If there is a world’s most famous copyeditor, no one has ever heard of him. I can’t imagine a self-respecting CE who would want to be famous. Most of us, I’m sure, are contented enough to be the guy they keep in the cellar who knows the difference between that and which – let the acquisition stars get the glory. Most CEs –– I know this from talking to MEs — are ambivalent even about being mentioned in the acknowledgments or would prefer not to be mentioned at all.
Still, you want a reputation in the industry, for the sake of growing your client list and simply because it’s heartening to be respected for your skills. If it’s a big company, word will get around its offices that you’re good at your job, and reliable, and (probably) that you’re strong with certain kinds of mscripts. Or an ME will move to another company and take her call list with her, with you on it. Or a happy author will recommend you to another author, or ask for you specifically for her next book. (Looks good on you.) Finally, an AE will become aware of your skills and ask the production side to assign you to specific projects. I can’t stress enough how important a solid reputation among AEs can be to your career. I’ve grown my client list in all of those ways.
It’s different, of course, when you’re starting out and have no clients at all. Plenty of freelance CEs worked in-house for years before striking out on their own, with the company they just left being their first and, usually thereafter, principal client. But what do you do if you don’t have that launching pad? I know what I did – I started sending out batch résumés and making cold calls, even though there was basically nothing for me to declare on my résumé and my cold-calling skills were negligible. It was the most excruciating few months of my working life, but I got my first client that way – one call out of dozens. The stars had aligned – one of the MEs I approached knew my family and gave me a moment, and then an assignment. That was my fingernail-hold.
Nobody pays you to guess
The Washington Post ran an advice column a few days ago that included a spelling test. Twenty items, it had. I missed two, but that’s okay, because the two I missed were ones that I know I would have looked up anyway: harassment and embarrassment. I’m pretty sure I’ve discussed that pair-from-Hell before this. Copyediting is at times about negotiating with that sort of weirdness (I would mention that I always look up weird – there, I just looked it up again – because I never trust myself to spell it correctly). Or I would have relied on my laptop’s auto-spellcheck function to tell me. Or I would have web-searched the word. The point being that there’s no reason not to check a spelling or a fact if you have the slightest doubt. Certainty is too quick and easy to achieve. I spellchecked five words just while typing this paragraph. And I just checked spellcheck after typing that sentence, which makes six. (Yes, it’s almost always one word.)
Spellcheck nightmares do exist. Local history can be a major headache. A history of the village of, oh, lets say Kettleby, Ontario. A beautiful little place, on a winding road in a tuckaway valley through a forest – I passed through it on the school bus (two words – just checked) every day for years – and well deserving of a local history. But hope you will never be assigned that mscript, because it will be saturated with people who are too obscure and too back-when to had ever made it onto Wikipedia or any other website. And what sources you might be able to find will be too back-when to ever be stable. You have no choice but to trust the author on that one, but what if their spelling is problematic?
Another example: a history of the Western University Dental College. Yes, somebody wrote one. Obscure names abounded, literally hundreds of them, and half the time I spent on that was checking the names of obscure (how could they not be?) orthodontists from back in the 1950s.