Step Fourteen: The Copyedit

The Moment In The Editorial Cycle When You Learn The Most About Writing

Here we are at the next step in the process, the venerable copyedit. This is the point in the book’s lifecycle that generates a lot of work but also turns your manuscript into a book. A good copy editor is worth their weight in gold. Any author who’s gone through an excellent copyedit knows what I mean, and any who’ve gone through a not-so-great one can attest to this truth: the copy editor makes or breaks this stage of the book.

I was lucky enough to be copyedited old school the first few times. Now the standard is to use Track Changes in Word, which automatically fixes many of these issues for you. But in the dark ages of the late 2000s, you used to get the physically copyedited manuscript back with all those lovely little codes all over it, and you had to rework your manuscript by hand. It was challenging, to say the least, especially when you had exactly no idea what all those marks meant.

It’s been nearly eighteen years since my first “official” copyedit, and I still remember the moment that red-tinged physical manuscript landed in my actual mailbox and made me realize that everything I thought I knew about writing, grammar, syntax, punctuation, consistency, vocabulary, and just plain storytelling was severely lacking. And that was with a degree in creative writing and years of book study under my belt.

Photo by Marcos Paulo Prado on Unsplash