After reading Friday’s item about alleged delays in getting royalty payments out to authors, Deanna Hoak emailed me about a different kind of compensation issue pertaining to her craft. “More and more manuscripts are being set in Times before they come to the copyeditor,” she writes. “This is problematic because most major publishers have never adjusted to setting book budgets based on words rather than mansucript pages. A 1000-page manuscript in Courier is about 250,000 words; in Times it’s closer to 370,000.”
“However, because the budget is based on manuscript pages rather than words,” Hoak adds, “the freelancers are still expected to complete the book in the same amount of time. It’s really becoming a problem for me… [and] I have had situations where the manuscript had been changed to Times for apparently no other reason than to lower the book budget. It’s frustrating.”
Hoak has elaborated on the problem on her own blog:
“Times squeezes half again as many words onto a page as Courier does. It therefore saves postage and copying, and it can speed up reading. However, you don’t want to speed up reading when you’re copyediting—you need to go slowly in order to catch mistakes. The space between letters in Courier helps the mistakes stand out, and the punctuation… is far, far more clear.”
“I have no problem with editors or agents preferring to read in Times,” she concludes. “However, the manuscript really should be set in Courier (or at least another monospaced font) before being sent out to the copyeditor—I’d think that even without the monetary issue.” At the very least, and I agree with her, all publishers need to start adjusting their budgets to reflect the actual word counts of their manuscripts, not a page count that can be manipulated willy-nilly.