Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
When you’re writing for publication, your text will need to be copyedited. And proofread.
No one likes overpaying for a service. No copyeditor likes being underpaid for their skill, knowledge and time.
So how can you keep the cost of a copyedit down? By preparing well. Here are four things to think about, whether you’re an author, a publisher or pre-press company.
Be sure that you’re ready to be copyedited!
This means that the text is finished. You’ve already had beta readers or anonymous peer reviewers, you’ve done all the developmental work, perhaps with a specialist developmental editor. You’ve refined your ideas and the way you express them. If it were up to you, you’d hit the big PUBLISH button yourself!
One great way to waste money is to skimp on this stage. There are few things copyeditors dislike more than trying to edit a moving target. It’s soul-destroying, as well as wasteful of their time and therefore your money.
If you know the text isn’t finished yet, you’re not ready for a copyeditor. If you hire a copyeditor when you’re still working on the content of the document, you will end up with:
- A spiralling bill – you will pay for each iteration of the text that the copyeditor has to work on.
- A worse edit – no copyeditor can keep going over different versions of the same text without starting to miss things through their own growing familiarity with what ought to be there on the page.
- A stressed editor – and, if the work is being done for a fixed fee, an editor who will vow never to work with you again, because no one likes seeing their reasonable fee turned into a pittance by what is, in effect, busy-work. To do that is unfair and unkind.
What won’t happen is that you save time. Don’t do it! Finish the text first. By all means seek out and hire a copyeditor to be ready for when the text is finished, but don’t send it to be edited until you have indeed actually finished it.
Oh, and don’t be tempted to send bits of a larger document out piecemeal. That makes it really hard to get a good result, and it also slows down the editing and the editor has to think her way back into the text each time another chunk shows up, refreshing her memory about your style preferences, and renewing her acquaintance with what’s going on in the text. Slow editing is expensive editing.
Do what you can for yourself
I’ve written already about avoiding author queries – when I’m editing scholars’ writing, the bulk of the editing time, and the bulk of the queries, almost always goes into the references.
So take a look at this post (with handouts!) to help reduce the queries, therefore reduce copyeditor time, therefore reduce cost. If you’re publishing formally, in a journal or edited collection particularly, when time just s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-s, being on top of your references means that your own time and frustration is also saved a year, or two, or three, after you’ve moved on and you don’t have to try to resurrect your sources, either.
Run spellcheck, at least!
If you don’t mind the very modest investment, I’d recommend buying PerfectIt. It’s not another Grammarly, or Word Editor, or anything of that ilk (which make really daft suggestions – not always, granted, but too often). It’s a consistency checker, so it will find hyphenated and unhyphenated versions of the same word or phrase, it will spot serial commas that should, or shouldn’t, be there, you can feed it with preferred spellings, tell it what to ignore, and what to check for always, plus, as the saying goes, much, much more.
You can build a style sheet in PerfectIt reflecting your own organisation’s style, and share it amongst users, so that everyone can keep to the organisation’s style more easily and consistently. I set up a style sheet for each major client, to help me spot the kind of departures from style that can glide past unnoticed.
If you repeatedly publish in the same few journals, you could set up a style sheet for each one, rather than having to remember which one prefers -ise spellings and which -ize, which prefers single quotation marks and which double, which uses UK spellings and which US ones, and so on.
If you’re a publisher, you could create a PerfectIt style sheet for your own style guide, and then send it to your copyeditors so that, if they use PerfectIt (and they should!), they can import it without having to reinvent the wheel, or make an error in setting it up. Or billing you for the time they spent setting it up…
PerfectIt is easily customisable and it’s flexible. It’s more for PCs – a Mac version does exist, but it’s my understanding that it has more limited functionality. PerfectIt is great also for writing that’s not for publication, too – perhaps lecture notes, material for your students, memoranda and so on. (For the avoidance of doubt, I’m a happy user of PerfectIt, and have no financial ties to it or any benefits at all from mentioning it.)
Give a good brief
Be clear what you want done – and what you don’t – so you can brief your copyeditor well, as I talked about recently. Supply the copyeditor with a style guide, if at all possible, and be ready for questions. And when you get them, answer them promptly!
Get a twofer
Make the best economic use of your copyeditor by requiring handover documentation – get the word list, the style notes (i.e. how the copyeditor has applied the style guide to this particular job), and, if you’re the publisher or pre-press company, the list of special sorts, and the records of all the answered queries (if this is applicable to the workflow) and then hand them on to the proofreader.
Any copyeditor worth engaging will produce these handover documents – mostly they need to produce them for their own processes to ensure consistency throughout the book, article or document, anyway, and they should be ready and willing to hand them over.
Why hand them to the proofreader? So that the proofreader doesn’t have to work in a vacuum, pushing up their own fee as they figure out what is probably wanted or having to pepper you with questions (or, if working for a fixed fee, doesn’t see the value of that fee dissolve before their eyes – unkind and unfair, remember?).
This is a two-for-one, making great use of your investment in the copyedit. And who doesn’t like a twofer?
When I talk to proofreaders, it always amazes, nay, shocks, me to hear how rarely the copyeditor’s handover documentation is passed along to them. Proofreaders are left wondering which decision to make, which interventions are necessary and which can safely be left undone, and indecision wastes their time – and your money.
Summary
If the copyeditor isn’t spending time reworking things because the text keeps changing, or picking up the pieces of a hastily assembled bibliography, or finding which of the many possible spellings, hyphenation or capitalisation of a word is the dominant usage, they can spend their time actually looking at the writing, which is where you really want them, and preparing the file for publication. This is, after all, the thinking behind ‘pre-editing’ files by the large pre-press companies – which would work better if it was carried out better. But that’s a different blog post!
And do ask the copyeditor for the right handover documentation, as you can get added value from it by sending it on to the proofreader, and have a happier proofreader who is no longer working in a vacuum.
