Carol Saller

[Today Lucy Ferriss and I continue a conversation we started last week about why copy editors do the things they do.]
Lucy: What is with the love of italics?

[In conversation with author Lucy Ferriss, on what she calls “the productive but sometimes perplexing relationship between writers and their copy editors.”]
Lucy: Hyphens and two-word nouns seem to be going the way of the dodo bird. In a 20-page stretch, my copy editor rendered back yard into backyard, bird cage into birdcage, picnic ware into picnicware, mud room into mudroom . . . Mostly I don’t care, but if I’ve been consistent, why should my usage be overruled?

Even after a well-written and well-prepared book has made it past an acquiring editor and through peer review, there is plenty for a manuscript editor to do.

Recently my brother let me ride with him for a week of long-haul trucking in his 18-wheeler. (Read more.)

It struck me the other day that I have access to a vast audience of handwriting experts. So I’m going to take advantage of your skills while you still have them to solve a puzzle I’ve been working on.

In a recent post about the timing of cover design in the publication process, I mentioned a colleague’s comment that typographic covers have the potential to wow just as much as those that feature a photograph or other illustrative art. To learn more, I put some questions to some design and marketing professionals.

When an academic book manuscript is under contract and comes to my department for copyediting, it undergoes an initial review by the assistant managing editor (yours truly) before assignment. If I find any major problems, I send the manuscript back…

A question I get from nearly every writer early in the process of publishing a book, sometimes before the manuscript is even edited: When will I see the book cover?

If after reading Parts 1 and 2 of this series you’ve decided that a computer isn’t competent to index your book and that hiring a professional isn’t an option, and if you’ve never written an index before, you might appreciate some advice.

Last week when I listed various reasons why you should not allow a computer to write the index for your monograph, I failed to mention one: That is, you might want to do it yourself because it’s potentially a lot of…