From the Editing Desk — August 2026
A monthly note on the real work — the book I am publishing, and the manuscripts I am helping other people finish. Client names and details are kept private; what I can share is the shape of the work.
August was a month of endings, and most of them were quiet ones.
A dissertation edit went back to its author three days early. An article went to its journal nine days early. My own book left my hands for the last time, one day early. And two editing engagements ended because the manuscripts in front of me were not at the stage where my contribution as an editor was helpful, and to save my clients money, I let them know that, with the promise that I’d edit their work when they were closer to defense.
The book
The page proofs for Synchronicity in Grief (Routledge) arrived on August 21 — the typeset book as a PDF, with corrections entered in an online proofing system. One review only. There is no second set for the author, so I focused on catching every remaining error I could find.
Then the index, which I built myself. I generated 934 unique entries across 1,329 occurrences and had to cut the list to 700, which I did by rule rather than by feel, keeping every cut entry recoverable in case I was wrong. Then came the locators — 997 of them — page number by page number, in work sprints of about two hours, because that is roughly how long my eyes hold out. I budgeted thirty hours for the index. It took most of them.
And then I had to do it again. Assembled and read back as a document, what I had was not an index but a concordance — a list of every place a word appears. I rebuilt it by hand, and the index that went to Routledge is 354 entries.
Everything went back to the production team on Sunday, August 30, one day before the deadline. Production is finished. The book releases October 19, and pre-orders open September 15. I wrote about the proof-and-index stage in more detail in Page Proofs and an Index, including explaining how I built a 1,500-entry index before I read the publisher's guidelines and then spent a week cutting it back, and about the rebuild in The Last Thing I Will Ever Do to This Book.
It takes a village to raise a book. In August, the village was a typesetter, a production editor, a proofing platform I had never used before, and a lot of hours at my own desk.
Dissertations and manuscripts
A doctoral dissertation in organizational leadership at Columbia International University came through a full-service edit and went back to its author three days ahead of the promised date and under the estimated hours. Most of the work was structural. The contents pages had been built by hand, which means they can never update themselves; they are now generated from the document's real heading structure, with real page numbers. The tables and figures were rebuilt to APA 7. The last pass was a program compliance sweep, which I use as a final proofread as well, so the two jobs pay for one set of hours.
A second organizational leadership dissertation at the same university came aboard at the end of the month for a September start. Before that author decided anything, he received a tracked sample edit of his file, a written findings summary, three service options priced line by line, and a day-by-day schedule for each one. I want clients to see the work and the calendar before agreeing to collaborate on their edit with me, because that helps us stay engaged and working as a team.
Another client was in an unfortunate situation. She had already defended her dissertation, but during the university style check, they found issues with her file from a previous editor she had paid over $1500 to prior to coming to me for help. She was then confused by the difference between ProQuest’s upload requirements and her university’s style. That project is a good illustration of an order of operations most PhD candidates have backward: the university template and the program's own policy govern approval, and the repository submission to ProQuest is a separate step that comes later. Both happen because after a doctoral candidate goes through defense, they continue to make changes to the document, which invariably introduces new errors that then fail to pass the university’s style department. This can delay graduation, and many schools will not release the dissertation’s signature page until all of the remaining editing work is completed. So if you are in this situation, please be ready to send your file back to your editor for a final round of edits after you make changes to it based on your committee’s feedback or other revision reasons.
The two engagements that ended
Two dissertation projects concluded this month, both on my recommendation, and both for the same reason: the manuscripts were still in developmental revision. Substantive feedback from a mentor or a committee was still arriving and still changing the argument. Copyediting a document at that stage means paying me to polish sentences that are about to be rewritten.
One author was invoiced only for the work already delivered. The other received her edited chapter and a full feedback letter back at no charge, so she has something useful in hand whenever she returns.
I do not think of either of these as a lost job. Telling a writer “not yet” is part of what an editor is for.
Coaching
A clinician I have coached for a couple of years submitted his article to its journal nine days before his own deadline, and we worked as the article pivoted to a featured blog post on the journal’s website, potentially reaching a much wider audience.
Editorial work
On the transpersonal psychology special issue on grief, August brought a new batch of new resubmitted articles for me to review and prepare to send off to peer review. Editorial management is mostly the work of making an invisible process legible to the people waiting inside it — what happens next, roughly when, and what is genuinely not knowable yet. The one thing I never do is promise a publication date. The special issue is shaping up nicely, with topics ranging from the cultural aspects of grief to the clinical application of creativity to working with it.
What August taught me
Nearly every decision I made this month was about timing. When is an index finished. When is a chapter ready for a copyeditor. When does an article go out. When do I tell someone that the most useful thing to do right now, is wait. The patience of publishing 😌
If you are somewhere in this process of academic writing and publishing
If you are trying to work out whether your manuscript is ready for an editor — or whether you are in the “not yet” stage — the free Are You Ready for Editing? quiz is a good place to start. You can also read about my editing services or book a free strategy call for an assessment of where your document actually is.
Last month's update is here: From the Editing Desk — July 2026. Next month, preorders for my book open on Routledge’s website (although preorders are open now on all major retailers), I continue to edit dissertations with 6 clients in the books, and I begin work on developing a new program for a university that reached out to me in late August to develop a dissertation program and set of certificate courses for post-dissertation publication. I am very excited about this new opportunity to see other scholars publish and move their dissertation research out into the wider world. Stay tuned for September’s portfolio post for more details!
Warmly,
~Jennifer