Galleys - and not the cooking kind

Camy here! As I write this, I have just finished going through the galley proofs for my November humorous romantic suspense novel, Protection for Hire. But as soon as I finished it, I started on my galley proofs for my January 2012 Love Inspired Suspense novel, Stalker in the Shadows, which are due in less than a week.

So what are galley proofs? For those of you who don’t know, they’re the typset version of your book--the manuscript has gone through a special software that changes it into the special file format used by the printing press. No, the printing press doesn’t use Microsoft Word documents! Galley proofs are also sometimes referred to as copy edits.

For Zondervan, the galleys look almost exactly like the book, with extra space around the edges where the pages will be cut:

I got the hard copy of the galley proofs--yup, a huge manuscript mailed to my door in a box. I made changes to the galleys--but because this is such a late stage of the manuscript production process, the only changes I can make are very small, which will not alter the layout much. So I’m mostly changing any errors I catch like typos or misspellings, or any story consistency errors that need to be fixed.

I also type out the corrections in an email to my editor. For example, for the page above, the corrections look like this:

page 7 line 16. Change "Glock" to "gun"
page 7 line 17. Delete "any more"

For my Love Inspired Suspense galleys, I get them as a .pdf file. They look different from the Zondervan galleys since Love Inspired uses a different program for their printing presses:

Since I got the .pdf file, if there was a change I wanted to make, I printed out the page in question, made the change by hand (which you can see I did above), and then scanned the page using my scanner. Authors don’t always have to do this, but since I had a scanner, and since it makes it easier for my editor, that’s what I did.

Like my Zondervan galleys, I also had to write out the corrections. Love Inspired has a form to fill out called AAs (Author Alterations). Here’s what mine looks like so far:

(AA = author alterations, PE = printer’s errors) Also like the Zondervan galleys, I can’t make major changes, only things that won’t alter the typesetting--errors and story inconsistencies, and I made a few changes above because the reading flow was confusing, but all the changes are only minor and necessary.

When I self-published my fourth Sushi novella, Weddings and Wasabi, I went through lots of galley proofs also, but they were all in .pdf files, not hard copies. Below is a page from the galley .pdf file:

I caught an error near the bottom, so I filled out an action required sheet for WinePress that listed page, line, and change:

So there you have it, more information than you ever wanted to know about galley proofs from three different publishers, Zondervan, Love Inspired, and WinePress. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment!


Camy Tang writes romance with a kick of wasabi. Out now is the fourth book in her Sushi series, Weddings and Wasabi. She is a staff worker for her church youth group, and leads one of the worship teams for Sunday service. On her blog, she ponders frivolous things like knitting, running, dogs, and Asiana. Visit her website to sign up for her quarterly newsletter.

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