4. Copyediting

4.1 Once we have agreed on a cover design a few months will pass as your book works itself up along the queue. About three months before the expected launch date, we start copyediting.

4.2 Depending on the length, style, nature, and format of your book and a whole bunch of other factors, copyediting can take up to several weeks. We may email you intermittently with queries. The sooner you respond the faster we can work, but we won't rush.

4.3 You will receive the copyedited files back from us together with verbiage explaining our interventions and changes. Most of them will be track-changed in the document, but certain repetitive errors (such removing UK spelling, inserting Oxford commas, or citation formatting) may have been done "silently" to avoid cluttered Word documents.

4.4 The contributing authors have a chance to review all our changes and respond to our queries. Please ask them to do so fastidiuously and to not make any undocumented changes. Use track changes for additions or emendations; if they reject a change they see, please ask them to reply via comment. Return the reviewed manuscript to us as a single package (i.e., don't send back individually reviewed chapters).

4.5 We will then check your reviewed manuscript against our edits to make sure nothing has slipped through and all open issues have been attended to. We do all this to avoid multiple rounds of corrections at the proofing stage, when such corrections are much more cumbersome to implement.

4.6 We may get back to you with additional queries, but after that it's time for typesetting.