Do what you can elsewhere.' Instead, I put my energy into more useful things, like guest blog posts and working on totally new stories. I had to tell myself, 'Those numbers are inaccurate. I quickly learned that I could not check my BookScan numbers on Amazon or I would go crazy. I was enormously stressed when the book came out. TQ: What do you wish that you knew about book publishing when The Clockwork Dagger came out that you know now?īeth: That I can only control so much. I doubt I'll ever again have a book that's so easy, so ready to write. I've had 4,000-word short stories that have been more painful to edit than that whole novel. The amazing thing is, the editing process was straightforward after that. I ended up writing the whole rough draft of Clockwork Crown in a single, frantic month. Since it's part two of a duology, I knew I needed to tie up most all of my loose threads, and my outline was very detailed in that regard. Those deep edits helped me to prepare for The Clockwork Crown.

After all that, when my revision letter arrived from my editor at Harper Voyager, she wanted extensive revisions, too. My agent had me do a series of very, very heavy revisions to hone the world-building and get the book in shape to submit to editors. I always outline heavily-heck, I even outline flash fiction sometimes-but writing The Clockwork Dagger was very much a discovery process for me. My writing process changed pretty drastically between the two books. Has your writing process changed (or not) from when you wrote The Clockwork Dagger (2014) to The Clockwork Crown?īeth: Thank you! It's wonderful to be back here. Your new novel, The Clockwork Crown (Clockwork Dagger 2), will be published on June 9th.

The Clockwork Dagger by Beth Cato