Editing and quality control in publishing

Publisher and poet Gus Ferguson once told me, with a smirk, that you should leave a mistake in every book, because it gives your readers such pleasure to find it. Behind the joke lies a truth about books: they are special in large part because they contain so few errors. It’s remarkable: in a sixty-thousand word novel, at least sixty-thousand things could go wrong. An author needs a whole team behind them to turn their work into something so clean.

Most of book production is the steady work of eliminating flaws. When I explain to budget-keepers how many times a book needs checking, they are incredulous: manuscript review, manuscript development, copy editing, proofreading, second-eye checks, metadata checks, printer’s proofs? Surely, they ask, you can skip something? After making books for thirty years, I can promise you: the best books need all of these.

Each layer requires a different mindset, and often a different set of skills. And once a person has done certain tasks, they disqualify themselves from doing others, because they no longer have fresh eyes, and mistakes they missed the first time stay missed the next.

We rarely comprehend how much went into a work, because it looks so simple when it’s finished. That’s the spell it’s meant to cast. ‘An illustration of writing brushes (1908)’ Shigeo Inobe (editor, Japan, 1877–1954)

Manuscript review

Once the author has a draft they’re happy to share, a manuscript reviewer asks: is this manuscript ready to be a book, and to do its job? What needs the most work? What kinds of people will we need on the team? The reviewer deals in parts, chapters, broad narrative arcs, arguments, and characters. This work is best done by an experienced book-maker: it requires a high-level strategic view and a grasp of nitty-gritty production work.

Manuscript development

Manuscript development is also called development editing. Most often, a development editor is the bridge between a subject-specialist author and their intended audience. In addition to not being professional writers, subject specialists know their field so well that they can find it hard to explain things clearly to newcomers.

The development editor might restructure chapters and recast entire passages, knitting the story together, fixing and smoothing and joining dots.

Manuscript development might not be necessary if there is only one writer and they are really excellent – an actual trained and experienced writer, not just ‘good at writing’. But it’s crucial when the author isn’t that, or when there are multiple contributors, who inevitably write in different styles.

Specialist development editors are usually professional writers with an editorial background, or editors with a knack for seeing the bigger picture. While a development editor doesn’t need subject expertise, they do need a basic understanding of the field, and a deep appreciation for its breadth and depth.

Copy editing

A copy editor asks: where is the prose not flowing? Where are the errors and inconsistencies that trip it up? The depth of a copy editor’s changes can vary enormously, depending on their background, opinions, skills, and their brief from the publisher. They work mainly at the level of words and sentences, with an eye on the bigger picture.

It’s not unusual for a copy editor to do some development editing, too, if the brief and the manuscript require it. Subject-knowledge is helpful but not required. An appreciation for the depth and complexity of the subject is absolutely required.

Implementing author corrections

After copy editing, the book is laid out in its final design. And this fresh, new look means the author starts seeing errors they missed before, and things they want to change. They send their changes to the production team, and it’s usually the copy editor, or someone with copy-editing skills, who implements them in the master version of the book, making sure the changes don’t reintroduce the kinds of flaws the copy-edit just addressed. This person needs to know their tools and the manuscript well enough that they can make judgement calls and not introduce new problems.

Proofreading

Once the book is laid out, and the author has given their input, this is the last line of defence against mistakes. A proofreader picks up the errors that slipped past everyone, or were introduced during the layout process. By the proofreading stage, even the best teams have missed an error in every thousand words – easily a hundred errors in a novel. So the proofreader saves everyone embarrassment.

Proofreaders focus on phrases and words, and they also check features in the final layout that didn’t exist in the manuscript, like page-number references, running heads, automatic hyphenation, bad line breaks, image positions, and misplaced footnotes.

Usually the publisher or the copy-editor will review the proofreader’s changes, to see what they missed during editing, and to make sure the proofreader hasn’t introduced new problems.

Subject knowledge is not required, though good proofreaders have an innate curiosity about the depth and detail of any field. Their curiosity manifests as intellectual humility, so they don’t make assumptions and they double-check everything. Their workspace is lined with reference books, and they know where to find authoritative information, never stopping at the top result of an Internet search. Of this whole team, great proofreaders are the most underrated and the hardest to find. World-class proofreading takes enormous skill and talent, and sadly pays poorly in comparison.

Second-eye checks

The proofreader has usually marked up their corrections on a PDF or web annotator, and someone else on the team must implement them in the source files. This is often because it takes technical expertise to work on the source files directly, whether that’s in InDesign, Affinity, or a digital production system.

Then another editorial pro, often the publisher or the original copy editor, performs a second-eye check that the proofreader’s corrections have been implemented correctly, and that new problems haven’t been introduced in the process.

These onerous second-eye checks are to prevent new errors being introduced at this late stage – after this, no one will read the whole book again until it’s published.

Metadata checks

Every book is published along with a cover, blurbs, ISBN numbers, copyright text, marketing assets, and other metadata. Someone needs to check that all of this is error-free, and that nothing has gone awry before sending it downstream to thousands of distributors, booksellers, subscribers, and reviewers. This is best done by a publisher or project lead with both strategic and operational expertise, and a catalogue of past disastrous experiences to draw on.

Organised teams have systems for managing and quality-controlling metadata centrally throughout the production process, so that assembling and checking it isn’t left to the last minute.

Pre-press and printer’s proofs

The printer’s pre-press team converts the publisher’s PDF to a custom format and layout compatible with their particular printing press. Sometimes the pre-press team will find problems with the PDF they’ve received, or design decisions incompatible with their machinery. For example, the designer might not have included crop marks or bleed (colour extending past the trimmed edge of the pages). Or some pages might specify more ink than the intended paper stock can hold, and need adjusting.

Once those issues have been resolved by the design team, the pre-press team then provides a ‘printer’s proof’ for the publisher to check, in case something went wrong in the pre-press process. It’s embarrassing but not unusual to catch editorial mistakes even this late in the day.

These days, most printer’s proofs are digital: the pages of the book laid out on screen, after going through pre-press. Some printers and publishers still require a printed proof. Either way, the person checking it should have a good grasp of the printing process, so that they know the kinds of issues to look out for. For example, have images with transparency rendered correctly? Are the pages in the right order? Has the printer made changes to the copyright page, like adding their name, and are they acceptable? Are there blank pages at the back of the book and, if so, was that expected? Has the spine width been adjusted and, if so, does it look okay?

For books with especially demanding colour requirements – like art or high-end recipe books – someone from the publishing team will visit the printer when the book is on the press to confirm that the colours are coming out of the press correctly. Good printers have highly experienced operators watching and checking colours and quality throughout the printing process, but buy-in from the publishing team at this crucial stage ensures peace of mind for everyone.

Other formats and beyond

The book is usually produced as an ebook, too, and sometimes a web book. It might be on its way to becoming an app, an audiobook, or a chatbot database. Even in single-source publishing systems, where each of these is generated automatically, each output format needs to be carefully checked. No one will read the whole thing, but someone needs to confirm that it displays correctly, that navigation and other interactive features work, and that the files pass distributors’ validation checks.

After the files are sent to distributors, they might be sent back for technical changes, too, triggering another round of fixes and checks.

I could go on, of course. I haven’t mentioned the quality assurance that goes into cover and page design, artwork, fact checking, rights and permissions, translations, co-publications, software development, and marketing. I haven’t addressed the exponential complexity introduced by multi-volume works, large author teams, demanding funders, editorial boards, legal review, or regulatory bodies.

If, like me, you find all this fascinating, then you’re probably already in book production. It is an epic collaborative puzzle. And while we’d love for everyone to appreciate what it takes, we also know that it’s a secret we have to keep. Books are a magic trick, where the only name on the cover is the author’s.