Well, it’s almost time. I’m on #199, which means the big 200 is coming up. I honestly can’t believe it, because back when I first created Edie and SimpleMarkup, I kind of thought I’d eventually just stop doing this once I ran out of ideas. But it turns out, there are a lot of jokes to crack about freelance editing.
Including this week’s comic. Of course, it’s not really funny when it’s happening to you.
For those of you who aren’t sure what the first panel means, it’s when an author decides that instead of accepting or rejecting the tracked changes in your edit, they look at your markup and manually add it to a new copy of their book.
Also known as “jacking up the human error occurrence rate by 5000%.” Okay, so that’s a completely unscientific guess based on zero data, but edits on a full-length manuscript can run anywhere from 2,000 to 15,000+ revisions. How efficient is it to transfer the vast majority of those by hand? The likelihood that tiny things like periods and commas and deleted spaces will be missed is high, and in a copyedit, that’s just not a good use of an investment in an editor’s services.
Track Changes is the standard for a reason. It works. Use it and enjoy it, and you’ll likely significantly decrease your editor’s extreme growth in height, anger, and blood pressure.
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