Somewhere Over the Transom, Part II
Two Production Pros to Get You to the End of the Line
“The success of a production depends on the attention paid to detail.”
—David O. Selznick
Welcome back to Shelf Life and part II of my Somewhere Over the Transom duology. Do you hate the word duology? I am not a fan. Back in my day, two books were just two books but now we have to have a special word for everything.
It’s fine. Having a word for everything is what keeps me in business. I’ll live.
Speaking of having a word for everything, a transom—in architecture—is the crossbar at the top of a door (usually an exterior door) that has a window above it (Google a picture of 10 Downing Street for an example). A manuscript either comes to a publishing company by solicitation or it comes in “over the transom.” A solicited manuscript is one that the editor asked for. The editor talked to your agent and asked them to send it over; or, if the editor accepts queries directly from authors, they liked your query and asked you to submit the full manuscript. If they haven’t requested your manuscript and you send it anyway, it is said to have arrived over the transom. As in, the author stood outside the publishing house and threw it through our window. I really think publishing industry people say “over the transom” instead of “through the window” to demonstrate how many special words we know.
Manuscripts that come in over the transom go in the slush pile. Printing your manuscript on orange paper will make it stand out in the slush pile. But not in the way you are hoping.
On Tuesday we talked about the acquisitions editor and the developmental editor and the work they do to get your manuscript ready for production. Today’s article is about the production editor and the copyeditor and the magic they’ll work to turn your manuscript into a real, actual-facts book.
The Production Editor
Once the developmental editor and acquisitions editor are satisfied that your manuscript is as good as they can make it, they’ll transmit it to the publishing company’s production department where it will be assigned to a production editor (PE), also known as a project editor. This is the person who manages the production workflow for your manuscript as it transforms into a finished product. Sometimes the production department is part of the editorial department, and sometimes it is a separate department under the publishing company’s operations arm. Either way, your production editor usually reports to a managing editor, who is in charge of keeping track of the entire company’s production calendar and assigning projects to editors as they transmit.
The first thing your production editor will do is familiarize themself with your book’s specifications. How many words? What’s the trim size of the book block going to be? What’s the word on cover design? Are we doing a paperback? A dust jacket? Both? And most important of all: What is the book’s publication date? They’ll build out a production schedule that accommodates all of the work your manuscript needs and makes sure your book is ready on time for its public debut.
The timeline for publication will have been set in stone during the pub committee meeting. Most of the time it cannot be moved. It’s the production editor’s job to make sure the book gets through all the stages of production so that it is ready to land on store shelves right on that publication date. As soon as the date is set, the marketing department, sales department, and editorial department all start preparing for it. The editorial calendar will be set up to make sure that other book launches won’t conflict with yours, the marketing department will design their publicity push around the date, and the sales team will block time to sell your book. Nothing about the choice of publication date is arbitrary, and your PE will move heaven and earth if that’s what they have to do to meet it. If your book misses its publication date, its chances of succeeding in the market are sunk.
The PE will share the production schedule with you early on and let you know which parts will need your input so you can make sure you’ll be available. At minimum, you’ll need to review copy edits and proofs, and you may also be asked to review additional rounds of edits, look at the cover proof, and sign off on the final proof before press time.
An important note about your production editor: Like your acquisitions editor, much of this editor’s work is not hands-on “editing.” Just as the AE was more involved with market research, sales projections, and contribution margins than they were with crossing your literal Ts and dotting your actual Is, your PE is more interested in managing workflow processes than they are in finding typos. They want the typos to all get found! They just don’t do the hands-on work of finding the typos personally.
The production editor will find the right copyeditor for your manuscript and then prep it for the copy editing process to begin. Prep work may involve applying manuscript styles within the word processing environment, converting word processor files to XML, creating and tagging components of the book’s metadata, and running the text through sophisticated algorithms that use complex rulesets and sometimes even natural-language processing (NLP) to automate as much of the copy editing process as possible. If you’ve used British and U.S. spellings interchangeably, mixed numerals with spelled-out numbers, and applied punctuation inconsistently—that’s all going to be handled by a proprietary algorithm before a human editor sits down to look at the language.
The manuscript then goes to the copyeditor, whose job is big enough that we’ll tackle in detail in its own section. After copy editing wraps, the next step is page composition (still sometimes known as typesetting). Page composition, or “comp,” is the stage when your manuscript goes from that twelve-point Courier double-spaced Word document with one-inch margins around to the carefully laid-out PDF that goes to the printer. Your book’s interior design may be developed specially for your book by a graphic designer, or it may be a template format that is easily adjusted for different trim sizes. Your PE works carefully with the compositor to make sure that your book comes to the target number of pages based on the acquisitions editor’s vision with input from marketing and sales, while making sure to maintain legibility.
Once the proofs are ready, your production editor will be knocking on your door. “Once again,” they will say in their best Bernie voice, “I am asking for you to read your own manuscript.” This is your last chance to make sure everything is perfect before your project goes to press. A professional proofreader will be reading it, too—sometimes more than one proofreader—and your PE may be reading along as well. By the way, the person you were picturing earlier? The one who pores over the text with a red pencil in hand to find mistakes? That’s the proofreader. If your book is going to have an index, the indexer will be working with the proofs at the same time to create it.
Everyone is combing through the text to make sure no typos remain and that no printer errors were created during composition. Once everyone has had a chance to review the proofs and send in their last corrections, the production editor collates everyone’s corrections into one master markup, rejecting any requests that contravene style or introduce errors, and then sends the markup back to the compositor to implement the changes. Comp will send back a clean revised proof, and the PE will check to make sure everything was implemented correctly and no new errors were inserted during the correction process. Production and comp will go back and forth till everyone agrees that the proof is perfect—and then it’s off to the printer and, from there, to the bookstore.
The Copyeditor
The copyeditor (CE), who is sometimes also called a manuscript editor or content editor, is the person who is going to read through your manuscript word by word and make sentence-level fixes like correcting typos, imposing the publisher’s style manual, and fixing grammar and mechanics. If the acquisitions editor and developmental editor feel that the text still needed some more work after the DE was done with it, then your CE might engage in a heavier edit that includes things like rewriting unclear passages to improve readability, suggesting minor reorganizations, deleting duplicate or redundant passages, and eliminating biased language.
On top of that, the copyeditor usually does some additional work above and beyond what we think of as editing the text. They often engage in fact-checking when requested or incidentally when not requested—many copyeditors will take initiative to investigate information that sounds fishy on its face. They’ll edit the endnotes to remove any duplicates and ensure that all references are called out (and, conversely, that every callout has an accompanying reference). They’ll be on the lookout for any material that might require permissions in case the developmental editor missed it.
As if that wasn’t enough, the copyeditor will also insert queries into the text for the author’s attention. When the copyeditor finds something that needs to be rewritten but they’re not sure how to do it without potentially altering the author’s intended meaning, for instance, they will insert a query to ask the author to recast the sentence and explain why. Or they may take a stab at recasting the sentence themself and ask the author to review the edited sentence and confirm that the intended meaning remains intact.
The copyeditor usually is not an employee of the publishing company, and in the rare instance that they are, they do not usually report to the production editor or managing editor directly. Most copyeditors in the present day are editorial freelancers who work directly with authors; or with vendors who provide copy editing services to authors and publishing companies (for example, Editage); or directly with publishers. The person at the publishing company who manages the relationship with freelance editorial service providers is usually called the copy chief or the freelancer coordinator.
Depending on the level of copy editing that a book requires, the copyeditor may communicate directly with the author by email or may instead work through the production editor. If a manuscript needs a heavy, substantive edit, then the CE may send each file as it is edited so that the author can review, answer queries, and provide feedback before the copyeditor moves on to the next file. If the publisher has decided on a lighter edit for the manuscript, then the copyeditor may edit the whole book in one shot and send it back for review as a single package.
The level of copyediting that a book gets depends on what the manuscript needs—how messy it is—and also on its budget. A book that has had a thorough developmental edit or is going into its second (or later) edition will need lighter copyediting than a new manuscript by an inexperienced author. Heavier copy editing costs more (copy editors usually charge per word although some charge per hour) and takes longer. A short- to medium-size book getting a light edit might be done copy editing in a couple of weeks, while a longer book getting a heavier edit could take more than a month.
The proofreader is also a freelance service provider, working independently or through a vendor, and is very commonly mistaken for a copyeditor by inexperienced authors. I’ve had many authors, interested in preparing their manuscript for submission or for self publishing, ask me if I could recommend a proofreader. While I can certainly recommend an excellent proofreader, that is almost never the service the author wants or needs when they come asking.
Proofreaders read proofs, not manuscript, and they read for errors only. They’re not going to improve clarity, grammar, style, mechanics, or language usage. They’re looking for misspelled words and actual typographical errors—that is, errors of layout inserted during the typesetting process like hyphen stacks, tight or loose lines, widows and orphans, dropped characters. If your manuscript has not been typeset to proof then you’re not ready for a proofreader. Proofreading is not lighter or less-expensive copyediting.
So what’s line editing? No one agrees. The term line editing seems to mean something different to everyone in the industry. It’s usually used to mean developmental editing or heavy copy editing. If someone uses this term around you—especially if a freelance editor is offering services—make sure you find out exactly what they think it means. I’m not even going to try to tackle it here.
So that’s it! This week I’ve introduced you to the four editors you’ll meet on your book-publishing journey and how they’ll each help your project be the best it can in their own, different ways. Maybe one day I’ll come back to this topic and talk with you about the editorial roles in journal publishing—because while some of the functions have similar names, the roles are otherwise entirely different. But that won’t be any day soon because the Shelf Life editorial calendar is already packed. Make sure you check back next Tuesday for a rundown of some of my favorite commonly misunderstood words—and how to make sure you use them correctly.
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