A Grant-aided Trip to Swansea

In which The Author meets a proper author

Back in the summer of 2015, I was coming home from a hospital appointment and reading Ben Aaronovitch's latest novel, Foxglove Summer, on the bus.

Actually, I've jumped the gun slightly. Let me start again ...

In about 2013, I was browsing in The Works in Aberdare when I found a book in the history section called Rivers of London. Thinking it was going to be about the actual rivers – the Fleet, Tyburn, Westbourne, and so forth – that lie beneath the streets of the modern city, I picked it up and started reading the jacket.

As soon as I saw the Gollancz colophon (that's a posh word for a publisher's logo, in case you're wondering) I knew the book was in the wrong place. Gollancz has long been regarded as one of the leading UK publishers of science fiction and fantasy. This was turning into a promising discovery.

It turned out to be a contemporary crime novel about a young Metropolitan Police constable named Peter Grant. He's out on patrol in Covent Garden one weekend and discovers a headless corpse in the portico of St Paul's Church. The body is very recent. And the only eyewitness to the brutal murder has been dead for two hundred years. That leads Peter to a secret department of the Metropolitan Police who investigate supernatural and paranormal happenings.

That was enough to spark my interest. I took it to the counter and mentioned to Stacey that it had been misplaced. She laughed, and we compared notes on the 'frequent flyers' you come across when you work in a bookshop. Then Stacey told me that it was in their offer, along with the next two books in the series (Moon Over Soho and Whispers Underground).

I bought all three and proceeded to enjoy them thoroughly over the next few weeks. It took me a while to track down the fourth one, though. Eventually Neil R. bought me Broken Homes as a Xmas present. He knew I was a big fan of the books and I couldn't afford to go hunting it down myself. By now I was using Twitter, and occasionally put a message up saying how much I'd enjoyed reading a particular book. One of the authors I was following was Ben Aaronovitch, needless to say. I always liked reading his day word count, his queries aimed at his small army of Tech Support experts, and his random thoughts on everyday life.

That brings us to the summer of 2015, and my hospital appointment. On the way there I called into Waterstones in Putney and bought Foxglove Summer to read in the waiting room. It had only come out in paperback a week or so earlier, and I made a beeline for Waterstones as soon as I arrived in the vicinity of the hospital.

By then I'd signed up for the Gollancz newsletter, which gives subscribers advance warning of new publications. I'd also looked at the Gollancz website, to see if they ever wanted proofreaders. Virtually the first thing it said was that they 'currently have all the freelance help they need'.

It therefore came as something of a surprise to find a number of production errors in a finished book. I was about halfway through it when I arrived home, and it was like reading one of the uncorrected bound proofs which the trade reps would drop off in the shop. (By chance, one of the reps who generously kept me supplied with practice material was Graham Ireland from Orion.) Some were very minor things – missing punctuation, simple typos like from instead of form, that sort of thing – but some were more like the sort of thing that shouldn't really have made it to proof stage. One officer was promoted from Detective Constable to Detective Sergeant in just a few pages. The spelling of one character's name changed from time to time. Another character's surname changed without explanation.

Pretty much the first thing I did when I got to the library the following day was log into Twitter. I tweeted that I was thoroughly enjoying Foxglove Summer, but added that Orion (Gollancz's parent company) really didn't have all the freelance proofreading help they needed.

About quarter of an hour later I had a notification that someone had replied to my post. I checked, and found a message from someone named Gillian Redfearn. She asked if I was reading the hardback, and added that they'd had the text 'redone since for obvious reasons'.

I didn't know who Ms Redfearn was, but a quick click revealed that she was Deputy Publishing Director at Orion.

Now here was an interesting situation. Should I reply in earnest? Or should I just laugh it off?

I decided to go for Plan A. I replied that it was a paperback, bought the previous day. A short period of time elapsed before Ms Redfearn responded. She invited me ('in that case', as she said) to send in anything I found.

Now, imagine my dilemma. I hadn't done any paper proofreading since leaving university, and I was a bit rusty on the BS symbols. Also, I was reluctant to mark up a brand new paperback and post it back to London without knowing when I'd be able to get my hands on a replacement copy. In the event I decided to go old-school on the book. Luckily for me the weather was glorious that weekend. I took my trusty Chambers Dictionary, my notebook, a couple of pens, a ruler, and Foxglove Summer itself, to Aberdare Park on the Saturday morning. I found a fairly quiet spot to sit in the sunshine and started working my way through the text, line by line, noting anything that seemed not to ring true. I even found myself googling a real church in Herefordshire, to see whether it has a tower or a spire.

But I enjoy doing that sort of thing. It wasn't work, it was a pleasant way to spend a weekend without spending any money. I spent two full days beside the lake, reading the book for the second time, but in microscopic detail. Back at home, I typed up my findings and wrote a nice covering letter explaining a bit about my background. I put everything in the post and sat back to see what transpired.

It was the start of the summer holidays. Probably not the best time to expect a rapid response to a job application, never mind a cheeky 'side door' approach to a large company. Consequently a few weeks went by until an email pinged into my inbox from a chap named Craig Leyenaar. Headed Foxglove Summer - Proofreader, this is what it said:

Dear Steve, Gillian Redfearn passed your notes on Foxglove Summer to me. The close reading was impressive and you caught many errors that we will be correcting. Thanks for that. We are happy to consider this your 'proofreading test', but before we are able to pass on any jobs could you give us some more details? Are you happy to do both proofreading and copy-editing on screen? How long did it take you to proofread Foxglove Summer? What is your hourly rate? After we've received this information and we can all agree on terms we'll put together a contract and move on from there.

Well, that was the foot in the door I'd been hoping for. I sent Craig the extra bits and pieces, and I was away. Sort of …

It didn't take long until my first assignment arrived in the post. It was the final part of a trilogy by Gavin G. Smith: a very strange SF novel called The Beauty of Destruction. Craig also sent me PDFs of the first two books, so I could check for any continuity errors that might have sneaked into the mix. And I'm not lying when I say that this huge pile of paper sat on my desk for two whole days while I pondered what to do next.

You see, from just reading the first few chapters I could see that I had an uphill struggle ahead of me. As well as a great many typos, missing punctuation, dubious hyphenation (especially of Welsh words), and the usual typesetting glitches I was used to from the bound proofs, there were numerous inconsistent spellings, changes of name, incorrect spellings of real places, real companies and so forth … In short, it was a bloody mess. I was afraid to touch it without seeking some advice first. If I fucked it up, I'd never hear from Orion again and I'd be back to square one.

I emailed Rob H., an old friend who's been proofreading for close to twenty years. His advice was simple, practical and sensible – just what I needed to hear, in fact. He reminded me that I was being paid to find mistakes in the text. That's exactly what I should do. Mark everything up, he said, and send it back. He added that he'd come across books where the copy-editor seemed to have 'fallen asleep at the wheel', and pointed out that that's why publishers use proofreaders as the final line of defence. So that's exactly what I did.

In the event I typed out about eighty separate queries, as well as correcting factual errors like the names of various armaments manufacturers. (I was almost expecting to find the library on lockdown, with snipers on the roof of the Jokecentre, because Echelon had picked up my google searches and decided that a major terrorist cell was based in Aberdare.) I marked up the proof with so much red ink that it looked like a crime scene, posted it back to Orion, and emailed all my paperwork to Craig. The die was cast.

I was prepared for an email thanking me for my work on The Beauty of Destruction and paying me off, never to darken Orion's door again. Instead, once he'd had chance to go through everything, I had a very positive email from Craig. This sentence in particular gave me a great boost: 'After going through it, I think I'd be happy to send you some copy-editing work as well as proof reading.'

Craig was as good as his word, fair play. The next assignment I had from Gollancz was the typescript of Rig by Jon Wallace, for copy-edit. This was a bit of a curveball, because that was also the final part of a trilogy. That meant that I was slightly confined by stylistic choices made by the previous copy-editor. (In fact I was rather surprised that the three books weren't assigned to the same person.) It was a bit of a learning curve, because I had to use features of LibreOffice I hadn't come across before. But it's all good grist to the mill. I enjoy new challenges, and I've always enjoyed researching things in books and via the Internet. It seemed as though I'd finally landed the job Rowland and my other friends had told me I should have been doing years earlier.

My reputation for thoroughness and attention to detail was starting to pay off. In fairly short order Craig asked me to work on the 'definitive' texts of William Gibson's 'Sprawl' novels, an anthology of his short stories, and the 'authors' preferred text' of Good Omens by the late Sir Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. These are far from being newcomers to the scene, after all. To have names like those on my CV was quite an achievement, considering that I'd been officially freelance for only six months or so.

It wasn't long until my name started to circulate within Orion. In my first departure from Science Fiction, Craig's colleague Tom Monson asked me if I fancied copy-editing a historical novel by Christian Cameron. Set during the fag-end of the Peloponnesian War, Rage of Ares was the final instalment of the Long War saga. I think I must have been off school ill for the morning we covered Ancient Greece, because I knew bugger all about the period. Furthermore, my grasp of Classical Greek is limited to a few epigrams from Homer I've picked up from crosswords over the years. But I did my best with the typescript, flagging up marginal queries and compiling a fuller list of Notes and Queries (something that soon became my signature). I must have done an okay job, because Christian was very kind in addressing some of my more obvious questions. It didn't take long before one of Tom's colleagues (another Craig) offered me another of Christian's books – this time, set during the Hundred Years War.

This was a bizarre coincidence. The day I finished working on Rage of Ares and emailed it to Orion, I was in London. (See The Oyster is Your World.) I somehow found myself at the Priory of St John of Jerusalem, in Clerkenwell. I took a few photos, wrote a blog about my discoveries in town, and thought no more of it. When The Green Count arrived, I was amazed to find that Sir William Gold, the protagonist of the series, was raised at the Priory of St John of Jerusalem. (This was the original priory, of course, sacked during the Peasants' Revolt.) I sent the link to Christian via Twitter, and he was kind enough to leave a comment on my blog.

Since then I've worked on another four of Christian's books (two historical fiction, two fantasy), and we've pencilled in a couple of pints when he's in the UK next year. (He's based in Toronto.) We work via Twitter and/or email to iron out any problems in the text, and always have fun discussing obscure points of fictional (but real-ish) grammar. He's been generous enough to mention me in the acknowledgments to his books, and to endorse me online. It's going to be great to sit down and talk to him face to face, rather than via cyberspace.

Last October I had an email from an unfamiliar name, sent from a publisher called Bonnier Zaffre. They had a new crime novel for proofreading, and apparently someone in the office had suggested that I was the man for the job. It turned out that one of Orion's editors had moved to a different company and taken her contacts book with her. I knew then that I was moving in the right circles. Since then I've done a number of jobs for them, most recently proofreading the new novels by Lynda La Plante and Wilbur Smith. Yes – the Wilbur Smith.

All of which brings us back to Ben Aaronovitch. At the start of April, Craig emailed me out of the blue:

And so we come full circle . . . the new Ben Aaronovitch is coming up for copy-edit in a fortnight. Would you be available to do it?

Needless to say, I said yes.

It was Lies Sleeping, the latest instalment in the adventures of Peter Grant. I had to refer back to my well-thumbed copies of the earlier books while I was working on the typescript. Ben and I got to discuss some points via Twitter when I sent the edited typescript back, and I think we got each other's sense of humour. And then came the best news of all. A couple of months ago Gollancz announced that Ben would be touring the country, giving talks and signing Lies Sleeping. Best of all, he was coming to Cardiff and Swansea.

Wales tends to get overlooked when it comes to author signings. If they get as far as Cardiff we can count ourselves lucky. Swansea is pretty much terra incognita for mainstream UK publishers. Unfortunately, it's also pretty much inaccessible from Aberdare by public transport.

Cardiff was a more realistic prospect – a Thursday lunchtime signing in an independent shop in the Bay – but by the time Rhian and I got round to booking the tickets, it was sold out. (Rhian's also a big fan of the books, so I made sure she had the day off before proceeding any further.) I commented on Twitter, saying how disappointed we were to have missed out. Luckily Craig spotted it, and said that he could put us on the guest list if needs be.

It turned out that social media came to the rescue again. My old friend John works in the centre of Swansea, and offered us a lift there and back again after the event. I told Craig that we'd be heading for Swansea instead, and he said he thought it would be a better event anyway. Instead of just a signing, Ben would be giving a talk as well. We booked our tickets straight away.

Rhian, Liam (a big fan of Doctor Who, for which Ben wrote a couple of scripts back in the Classic era), and I set off in John's car at 8.00 on a hazy Thursday morning two weeks ago, and were in town just after 9.00. We decided to have breakfast in Thereisnospoon (as good as anywhere), and then jumped on a bus to Limeslade. We had the day to ourselves, and for £4.50 we could kill a couple of hours and get some sea air. We got to the beach at high tide, by which time the clouds had burned off and the sun was well and truly out. We walked the cliff path to Langland Bay, stopped off in Langland's Brasserie (a couple of converted beach huts) for second breakfast, and then walked to Caswell village to get the bus back into town.

We killed some more time at the Waterfront Museum, which wasn't as exciting as I'd hoped it might be, then made our way to the No Sign Bar for something to eat. It's not far from there to Waterstones, and we had time to browse before the event started. I picked up The Gradual, a 2016 novel by Christopher Priest that sneaked into the bookshops while my back was turned. (I finished it on the way back from London on Tuesday, and very good it is too.) Obviously I needed to buy Lies Sleeping. And I needed a new copy of Rivers of London, the first book in the sequence, because mine is currently circulating among the bar staff in Thereisnospoon in Aberdare. I had a nice chat with the Waterstones people while I was updating my loyalty card. I had the rest of Ben's backlist in my bag, after checking with the management that he'd be happy to sign those as well. John joined us when he finished work, and we all headed to the top of the building for the event itself.

The talk was entertaining, informative, and light-hearted. Ben has a rather warped sense of humour (which comes across in his books), and he's very down to earth about his writing, his family, and his writing process. It was good to be with so many people who clearly love the books as much as I do. He was even kind enough to ask if his copy-editor was there. We had a bit of banter about publisher's house style, public transport in Wales (Ben was travelling by train), and assorted odds and ends.

We queued for the signing (towards the end of the queue, because I had half a dozen books as well as Lies Sleeping) and we had a chat with the PR lady from Gollancz while we were waiting. (I can't remember her name, alas, but she was very pleasant.) It was nice to know that we were expected, as she called us 'the Aberdare contingent' when she came over to talk to us. Ben and I had a good chat while he signed my books, and I explained how the paperback of Foxglove Summer had opened the door to what I'm doing now. It was really lovely to tie everything up in a big loop, face to face with the author himself.

Afterwards the PR lady told me that Christian Cameron will be on the Gollancz Authors events list next year. (I knew that already from the horse's mouth, so to speak.) It seems that my name is quite well known in the offices. I asked her to pass on my thanks to Craig, for arranging for us to come to the event. I also emailed him the following day to tell him how the day had panned out and thanking him for having faith in me back in the summer of 2015.

John dropped us off in Aberdare and Rhian and I repaired to Jacs for a pint. It was only then that I realised Ben had given me a namecheck in Lies Sleeping, for my 'meticulous' copy-editing. That's as big a vote of confidence that I could have hoped for. All in all it's been a long, strange trip, and meeting the man who indirectly started the whole thing off was the perfect way to end a very busy, educational, entertaining and thoroughly enjoyable year of freelance work.

The Unstarted Trilogy

In which The Author almost leaves a bookshop empty-handed

Yes, you read that correctly.

I've just returned from Pontyclun, where Fay J. and the regulars at the Brunel Arms have managed to raise a very respectable £31 for the Anthony Nolan Trust. This takes the pub's fund-raising total to over ninety quid. It's definitely worth making a special trip across country every six months or so to pay it in. In reality, I won't be able to pay it in until tomorrow, because Barclays no longer have a branch in Pontyclun. I could have walked the two miles or so into Talbot Green, but given the way the 'high street banks' are pulling out of the high streets, there was no guarantee I'd have found that branch open anyway. I'll do it in Aberdare and post the receipt to Fay, as usual.

And talking of well-known high street brands …

I had the best part of an hour to kill in Cardiff, so I walked over to Waterstones for a nose around. There was no sign of Jeff, as usual – he might have been on lunch, or in Newport, or in Abergavenny, or in any other branch within a train ride's emergency cover range. I didn't see any of the old gang, in fact. I headed straight for the Science Fiction section, eager to pick up anything by Paul McAuley, whose forthcoming book I finished proofreading on Monday. Or maybe on Sunday. Or possibly yesterday. It's a long story …

Anyway, Craig L., my contact at Gollancz, had mentioned Mr McAuley's novel Fairyland, which is published in their SF Masterworks series. That seemed a decent place to start exploring Mr McAuley's backlist. Therefore I wasn't especially surprised when I failed to find a single book by him. When Craig first mentioned this upcoming project about six weeks ago, I asked whether Mr McAuley was a new author, as his name didn't sound familiar. (He turns out to be quite the opposite – as a scientist turned writer, he's frequently mentioned in the same breath as Stephen Baxter.)

I emailed Craig back, joking that I never got to run the Science Fiction section because that particular role was always given to someone who never read books. Instead, it was the preserve of people who were into superhero films, computer games, and manga books. Even if they were fairly au fait with the genre (like Scott P. and Gareth M.), they were never given free rein to stock a decent range of backlist titles which would guarantee repeat business.

Now that Waterstones is run almost entirely by computers which decide a branch's stockholding based on the percentage of shelf space allocated to each genre, you can spot the winners and losers a mile off.

Take the History section, for instance. When I was in the shop a few months ago, I amazed myself by being able to find books on the Hundred Years War and the Crusades. Ten years ago I'd have lucky to find anything that general. I didn't want a huge tome on either – just something I could use to double-check names and dates if I get another historical novel to work on – and the two books I found suited me admirably. But I wouldn't have found them when I was working there.

When Louise was running the History section, her pet preferences (the areas she'd studied for her degree and her own personal heroines) decided what we stocked. Yes, of course we tried to take account of the school and university syllabuses. However, by and large Louise's choice of books was determined by a mixture of how interested she was in the topic, and how well she got on with the publisher's rep. When Russell was the rep for Routledge, you could guarantee finding pretty much every new title on the shelves within days of publication. When John took on the role as part of the ever-growing Taylor & Francis portfolio, T&F's titles dwindled almost to the vanishing point. You should never mix business with pleasure, especially when it comes to stocking a bookshop.

The new Waterstones History department is rather thrilling in comparison. Presumably there's enough turnover of titles to justify the increased shelf space and vastly improved depth of range.

I can only assume that Horror is showing the reverse of this trend. It's gone from being an entire island and a couple of bays to barely half a dozen shelves and half a table. It's no great loss, to be honest. The post-Twilight Vampire Romance bubble seems to have burst, thank Goddess, and now the section consists pretty much exclusively of James Herbert, Stephen King and Richard Laymon. It's business as usual. Never been a fan, don't care if they sell or not.

The Artificial non-Intelligence in charge of stocking the Science Fiction section seems to be one capacitor short of a full circuit board, though. I'll give you a theoretical example to begin with.

Would anyone, even in their wildest fantasies, ever stock The Return of the King without also having The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers? Who the actual fuck would start reading a trilogy with the last book?

Yet that's what Waterstones seem to be doing at the moment. Having finished John Hornor Jacobs's Infernal Machines (for pleasure and profit) about six weeks ago, I was pleased to find one of the preceding books on the shelf. Only one of them, though: Foreign Devils. There was no sign of The Incorruptibles, which is where the whole saga begins. I checked the tables to make sure I wasn't just missing it, but it was nowhere to be found.

I moved on. Ben Aaronovitch's occult police procedurals featuring the young Met copper Peter Grant have really made an impact since they were first published. (It was my close reading of Foxglove Summer, the fifth Peter Grant novel, which opened Gollancz's doors to me in the first place.) I wasn't surprised, therefore, to find the series opener Rivers of London face out on the shelf, along with two of the others, but not necessarily in the right order, as Eric Morecambe might have said.

I moved on again. Gavin G. Smith's The Beauty of Destruction was the first proof I ever worked on. I found that on the shelf, but neither of the books which precede it. What's the fucking point of that?

Jon Wallace's Rig, my first copy-editing job, has recently come out in paperback. Craig very kindly sent me the first two as preparation for the typescript, so I was eager to see the finished book. I found it all right – beside Barricade, which opens the story. There was no sign of Steeple, though. Ever get the feeling you've missed something important?

Skimming the rest of the display, I spotted the distinctive yellow jacket of a Gollancz SF Masterwork among the Ps. It was The Prestige by Christopher Priest. There were none of Mr Priest's dozen or so other books on the shelf, though. His first novel, the hallucinatory and terrifying Indoctrinaire, was published 45 years ago. He's generally regarded as one of the elder statesmen of British SF, along with Brian Aldiss and Michael Moorcock. There was one of Mr Aldiss's books on the shelf (got it), and a collection of Mr Moorcock's short stories. Yes, you read that correctly, too. Just the one. Mr Moorcock's published works would take up least two shelves by themselves.

The Prestige first came out in 1995; Greybeard is thirty years older, and Mr Moorcock's short stories were published sporadically through the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Messrs Moorcock and Priest have both had novels published by Gollancz within the past couple of years, and both were acclaimed in the SF magazines. I've got them at home, but only through the good offices of Waterstones in London. If I was relying on the Cardiff branch, I'm sure I could be forgiven for assuming that they'd curled up their tootsies and shuffled off this mortal coil (to quote a line from another classic comedy routine).

I wandered over to the music section. We've recently marked the fiftieth anniversary of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Cub Band, so I was sure I'd find a plethora of books about that musical landmark. Not a fucking sausage. In fact, there was only one book about the Beatles, and I've already got that at home. Does anyone read the fucking papers any more?

I was about to leave empty-handed when I spotted a face-out copy of All the Madmen, Clinton Heylin's recent(-ish) book about the uneasy relationship between British rock musicians and mental health. I say 'recent(-ish)' because according to the title page it's been out since 2012. I've never seen it in Waterstones before. If it hadn't been face out, I wouldn't have seen it today either.

I've necessarily based this entry on a cursory examination of the shelves in one 'flagship' branch of Britain's only surviving national book retailer. I've worked on a small sample of authors whose books I've worked on over the last couple of years, too. It's a reasonable basis for further study, I think. I've been out of the bookselling game for over eight years now, as Facebook reminded me over the bank holiday weekend. It was, as I said at the time, 'the end of an error'.

With the benefit of twenty years' experience at the sharp end – and when I walked away, I went with half a dozen colleagues whose time in post was comparable – I think it's fair to say that Waterstones are missing us more than we miss them. I wonder how long it'll be before the smaller branches start to wither on the vine. There was a time when every town worth its salt had a branch of at least one high street bank. HSBC closed its doors in Aberdare last year. NatWest are going at the end of the summer. They've all pulled out of Mountain Ash already.

In the same way, all but the most piss-poor of towns had a bookshop. Given what I've seen today, I can't help wondering how long it'll be before Waterstones starts going the way of Barclays and the others of the 'Big Four' banks.