Seeking editorial support for your text? Reach out to discuss how I can best support you on the road to publication.
Seeking editorial support for your text? Reach out to discuss how I can best support you on the road to publication.
After you’ve refined the prose with a line edit, the next step is to have someone review the text for continuity, style, and inconsistencies and errors in grammar and mechanics.
Working with a copyeditor is like having someone maintain your yard on a regular basis. I’ll mow the lawn and tidy up the edges, pull weeds, deadhead the roses. It’s a fine-tuning of what the landscaper (or line editor) did before me. I’m not going to address overcrowded areas or do any heavy pruning, but I’ll make sure your yard looks well tended, with nothing wildly out of place.
As they edit, copyeditors develop a document called a style sheet, where they list your style preferences. This ensures that every instance is treated in the same manner (e.g., you prefer dreamt over dreamed or perhaps you want to set all dream sequences in italics). Copyeditors also generally perform light fact-checking tasks to ensure proper nouns are spelled and capitalized correctly, dates for significant historical events are accurate, and so on. More rigorous fact-checking may be required for certain texts, such as historical fiction or any text that includes real people and events. The style sheet also includes a word list, where all proper nouns are recorded. These details are particularly helpful for the proofreader, who will use the copyeditor’s style sheet to guide their review of your manuscript.
“Erin is gifted at seeing the mission of a project and helping the project fulfill those promises. She is also not afraid to pull up her sleeves and really get into the nitty gritty details. For example, she cross-referenced all the harvest dates provided throughout my books with a harvest calendar I created, and found that there were a lot of inconsistencies I hadn’t noticed, correcting each one and consulting me for accuracy. She also dug into my recipes with fruitful insights that made the recipes way more clear to readers. The depth, organization, and clarity of Erin’s work makes me feel incredibly grateful to be working with her for a second time.”