My high school English teacher told me that I would have a bright future as a copyeditor. That was when I was on my way to college in the big city to study International Affairs. I was going to be a diplomat at the United Nations, and then I changed my mind…I was going to be an architect. The idea of an editorial career never crossed my mind.
Until, after graduating college into a rough market to be an architect, I landed a sweet job as an editorial assistant at an architecture magazine. I loved editing, primarily for the reason that it gave me access to so many interesting people and ideas. I’d had a liberal arts education in architecture, and I was amazed to meet and interview the most prominent architects of our time. Instead of going to graduate school in architecture as I had planned, I stayed in publishing, following a chain of progressively more interested and responsible editorial jobs.
It takes a village to edit a book.
There are several different kinds of editors that I know:
Acquiring, Acquisitions or Commissioning editor. This is the taste-making editor who brings new books and their authors to agreements with a publishing house. The acquisitions editor is responsible for shaping the proposal, working with agents, shepherding the proposal to the publisher, marketing, and sales teams. As a gatekeeper, the acquisitions editor is often the primary contact between the publishing company and the author. She is also and is the book’s internal champion and will defend the books budget and marketing priority. At some publishing companies, the acquisitions editor receives signing bonuses and has clearly defined signing and revenue (value) targets.
Development Editor. A development editor, often a freelancer, helps the author to create a complete manuscript. This often means detailed re-organization and even re-writing. The developmental editor might also help the author to secure any rights or permissions for illustration or photography or quoted text. Depending on the number of books in a publishing program, the Acquiring editor may or may not be responsible for the development of the manuscript. Some publishing companies have development editors on staff who actually write and create books as they go.
Once the manuscript is approved by the publishing team and is considered complete, the manuscript is “transmitted” to the publisher’s production department.
Managing Editor. The managing editor is typically in charge of the book’s production process. The keeper of the schedules and production budgets the managing editor provides an estimate for the cost of producing the book and assigns the book to the editorial and design staff. The managing editor sets the house standards for editorial and design, and makes sure that final editorial files are ready to go to the printer. Because the managing editor oversees the publishing program as a whole, she is rarely very involved with any one particular book.
The Copyeditor. This is an amazing picky, detail-oriented person who carefully checks the manuscript for typos, grammatical errors and problems with consistency or logic. Often, the copy editor also “tags” a manuscript for production, which means she marks up all of the headlines, quotations, sidebars, boxes, captions, lists, footnotes and other book elements. The copyeditor may also provide the book’s front matter according to the publisher’s style. (There are also editors who specialize only in tagging, and I imagine that the copyeditor’s role will expand as e-book elements will also have to be specified.)
The Indexer. Not every book has an indexer, but these are specialized editors too who decide which items are important enough to be called out and who compiles the books’ index.
The Proofreader. When everyone else is done with the book, a proofreader provides a fresh set of eyes to make sure that all of the previous edits did not introduce new errors when the old ones were corrected. If the copyeditor marked up the manuscript by hand, she’ll also make sure that all of the corrections were incorporated into the final version.