Copy Editing Phases And Scheduling The Work (Or, How I Returned My Copy Edited Files to Routledge 4 days Before My Deadline)

Late last month, the copyedit of my book arrived. This past weekend, I sent it back.

If you have never published a book, this is the stage called copyediting corrections. A copyeditor has gone through the manuscript line by line — tightening, querying, catching the things I stopped being able to see months ago. Then it comes back to the author, and my job is to answer every question, accept or decline every change, and return the whole thing for typesetting. Not long ago I wrote about the copyedit coming back, and the small panic of seeing your own sentences marked up by someone very good at their job. This is the other side of that beat — the part where you let it go again.

Here is the part I most want to tell you about, because it was a choice I made that mattered to the project and its trajectory.

I gave the book my weekend. On purpose.

During the week, my desk belongs to other people’s work — dissertations, articles, a client’s own book on a deadline of their own. I did not want my deadline to intrude on clients’ time, an hour here and an afternoon there, until the people who were paying for my full attention were getting something less than that. So I did the thing I am always telling my authors to do: I protected the work by giving it a place of its own. Saturday and Sunday, the book had my whole attention, and my clients had their weekdays undisturbed. I finished four days ahead of the deadline.

There is something fitting about spending a weekend that way. The book that has waited years for me could have my two quiet days, and no one else’s hours had to be borrowed to give them. I wanted to devote these hours to just this project, my own writing voice, and the sacredness of the topic itself: grief and synchronicity.

The work itself was calmer than the word “corrections” makes it sound. I answered the author queries — most of them “please confirm” — read my own quiet way through every chapter one last time, checked that the headings and tables were consistent, and, in the very last chapter, found a sentence describing the structure of the book that no longer matched the book. A leftover from an earlier draft and the first outline before the structure changed, invisible to me but not to the copy editor. I fixed it. Then I zipped the files and sent them back.

Sending it back is its own small ritual. The file is protected, so every change I make is tracked; I answer the queries in the margins, comment by comment, the same way my own clients answer mine. There is no dramatic final keystroke — just a zipped folder, an email, and the quiet click of handing your work to the next set of hands.

Mostly I feel quiet.

There is a particular kind of tired at the end of a long, careful task — not the tired of too much, but the tired of a job well cared for. The book is not finished. It goes to typesetting now; the page proofs will come back to me in a few weeks; then I will build the index; and then it will be finished. But this pass — the last time I will read it as a manuscript rather than as pages — is over, and I’m through it.

If you are somewhere in the middle of your own long document — a dissertation, a thesis, a first book — I think this is the part no one warns you about. Not the blank page, but the long, careful tending at the end. The ideas are already there, and the task now is making them clean, consistent, and true. The work can be slow and unglamorous. But it is worth doing well — worth protecting, even, with a weekend of its own, so it gets your real attention instead of the scraps left over from everything else. Don’t cram in your copy edit. Luxuriate in it.

It takes a village to raise a book.

The patience of publishing.

Warmly,

~Jennifer

I’ve been writing this whole process down as it happens — the waiting, the queries, the letting go. If you’d like to follow the rest of the way to print, subscribe for the next update.