Copyediting & proofreading
Copyediting
After I had completed and tested all of my recipes, I worked with Keryn to make sure the structure and flow of everything was as good as we could make it. We went through the book over and over and over again, making tweaks to the content and moving sections around until we were happy. Even though we were happy with what we’d done at this stage, it was absolutely essential to have a second pair of fresh eyes to look at our cookbook because you’re almost guaranteed to miss something when you’re so deep into the project. This is where Andrea Coppock worked her copyediting magic. She’s so incredible that she’s also worked on other books such as Nadia Lim’s, so we knew we were in good hands!
“In a nutshell, a copyeditor’s job is to make the book as logical and reader-friendly as possible without encroaching on the author’s voice or message.”
We were lucky to have Andrea come on board to copyedit our book. Her role was to understand the style and tone of our book, and ensure this was consistently applied to every page. One of the first things she did was look at the whole manuscript from end to end, taking in the order of the chapters and the types of recipes in each to check that nothing jumped out as being in the wrong place. This also helped her get a feel for the voice and tone of the book before she dived into the detail. She checked for errors in spelling, grammar and syntax. She checked to make sure that the name of the recipe matched with the ingredients listed, and the steps of the method were logical and easy to follow. She also made sure that ingredients were referenced consistently throughout the book, for example ensuring that ‘coriander’ was used in recipes instead of chopping and changing with alternate words such as ‘cilantro’. Any complicated or wordy sentences were simplified, all while making sure that our voice remained authentic to our book. Andrea queried anything in our book that didn’t make sense on a Word document, and then sent this to us to review before she incorporated them all into the master file. Keryn and I stayed up till the early hours of the morning looking at her suggested changes. It was so important doing this because Andrea picked up on some key things that weren’t obvious to us - this really showed just how important it is to have a professional copyeditor with fresh eyes look over our content! We went through a few rounds of this process and once Andrea updated the master file with all of the necessary changes, copyediting was complete! We could then send the manuscript to our designer, Jess Read, for typesetting and layout into first page proofs.
Here’s a sneak peak at how we communicated with Andrea to complete the copyediting:
Proofreading
After Jess had incorporated all of the copyedited content to her design file and completed the mammoth design stage, it was time for proofreading with Kate Wanwimolruk from Damson & Beet. The job of a proofreader is to ensure there are no mistakes in the copy, and to check that content, design and photography all flow together before sending the book off to be printed. Of course Keryn and I did our best to check this, but similar to copyediting, it’s really important to have another fresh pair of eyes from a professional in the industry. A fair few changes were made between the stages of copyediting and proofreading, so it was critical to go through this step and pick up on anything that didn’t seem quite right.
Kate approached the task of proofreading by printing off the whole book on A3 paper. The reason for using physical paper instead of working on a screen enabled her to scribble and show us exactly what part of the page she was talking about when referring to her suggested tweaks. After Kate had completed proofreading, she handed over her work to us and then Keryn and I went through all of her suggestions to accept or reject. At this stage of the project we were running to such tight timeframes because of other dependencies, so we wanted to get through Kate’s suggestions quickly. When we started looking at how many suggestions there were, we were honestly heart broken. At first glance it looked like sooo much, but as we wrapped our head around how the proofreading was done and what we had to do, it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. The trickiest part was understanding the ‘proofreading marks’ key. Changes weren’t just marked on the pages as ‘add a space here’ or ‘move this sentence up a line’ or ‘remove this extra space’. They were marked with a symbol instead to save space on the page and make it look less messy. We had to quickly learn how to translate these symbols in the key. It reminded me of the confused manuscripts I used to do for my typing exams many moons ago! Initially it was quite hard reading and understanding the key, but when we got the hang of it, it became much easier. We had to get it all finished in our tight timeframes so a few things that helped get us through the nights were peanut slabs and a bit of mixology with plenty of laughter! Let’s say we didn’t get much sleep that night, but looking back, these are some of the greatest memories of our cookbook journey!
As we went through the physical proofread copy, we realised that it would be really hard for Jess to understand and to see everything that we wanted changed, especially with her being in the UK and the urgency to meet our deadline! We could have scanned the entire document over to her but it would have been too tricky to understand the exact changes we had accepted to bring across into the master file, and also to understand the key. We wanted the process of her incorporating all of our wanted changes to be as easy as possible to save time and to minimise error. So we copied the ENTIRE book to Google Docs and in suggestion mode, typed out all of the changes we wanted. When Jess had incorporated all the changes, we checked them against the Google Doc to make sure everything was right (we’re all human so checking was important!) After a couple of feedback loops all of the suggestions were resolved and Jess’ master file was all up to date with the proofreading changes. Keryn and I did our very last proofread before sending off to Andrea to create the index. It was getting closer to the finish line!
Shobha Kalyan