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He takes you through his process from first(ish) draft to finished page. It is mostly about the high-level process. However, the actual examples were not very useful. Mostly they were too long. It was too hard to trace changes from one step to another, especially since it wasn't the same chunk (usually overlapping, but not identical), and the example was many pages long. He didn't really talk about WHAT he was doing from a word-level, but rather from a process. So he types up new paragraphs and pastes them in, rather than why he put in the new paragraph (he did explain why he took some out). Then he has his assistant type them up on the computer. Then the editors come in.

It is nice that it touches on the part after the author "finishes"--the benefits of editors and continued changes through galleys/etc. I have not seen that in other similar books. That said, he doesn't go into any example in particular detail to really understand how often or how many people or how many times it goes back and forth. The same issue as with the writing section--very high level overview, with some pages with markings as accompaniments.

Perhaps if you copied some pages and did careful comparison with earlier or later you could determine what was going on, but the examples are too long to be able to do that easily as you read, and he does not particularly explain. The pages feel more like illustrations to the text, rather than the text explaining in detail the illustrations.

The Q&A at the end was indeed some of the best part of the book. But overall, Stephen King's On Writing or Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird fit much more what I was expecting from this book.

I did learn some fun things about being an editor in the past, and his process is indeed rather different. I ended up skimming the examples, but enjoyed the text (that was written for this book) as a bit of a window into a very successful writer's mind. It does make me think that version control should be applied to modern writing--so one can go back and look through how you got to where you ended up. The ability to do that is one that, as he notes, is mostly lost with modern computers. But it is fascinating, and sometimes what is cut becomes new stories.