Copyediting Deep Dive: Part II
What to Expect From Your Edit
Welcome to Shelf Life, where I will get back to the subject at hand—copyediting—momentariwise. First, I want to acknowledge two special occasions. The first is Joe’s birthday. Joe is Shelf Life’s biggest fan and I appreciate his readership. Joe, happy birthday and thank you for never missing a Shelf Life. The second occasion I would like to mark is the first time my word processor did not give me crap over the word momentariwise. I guess I must have added it to my dictionary at some point.
I use momentariwise to mean something is going to happen “in a moment” and reserve momentarily for its proper use, meaning something is going to happen “for a moment.” This is one of the small ways I enjoy being a grammar pedant in daily life while still leaving room to be wrong about something.
Now that it’s been a moment, let’s turn to the subject. Last Thursday’s Shelf Life started a deep dive into copyediting to prepare developing and new authors for the experience of their first copyedit. Today I’m going to wrap up this exploration of the copyediting process.
Turning over a manuscript for copyediting is scary no matter how many times you do it. And any scary thing is way scarier the first time you do it. If you don’t know what to expect from copyediting, the process can seem intimidating. The best-case scenario is someone tears into your manuscript and points out all its flaws. The worst-case scenario? You might be entertaining thoughts of someone telling you to give up writing because you’re terrible, or even stealing your work and passing it off as their own.
So let’s say you’ve made it through finding a copyeditor and choosing the level of edit you want. You’ve schlepped your files off to the editor and reviewed and approved a sample edit. What’s in store for you next?
The Full Edit
Once the sample edit is in the bag, the edit begins in earnest. The copyeditor will now take their style manual in one hand, your feedback on their sample edit in the other hand, and plunge headfirst into your manuscript.
Some copyeditors work in one “pass” and some work in multiple passes. In this context, a pass means one time through the manuscript: That is, your copyeditor might read your manuscript once and edit everything in that one read, or they may take multiple reads of the manuscript looking for different things in each pass.
I can say from experience that my decision to make one pass versus multiple passes depends upon a number of factors, including how much I’m being paid for the work and how messy the manuscript is. A cleaner manuscript might require less work that can all be handled during one pass. A messier manuscript might require separating the editing tasks into multiple passes. For instance, if reorganization is in the cards for a manuscript I need to do that before I go through looking at flow from paragraph to paragraph and through each chapter. There’s no point working on manuscript flow when the parts aren’t in the right order yet.
If I’m making one pass, I always read at least a few chapters while making notes for myself in my style sheet, and then return to the start of the manuscript to do a thorough edit. Reading a few chapters ahead gives me a sense of the condition of the manuscript and what it will need. Often, the first chapter or two are more polished than those that follow, because the first chapter or two are the ones that had the unenviable task of attracting an agent and then an editor. Subsequent chapters might be more messy, and I want to know that before I start editing the first couple of chapters. There’s nothing like thinking you have a clean manuscript and digging in deep to perfect it only to watch the quality take a nosedive after two chapters and realize you’ve committed yourself to an impossible task.
Whether the copyeditor is doing a single-round edit or multiple rounds, they may send the manuscript back to the author as a whole (all chapters complete) or they may route the chapters to the author piecemeal (one or two edited chapters at a time).
Many editors prefer to complete the whole manuscript before sending materials back to the author, because there’s always a possibility of uncovering something late in the manuscript that will change the editing of earlier parts. However, if time is of the essence and you need to shorten the duration of the copyediting process, you can request chapters flow to you as they are completed so that you may review then while the copyeditor is still working.
Review and Query Integration
As I mentioned in Thursday’s Part I, there may or may not be an author review planned during the copyediting phase. If there is no author review phase planned as part of the copyediting process—that is, if author review occurs after the copyeditor’s work is done—then the copyeditor will skip right to cleanup and finalization, which I’ll describe in the next section.
If the author’s review takes place during the copyediting process, this means the author will review edited files after the copyeditor’s initial edit and will submit feedback to the copyeditor. Your copyeditor will provide specific instructions to you on how to share your feedback with them, but the general rules are these:
If you’re fine with a change the copyeditor has made, there is no need to call it out with an “okay” or “fine.” Just ignore it. The copyeditor will accept this change during cleanup.
If you want to reject a change the copyeditor has made, insert a comment or type inline stet, which means “let it stand as it is set,” that is, “don’t make this change.” The copyeditor will reject this change during cleanup.
If the copyeditor inserted an author query (a question for the author), you can either answer that question in a comment or rewrite the text in question in such a way as the query is resolved.
For instance, if you wrote “That year was horrible.” and the editor queried “AU: What year?” You could either insert a comment to say “1992” and let the copyeditor recast the sentence, or recast the sentence to read “The year 1992 was horrible.”
If you want to make additional edits to your manuscript, either in response to something the copyeditor has done or otherwise, make your edits while leaving track changes on so the copyeditor can check your work during cleanup.
Unless your copyeditor specifically instructs you to do so, do not use the word processor’s review feature to accept and reject tracked changes that the copyeditor has made. The copyeditor will handle accepting and rejecting changes according to your comments during their cleanup process.
When you have completed your review of the copyedited files, return your copy with your additional tracked changes and comments to the copyeditor. They will then proceed to cleanup and finalization of the files.
Cleanup and Finalization
This process takes place either (a) after the author review phase is complete or (b) at the end of the initial full edit, if no author review phase is planned.
If no author review phase is planned for during the copyediting phase, then the copyeditor should return two sets of files to the author: One with track changes still on and all the edits called out, and one clean version with all changes accepted and with queries still embedded either inline or as comments.
If there was no author review during the copyediting phase, then the author completes their review after copyediting is done. The author looks at the file with track changes called out and makes any additional changes, and answers any queries, in the clean files.
If there was an author review phase during copyediting, the copyeditor begins cleanup after the author sends their reviewed files back.
Cleanup consists of going through the edited file and accepting all changes—except those the author requested to stet—and incorporating any additional information the author provided such as query answers or new text. After accepting and rejecting changes, the copyeditor will save a new copy of each file (it’s always a best practice to keep a copy with changes tracked around somewhere). They will also likely check for a few last-minute items—for instance, running spellcheck one more time to make sure no errors were introduced during cleanup.
Once then clean, final files are saved, tracked changes and query answers have all been incorporated, no redlines remain, and everything is perfect, the copyeditor sends that final package of edited files back to the author (usually along with their invoice) and their style sheet (more on this in a moment).
Invisible Changes
The copyeditor will likely not call out all changes that they make to your manuscript using track changes. Some changes will be made either before turning on track changes, or after turning it off, to avoid cluttering up the manuscript. These are invisible changes.
Invisible changes are formatting changes that don’t affect meaning and needn’t be reviewed by the author. They include things like:
Removing two spaces after a period, question mark, or exclamation mark and replacing them with a single space.
Replacing straight apostrophes and quotation marks with curly ones (“smart quotes”).
Replacing paragraph indentations made using spaces with the tab character.
Removing blank line spaces between paragraphs.
If you ask your copyeditor what changes—if any—they made invisibly, they should be happy to tell you. But you can rest assured that these minor changes make your manuscript cleaner and more professional without compromising your meaning. That’s why they’re not called out with tracked changes.
The Style Sheet
Finally, the copyeditor will create the project’s style sheet and send it to the author and the production editor, if the manuscript is being produced at a publishing house, to accompany the book through the rest of its production cycle.
The stylesheet is a document that tracks all the style choices made by the copyeditor during their edit of your manuscript. Style guidance usually comes from three levels of documentation:
Published style manual, like the Chicago Manual of Style or the AP Stylebook. This is the broadest level of style guidance.
House style guide. This is a document that specifies style for a particular publishing company or imprint. This document details where house style differs from the major manual they follow, or where to follow which manual. (Eg, house style may state to follow CMS except for number style, then follow APA instead.)
Project style sheet. This document covers style for a particular manuscript and details any decisions that were made specifically for this project or that contravene house or prevailing style.
The copyeditor will provide their style sheet to the publisher and author so that all parties understand what style decisions were made and don’t accidentally revert them during review or proofreading. For more on style sheets, including a sample stylesheet template, check out Compile Your Style (Sheet).
If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.
For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.
After you have read a few posts, if you find that you're enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.