[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by rhadin

For those who doubt, Dennis' description of the process is pretty accurate. I say "pretty" because there is one step that is not mentioned but needs to be. After the manuscript is edited (presumably) by a professional editor, the edited copy is usually returned to the author to approve or disapprove the editor's changes (the changes are shown using Track Changes).

You're absolutely right. But that was part of "copyediting and proofreading", and left out deliberately because it wasn't relevant to my point.

There's a nice description of the process from a non-fiction author's view here: http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2009...nd-feels-like/

Unfortunately, that sometimes -- and more often than you might think -- means that corrections made in editing are undone by the author who believes whatever he/she wrote originally is sacrosanct. I have had the "pleasure," on a few occasions over my 25 years of editing, of discovering that the print version of a book that I edited had been returned to its original (or to near-original) state by the author, replete with errors, because the author was incensed that the publisher had permitted me to do anything more than run spell check and the publisher was more interested in appeasing the author and getting the book out than in whether the book had a minimum number of errors.

And sometimes it's the other way around. The late John Brunner recounted writing an SF novel where he had an assortment of usages done deliberately he knew a copy editor would want to "correct". So in his submission draft, he circled all such instances and wrote STET! in the margin. (Yes, this was back in the hardcopy submission draft days.) Sure enough, when he got the galleys, every instance had been "corrected" by a helpful copy editor, leading to the conclusion that no one at the publisher knew what "STET" meant.

The authors I know all recognize that a good editor can make a book better, and while they might not look forward to the revision letter, they will pay attention to what it says and consider that the editor just might know what she's talking about.

One interesting question is how often you are able to get in direct touch with the author, and personally go over copy edits and corrections.

Absolutely true. We have tried to use InDesign's export to ePub feature and its output ain't pretty. Considering that Adobe has adotoped and helped design the ePub standard and is pushing ADE, you would think that Adobe would solve this problem. Perhaps that will be the big inducement to upgrade to InDesign CS5. One thing, though, is true: version CS4 is a major improvement over CS3.

And I expect CS5 to be an improvement over CS4. I just found it quite ironic that Adobe was the major force behind the ePub format, yet their own software does a bad job of producing it.

An old friend is a DTP specialist at a major publisher, and spends her day in InDesign doing markup and typesetting. She used to use Quark Xpress, and was actually annoyed by InDesign: she had developed significant expertise in Quark, and knew how to get around the design flaws and misfeatures to get it to do what she wanted. InDesign didn't have those design flaws and misfeatures, and all that hard won expertise was now irrelevant...

I have an old version of InDesign here (v2 or so), which was passed along to me for a project I was working on. I actually did the job in MS Publisher 2007, once I discovered the MS add-in that would let me publish to the PDF format the printer wanted, since I was familiar with it and knew how to make it do what I wanted. I look at the old version of InDesign on occasion to get familiar with it, but can't justify springing for CS4 right now, since it isn't what I do for money.
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Dennis