With crossed fingers in late November 2023, we waited to see what our copy editor, Heather, would want to change or to her style writing from our already, 4 times re-read manuscript and revised with our editor Cassie’s queries.
Copy Editor Round: We were quite surprised by the Heather’s dedicated work in mainly offering minor grammatical changes, confirming titles for cross references, and suggesting for us to add more text for clarity. Obviously, we were quite pleased. My preference is to tackle these editing phases with back-to-back days for continuity. So Woody and I once again spent several 8 to12 hour-long days forging through the pages. Within three weeks, we were able to send back our edits for the copy edit phase.
1st Pass: A big package came late January for 1st Pass, with 2 full 704 pages, 17 by 11 sheets of double page spreads of the laid-out pages. Not since Rose’s Heavenly Cakes have we gotten 2 copies, and that was because Woody was in Minnesota. Although Cassie promised, “what Rose wants, I want” we were shocked to see the original 650 pages contract was now happily increased almost 10%!!
1st Pass shows exact positioning of text, recipes, and charts on each page with Copy Editor’s changes integrated. With this book now being formatted like The Baking Bible on a much larger page with headers for instructions, no side bars, and each recipe starting on its own page compared to the original Cake Bible’s continuous, paragraphed instructions, sidebars, and recipes starting after the prior, we had to make tough decisions on cutting text to fit. Fortunately, many times there was page space at the end. We could see that the extra 50 pages was partially due to Cassie’s decision to letting each recipe in the Frosting and Adornments section to start at the top. We had been willing to let these recipes wrap after the previous.
