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.

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.

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’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)?

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?

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!