Although I hinted at this in last week’s post, now I can really say it: we have a finished manuscript.

I was reading through past Start to Finish posts as I was planning what I would write this week, and it made me pause to consider this milestone. We’ve been talking about editing Wax Bullet War for a long time: Kait’s first post as project manager for this book was almost exactly a year ago, and in it she wrote about handing the manuscript over to our Editing department. In the twelve months since, this book has gone through what feels like countless rounds of revisions—in fact, the word “edit” (in all of its various forms) appears 57 times in past posts.

Sean has been wonderful to work with through it all, and we’ve had the dedication of many skilled editors to get us to where we are now. Together they have worked through the developmental edits that covered the big picture things; the fact-checking; and multiple rounds of copyediting to catch small typos, misplaced punctuation, and all of their finicky friends. As I mentioned last week, Marco wrapped it all up (with an assist from Sarah, our Editorial Department Lead) by going through the entire book to check for any straggling issues.

The process for editing a book looks different every time, but the ingredients are always the same: creativity, technical knowledge, collaboration, and lots of hard work. Next week I’ll update you on some of the marketing and production work we’re starting to do; we don’t like to be too self-congratulatory around here, but this week I wanted to stop and celebrate a job well done by Sean and all of our editors!

- Laurel Boruck