One of the big time eaters lately has been the Warbreaker Copy Edit. This is the last chance that I, as a writer, get to look at and change a manuscript before it goes to press. After this, the text is locked into place, and it’s very difficult to make changes other than little proofreading tweaks. So I like to take my time on a copyedit and make sure everything is how I want it. I also take a lot of notes during this point for the Annotations, as this is generally my last time reading straight through a book.
The copyedit arrives in a loose leaf form, having already been to a copyeditor. Their job is to do very in-depth line edit, meaning they’re not editing for story or character, but instead trying to make sure everything is consistent, properly formatted, and grammatically correct. One of the big things I have to do in a copy edit is approve or reject any changes made by the copyeditor. (Of course, there are rarely things to reject here—but occasionally you do something for stylistic purposes that might not be standard. For instance, in Warbreaker , I wanted to have Kalad’s Phantoms capitalized, despite the fact that the copyeditor wanted to make the Phantoms lower case.)
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