Thirty-One Queries in a Hundred Thousand Words

Inside a Real Copyedit — Post 2 of an ongoing series. I am publishing my first solo book, Synchronicity in Grief: Reconstructing Meaning After Loss, with Routledge; I turned in the finished manuscript in June 2026, and it is now in production. Each post in this series follows that real copyedit, one author query at a time.

Everyone bracing for a copyedit imagines the same thing.

A manuscript that comes back bleeding. Page after page of red. Hundreds of little questions in the margin, each one confirming what you have privately suspected for months — that you are not really a writer, and that someone has finally noticed.

I have heard some version of that fear from nearly every client I have worked with. I do not feel it myself, not because I think I am a perfect writer but because I know I am not a perfect writer. I was looking forward to the copy edit because I knew another set of eyes would catch what I was too close to the work to see—all the human errors that pile up over the long haul of writing a 9 chapter book.

So here are the actual numbers from my own book.

The count

Across the whole manuscript — roughly 102,500 words, eleven files — my copyeditor raised thirty-one author queries.

Thirty-one. For a book that took years to write.

If you have not published before: an author query is a question the copyeditor leaves in the margin when the answer belongs to you and not to them. They fix what they can fix. They ask about what they cannot.

Thirty-one questions across a hundred thousand words works out to roughly one question every three thousand words. Somewhere around one every ten pages.

Where they were inserted in the file

The distribution is the part I find most useful, because it is not what anyone expects.

·       Front matter — 4. A catchwords request, two references that had not been cross-referred in the text, and one incomplete Jung citation that needed rebuilding.

·       Chapter 1 — 5.

·       Chapter 2 — 5.

·       Chapter 3 — 3.

·       Chapter 4 — 3.

·       Chapter 5 — 4.

·       Chapter 6 — none at all. Not one. That chapter came back without queries. I was surprised.

·       Chapter 7 — 4, and all four were the same request: please check this sentence for clarity.

·       Chapter 8 — 4, in the longest file in the book, around seventeen thousand words.

·       Chapter 9 — 1.

Notice what that pattern does not do. It does not track difficulty. My longest, most demanding chapter drew four questions; a shorter one drew none. The queries clustered where information was missing — a publisher name, a page range, a translator — not where the thinking was hard.

What most of them actually said

The large majority of those thirty-one were a variation of the same sentence: please confirm whether this edit is correct. Not a challenge. Not a correction of my reasoning. A courtesy — someone telling me what they had already done and giving me the chance to say no. I often tell people a good academic editor is like the friend who will tell you there is spinach in your teeth. The copy editing team at Routledge did exactly that for each chapter they worked on and I am grateful for it.

Why a change count is not a damage report

I want to put one more number beside those, because on its own it looks alarming.

Chapter 9 — my synthesis chapter — came back with eighty-one deletions. Eighty-one. If you open that file cold and look at the markup, it appears to have been taken apart.

It had one author query.

Nearly every one of those eighty-one deletions was mechanical: single quotation marks converted to double, spacing corrected, formatting normalized to house style all of it in two sets of tables. The argument was untouched. The chapter that looked the most damaged was, in substance, one of the cleanest in the book.

A change count is not a damage report. A chapter can carry eighty-one deletions and be essentially intact; another can carry six and lose a paragraph that mattered.

The arithmetic I do for other people

I count things for clients constantly. It is most of what an estimate is — how many pages, how many hours, how many citations need checking, what a pass will and will not fix. I do it because a real number is almost always smaller and steadier than the imagined one it replaces, and because a writer who knows the actual size of a task can decide what to do about it.

This time the arithmetic was on me, and I’ve now offered it here, in this post.

I finished answering all thirty-one of those queries this past weekend and sent the files back to production. What I felt at the end was something quiet: the recognition that the copy edit phase of the book publishing production process was manageable.

If you are waiting on an edit right now — from a committee, a copyeditor, a reviewer, a colleague you asked to be honest — I would gently offer this. You do not know yet how big it is. You only know how big it feels. Those are rarely the same number, and you are allowed to wait for the real one before you decide how to feel.

The fear of the copyedit is almost always larger than the copyedit.

The patience of publishing.

Warmly,

~Jennifer

This is the second post in Inside a Real Copyedit, a short series written from the actual queries and tracked changes in my own Routledge copyedit. The first post is here. Next: what an author query actually looks like, one category at a time.

If you are wondering whether your own manuscript is ready for this stage, the Are You Ready for Editing? quiz is free and takes a few minutes. Be sure to sign up to follow the latest in this series and other news from JHMES.com