Capitalisation, Commas and Character Eye Colours

I’ve just finished the copyedit for THE MADEMOISELLE ALLIANCE—woo hoo! The copyedit is simultaneously one of the most painful and best parts of the process of getting a book out into the world. It’s where you discover you’ve changed the eye colour of one of your main characters from grey-green to blue halfway through the story, where you have intense debates about the rules of capitalisation in French vs English, because they’re really quite different—and when you’re referring to organisations from the 1940s, it can be hard to find a consistent approach. Thank God for Larousse, the French dictionary of choice for all such debates.

You’re possibly wondering what a copyedit is and how an author can forget the eye colour of her own character. Good questions! So let me answer them in this week’s post.

The Style Sheet—Like the Bible, But Better!

The copyedit is where you finally have to deal with the nitty-gritty of making sure everything in your book is consistent, correct and exactly how you want it. To help with that process, the production editor at the author’s publishing house usually produces something called a Style Sheet. These vary by publishing house, but because I tend to use French phrases, as well as French street names, people’s names, city names and organisation names, the style sheets for my books are pretty comprehensive.

Basically, the style sheet lists every slightly unusual or foreign word that you’ve used in the manuscript and notes the correct spelling, correct accents, correct capitalisation etc. This helps us make sure that these words are consistent across the whole book, that I haven’t accidentally dropped a cedilla under the letter “c” when I’m typing Provençal, for example.

The style sheet also lists every character’s name and has a short paragraph of description about each character, so we can make sure their hair and eye colors and distinctive mannerisms remain the same over the book. This is very important in this book as there’s a big cast of characters.

You might think an author should be able to keep track of these things in their head but, to be honest, I had absolutely no idea that I’d accidentally changed one of my main character’s eye color. You just get caught up in what you’re writing and, despite having read the manuscript at least a dozen times before I submitted it to my publisher, I didn’t notice.

And, given the characters in my book are all part of a Resistance network, they all have both real names and code names! Yes, that’s a lot of names. I want this to be as easy as possible for readers to keep straight, so I definitely don’t want a character with the code name Eagle to suddenly become a Scallop, which are two of the code names in the book.

Would You Like a Comma With That?

The amazing production editor has also done a summary of each chapter, which I haven’t seen in a style sheet before, but this has been great as each chapter has its own title. Seeing all the titles laid down on a couple of sheets of paper means I can get a feel for how they all work together.