Practicalities, by which I mean how it’s done. You’ve just been offered a mscript, usually by email. The ME asks if you want to handle it and if you have time. (I almost always say “Hell yes,” but that’s a different discussion.) Then a day or two later the project shows up in another email, as one or more attachments, whether zipped or loose. In either case, they’re certain to be in MS Word, which is publishers’ standard everywhere. Some mscripts will arrive as One Big File, some will come to you as a bundle of chapter files.
Here’s what I always, always do – my own conveyor belt, such as I have found it useful to develop one. Step one: download, and you’d best do that into a folder marked jones-MASTER (if the author’s name is Jones). Then you copy that folder and label the copy jones-WORKING. Then you drop an blank MSW file into the WORKING folder and label it jones-STYLE (you might as well do that now, heck). Then you open the working folder and look at what you’ve got. There will often be files you don’t have to do anything with (peer review, house style sheets you’re already holding), and so on. You can delete those from the WORKING file, because you still have access to them in the MASTER file. It’s just tidier. Let’s assume that it’s your lucky moment and the mscript has come in as one file. Publishers like to get baroque with file names – it may well be something more like 48503AFile39d-JONES1xa. Give yourself a break – change it to jones-CE. Or if there’s more than one file to the project, jones-CE-01, -02, -03, and so on. Okay … now you open it/them.
An early wrinkle: some houses will have done a lot of file prep before sending the mscript to you, in which case you’re well advised not to touch any of the formatting. If you’ve worked for the house before, you’ll know whether you can do that or not. Other houses haven’t done any pre-formatting at all, in which case you’re in luck and can move to Step Two: Open the style sheet, because you’re about to need it.
Now Step Three: If the house allows it (see above), reformat the file(s) to whatever you like in terms of typeface, font size, colour, and spacing. Experiment to find what’s easiest on your own eyes. My own preference is turn everything into 12-point double-spaced black Time Roman, handle the copy edit, then shrink the CEed material down to 10-point as I go. Later on, while taking a second look (I always do), I’ll turn the CEed material back into 12-point and read through it again, looking for what I missed (there’s always something) and cleaning up my own typos (there will be a few). That’s me, anyway.
Step Four: Go straight to the end of the file and see what’s there. That’s where the documentation almost always is. Some mscripts will have notes only, some a biblio only, some will have both. In any case, now you know. Before you go anywhere else in the mscript, make a copy of the bibliography and drop it into the style sheet, because you’re going to be CEing the biblio before you do anything else (i.e., I do anyway), and navigation is easier if you’ve parked it in the style sheet before you do. I’m sure some CEs don’t handle the doc before they do the text edit. I’ve no idea why they’d torture themselves like that. It’s much simpler to start with all the doc, besides which it gives you a preview of the mscript’s content as well as, for that matter, the author’s skill and his interest in taking pains.
Step Five: Go back to the top of the file and begin a scroll-down: author’s name, title of work, and whatever boilerplate the house has already placed there. You’ll run quite quickly into the Contents page (which is no longer called a Table of Contents – if the author has called it that, delete “Table of,” and there you go, you’ve started the CE). Now copy the Contents page over to the style sheet, above the biblio you just placed there. If there’s a List of Illustrations (and the like) below the Contents page, copy that over too. I mentioned earlier that the style sheet is used for a lot of different tasks. Now you start to see what I mean.
Step Six: It’s time to acquaint yourself with the mscript. Continue the scroll-down, checking the accuracy of the Contents page (and other lists) as you go, while watching for myriad other things, as many as come to you. Are there subheads? Are they all the correct weight? Are they numbered accurately? Does he use in-text citations, and are they consistent? If there are illustrations and callouts, are they presented consistently? If there are block quotations, are they formatted consistently? A copyedit is 80 to 90 percent about handling the text itself. The point of this prelim work is to get the other 10 to 20 percent out of the way. It can take a day or two (or weeks, if the documentation is especially weak – I’ve seen that happen). It’s worth the time, because once it’s all done you can focus more sharply on the CE.
Step Seven (optional): I don’t always do this, but it can be useful: run a spell check on the entire mscript, to see what proper nouns and unique style points arise consistently. At this stage you can actually start building the style sheet. Is that suburb of Paris St. Cloud or St-Cloud? What is the author’s preference? Is that corner store in Tijuana a cantina or a cantina? Questions that can be dealt with early, should be. Authors tend to be given fair leeway with petty style points, and blanket changes to them are rarely worth the ensuing bunfight. So get things like that out of the way – it will save you time and reduce the later effort of keeping track.
Next, the doc. But that’s for another instalment.