What usually happens is that I carry out the CE and send it to the author for review (usually routing it through the ME). The author gets the review back to me ahead of time, thanks me quite happily and presents a couple of quibbles, which I bow to with equal goodwill (unless he’s black-letter wrong on a grammar point, or house style would be grossly offended). It’s his book, after all, and everything I do is advice. I fold his changes, usually light to moderate, CE any new material (there often is some) into the mscript, and send the files off to the ME for typesetting. A few weeks later the proofs appear, which the author has reviewed by then. Again more thanks, and perhaps a few more quibbles, which I’m happy to receive, because it means he actually examined his own proofs (some authors clearly don’t, those pikers). He has arranged a professional indexer, which means that I’m very unlikely to find any errors, except in alphabetization. (There are always a few of those.) The proofs go off to the ME, and next thing you know, weeks and weeks down the road, it’s a bound book, and I’m entitled to a free copy if I want it. (I almost never do.) The point of telling you all that is that it’s what happens 98 percent (per cent?) of the time: projects run smoothly, on time, and no one’s hackles rise. It’s mostly a love fest (two words, in Oxford). I’ve got a share of horror stories (2 percent of 800 books makes around a dozen of them), which I’ll get to eventually, having to do with toxic authors and nightmare writing and problem deadlines, and other matters I don’t want to imagine at the moment, but they’re rare. As milieux go, academic publishing is quite sunny that way, assuming you’re good at what you do and give the author no good reason to complain. When I offer the occasional horror story, it will be one of those for a reason: they’re invasions from outside the real world of book publishing.
SIDEBAR
It’s Canadian Thanksgiving this weekend. Better weather, no football. Brings to mind that the country whose capital is Istanbul recently called for its name to be spelled Türkiye (with an umlaut) from now on. A matter of pride? I’m all in favour of people and places and organizations having the last word on what they’re called and how they’re spelled. Burkina Faso used to be Upper Volta, Myanmar used to be Burma. When Canada was being created, a few alternative names were proposed: Laurentia was one, Borealis was another. Laurentia would have had its chances – Laurentian as a demonym has a gently romantic ring to it, it slides off the tongue quite pleasantly, and I’m all about sound and cadence. But Borealis? I cringe at the demonyms that one might have generated. Which is a long intro to the point I’d make here: as the Turks have reminded us, and the Burkinabés (I had to look that one up), there’s no reason to spell any word in any particular way. Dictionaries and atlases exist to smooth communication; they’re sets of rules for helping us get along together through written language. I’m all in favour. When everyone spells receive the same way, or picture, that ends any questions about spelling and you can move on to what is actually being communicated with those words. That’s why consistency matters so much in a manuscript: it silences the noise. But at root, spelling is always arbitrary. I mean, why not reseive and pickture? It’s all convention, and conventions change. As I pointed out in an earlier post, copyeditor was a misspelling forty years ago. You have to keep an eye open for the changes; you can even put your own forward, and get away with it sometimes.