blurb: TIGER TIGER is the second in the Chicagoland Shifters series, which started with BURNING BRIGHT. brings us back to the world of animal empath and veterinary surgeon, Doctor Sasha Soskoff.  Sasha has found a sense of belonging with Neal Harrison and his small band of Siberian tiger shifters.  When a mangled body is found, clearly the victim of a tiger mauling, they must find the rogue tiger before it destroys everything they’ve built and causes a war between the tiger shifters and the jaguar shifters.

Since we’ve already worked with our acquiring editor at Samhain, the submission process involved sending the manuscript directly to her.  It still required a synopsis and blurb, like a normal synopsis “over the transom”, but had a little less pressure since we knew she knew it was coming.  That didn’t mean she’d accept it, just that she knew to look for it and review it when it came.

The submission process can be scary for any writer, but it’s not the mystery some make it out to be.  Publishing is a business, not an art, and the acceptance of a new manuscript isn’t just about whether the editor likes the piece or believes in it.  It also involves what other manuscripts the publisher has already accepted, what similarities it has to pieces already in the publisher’s catalog, and the upcoming releases that are scheduled.

Now that we have the contract in place, it’s a matter of starting the editing process.  It takes an average of nine months from acceptance to publication and we will start our edits in January.  There are two rounds of content edits where we will work with our editor to fine-tune the story and tweak or change elements as she believes it necessary.  Once that’s done and everything is as ready as we can make it, it will go to a final read-through with a beta reader.  They will look at it from the point of view of a potential customer and see if there are any plot holes or continuity errors that need to be fixed.  This is also an opportunity for final line edits.  The final step is to review the galleys, which is the final chance to see if there are any minor grammar or spelling errors.

In the middle of this process, the cover art will be given to the author.  We get a chance to submit ideas of what we would like it to be, and then the art department does their magic with it.  This is also the time to do the marketing paperwork, which includes the blurb.  The blurb, or the material that goes on the back cover of the book, is critical to the success of the book.  Once we draft our blurb, the Blurb Magicians do their work and it comes out as a finished product.

In the meantime, we’re working on NaNoWriMo.  National Novel Writing Month, every year in November, involves writing 50,000 words or more on a draft of a novel.  This year, we decided to write the rest of EMERALD KEEP, our sequel to EMERALD FIRE.  Of course, what came out of the keyboard is totally different and is a new novel, a science fiction war thriller with a working title of “In the Lane.”  It’s been loads of fun and is totally different from anything we’ve done before.

Are you working on NaNo?  How is the experience for you?  Tell us in the comments.  We’d love to know!

Resources

Photo from “Siberian Tigers,” by Alex and Gregory.com, the Ultimate Guide to the Largest Cats on Earth, website URL http://www.alexandgregory.com/siberian_tigers.html Accessed 11/18/2012