Back when I was trying to get my first book published, a novelist friend warned me: "The only thing worse than not being published is being published."
Thank you for writing "copy editor" instead of "copyeditor," a bizarre usage that seems to have come into the world via Karen Judd, whose "Copyediting: A Practical Guide," at least in its first edition (1982), had a surfeit of typos and offered some truly impractical advice. Apart from proofreading, that edition needed developmentalediting by a developmentaleditor.
I have friends (probably we all do) who complain about typos in published books and automatically blame the editors.
My experience, after decades in editorial management, is that most typos in books published by the Big Guys have two likely sources: (1) penny pinching in the C suite, with a number of publishers either deciding that proofreading is unnecessary or outsourcing it (and sometimes even copy editing) to India, and/or (2) poor management of the editorial/production interface, so that decisions get made (2a) by a designer who fails to circle back to the editorial department after making an erroneous change to what had been a final digital file or (2b) by an incompetent production editor who transmits uncorrected digital files to the printer. There may be other issues at play, too, but these two are common.
Some of my friends who read book club selections don’t realize that the books may be uncorrected bound proofs with a cover. But readers tend to catch on when a whole signature has been inserted upside down or in the wrong order, or when a character’s name is Ralph in chapter 3 and Sidney in chapter 7.
On the whole, I am glad to be out of the business. Things were getting so bad in the Big Guy companies that I migrated to university presses for the last ten years of my in-house career. But the bean counters struck again, with university administrators deciding that university presses needed to be profit centers, whereas the traditional role of the university press had been to lose money responsibly. My boss’s boss at Stanford University Press was Condoleezza Rice, then the university’s provost, with oversight responsibility for the press’s budget and operations, which also came with a certain amount of unwarranted pushback against the press’s seasonal lists.
Do editors actually edit much? The rap is that they acquire books, at least at the major houses. I blame the authors for gross mistakes first, the copy editors second, like a novel which stated that determining one's Jewish identity was matriarchal when the sense was clearly matrilineal. Or the thriller set in Nazi Germany where the Bavarian and Austrian greeting Grüß Gott! was rendered as Greet God! when it's really Good Day! or Hello! or Greetings!
Acquisitions editors may or may not do any editing. Usually they don’t, but they may be closely involved in arranging for such work to be done if a title is important enough.
For a trade book, the publisher may sometimes hire a developmental editor, if the book is projected to have sales that will justify that expense. But most of the time the author either has to do the developmental work herself or hire a freelancer. And lots of people claim to be developmental editors (or even copy editors) when they are no such thing. Developmental editing is a specific task, as distinct from copy editing as copy editing is (or should be) from proofreading.
For an academic book, the developmental work effectively gets done through the peer review process (the manuscript goes out to “readers”). As a result, it’s unusual for a developmental editor to be involved.
As for copy editing, most publishers use freelancers, with in-house editors scheduling and managing copy editors’ work as well as the work of proofreaders, and coordinating everything between receiving the manuscript from the acquisitions editor (or “sponsor,” in the academic context) and handing the edited and proofread manuscript off to production (though the in-house managing editor may double as the manuscript’s production editor).
Regarding the errors you mentioned, I would divide the responsibility between the author (who originally made the mistake) and the probable lack of a developmental editor (who might have caught it). A copy editor might also have been able to catch the error but would not necessarily be expected to do to. Occasionally an in-house editor has the great good fortune of coming across an erudite proofreader who is able to catch and correct the error at the last possible moment.
That said, all kinds of people who should know better, including publishers, increasingly foist developmental work on copy editors who may or may not be up to what the task requires. When they are up to it, they are grossly underpaid for their services. When they are not up to it, the reader suffers—and blames “the editor.”
Not enough authors get good editing of any kind before they submit their books, and it shows. I've been lucky and have had acquiring editors do developmental work too....
Thanks Lev…I think? HA! I’m working on my first book now and will be submitting starting in October. Good warnings. It’s probably a good sign that it doesn’t daunt me, right?
Thank you for writing "copy editor" instead of "copyeditor," a bizarre usage that seems to have come into the world via Karen Judd, whose "Copyediting: A Practical Guide," at least in its first edition (1982), had a surfeit of typos and offered some truly impractical advice. Apart from proofreading, that edition needed developmentalediting by a developmentaleditor.
It helps me help writers I work with to have had some good copy editors....
But on that subject, in my years of reviewing, I've been surprised at how many badly edited books get published by the Big Guys.
I have friends (probably we all do) who complain about typos in published books and automatically blame the editors.
My experience, after decades in editorial management, is that most typos in books published by the Big Guys have two likely sources: (1) penny pinching in the C suite, with a number of publishers either deciding that proofreading is unnecessary or outsourcing it (and sometimes even copy editing) to India, and/or (2) poor management of the editorial/production interface, so that decisions get made (2a) by a designer who fails to circle back to the editorial department after making an erroneous change to what had been a final digital file or (2b) by an incompetent production editor who transmits uncorrected digital files to the printer. There may be other issues at play, too, but these two are common.
Some of my friends who read book club selections don’t realize that the books may be uncorrected bound proofs with a cover. But readers tend to catch on when a whole signature has been inserted upside down or in the wrong order, or when a character’s name is Ralph in chapter 3 and Sidney in chapter 7.
On the whole, I am glad to be out of the business. Things were getting so bad in the Big Guy companies that I migrated to university presses for the last ten years of my in-house career. But the bean counters struck again, with university administrators deciding that university presses needed to be profit centers, whereas the traditional role of the university press had been to lose money responsibly. My boss’s boss at Stanford University Press was Condoleezza Rice, then the university’s provost, with oversight responsibility for the press’s budget and operations, which also came with a certain amount of unwarranted pushback against the press’s seasonal lists.
Do editors actually edit much? The rap is that they acquire books, at least at the major houses. I blame the authors for gross mistakes first, the copy editors second, like a novel which stated that determining one's Jewish identity was matriarchal when the sense was clearly matrilineal. Or the thriller set in Nazi Germany where the Bavarian and Austrian greeting Grüß Gott! was rendered as Greet God! when it's really Good Day! or Hello! or Greetings!
Acquisitions editors may or may not do any editing. Usually they don’t, but they may be closely involved in arranging for such work to be done if a title is important enough.
For a trade book, the publisher may sometimes hire a developmental editor, if the book is projected to have sales that will justify that expense. But most of the time the author either has to do the developmental work herself or hire a freelancer. And lots of people claim to be developmental editors (or even copy editors) when they are no such thing. Developmental editing is a specific task, as distinct from copy editing as copy editing is (or should be) from proofreading.
For an academic book, the developmental work effectively gets done through the peer review process (the manuscript goes out to “readers”). As a result, it’s unusual for a developmental editor to be involved.
As for copy editing, most publishers use freelancers, with in-house editors scheduling and managing copy editors’ work as well as the work of proofreaders, and coordinating everything between receiving the manuscript from the acquisitions editor (or “sponsor,” in the academic context) and handing the edited and proofread manuscript off to production (though the in-house managing editor may double as the manuscript’s production editor).
Regarding the errors you mentioned, I would divide the responsibility between the author (who originally made the mistake) and the probable lack of a developmental editor (who might have caught it). A copy editor might also have been able to catch the error but would not necessarily be expected to do to. Occasionally an in-house editor has the great good fortune of coming across an erudite proofreader who is able to catch and correct the error at the last possible moment.
That said, all kinds of people who should know better, including publishers, increasingly foist developmental work on copy editors who may or may not be up to what the task requires. When they are up to it, they are grossly underpaid for their services. When they are not up to it, the reader suffers—and blames “the editor.”
Not enough authors get good editing of any kind before they submit their books, and it shows. I've been lucky and have had acquiring editors do developmental work too....
I am glad that has been your experience. Clearly those publishers thought it was worth the expense.
Thanks Lev…I think? HA! I’m working on my first book now and will be submitting starting in October. Good warnings. It’s probably a good sign that it doesn’t daunt me, right?
You're very welcome, and good luck!