And then things went south.\u00a0 The editing process was fine until the day before I left for a book tour in Germany and the editor told me the book was being moved up a season because the publisher loved it.\u00a0 Ordinarily that would have been great news, since in-house excitement is crucial to launching a book.\u00a0 But he asked me to correct the edited manuscript and get it back to him (via email) in the next two weeks.<\/p>\n
I explained that I was leaving for a tightly-scheduled book tour, doing daily events and would be in transit when I wasn’t speaking and reading. Moreover, tours were exhausting and I didn’t feel I’d have the focus required for reviewing the book. I also worked on a PC and didn’t have a laptop, which would mean going to internet cafes.<\/p>\n
I explained all that and he said fine, he would get it taken care of.<\/p>\n To my dismay, when I got the book back in page proofs, there was one passage that was repeated.\u00a0 I deleted the repetition while making other minor corrections. But when I got back home after the tour, the publisher himself called to tell me that it would be too expensive to re-do the book since it had gone too far in the publishing process.\u00a0 He refused to fix the problem.<\/p>\n While I loved the book’s cover, I was mortified that it was being published with a glaring flaw.\u00a0 And then a reviewer blamed me for letting the book appear with a repetition.<\/p>\n I felt burned, but luckily fans enjoyed the book despite the screw-up.\u00a0 That’s what publishing is like, filled with ups and downs, and nothing is predictable. As novelist and memoirist Deborah Levy says, “The writing life is mostly about stamina.\u201d<\/p>\n Lev Raphael is the author of 25 books in many genres, including the guide for writers, Writer’s Block is Bunk<\/a>.\u00a0 You can take creative writing workshops with him online at writewithoutborders.com.<\/a>\u201cStudying creative writing with Lev Raphael was like seeing Blade Runner for the first time: simply incredible.\u201d \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It started out as a fantasy. An editor at an esteemed publishing house contacted me and asked if I had a book for him. He admired my previous work and wanted me on their list.\u00a0 I was flattered and thrilled.\u00a0 The timing was perfect because I did have a book, so I was soon signing … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[592,307,497,292,5,95,198,1259,504,192,496,290,214,380],"class_list":["post-3686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-publishing","tag-author-book-tours","tag-author-readings","tag-authors","tag-book-tours","tag-books","tag-creative-writing-2","tag-fans","tag-http-writewithoutborders-com","tag-promotion","tag-publicity","tag-publishing","tag-the-writers-life","tag-the-writing-life","tag-writers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3686"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3719,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3686\/revisions\/3719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/writing-business-9.jpg\")
<\/a>He insisted.\u00a0 I thought, okay, I have to try.\u00a0 But when I got to Germany I discovered that even if I tried to squeeze in some time at an internet cafe every day, there was no way I could work on German keyboards because they were laid out differently and very confusing.\u00a0 My emails home were garbled and I didn’t want to risk any errors creeping into the book.<\/p>\n
\n\u2014Kyle Roberts, MSU Class of 2016<\/strong><\/p>\n