[Teresa Edgerton]

My first editor (she left the company fairly early in the publishing process) line-edited a couple of chapters and said, "This is how it's done. Now you do the rest yourself." It was a good way to learn. Then, when another editor came in on the project after the first one left, of course she had her own ideas, but wherever she saw a problem, with pacing or whatever, she just pointed it out and left it to me to come up with a creative solution. Most of the editing, though, was done by the copy-editor, who was mainly concerned with keeping punctuation, spelling, capitalization, etc. consistent with the house style.

As for sequels to The Hidden Stars, I've been given no suggestions to date, so I assume HarperCollins expects me to stick fairly close to the original outline I gave them.

To a certain extent, I think it depends on the editor and the house: some are more hands-on than others. At the big houses they usually don't have as much time to collaborate with you, so they won't buy if they think the manuscript needs a lot of work.

Compensation: think of the advance as more likely to come in four figures rather than five for a first-time author. That's just the advance against royalties, however. If the book makes more than expected, then the writer is rewarded accordingly. If the book makes less, the writer still gets to keep the whole advance. As I understand it, most of the time the advance is all the writer will ever see.