Copyediting Electronically
Published by Deanna Hoak February 7th, 2006 in copyeditingI’m still pulling questions from the comment threads, and probably will be for a while. :-)
asked: Is most fiction still edited in hard copy? All the university presses I do work for have switched to electronic files, copyedited onscreen. I love this: I can work much faster, and it’s trivially easy to go back and find something–gone are the hours spent paging back through to find something “I know I saw.”
All of the big fiction houses I work for still edit on hard copy. The smaller presses edit electronically, which I far prefer. This is an area the big houses just haven’t caught up on yet. IMHO, editing electronically produces far cleaner copy, but the copyeditor has to know how to do it properly to avoid problems.
The authors I work with far prefer electronic editing, too. I got special dispensation to copyedit the British and American versions of China Miéville’s Iron Council electronically, using Word’s “Track Changes” feature, and China has said he never wants to have to go back to paper; reviewing changes is far easier for authors when they can simply click a button to go to the next one, and then click another button to accept or reject it.
If I have to edit on hard copy, it’s enormously helpful to me if the author or publisher can provide me an electronic file for use in searching as I copyedit. Most don’t do this, or they provide files broken down into chapters–which means I have to search individually through each chapter’s file to find something.
I don’t know when the big houses will start editing electronically. It’s really a pity to endure paper’s limitations when every book these days is on an electronic file somewhere. I’ve even considered organizing a seminar to teach publishers about electronic copyediting, since I started handling files that way more than a decade ago. I think the publishers would benefit from it enormously.
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I'm a freelance copyeditor specializing in fantasy and science fiction. SF/F novels I have copyedited have been finalists for (and have sometimes won) the Hugo, Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke, Golden Spur, John W. Campbell Memorial, Quill, Locus, Philip K. Dick, British Science Fiction, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy awards. In 2007 I was short-listed for a World Fantasy Award for my copyediting.
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When you copyedit electronically, do you also do one pass on paper? Or do you find everything on screen?
BTW, if you ever decide to teach about electronic copyediting, don’t limit your audience to publishers… I’d be willing to recommend you to the STC (Society for Technical Communications), which offers webinars to its membership of technical writers and editors.
Hello! I’m here from either ’s or ’s recent links to your ‘how to make a copyeditor’s life easier’ post, and I’m finding the discussion of copyediting and publishing in general very interesting. Mind if I add you to my friends list?
Of course not! Add away! :)
Thanks for getting to my question!
reviewing changes is far easier for authors when they can simply click a button to go to the next one, and then click another button to accept or reject it.
Ah, big difference: the university presses I copyedit for do not let the author touch the copyedited electronic file. The authors have to do their reviews on hard copy. Authors of scholarly nonfiction books, no matter how big their names in their fields, don’t have the same veto power that many fiction authors do; they of course have the final word on content, but not on grammar, style, and usage.
The files I receive are broken into chapters (except for those from one small university press, which sends me one enormous lump). But nonfiction works typically have fewer chapters than fiction–I seldom have a ms. with more than ten chapters–so searching through several or even all of them electronically is a snap compared to the old days of paging through by hand and scanning every line.
Sorry–fairly obviously, that was my comment. I’m on the family computer and forgot to log in.
I do miss HarperCollins’s ETM software. They had a whole electronic editing and typemarking system set up about eight, ten years ago.
I work for many university presses as well, and 90% of my work is online now… I’ve been doing it for years, and it IS much faster in some respects. As I tell curious folks though, it’s just DIFFERENT than editing hard copy. Some things are easier, some things are harder. Some typos are very difficult to see on screen, whereas they would be easier on hard copy.
Recently I had a 1400-page hard copy behemoth to edit… it was all done in TeX, which is great for science and math titles, but will not typeset! I always have to edit those on hard copy.
And Hello to Deanna, A friend recommended your blog to me, so I’ve added you to my friends!
I agree that editing on screen is just different than editing hard copy, but I think the differences have to do with the individual copy editor, not the processes. For example, I find more typos on screen than in hard copy–I don’t know why, but they stand out more to me on screen.
The consumer computer books I edit are entirely done digitally, using Word with custom macros for formatting and then .pdfs for proofs. I like the digital editing part, but I still read them in hardcopy, then mark up the digital file.
I’m glad to hear you guys generally like the electronic systems, because I hear the winds of that coming at my company, and I admit my gut reaction is YOU GUYS ARE OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MINDS!!
But, you know, that’s speaking purely from theory, not empiricism. I admit to a bit of a reactionary streak.
Deanna, can you describe the electronic copyediting process a bit more? Usually we have a managing editor who, er, resolves any disputes between author and c/e. How does that work when the author has the ability to nix everything?
Do you handle electronic copyediting only in MS Word? What if an author has a different program, or an older version, say?
Thanks! I sometimes get to do some editing of technical articles at work and I enjoy the process of going through and tweaking or querying things, although I’m not sure I could do it full-time. It’s definitely interesting to see how these things are done properly!
I agree it would make the publishing world a lot happier if everything was standardized and formatted.
I’ve had authors who did not write on a computer–they handwrote drafts and then typed it up on a typewriter. We weren’t paying them enough money for them to buy even a refurb’d machine with peripherals, printer, and the lessons to learn how to use it. The money used from the advance was going towards living expenses and no one was counting on royalty checks. Computers, to those writers, was not a necessity.
I’ve had authors who were also still using old word processing programs pre-Windows 95. Again, these are the kinds of authors who did not have the money to upgrade and using their ancient system to tap out some documents was working just fine for them.
These are probably the smallest percentage of writers a publishing house sees, but still, what would happen to these writers if they didn’t submit in an e-format? Or how much would it cost the publisher to create an e-file from a hardcopy (pay in time or some beta scanning software)?
I’m curious about the process of electronic copyediting. I’m taking an on-line editing class at the moment, and the teacher keeps mentioning how much easier it is, but hasn’t yet gone into the hows. I’ve always like to do my (own) editing on hard copy, as I can take it on the bus, to the cafe, whatever. Plus, I love the feel of pencil and paper. But I can see how it could be faster and more efficient to do it all in Word (or similar).
The few times I’ve used “Track Changes” in Word, though, I’ve found it to be very messy. This is probably because I don’t really know how to use it, though. :-)
I work as a copyeditor for small to medium-sized presses in the SF, fantasy, and horror field. Most of the work I do is done electronically using Word’s Track Changes.
When accepting a job, I am very careful to find out what operating system and program version was used to create the file I am receiving. One hazard of electronic editing is that errors, especially formatting errors, can creep in if a file is migrated into a new program.
However, the Track Changes function is delightful, and well worth the effort of making sure that the file is imported correctly.
With Track Changes, I can see everything: footnotes, endnotes, placeholders for illustrations, comments embedded by the author and editor, etc. My changes and comments are marked in red; as the author and editor go through the edited file, their changes and comments are marked in different colors. When the editor does the final pass before layout, they can see everything that has gone before, and choose which version of each change they wish to keep, or simply decline all of them and make their own change.
Word also has function to show formatting marks - at a click of the mouse, I can see every space, paragraph mark, and carriage return. This makes it simple to tell if a stray space or carriage return has crept in where it doesn’t belong.
The obvious ease of using Find and Replace instead of paging through by hand needs no explanation. In addition, I can (and do!) back up my work on my hard drive and on a USB drive every few hours (this was a godsend when my hard drive broke near the end of a 1500-page mss). I can make my notes and comments as complete as necessary, without worrying that the note is too crapmed to make sense. When I receive a style sheet containing words unique to a certain project, I can add that list into Word’s Custom Dictionary, and have the backup of electronically checking the spelling of these terms.
Even better, my laptop is usually easier to carry around than a full manuscript, and I do not have the expense of making a photocopy of the manuscript before consigning it to the tender mercies of the shipping service.
I have some experience copy editing electronic files. I occasionally work for magazines–there, each article is generally edited onscreen in Quark or InDesign, then the art people format the page (which may contain several articles, as well as photos, other art, captions, and ads [we don't deal with the ads--they're just gray boxes to us]), and then a partial or complete proof of the page is read on paper.
I’ve done one entire novel for a smaller house electronically. There are a lot of advantages to this–especially if there are consistency problems. You can search the entire file, see what the predominant usage and variants are, and just run through it all and make it consistent. However, if you don’t know what you’re doing with search and replace commands or spell checks, you can really mess things up royally. “To err is human, but it takes a computer to really fuck things up,” as they say. For this house I actually did more than just edit–I entered the editor’s occasionally extensive handwritten edits in the Word file, and reformatted the file for bound galleys.
I’ve also done portions of multi-author books in Word’s Track Changes mode, as well as entering others’ corrections in-house for a number of publishers. (I enjoy doing this–it’s essentially being a typesetter, but it’s fun, and it generally pays well.) Most houses there days use outside typesetters at least some of the time, but several are becoming (to a greater or lesser extent) more like giant desktop publishing enterprises, where the production editors are responsible for entering some or all of the copy editing or proofreading changes. I think this is probably the wave of the future.
I do think it’s important to see things on paper at some point. Electronic files can have hidden codes that can wreak havoc with design. And one little comma can rewrap pages and pages and create widows or even bigger design problems.