I considered the question earlier of whether a CE is working for the author or the house. Basically it’s the house, because it’s the house that is paying you. But here I would add some nuance to that. If you are a carpenter building a table for a client, you’re working for the person who is buying the table. But that person isn’t in front of you while you’re actually making the table. A carpenter’s work is liminal in that sense. While you are crafting the table, the person who owns the table is you. I’m saying that copy editing is a craft, and while a mscript is on your desk, you own the mscript because you own the craft. Knowing that you’ll be sending it on to the house, and to the author, doesn’t change the relationship you have to the work itself. So you’d better take some pride in what you do, and not let shoddy work go by you.
Fairly recently, I ran into one chapter in an edited collection about music education that was so poorly written that I warned the house it wasn’t publishable. I think twice in forty years I’ve told a house that. In situations like that, it isn’t your job to tell the volume editor – concerns like that are routed through the ME, who takes it up the chain either to the AE or the volume editor. So the query went around the horn, and came back that way. Basically, I’d said that the essay was very poorly written and that, once I’d peeled off the crust of dreadful English, I’d found that the content itself was confused and self-contradictory. It turns out that the chapter was by one of the volume editor’s grad students and that he’d been doing her a solid by including it in his collection. The essay as it stood would not have helped her career (or it shouldn’t have). To his credit, he sent it out to his peers, conducting his own peer review, and it returned from that process with a series of sharp notes attached, which he addressed himself. The essay was one third shorter. I worked on it again until it was less than half the original length. So the house, in the end, was not embarrassed, and the author was not humiliated.
The house had sent me a two-legged table. A straight CE would not have added a third leg. I was telling the house that the chapter simply wouldn’t function, and they listened.