British Vogue: The Biography of an Icon Part 2 Editing and Production
When I talk to students about editing, I see them roll their eyes and look away. ‘Editing,’ I say in my most enthusiastic voice, ‘is where the magic happens.’ This is usually greeted with a plaintive ‘but I hate re-reading what I’ve written.’ To which I reply: ‘Poor tutor having to read it then.’ I know what they mean, though, and sometimes it is tough to look at your first draft and love it, but writing is a process, and it takes time. Imagine your first draft as information gathering, your second as a first bash at what could become the story, the third a less clumsy version of that and so on. When I finish my first draft it is an unwieldy, shifting pile of sand that has some form but is in serious need of beating into shape. It takes me as long to edit my manuscript until it reaches the form it will have for the editor as it does to write the draft in the first place. Sometimes it takes longer.
Once I’ve finished the first draft, I walk away from it for at least a week, preferably a month. It didn’t happen in the case of this book as things conspired against me. But I did manage to get five days out of my writing room. I think it is important to switch from being a writer to a reader and by that, I mean, to see the story from other people’s perspective. Is there a story there? is the first question I ask myself. On the second read I’m looking for whether the narrative is in the right order. Sometimes this involves moving whole chapters from one place to another. Third read for me is historical accuracy. If I get a date wrong, it can undermine a reader’s trust in my research and once that trust is broken it is very hard to regain it. Over the course of six drafts, I make ever more detailed changes. The last version of the manuscript, which will be sent to the editor, is as good as I can make it. I play with individual words, try to find beautiful but clear metaphors and sprinkle the book with what my agent calls ‘fairy dust’. Only then, after this rigorous process, do I send my perfect book to my editor. That is what happened on 30 August 2023.
And then the fun started. Six weeks after she received the book, editor Maddy Price at Orion sent back her comments and thoughts on the whole book. It turned out that she had plenty to say and offered excellent ideas about where to cut paragraphs or whole stories, what needed to be added to make the narrative flow better and, heck yes, a conclusion. That is always the most difficult thing for me to write. With Vogue we had to decide where to end the book. By a stroke of luck for me, though sad for history, Condé Nast sold Vogue House in the spring of 2024 and with that the greatest chapter in the magazine’s life ended. The company had been in Vogue House at 1 Hanover Square for 66 years, taking on the 150-year lease in 1958 when Audrey Withers was the editor and female employees still had to wear gloves to work.
I had the manuscript with Maddy’s comments for six weeks and then, when I was happy that I had made the changes she wanted, it went to the copyeditor. Here is a person I greatly respect. They are barely ever mentioned when books are prepared for publication, but their role is key. Their job is to challenge the author and call them out on sloppy references. My copy editor on this book was Jane Selley. She was eagle-eyed and picked up several points where I needed to produce explanations or be clearer. The next person in line is the proofreader who is looking at the text in minute detail: checking grammar, removing wayward commas, making sure references tally and generally providing a toothcomb approach. Justyna Bielecka worked on this book and, like Jane, did a great job. All of the changes and tweaks get fed into a first proof which is the moment when I, as the writer, see the book laid out in the form it will finally appear in months down the road. It is thrilling, I’ll be honest.
There are then several more reads of the book in proof form and it is extraordinary how many changes one makes. My first proof had 451comments, ranging from changing a whole paragraph to correcting a spelling. The second had 115, the third 39, and the final version 22. Next comes the index and then the plates, which are the images that tell the story of the book visually. This is a lengthy and complicated process, especially in this case as I had over 70,000 images in my database to choose from. Eventually I whittled it down to just over 50 pictures and worked with the picture librarian at Condé Nast, Frith Carlisle, to clear permission to reproduce these glorious images in the book.
Once that was all put to bed and the cover finalised, the managing editor at Orion, Sarah Fortune, sent everything to the printer. For the first time in my writing life, I went to see my book coming off the presses. On Monday 2 September I drove to Clays in Bungay, Suffolk, with my friends Richard and Carol Pietrzak, to have a tour of the printing works and stand by the huge machine at the end of the production line that spat out copy after copy of my Vogue biography.
It was a great thrill to get to handle a naked book ie, one without its casing, then to get a cased version and finally, to my delight, a jacketed book. And yes, it was warm, so I can truly say it was hot off the press.
Now the book is ready to start its life on the shelves of bookshops throughout the country. We – that is the publisher and I – will do everything we can to promote the book and make people aware of its existence. But ultimately it is you, the reader, who makes the final decision as to whether this book is worthy of a place on your shelves. And that comes back to whether I have done enough work on the original manuscript to produce something that is entertaining and informative as well as beautiful to look at. That look is down to the publisher and the last person to be named – the designer, Chevonne Elbourne. She took Willie Christie’s beautiful image from March 1977 and created my favourite cover to date. In my next blog I will tell the story of the cover picture.
