Title: Into the Labyrinth

Author: Sigge Eklund (Translator: Katarina Tucker)

Client: Echo Publishing

Brief: Copy edit English translation of Swedish novel.

Job: This was an already successful published book that had been translated for the local market. In this case, the focus was on maintaining the Swedish voice, story and setting, while ensuring it was still accessible to Australian readers. It was important to find the balance between words and phrasing that might simply be unfamiliar, and those that would actually trip readers up.

This edit was largely about “reading and considering”, rather than heavy-handed adjusting. It was an intense if light-handed edit that largely resulted in small tweaks to the text to clarify geographical and cultural terms, and occasional amendments of literal translations, rather than rewriting any of the text.

Title: The Shadow’s Heart

Author: KJ Taylor

Client: HarperCollins Publisher Australia

Brief: Structural edit followed by copy edit

Job: The structural edit was done first to take care of some of the “big picture” aspects relating to the plot. This meant it primarily took the form of a report, with only a little mark-up on the manuscript itself. The author then completed another draft of the manuscript before the copy edit, focusing more closely on language, punctuation and grammar, was begun.

In this way, any suggestions and queries that could result in major rewrites, or that required careful reweaving of plot strands, could be undertaken before any hands-on editing – thus avoiding double-handling and also keeping the edit manageable for the author.

Title: The Falcon Throne

Author: Karen Miller

Client: Hachette/Orbit UK

Brief: Copy edit

Job:  This was the first book in what is intended to be a sprawling saga. With series it’s important to remember that choices made in book 1 will affect books 2-10, and this is true for editing as well. This means being extra careful when checking details – and in this case meant creating a strong and detailed style sheet in order to ensure consistency – not just for the benefit of the other editors and proofreaders, but hopefully for the benefit of the author as well. Since this was to be so epic, it was a chance not only to track word and punctuation choices, characters, and place names, but also finer details of character appearance and habits.