Do Publishers usually edit the book?

Is that why there were changes to the American version (i.e. changes the American editor suggested?)

(1) Yes, most definitely. Publishers ALWAYS edit any book they publish, even if that book has previously been available in an edited version. It makes sense, too, if you think about the amount of money involved and invested for purchasing rights, setting up and designing the edition, and then marketing the finished product. Never trust or blindly accept another publisher’s edited product — editing is purely a matter of taste.

I can ratify that from personal experience, by citing the example of two separate editors with whom I have worked, who had widely differing ideas on the stylistic use of semicolons. Neither of them was wrong, since each understood the primary use of the semicolon in punctuation, but each had firm ideas on the style element and a style is self-defining by definition. I learned to live with both of them, mainly by cutting back drastically on my own use of semicolons and substituting an em-dash wherever possible.

On the other hand, there are more glaring examples of the need for re-editing that only come to mind on reflection. I’m a Canadian, expatriate Brit, which means I use words like colour, humour, neighbour and odour, and I double all my ells in words like travelling, marvelling and shovelling — and those are only the first examples that spring to mind. Now, my Canadian books, from Viking Penguin, all have the Canadian/UK spellings as the norm. The Americans had to change all that, and to make judgment calls on the dozens, perhaps hundreds of individual words that don't fall easily into either the 21st-Century US or UK category

2) Having said all of the foregoing, I now have to add that the differences between the Canadian and the US versions of the stories are as much due to good fortune (from my viewpoint) as to editing...

I had spent almost fifteen years writing the first three novels in the series before I went looking for a publisher. Penguin Group (Canada) bought the series. The Canadian Version of the Skystone appeared in 1992, and it had been through perhaps seven or eight complete rewrites prior to that. It was originally what used to be called "a man’s book." — not out of voluntary, willful sexism, but merely because of who I am and what I was...the product of an age, a British Imperial/Colonial mind set, and my own father’s upbringing. I set out to tell the story of a group of men, professional soldiers all, who dreamed about the rebirth of the greatest society — and the most successful Empire — the world had ever known, based, this time around, on the island of Britain. Their Dream was 1,000 years premature. Their first step towards realizing it, however, was the unification of the country for the first time under one ruler, and that man was the man we today call King Arthur. Now, having said that, I have to add that I had never known, or visualized, a female editor. I had no notion — no vestigial concept — of the power (beneficial and beneficent) that editors in general and female editors in particular can bring to focus on work like mine... Nor had I the slightest understanding or anticipation of the impact and the effect that the articulate and critical opinions of real, cash-paying female readers would have on my own perspectives. Since then, beginning in 1991, I have been massively and convincingly reorientated and reconstituted, to the point at which I have come to terms with not only the needs and requirements of my female characters, but I have even been brought to an awareness of their personalities and their crucial importance to the development of the entire story of Merlyn and Arthur and Camulod. So The Skystone was published in 1992 and The Singing Sword in 1993, and I had begun receiving regular feedback from my readers before The Singing Sword hit the bookstores. Eagles’ Brood came out in 1994, and by that time, I had been working with women editors for three years, and learning a whole lot about life and writing and telling tales... In 1994, then, Tor/Forge books bought the series and wanted to change the name from A Dream Of Eagles to The Camulod Chronicles ... I was leery about that, but I bowed to their American marketing expertise. Now I kinda wish I hadn’t, but that’s neither here nor there.

The important thing about that sale was that there had been a three- to four-year gap between the two publications of The Skystone — Time enough for me to have become aware of all the things I wished I had changed or done differently; time enough for me to have absorbed and heeded all the comments from women who seemed invariably to say "Gee, I wish you had dealt more with Luceiia Britannicus and made her more prominent and more real." Time enough for me to come to believe that there was too much blood-and-guts action "up front" in the first edition (120-odd pages of trauma before the first mention of anything other than war and wounds.) Tor Forge allocated me an editor — another woman, this one called Blessed Claire Eddy — and her first words to me were along the lines of: "I really wish you’d told me a bunch more about Luceiia Britannicus, and can we do something about that 120-page-long trauma ward incident at the start of the book...?" I was home, and the American version of the book reflects and contains that phenomenon that is most unusual in an author’s life: a second chance to do the thing and get it absolutely right this time... Of course, having done it now, and human nature being what it is, there are still things I’d like to change and improve....