What an Author Query Actually Looks Like

Inside a Real Copyedit — Post 3 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.

In the last post I counted the queries in my copyedit — thirty-one, across roughly a hundred thousand words. This time I want to open a few of them up, because the word query sounds more ominous than it is.

By the time I sent my corrections back, I had answered every query. Looking at them together, laid out across eleven files, I could see they came in four kinds. Not thirty-one different problems. Four kinds of question, repeated.

The first kind: “Please confirm this edit is correct.”

This was the large majority. The copyeditor had already made a change — a comma, a hyphen, a house-style adjustment — and was simply showing me what they had done, giving me the chance to say no.

That is worth sitting with, because it is the opposite of what the word query makes you brace for. It is not a challenge to your thinking. It is a courtesy: someone did the work, then handed you the veto.

The honest query response is often two words: yes, correct. That is publishing’s shortest legitimate reply, and it is not laziness. When the change is right, confirming it quickly makes the process run smoothly. 

The second kind: “Please check this sentence for clarity.”

Four of these landed in a single chapter — my longest, most demanding one. Not one of them said the sentence was wrong. Each said, in effect, I read this twice and I want to be sure I have you right.

This is an invitation to sharpen the meaning and clarity of the sentence. And the response that serves the reader is to take the invitation — to clarify — rather than to defend the sentence I already wrote. If a careful professional reader stumbled, a tired student reading at eleven at night will stumble harder. The query is one more set of eyes on the exact spot where the meaning went murky.

The third kind: “Please supply what is missing.”

A publisher’s name. A page range. A translator I had named in the text but not in the reference list. These clustered in a very particular place — not where the ideas were hardest, but where a piece of information was simply absent.

This is the most concrete category, and in some ways the most reassuring, because there is nothing to feel about it. You are not being asked to reconsider your argument. You are being asked to go find a page number. Most of these took a few minutes and a look back at the original source.

The fourth kind: a question only I could answer.

One query did not fit the other three. It asked about my heading hierarchy — the structure of the book, which levels nested under which. That is not something a copyeditor can simply fix; it is a decision that belongs to the author.

I did not just say yes. I asked a question back — and that turned out to be worth a whole post of its own, so the next post in this series will cover this issue.

What none of them said

Many writers are anxious about author queries, and I’ve coached several through the process. Queries are only meant to help strengthen the manuscript and are never personal attacks on your writing. I knew that going into this process because I have coached so many authors through it beforehand. I was grateful for every single query because it made the book better than it had been when I sent it to Routledge in June. And each one was easy to address and I was able to return the files four days early.

If you are waiting on an edit right now — from a copyeditor, a committee, a reviewer — you may be imagining a fifth kind of query that does not really exist: the one that tells you your writing is bad. On the page, in my experience, it never comes. What comes instead is a list of small, specific questions, most of which you can answer in a sentence, and will make your book shine all the brighter.

The patience of publishing.

Warmly,

~Jennifer

This is the third post in Inside a Real Copyedit, a short series written from the actual queries and tracked changes in my own Routledge copyedit. Earlier posts: The Copyeditor Caught a Name I’ve Read a Thousand Times and Thirty-One Queries in a Hundred Thousand Words. Next: you are allowed to ask the copyeditor a question back.

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. And if you would like a real number for your own project rather than an imagined one, that is what my editing services and a free assessment are for.