Copyediting for Novels: What It Is and What It Fixes

A copyedit takes a manuscript whose story and sentences are settled and makes it correct. Spelling, including the words a spellchecker passes because they are real words in the wrong place. Punctuation, especially around dialogue, where most novels have their most frequent slips. Grammar and usage: the pronoun with two possible owners, the tense that wobbles mid-paragraph, the word that means nearly what you meant. Capitalisation. Numbers, whether they are words or figures, and whether the book decides once. And consistency, which is the part that separates a copyedit of a novel from a grammar check of a document.

What is copyediting, then, next to the stages either side of it? Line editing is craft: whether a sentence does its job, whether the paragraph moves, whether the voice holds. A line editor might suggest that a sentence is carrying too much. A copyeditor takes the sentence as written and makes sure it is punctuated properly, spelled correctly, and consistent with the rest of the book. Proofreading is the pass after the copyedit, for the slips that survive it: the doubled word, the missing full stop, the stray space. Our guide to what kind of editing your book needs sets all of them side by side.

The thing to understand about copyediting is restraint. A copyedit conforms; it does not restyle. If you write in fragments on purpose, a good copyeditor leaves the fragments and makes sure they are punctuated the same way every time. If your narrator says "alright" and the book's style sheet says "alright", that is the book's rule and the copyedit enforces it, whatever the dictionary prefers. The job is to make the book agree with itself, not to make it agree with a manual. A copyedit that starts reshaping sentences has drifted back into line editing, and the author ends up paying for the same pass twice.

Stage 5 is a read of the whole manuscript for mechanics and consistency, chapter by chapter, with the whole book in mind. Here is what she checks, in plain terms.

This is the first stage that works differently from the four before it. In Stages 1 to 4 the notes arrive as cards you decide one at a time, because those notes are judgement calls. Copyediting mostly is not. A missing comma has one fix, and asking you to discuss it would waste your time. So at Stage 5 Edith reads the whole manuscript in one pass and puts every change into the file itself. It takes a while; you can close the tab, and she emails you when it is ready.

What you download is your own Word file with each edit marked as a tracked change, the way any editor's markup arrives. You go through them in Word and accept or reject each one. Where a change is not hers to make, because the call depends on something only you know, she leaves a comment instead of a change: a question at the passage, with the reason. A deliberate misspelling in dialogue, a fragment that might be voice, a fact that differs from an earlier chapter. Those stay yours to decide.

Then you upload the revised draft. Edith checks it against her edits and shows you what landed, so a change you accepted in Word but lost in a later save gets caught. Two revision rounds per stage are included in the complete edit. And the two things she keeps about your book, the record of decisions you have made across every stage and her description of how the manuscript sounds, are in front of her the whole time: a choice you made about a character's speech in Stage 4 is binding on how she copyedits that character's dialogue in Stage 5.

What she never does is change a word you did not agree to. Every edit is a suggestion in the file until you accept it, and the file is yours. If the worry that has kept you from a copyedit is that it will sand the prose down, how to edit your novel without losing your voice is about the line between an error and a choice, and the copyedit is built to stay on the right side of it.

Here is what a copyedit of a single page of fiction actually consists of, as a list of the changes and the reasons. The sentences are sample prose written for this page, not from any author's book. Notice how many of the decisions are about the book agreeing with itself, and how few are about grammar in the schoolroom sense.

Copyediting and proofreading are the two passes most often bought as one, and they are not the same job. The simplest way to tell them apart: a copyedit makes the manuscript correct and consistent, and a proofread confirms that nothing slipped while it was being made so. Here is the difference from every angle. For the last pass in full, see proofreading for novels.

Most copyediting tools work one sentence at a time, and for most copyediting that is fine. Consistency is the exception, and it is the part of a novel copyedit that matters most. A slip in consistency is not in any one sentence. It is between two sentences that might be three hundred pages apart.

Here is the example we use on how it works. In chapter 2, Mara's eyes are grey, like her father's. In chapter 19, she turns, her eyes blue in the lamplight. Both sentences are correct. Neither would trip a grammar checker. Only a reader holding both chapters at once sees the problem, and Edith holds all 150,000 words at once. So she flags it, as a comment at the second passage: "Mara's eyes are grey in Chapter 2 and blue here. Which did you intend?" She does not silently change one to match the other, because she has no way of knowing which is true, and neither would a human copyeditor. She asks.

The same whole-book read is what makes the style sheet work. A rule about hyphenation set in chapter one is applied in chapter forty. A name spelled two ways is caught the second time, not on a reader's review. If you have fought this battle by hand, with a story bible and a search box, how to keep characters consistent across chapters is about the manual version of what Stage 5 does across the whole draft.