5 key ways to prepare your files for editing

When you send your files to your copyeditor, it can be a bit of an unknown. Do you have to make your file look like the finished book? Surely you should include all your artwork – figures and tables – in the right place so you can write ‘see below’ and ‘see above’ correctly?

Just what does your copyeditor want from you?

1      Use Microsoft Word

Yeah, Word.

Why?

It’s the industry-standard program, and so most tools are written for Word – Google Docs and other programs just don’t have the necessary inbuilt tools for a copyeditor. Although lots of editors whine about Word almost as a hobby, its ubiquitousness and the variety and power of the tools it has, make it hard to argue with.

Third-party tools are usually only for PC, but sometimes there’s a Mac version, even though it may have more limited functionality. But they’re written for Word.

Some programs, such as Scrivener, are developed with writers in mind to help you organise your thoughts. But they’re awful for editing in, so if you use one of these programs, be prepared to convert your file to Word – there’s usually a button in the menus to convert, or export, the file to Word. That’s what your editor will need.

2      Keep illustrations separate

Including all your artwork – figures and tables, and charts and diagrams and anything else that you have to draw or paste into your Word file – in the main manuscript file is a Bad Idea.

It should be in individual additional files (OK: if they’re all pretty small tables or images then one per page in one file would work, with separate files for images and for tables, regardless).

Why? Three reasons:

• Because your file is going to be far bigger than it needs to be, and sometimes if you have a lot of figures, bigger than Word can comfortably handle without crashing and being slow and squirrelly.
• Because everything’s going to be moving around, and hauling images from being under or over text is a pain and can lead to mistakes. Many’s the time I’ve found a paragraph underneath an image that’s been moved carelessly! If you want to change the order in which figures are displayed, you have to keep shifting them around all the time, and renumbering them, and bringing the captions with them, and updating the mentions in the text.
• Because as the copyeditor tracks changes, the file is going to get bloated and more unstable, and the tracking is going to be horrendous to try to follow.

3      Make your headings clear (but not fancy)

The copyeditor needs to understand the hierarchy of your headings – and, indeed, what’s a heading and what’s a single-line paragraph.

The copyeditor doesn’t want fancy fonts and colours, whether applied with Word styles or by hand, ideally.

It’s enough to put <A> in front of an A-head (top-level subheading), <B> in front of a B-head (next level heading down), <C> in front of a C-head (you’ve got the idea). You don’t have to make it big or bold or italic or centred or anything.

Why? Three reasons:

• The copyeditor is certain to strip out all your personal styles. A whole conglomeration of stuff will have accumulated, anyway, as you’ve developed your manuscript. It makes the file a bit unwieldy, and is a real pain when it comes to importing the edited file into the book designer’s or typesetter’s software. It becomes the first half of ‘garbage in, garbage out’. So it’s wasted effort on your part.
• The copyeditor may be required by the publisher to use a template of the publisher’s own styles, that have been built to cooperate with the typesetter’s software to make that transfer more reliable, so again, all your styles will disappear. However, if you’ve used Word’s basic inbuilt heading styles, it’s easy for the copyeditor to use Find and Replace to use the publisher’s styles instead.
• It’s tempting (and exciting!) to lay out your manuscript how you imagine it will appear when published. Well (unless you’re self-publishing), the publisher’s house style will dictate the fonts, colours, sizes and positioning of the typefaces used. Again, it’s wasted effort on your part.

PS If you’re comfortable with Word styles, it can help to use Heading 1, Heading 2 etc. as well as the <A>, <B>, <C>. It’s fine to use the default definitions – what’s important is using the basic inbuilt style names. You get the benefit of navigating your file more easily, as does the copyeditor, immediately.

4      Don’t anticipate the page flow

I get a lot of manuscripts that introduce a figure or table with ‘as you will see in the figure (or table) below…’. This is another Bad Idea.

Why?

Because you don’t know where those words will be when the pages are made up. The figure or table may now actually be above, or overleaf! Books just don’t get to market A4 (or letter-size) with the same size margins and fonts as you’ve used in the manuscript – it all shifts around on the smaller paper size and with the different typefaces and fonts.

So number all figures and tables, and refer to them in the text by number, then there’s no confusion for the reader, and none for the copyeditor, typesetter and proofreader.

5      Check your changes

When you’ve got everything ready to send off to the publisher or directly to your copyeditor, STOP.

THINK.

Did you make any last-minute changes?

Did you cut a chunk, or add one? If so, did you delete unused references (unless they’re used in the remaining text, of course)? Did you add the new ones?

Did you cut or add some artwork? If so, did you renumber the illustrations list and the illustrations files themselves? And did you remember to reflect all these changes in the text?

Believe me, a lot of authors miss this step out and it takes a lot of to-ing and fro-ing to be sure that everything is as it should be, in the right versions. It must be really annoying for the author having the copyeditor bleating away at them! And it’s easily prevented.

A warning

There are good reasons for doing things in the proper sequence. Trying to do the things that come later in that sequence at the beginning can and does create problems that will require undoing and redoing lots of work.

You’re not so much ahead of the game, or being efficient, as throwing extra obstacles across your own path, and your editor’s.

Outcome of steps 1–5

When you follow these 5 steps, good things happen.

You don’t waste your own time and you don’t waste the copyeditor’s time (and so no one has to pay for it, or wait for it).

You get a more reliable result because less needs to be changed in the edit and so there’s less risk of accidents happening.

And you don’t have to fight fires weeks, months or in some cases years after you finished your writing. What’s not to love?

If you liked this and want more info on how to save yourself time and effort when your manuscript is being copyedited, you might like to take a look at How can I cut down on copyeditor queries?