Alexis Glynn Latner was nice enough to contact me through my website last week to let me know how much she appreciated the job I did on her novel Hurricane Moon (which is wonderful hard SF with a romantic twist):
I e-mailed the MSS back today, much improved, thanks to you! I attached a cover letter reiterating important changes I made in response to your excellent questions. Thank you again! Great information about copyediting here under Best Of, and I plan to direct students’ attention to the URL this spring when I teach an editing class.
When I wrote back to thank her for the kind words, she shared that she had also written the following to the editor:
Deanna has done marvelous, meticulous, astute work and I’m so glad she’s in the process. It’s like a safety net so a whole raft of glitches, typos and murky sentences are not going to be out there for the world to see.
And she had written to the production editor about the job, as well:
Deanna caught tons of glitches and asked many questions that made me clarify things. And she really has an ear for clear, flowing prose. I’m extremely glad to be working with such an astute copyeditor.
It’s really wonderful when authors take the time to let you and others know they’re happy with your work. Thanks, Alexis!
ETA: Oh, and she also has nice things to say about me on her shared blog, No Fear of the Future.
How nice! :)
The more I read your blog, the more I hope that, should I ever finish the novel I’m writing (am stuck, stuck, stuck on second-to-last chapter, sigh) and find a publisher for it, I will be able to persuade them to hire you to copy-edit it …
I love getting positive feedback from authors — it happens all too rarely, since most of my authors bother to write to me after the fact only if something terrible has happened.
I keep a file, though, of all the nice things authors (and journal editors!) have said about me, and copies of every publication in which I’ve been acknowledged (not very many, since I mostly do journal articles), and I get it out and look at it on the bad days.