Self-Publishing: Every Stage a Publisher Would Have Paid For

The editorial stages, in the order the profession names them

Four operations exist and they are not interchangeable. Developmental editors deal with content, organization, and genre considerations. Line editors work at the sentence or paragraph level, correcting errors while concentrating on the language and style. Copyediting covers spelling, grammar, usage, and punctuation, along with checking cross-references and preparing style sheets. Proofreading comes among the last stages, checking for typographical errors and formatting mistakes.¹

Editors Canada records the boundary at the end of that sequence, stating that proofreading is not a substitute for editing.² A self-publisher who buys only the last operation has bought the last operation.

The order matters as much as the list. A copyedit that precedes a structural revision is repeated work, and a proofread that precedes typesetting is a proofread of a document nobody will read.

Completeness is a stage, and it has a deadline

Presses treat this as a hard gate, which is instructive for anyone without one. The University of Chicago Press states that anything an author plans to have in the book must be submitted before copyediting, including all art.³ Cornell University Press requires that permission to use any copyrighted material, including an author's own previously published work, be obtained before the final manuscript is submitted.⁴

Neither requirement is administrative. A chapter or an image arriving after copyediting changes cross-references, note numbering, and the index, and none of those can be repaired by the person who supplied the late material.

A self-publisher has no gate, which means the gate has to be self-imposed. The useful version is a date after which nothing is added, written down before it is needed.

The identifiers, and what they do not do

An ISBN is an International Standard Book Number, thirteen digits since 2007, assigned to text-based monographic publications. Any book made publicly available, whether for sale or without charge, can be identified by one, and each different product form should be identified separately, so a paperback, an EPUB, and a PDF are three.⁵

The International ISBN Agency is explicit about the limit. The ISBN is an identifier, and it does not convey any form of legal or copyright protection.⁵

Copyright is a separate matter with its own timing. Registration with the Copyright Office is not what creates the copyright, but the effective date of registration is the day the Office receives an acceptable application, an acceptable deposit, and the filing fee together. Statutory damages and attorney's fees are available where the infringement began after that date. A grace period of three months after publication keeps full remedies available, provided registration is made before that period ends.⁶

Those are two documents with two functions, and neither substitutes for the other. Authors routinely believe one of them does the other's job.

What actually gets skipped, and what it costs

Three stages disappear most often when nobody is scheduling them. None of the three announces its own absence.

The style sheet is the first, because nothing forces its existence. Editors Canada's copy editing standards require one, tracking abbreviations, the treatment of numbers, and vernacular usages, and resolving variations in terminology, logic, and mechanics.⁷ Without it, a second book starts from nothing.

The proofread after layout is the second. It exists because typesetting introduces errors that were not in the file, and skipping it means the book's first readers do the job.

The permissions inventory is the third. It is the only one of the three whose absence has a legal consequence rather than a consequence for quality.

What EditFast does in this sequence

We take a manuscript at whichever stage a client has reached, say plainly which of the four operations the price covers, and return the style sheet with the work. Where a manuscript needs an earlier stage than the one requested, we say so before starting rather than after.

Everything a client sends is treated in confidence, including unpublished manuscripts, art, and correspondence. Our self-publishing support and book editing are quoted on the whole document.

An author about to start has one free move worth making first. Read a university press author guide end to end. It is a list of everything a publisher would have done, written by people who do it for a living, and it costs nothing to copy.