What to fix yourself before paying anyone

What should I fix myself before paying anyone?

Everything on this page and nothing beyond it. The tasks worth doing are the ones with a right answer the author already knows. Which spelling of a name is correct, which chapter number was skipped, and which note was meant for the author rather than the reader are all in that category.

The Chicago Manual of Style gives a whole section of its manuscript preparation chapter to cross-checking a manuscript, alongside sections on manuscript formatting and on preparing electronic files.² Those are author tasks in Chicago's arrangement, and they come before the editing chapter rather than inside it.

What should not be attempted is anything requiring a decision the author is unsure about. An author who standardizes hyphenation by guessing, or imposes a citation style half remembered, creates work rather than saving it, because inconsistency applied consistently is harder to unpick than inconsistency left alone.

Are my chapter numbers, headings, and section breaks consistent?

Numbering is the mechanical fault we see most often in a revised manuscript, and it has an obvious cause. Chapters get split, merged, and reordered, and the headings keep the numbers they had.

Three things are worth checking against each other: the chapter numbers in sequence, the heading levels used inside chapters, and the table of contents if the file has one. Chicago treats the format of chapter titles and the format of subheads as separate matters, which is a useful reminder that a book can be consistent in one and not the other.²

The check takes minutes with a document map or an outline view, and it is worth doing last, after every other change. Fixing the numbering and then moving two chapters puts it straight back where it was.

Have I used two spellings of the same character's name?

Almost certainly, if the book is long and the name is unusual. Names acquire variants through typing, through autocorrect, and through an author changing their mind in chapter six without going back.

Copy editing covers this as a matter of course, since Editors Canada defines it as editing to ensure correctness, accuracy, consistency, and completeness, and lists the development of style sheets among its tasks.³ An editor will find the variants. The point of finding them first is that the author knows which spelling is correct and the editor does not.

The same applies to place names, invented terms, and any word the book has coined. A short list of preferred spellings sent with the manuscript saves a query for each one.

Are my scene breaks marked the same way throughout?

Scene breaks are invisible until they are inconsistent, at which point they are conspicuous. A manuscript that marks them with a blank line in some chapters, three asterisks in others, and a hash in the chapters written last is describing its own writing history.

Blank lines are the least reliable marker, because a blank line at the foot of a page disappears in typesetting and the break is lost. A visible character survives the trip to the page.

Whichever marker a book uses, using one marker is the requirement. The choice belongs to the author, the consistency belongs to the editor, and doing the search and replace in advance costs nothing.

The related question is what happens where a scene break falls at a chapter end. A marker there is redundant, and a manuscript that carries one in some chapters and not others has an inconsistency a typesetter will inherit.

Is there placeholder text left in the file?

More often than authors expect. Placeholders survive because they were written to be temporary and therefore look unremarkable in a file the author has read fifty times.

The pattern to search for is whatever the author's own habit is: square brackets, three question marks, the letters TK, a repeated X, or a phrase such as check this. Searching for the habit finds them all at once.

The reason to do it first is arithmetic. A placeholder discovered during a copyedit produces a query, an email, an answer, and a re-read of the paragraph. Discovered by the author, the same placeholder produces a sentence.

The worst cases are placeholders that read as finished text. A name written as the character's role, or a figure typed as a round number to be corrected later, will pass an editor's eye because nothing about it looks provisional.

Are there notes to yourself still in the text?

Notes to self are the most awkward version of the same problem, because they are written in the author's ordinary voice and can read as narration. An instruction to expand a section, an argument the author was having with themselves, or a reminder to check a date can all survive into a submitted manuscript.

Comments in a word processor are safer than notes typed inline, precisely because they are visible as comments and can be shown or hidden as a group. Where notes were typed into the text, the search that finds placeholders will usually find these too.

An editor who finds one queries it rather than deleting it, because it might be a deliberate aside. That query costs the author an answer and is entirely avoidable.

Does my chapter numbering skip a number?

It is worth counting, because the eye does not catch a missing number in a sequence of forty. Deleted chapters and merged chapters are the usual cause, and the gap can survive several rounds of revision without anyone noticing.

Numbering that skips is not always an error. Books that number parts and chapters separately, or that use unnumbered interstitial chapters, are doing something deliberate, and an editor cannot tell the two apart from the file alone.

The related check is that the numbers in the text agree with the numbers in the headings. A cross-reference to chapter eleven that survives the deletion of chapter seven now points at the wrong chapter, and the sentence around it still reads perfectly well.

Books with parts have a second layer of the same problem. Part divisions renumber chapters in some houses and not others, and a manuscript that has been reorganized often carries both schemes at once.

Are my notes and citations complete, if the book has them?

Incomplete citations are the most expensive thing on this list, because the missing information usually exists only in the author's own records. An editor can flag a note with no page number, and cannot supply the page number.

Chicago devotes its first chapter to the parts of a book, including where notes, bibliography, and other back matter sit, and its second chapter to preparing the manuscript in which they arrive.² The order implies the sequence: the apparatus is assembled before the manuscript is handed over.

The minimum worth reaching before an edit is that every note has a source, every source in the notes appears in the bibliography, and every bibliography entry is cited somewhere. Those three checks can be done mechanically, and they remove most of the back-and-forth that otherwise stretches a schedule. Every document a client sends us is treated in confidence, working notes included.