Every author writing for publication has to face the moment when they have to hand their text over for copyediting. For authors doing this for the first time, it can be scary! I’ve worked with a fair few first-timers, or people who have written only journal articles before, and are now releasing their first book (often a repurposed thesis).
And I get it. I feel a particular responsibility to the first-timers, as how they feel after working with me will colour their feelings around being edited for the rest of their career, if I get it wrong!
Important context: I work with authors of scholarly books and journal articles in the humanities and social sciences, so what I say here will relate to that. I mostly work with text that has been accepted for publication, but sometimes I’m working on text that has yet to be submitted to the press. If you’re looking for someone to edit your text before submitting it, the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading’s free booklet has useful information on choosing the right professional, and I’ve blogged on it, too.
So let’s take a trot through the typical process for a book – what happens when, who does what, and what it’s like to be copyedited.
Let’s put one fear to rest right away. A good copyeditor will hand back your book to you such that you recognise it! They’re not paid to rewrite it wholesale, so they don’t.
Good copyeditors understand the importance of the author’s voice – the style that makes your book different from everyone else’s on the same subject. The author’s voice must be preserved. What’s the point of publishing cookie-cutter books that could have been written by the same committee? Dull, dull, dull.
The sequence of events
In the context in which I work, files come to me after the book has been accepted for publication. We’re now on the publisher’s schedule, and in terms of the publisher, you’ve probably been handed over from the Editorial department to the Production department. The book is deemed finished. No big rewrites. Not many small changes. There comes a time you have to accept the book is finished, and that time is now.
So, let’s get your text copyedited. (I’m going to be looping back to this in rather more detail!) After I’ve done my stuff, the book goes back to Production for typesetting (also called design or layout), then the proofs are produced. These will come to you, and should also go to a proofreader, but in straitened circumstances, the author may be the only proofreader.
Proofreading is making sure that nothing horrible has happened in the typesetting/layout process. Images are in the right place and the right way round with the right caption. Tables are reproduced legibly, in full, no paragraphs have been included twice, cross-references are correct (or they’re left until this stage if you’re cross-referencing to a particular page number), every mark on every page – running heads, page numbers, chapter titles – is as it should be.
It’s not a time to start tweaking the text – some publishers will actually charge you a fee if you do this.
Sometimes more than one round of proofs is needed to resolve all the issues.
Once the final proofs are agreed, the book goes off for printing and distribution and you’re a published author.
The Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading has produced a free factsheet that summarises all this.
The copyediting
How much contact you have with the copyeditor depends on how the publisher likes to organise the work.
I much prefer to work directly with the author. I think it gives a better result, is kinder to the author and, incidentally, is much more fun for the copyeditor!
In such cases, you can expect to be introduced to the copyeditor by the project manager (also called a production manager or any of a gazillion other titles). The copyeditor should then get in touch to say hello, outline the timescales and how queries will be handled and ask if you have any concerns or questions about the editing process.
This is a great opportunity to make sure your editor has certain background information about the text. Perhaps you’ve agreed with your commissioning editor (acquisitions editor, or some other title) that your book will have certain features – boxes for text, say, or a spelling of a word that isn’t your publisher’s preferred spelling, or perhaps you’ve written in US English and the publisher usually wants UK English, but they’ve agreed to let you keep your own style.
These things ought to be included in the brief the copyeditor gets from the publisher, but, ya know, mistakes happen so it’s as well to ensure the copyeditor knows – we’d rather be told twice than not at all!
When I’m editing a book, I much prefer to send any queries I have chapter by chapter. That lets you get an early look at how your copyeditor is working, which can be a comfort (or alert you to something you need to raise with the copyeditor right away!). It removes that element of the unknown, anyway.
Sending queries out piecemeal like that has several benefits – you’re not expected to work through a book’s worth of queries all in one hit, in a short time, perhaps not at a time that suits you at all.
For me, editing, if one of the queries is, say, a missing reference, then getting that reference can mean that I don’t have to raise that query again in every chapter that it’s cited in. If the query is about a citation where the page number doesn’t fit in the page range of the source, then that can be an early warning that the wrong reference has been included, or one forgotten that has the same date as the one that’s already in the references list.
I also get an early feel for how you, as author, respond to questions about ambiguous drafting, and I can, if necessary, adjust how I phrase such questions, to give both of us a more pleasant time of it. I also get a feel for how quickly you’re likely to respond. I know that you’ll be really busy (often edits land on my desk at the worst times in the academic year – when you’re marking exams, getting ready for the new intake of students or in the run up to the end of a term), so anything I can do to make the queries process simpler for you and easy to handle helps everyone.
Silent changes
The copyeditor will be making changes that they don’t ask you about! These are the ones that bring your text into the publisher’s house style, improve the reader’s experience (splitting overlong sentences or paragraphs), cleaning up all the extra spaces, mid-sentence tabs, wonky spelling and so on.
Depending on what the publisher wants, these changes may be tracked or untracked, so if you get the entire file back to accept and reject changes, hopefully you won’t be faced with a file awash with changing two spaces to one, or removing line spaces after paragraphs (we have other ways of making space after a paragraph without hitting the return key, that work far, far better when the text is typeset).
Author queries
Ah, the dreaded AQs. Personally, I don’t let you have the text back! That puts too much temptation your way to just do a bit of that tweaking I said it was too late for.
I send you a file for each chapter with the paragraph that the query occurs in, and set out my question, with possible solutions, if it’s ambiguous writing, and you reply to me in that same file. When I get that back from you, I update the text and verify anything that still looks a bit wonky with you – we may discuss alternatives to resolve a problem or your answer may give rise to a follow-up question.
Other editors (and other publisher workflows) might send you the edited file with AQs in comments bubbles, and ask you to accept or reject the changes they’ve made, as well as answer the queries.
That is fraught with danger, to my way of thinking.
It allows you to make untracked changes, which may reintroduce something the copyeditor’s been busy removing. Perhaps you like to use serial (Oxford) commas (bread, butter, and tea) whereas the publisher’s style is not to (bread, butter and tea). Or vice versa.
Perhaps you spot somewhere you’d like to add another reference, and bung in the citation, but that new citation doesn’t have a corresponding reference. Or you naturally write with ‑ize spellings, but the publisher insists on ‑ise spellings – if you tinker, bad things can happen.
And if the copyeditor doesn’t see that you’ve tinkered, bad things get perpetuated until the proofreading phase, which suddenly becomes more complicated than it otherwise would have been.
The other drawback is that it can be overwhelming for the author to see just how many small changes the copyeditor is making to what you thought was sound, clean text! And if you’re asked to look at and accept or reject every change, that’s a lot of your time as well as allowing inconsistency to creep back into the file if you’re not absolutely clear in your mind about what you’re accepting and rejecting from the first chapter to the last.
However, some authors like it because they feel they’re in control, and there is something to be said for that. I know my authors feel in control because they get the queries laid out clearly, they’re invited to have discussions with me about points of style, and they remain in the driving seat as far as that works. They’re not going to be allowed to override house style in some areas, or introduce inconsistency!
Keeping to the publication schedule
This is important now – not keeping to the schedule can have serious knock-on effects for everything that happens down the line, and the people who have been booked in to do those things.
I’ve worked with one author who was so bad about respecting the publication schedule that the publisher told me that they would never have that author back.
For you, that usually means that once the copyedit is complete, you don’t get the entire edited text back for ‘one last read through’. The book was finished, remember? ‘One last read through’ is going to invite you to do some last tweaks, which then have to be edited, and that all adds to the time.
It is also really, really difficult to do a good editing job on text that keeps being tweaked!
Further, your copyeditor is almost always freelance (and getting paid a fixed fee for the job, no matter how many last-minute tweaks you want to make). We’ll have the next job already booked in and will be struggling if we have to reschedule our next client, and the one after that, because you won’t let go of the text!
After the copyedit
Once all the queries are answered and the edit is complete, the files go back to the publisher on time, and the typesetting (or layout) begins.
I send my authors two documents to help them when it comes to the proofs stage.
One is my style sheet, which summarises the publisher’s house style as it relates to your book, plus how references are styled, and anything that is a variation from the house style. That tells you what silent changes have been made, and what it’s not worth even trying to change back.
The other is my word list. This lists all the spellings – English allows lots of variation in spellings, so this is where I record which option I’ve standardised on, plus what’s always capitalised, or in italics, or hyphenated, and how names are spelled.
One of the key demands on a copyeditor is to bring consistency to the text, and these two documents are a major part of that. But, of course, they work for you too, as the author checking the proofs (and the documents also go back to the publisher with the files for your book, so everyone is on the same page).
Other ways of working
I have one publisher client for whom I complete the copyedit, raise the author queries (AQs) in comments bubbles, send the job back to the publisher and never see the thing again.
All the things about answering those queries and accepting or rejecting changes happen where I can’t see them – I’ve always moved on to the next book – so I’m not available to explain why a certain edit has been made.
I’m also not available to make all the consequential changes that the answer to an AQ may require, and I do worry that the in-house staff simply won’t have the intimate knowledge of the text that the copyeditor will have achieved, and will miss that an answer actually creates a problem elsewhere in the text.
Further reading
The author–editor relationship is one I keep returning to in my blog, for obvious reasons – it’s the most important relationship in my working life!
Here are some articles from my back catalogue that will help you navigate being copyedited, and give you a flavour of what it’s like to work with me.
About copyediting
Why does my publisher insist on a copyedit? What’s its value?
4 ideas about copyeditors that are wrong
My editor sent me a style sheet. What do I do with it?
Preparing your text for copyediting
How can I cut down on copyeditor queries? (Has downloads for detailed help)
5 key ways to prepare your files for editing
Style sheets: authors, 3 sound reasons to provide to your editor for great results!
Working with your copyeditor’s queries
Authors! How to deal with your author queries (AQs)
Working with tracked-changes files
4 reasons I don’t track every change in Word, for better results
Navigating Tracked Changes in Word: a quick guide
