ABSTRACT
You will deal with a commissioning editor while negotiating a contract and throughout the writing period-this person may also be called a senior, or an executive editor, or just an editor, in some publishing houses. After the manuscript is submitted and approved, your main contact is likely to be a sub-editor, or a production editor, who continues as your key link during the rest of the publishing process, although at various stages you may be contacted by a copy-editor, a representative of the marketing department and perhaps also by a designer and by a proofreader or by someone with a fancy name like schedule co-ordinator. Your sub-editor will pass your manuscript to a copy-editor, often a freelance familiar with the subject you are writing about. The copy-editor is expected to pick up not only spelling mistakes and punctuation and grammatical errors, but also to watch out for obscurities, ambiguities and factual errors; also to check that your manuscript conforms with house-style. To learn the details of a copy-editor’s job and how it interfaces with writing, read Judith Butcher’s Copy-Editing (FRI). I say more about the relationship between copy-editor and author in section 10.1.
