Dear Geist,

My first novel will be out next spring. Happy news! But I got a shock toward the end of production, and I wanted to warn other writers not to get caught like I did. The last step in editorial is to check page proofs. My publisher hired a professional proofreader and also sent proofs to me. I cancelled everything and spent three days on it and sent the proofs back with my corrections. The managing editor called me and said that I owed them a whack of money for inserting all the corrections, and did I want this to come off the last installment of my advance or the first installment of my royalties? It turns out there’s a clause in my contract limiting the number of changes I could make in the last proofing step. Authors are only allowed to mark “actual errors” and a few “non-essential changes” for free. So be careful, fellow writers! Find that clause in your contract and toss it out.

Dear Sadder,

The clause you refer to is standard in most book contracts. It is born of two incompatible facts:

a) that it costs an awful lot of money to make changes to text and/or images in a book once the design, layout, indexing, et al. are finished, because all of those elements would have to be checked and adjusted; and

b) that writers tweak their work at every opportunity, particularly at the end of production when they haven’t seen the book for ages, and now they are taking fresh eyes to the work, and to compound matters the proof looks like a real book.

The solution for most publishers is to include that clause in the contract so that the production schedule and expenses of the book don’t go off the rails at the end. The book publishers we know are also as flexible as they can be about “author’s alterations,” because a happy author is good for every aspect of book marketing.

We’re pretty sure most authors could not get the clause deleted. But we wish you hadn’t learned about it the hard way! And we thank you for pointing it out to the rest of us.