What got me blogging this time is the notion of editing, and how it’s related to the e-book bestsellers lists now showing up regularly in the major papers. That topic comes up all the time when novelists – fiction dominates the e-book scene – discuss indie publishing, i.e. going it alone and maybe giving up a substantial advance to do so.

The items that make the checklist, the things the publisher normally does for the ms that the indie writer will have to do for herself, are editing, cover art, marketing, and of course distribution. Well, the argument goes, distribution is what the e-book removes from the equation. That really is easy now. Marketing, on the other hand, demands very hard work, but publishers have never satisfied 99% of their authors in this area. Self-marketing is an author responsibility whether the book is traditionally published or an indie. And, the argument goes, I can hire all the rest. If I’m willing to spend a few bucks backing my own career, I’ll get the same top class professionals who work for the legacy publishers.

That’s probably true for the cover. In the matter of editing I submit it is not. I’m convinced you cannot get the same results even if you’re willing to pay a top line-editor the going rate – which will certainly be in the mid to high four figures. Maybe more. (You can get first-class copy editing for considerably less, but that comes later in the process and it’s not what I’m talking about.) The reason is that there’s a very real difference when you’re the one writing the check.

Brilliant editing – and if you’re a writer worth anything you pray for nothing less – involves tension and abrasion and maneuvering. It flows from the fact that in a subtle way you and the editor are on different teams. In some measure your role becomes protecting your vision of the novel; your way of interpreting these characters you’ve created and the things that happen to them. Your story. Your plot. The editor’s job is to push back, to insist that you make it clearer, write it bigger, eliminate superfluous scenes – maybe characters – and add those that the reader must have if the whole thing is going to make sense. It’s the editor’s job to push you to the edge of a cliff, and make you brave enough to jump off.

A process of that nature inevitably brings a writer to the point of wanting to write STET in big red letters on every page. The time will come when that’s exactly what you have to do. But if the editor works not for you but for your publisher, and probably a good chunk of your advance depends on the two of you agreeing that the ms is as good as it’s going to be, you will think long and hard before putting your foot down. That, I submit, is not being abjectly beholden to the almighty dollar. It’s going through the crucible of the creative process; aware always that the editor can identify the problems, but only the writer can fix them. At the end the pair of you will have created something infinitely better than the original – even though it was probably your fifth or sixth draft, and good enough to attract the publisher in the first place.

Good – sometimes great – editing, I submit, is why those e-book bestseller lists are so overwhelmingly dominated by the digital version of books traditionally published rather than indies.

*For those who may not know, Maxwell Perkins was the publishing legend who edited the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. A. Scott Berg’s wonderful Max Perkins, Editor of Genius is must reading for any novelist. It is happily available in e-book format as well as paperback.

Just checked the Amazon customer reviews for City of Promise, the published-last-week and last-for-the-moment of the NYC books I’ve spent over a decade doing for Simon & Schuster. Terrific reviews and I am enormously grateful. Especially to a very savvy lady who gave the book five stars, has insightful comments to make about the characters, promises to read everything I write, and finishes up by commenting that she seriously disagrees with my politics.

Wow! Not because she disagrees. Half the country disagrees with the other half. I will go to the mat fighting for her right to disagree and I’d like to think she’d do the same. The comment was a stunner because nowhere in City of Promise is there a single word about contemporary politics or my view of same.

But on my Facebook profile my politics sticks out a mile. I started that page years ago on the urging of I think my daughter-in-law. A way to keep up with family and friends… It never occurred to me that in our brave new world professional and personal are all mixed up. Which I guess makes me pretty foolish.

I’m happy to be disabused and I love you “insatiable reader.” Not just because you say great things about my books – though I’m really, really happy about that – but because like me, you care about our politics. And we’re all better off when that’s true. Thank you.

Next stop, London. Will try and blog from there…

I am by nature and by nurture very careful (read obsessive) about the facts in my historical fiction. I check and double check. Indeed, there’s no excuse not to these days when you can access so much material without even getting up from the desk and walking over to a bookcase.

Then there’s the process. This novel like all the others in the series was worked on by a line editor at Simon and Schuster, then sent back to me. I read it again and sent it back. Then it was read by a copy editor (in this case, two – long story, just accept it) and came back once more. I read it again. It got sent to a proofreader (the world’s greatest I know because I’ve worked with her before). And came back to me yet again. I had, in other words, three bites of the cherry, right? Trust me, it’s right.

So how come there can be a foolish and amateurish mistake on page 286 of City of Promise? To wit: “The gold,” Zac said, “is in Fort Knox.”

Never mind the context. Only thing that matters is that it’s 1873. And as the aforementioned Clarence Allen, informs me, Fort Knox was not called that until 1918 and there was no gold there until 1937.

How did I miss it? (And it was my error, not that of anyone else.) Because it’s always the things you are absolutely sure of that catch you out. I’ve heard/said/believed “all the gold in Fort Knox” my entire life. Never occurred to me to doubt that was as true for my characters as for me.

But all is not lost. In his e-mail telling me about this bit of simple historical fact Clarence Allen also tells me he loved the book, loves them all, and can’t wait to read more of what I write.

I am sooooo grateful. I love you Clarence Allen, and I promise we’ll fix it as soon as we have a new edition.

Hard cover and e-book edition coming simultaneously. And let me admit here what I am maybe not supposed to say: I love my Kindle! So much so that I have finally decided to put some of my earlier books (written as Beverly S. Martin or Beverly Byrne) in electronic format and make them available for a very modest price. Four of my own personal favorites to start with: Women’s Rites, A Matter of Time, Juffie Kane, and Mollie Pride. Reversing what has become the traditional process and getting books from paper to digital format turns out to be a challenge (read huge pain), but we’re winning. Hope to have them up by mid August. I’ll keep you posted.

First, thank you for coming. I am constantly moved, awed, humbled, and a lot of other things by the readers who visit this site and e-mail to say my books give them pleasure. I try to answer every one, but it seems reasonable to presume others come to the site and maybe click on this blog (where until today they found nothing new in years!) and never e-mail. So I’m taking the opportunity to say thank you to each of you. I’m deeply grateful. And I’m happy to at last manage to share some news.

The last of the City series from Simon & Schuster will be out this summer. What had been City of Gold is now City of Promise because the marketing department thought we were confusing you with all these G’s. (City of Glory, City of God…)

City of Promise takes place in the period immediately after the Civil War (though there’s a prologue in 1863) and ends in 1883 when the city we know was peeking over the horizon.

This is the story of how people found housing in New York if they couldn’t afford a millionaire’s mansion, and weren’t so destitute they needed to live in a rookery, the vile barracks-like containers of misery and filth where the poor were piled together like rats. For the folks in the middle, those neither enormously rich nor penniless, until the late 1860s the only choice was a boarding house. Accountants and clerks and middle managers – the ordinary folk like most of us – had to cram their entire families into one or two bedrooms, and eat boarding house food at a common table.

The answer, of course, was the apartment house, first known as French Flats. How housing for everyman developed in Manhattan, alongside such luxury as splendid Park Avenue buildings with penthouses, is what City of Promise is all about. (Cue Selling New York, now such a hit on HGTV.) It’s also about the first telephones and early electricity… and the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge, which changed everything and occurs just before the book ends.

All this is the background for the story of Joshua Turner – who returns from the war with only one leg, but will become the Donald Trump of the gilded age, and the irresistible Mollie Brannigan, whose upbringing in a whore house teaches her more than she wants to know about men, but also makes her Josh’s perfect wife. I promise lots of wonderful characters: pickpockets and pawnbrokers and seamstresses, and the Macy’s clerks who wore uniforms and worked an eighteen hour day and slept on the counters between shifts – and were forbidden to talk… Plus suspense and intrigue, and a plot with lots of ins and outs to keep you guessing.

City of Promise can be pre-ordered on Amazon now and it will be in your bookstores in July. We’ll also have a new video trailer of the book on the home page of this site shortly. And the cover of the book up even before that.

Do send an e-mail if you want to be on the mailing list to get a heads-up before publication – and possibly a sneak preview. Beverly@BeverlySwerling.com

Last word – I promise to blog again soon with more big news. Watch this space!

Last November I finished book four in the City series, now called City of God. I then took a deep dive into copy editing hell. That followed after working with my wonderful line editor, Syd Miner, at Simon & Schuster. Copy editors do different nuts and bolts kinds of things and I won’t bore you with what they are, except to say that copy editors these days are almost always freelancers hired by the publisher, and while some are wonderful, a good few are disasters. Unfortunately this time I got the latter sort. Then the absolutely terrific head of S&S’s copy editing department stepped in and it all got sorted and ended in triumph. The ms is really clean and beautifully presented. (Thank you Loretta and Tina!)

Think of it like labor. After it’s over you forget the pain and celebrate the baby. So, while no book has ever been written that’s in the same league as producing a real live boy or girl, this one is finally born. Online presales now at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and books will be in your bookstore by late November for an official December 7 pub date. We’re hoping you’ll think of it for some of the readers on your Christmas list.

Meanwhile, first reviews are in (Booklist and Kirkus – aimed at bookstores) and very gratifying. I’ll be sending out Advance Reader Copies in a few days to as many of you as I can (I only get a limited number of these uncorrected proof copies, which are mostly used for newspaper/magazine reviewers) and a greater number of ”toe-dippers” which I talked S&S into making up for me. They are the first seventy-five or so pages of the book (the complete version is 525 pages) and I hope it will make you want to read the whole thing. There will be a new video on the site shortly, and just to whet your appetite, here’s what in the trade we call the flap copy, the about-the-book material printed inside the dust jacket:

City of God, the latest installment in Beverly Swerling’s gripping saga of old New York, takes readers to Manhattan’s clamorous streets as the nation struggles to find a compromise between slave and free, but hears the drums of war. This is New York when one synagogue is no longer adequate for thousands of Jewish immigrants, when New Evangelicals rouse complacent Protestants with the promise of born again salvation, and when the city first sees Catholic nuns and calls them whores of Satan. It is New York when ships bring the fabulous wealth of nations to its wharfs and auction houses, while a short distance away rival gangs fight to the death with broken bottles and teeth filed to points.

Into this churning cauldron comes young Dr. Nicholas Turner. Nick knows the discoveries of antisepsis and anesthesia promise medical miracles beyond the dreams of ages. He learns that to make such progress reality he must battle the city’s corrupt politics and survive the snake pit that is Bellevue Hospital, all while resisting his love for the beautiful Carolina Devrey, his cousin’s wife. Sam Devrey, head of the shipping company that bears his name and a visionary who believes the future will be ushered in by mighty clipper ships spreading acres of sail, battles demons of his own. The life he lives with Carolina in the elegant brownstone on newly fashionable Fifth Avenue is a charade meant to disguise his heart’s true home, the secret downtown apartment of the exquisite Mei-hua, his Chinese child-bride. The worlds of all four are imperiled when Sam must rely on Nick’s skills to save the woman he loves, and only Nick’s honor guards Sam’s secret. On a night when promises of hellfire seem to become reality and the city nearly burns to the ground, Carolina and Mei-hua confront the truth of their duplicitous marriages. Rage and revenge join love and passion as driving forces in a story played out against the background of the glittering New York that rises from the ashes, where Delmonico’s and the Astor House host bejeweled women and top-hatted men, both with the din of commerce in their ears and the glint of gold in their eyes.

As always, Swerling has conjured a dazzling cast of characters to people her city. Among those seeking born again salvation are Addie Bellingham, befriended by the widow Manon Turner but willing to betray her, and Lilac Langdon, who confesses her sins but avoids mentioning that she’s a skilled abortionist in a city that has recently made abortion a crime. Ben Klein, a brilliant young physician, must balance devotion to his mentor and dedication to research with duty to the Jewish community. Wilbur Randolf, Carolina’s father, indulges her in everything but fails her when she needs him most. Jenny Worthington, Wilbur’s long time mistress, is driven by avarice to make common cause with Fearless Flannagan, a member of a New York police force as corrupt as the city it serves. Ah Chee, Mei-hua’s devoted servant, struggles through Manhattan’s streets on bound feet, and burns incense to the kitchen god in this place of foreign devils. They are all here, heroines and saints, villains and victims, and a vanished New York made to live again in an intricate tale of old debts and new rivalries.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, that Monday was also the 144th anniversary of Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address. (Found out by accident when there was a mention of it in a newspaper article.) The reason that’s a little spooky is that the book begins and ends a few hours after the guns of that terrible battle are silent, in a hospital tent pitched at Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg. Where, as no one who is a fan of this series will be surprised to learn, one Dr. Nicholas Turner is doing what the Turners have been doing since Lucas Turner arrived in Nieuw Amsterdam in 1661 in the first book of the series, City of Dreams; Nick Turner is pushing the art of surgery as far as the times will allow. And further.

Nineteenth century medicine plays a big part in this story, which takes place from 1834 to 1857 (the 1863 Gettysburg scenes are a bit of an added attraction that I promise will make sense when you read the book). The medical theme largely plays out at Bellevue Hospital, which was really, really scary back then (the mentally ill in cages, and a half-blind apothecary making what passed for medicine in a basement chamber of horrors). There is also a great conflict between religion and medicine, mostly centered on the subjects of anaesthesia and the truth (or not) of the germ theory of medicine. Plus, it wasn’t until 1857 that the medical faculty of the young New York University School of Medicine succeeded in getting the law rescinded which forbade the dissection of any cadaver other than that of a hanged criminal. Before then it was illegal to perform an autopsy on the grounds that it was an offense against God.

Other elements involving belief and non-belief burst new on the Manhattan stage in this same period. Evangelicalism challenged the supremacy of the more traditional Protestant denominations. And the single Jewish synagogue that had been founded at the time of Peter Stuyvesant became first two synagogues, then three. And by the end of the book there are thirteen, including the first Reform congregation, Temple Emanu-El. This is also the period when Catholic churches began growing like weeds in the cracks of the cobblestone streets, which stretched as far as the low 30’s by then. There were thirty-plus Catholic parishes in the 1850’s – mind you, there were over 300 Protestant churches – and in the 1830’s the first nuns were seen in the town. (Fascinating stuff – I’ll blog more about those first sisters some time soon.)

This bare-faced presence of “the papists among us” struck some as red hot evidence of sin, and one of the big bestsellers of the day was a book called Priests, Nuns, and the Confessional by someone named Maria Monk. What she had to say was exposed as the ramblings of a girl who had never been “right in the head,” as her mother put it, much less a nun, but the book kept selling anyway. So did another book that had a much greater effect on those turbulent times. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold 100,000 copies in a matter of months, and there’s a probably apocryphal story that the first time Lincoln met her he said, “So you’re the little lady who started this great war…”

This book certainly won’t cause armed conflict, but I hope it will be thought provoking as well as enormously entertaining. You’ll be able to make up your own mind in less than a year. It will be at a bookstore near you in October 2008.

So what’s it called? DRUM ROLL!!! City of God, and that title was suggested by one of you, but I can’t find the e-mail so I can send him a bottle of champagne. Will this prescient gentleman who knew what I was writing about before I did myself please get in touch again.

Meanwhile, if you’ve been waiting for City of Glory in a snazzy new paperback version, it’s headed for the bookstores next week. “Riotously entertaining…” according to the Washington Post. Hope Santa thinks of it for some of those stockings.

Do you know about the New York City fire that was the worst urban blaze since the Great Fire of London nearly two centuries earlier? Every one I’ve sprung this on so far, including my very historically knowledgeable husband and ditto agent, says no. Or maybe that they’ve a vague memory of reading something…

• It happened on a night of 17 below zero temperatures on December 16, 1835.
• The fire was fought by 1500 volunteer firemen who pulled their wagons by manpower, jogging along in unison and REFUSED to allow the city to buy them horses, or steam engines to operate their pumps. Not macho enough. Most people – who regularly bet on one fire company over another – agreed and cheered them on.
• There were hydrants and cisterns all over the town, but when they tried to use them, everything was frozen. Even the water they tried to get by cutting into the East River froze in their hemp hoses.
• The firemen formed long lines and jumped up and down on the hoses to melt them, but a howling gale blew what water they could force through the hoses back in their faces.
• They wound up having to pour brandy into their boots to keep their feet from freezing.
• The glow in the sky could be seen as far north as New Haven and as far south as Philadelphia.
• Eventually they held the fire in check by using gunpowder to blow up buildings that stood in its path. Even so, everything from Broad Street to the East River, and from close to the southern tip of Manhattan north to Wall Street burned – over 700 buildings.

A year later six hundred of them had been rebuilt, the city had finally committed itself to a proper supply of running water and to constructing a huge reservoir at 42nd and Fifth (where the main New York Public Library now stands), and two of the most famous pleasure palaces of old New York went up as a direct result: The Astor House Hotel and Delmonicos.

Of course, for the Turners and the Devreys, this is a very personal tragedy…

A prodigious amount of research goes into the writing of a book set in an earlier time. All the shorthand that’s available to the writer of novels set in our own times, or even the recent past, is unavailable to the writer of historical fiction. It is not possible to call on shared experience. The job of that writer – my job – is to sketch in the world of the characters with enough care and detail so that you are able to picture them and their settings, despite the fact that you have no personal experience of – for example – the 1830s in New York City. That, however, is just one of the challenges. We who write these kinds of books have also to make sure that we do not let the history, all that prodigious detail we’ve spent so long studying and cataloging and obsessing over, does not get in the way of telling a crackerjack story that is first and foremost about the characters and the situations in which we’ve placed them. As readers we all care more about whether Pauline escapes after being tied to the railroad tracks then about the nature of the engine that powers the train racing toward her. As the writer I have to know about that engine, probably in a fair amount of specifics, but what I leave out is more important to guaranteeing a wonderful experience to you as a reader than what I put in.

This was brought home to me recently when I was reading the manuscript of a hopeful new writer of historical fiction and found that it’s huge (and virtually unpublishable) length can be blamed on his having fallen in love with his research. He knew how those people dressed and what they ate and where they slept – even what they smelled like. And he wanted we as readers to know that he knew. And we wind up plowing through endless detail saying ho-hum, where’s the story?

Another common error is thinking that the history leads, rather than the story. Here is what I wrote to another writer who has been worrying about whether she can bend the facts of the historical incident that was the inciting point for her novel:
“All novels are based on truth. Whether historical or emotional truth or both. You’re writing a novel inspired by a particular event in France in the 1700s, but if you do not serve the novel first and the facts second, it will ultimately not fly. If you don’t feel you can do that (and it does not mean mangling the history, only using it as a background to your story rather than the driving force), then you should be writing non-fiction in which you simply tell the story of the event. Your choice, but you’ve got to commit your gut as well as your brain to one or the other.”