Copyedit Query Response Template

A copyeditor's query points at one sentence. The CIEP's own guide to fiction style sheets names the plainest version of what goes wrong when a decision is only ever checked at the one place somebody flagged. A style sheet exists so James is not allergic to gluten in Chapter 1 and eating a sandwich by Chapter 2. This space starts once a submitted manuscript comes back from a publisher's copyeditor with tracked changes and queries attached, and checks every recurring decision against every other place it should govern.

On the worked manuscript, Cormorant Point by Marisol Kavanagh-Oyelaran, 380 pages and 34 chapters, the copyeditor raised 214 queries: 138 confirmations and 76 judgment calls. Twenty-nine of the judgment calls set a rule recurring elsewhere in the book, 193 other times in total. Checking all 193 against the rule that was supposed to govern them found 11 contradictions, one character's dialect spelling accounting for 4 of the 11 on its own, across eleven of the manuscript's thirty-four chapters.

Finding those 11 now instead of at the proof round is nearly free; finding them later is not. A sample author-publisher contract clause the Authors Guild distributes to its members deducts an author's proof-stage alterations, past a set share of composition cost, from royalties rather than the publisher's budget. The CIEP's own account of the editorial workflow is explicit that a separate round of queries comes at proof stage; it does not promise the copyedit round's decisions get re-verified there. This space checks them now, while the fix is a document, not a bill.