My last post was all the free and easy ways to improve your written work. These get you only so far. Going from “free” to “a penny or more” in today’s friction-free Internet economy is a hard sell, but you should consider it. Would you pay $40 to have your submitted or completed article be more professional and readable? If you’re a researcher, I’d hope you’d answer “of course.” The trick is knowing how to do so.

My answer: hire a technical-oriented copy editor. Specifically, hire Charlotte Byrnes – contact email’s below. She did all the copy editing and typesetting for Real-Time Rendering, 4th edition, and all the copy editing for Ray Tracing Gems I and II. Me, I’m not planning on writing another book for a decade or so – that’s about how long it takes for me to forget all the pain from these previous times. Charlotte’s not part of that pain – just the opposite. I asked Ms. Byrnes if, with our book done, she was accepting article-editing work. She said she’s currently available, though may have to turn down work if the demand becomes unmanageable. Now that we’re not selfishly monopolizing her time, I asked if I could pass her name along – she agreed, and so, this post.

Of the four editions of Real-Time Rendering, she’s done by far the most clean-up work on our text. I recall a previous edition where the copy editing was nothing but thousands of commas getting added, page after page of little blue “add comma” marks, which (to meet the deadline) I had to type in. Ugh, and I knew there were sentences that could have been polished and improved, but simply weren’t. Charlotte improves sentences, makes equations look better, notes problems with notation, cleans up bibliography references, on and on. With Charlotte, we send her the .tex file, figures, and whatever else is needed to compile the article. She edits the .tex and .bib files, making corrections and adding a few notes about elements she wants the authors to check.

My advice: if you’re using .tex, don’t use “\import”, just send her one .tex file with all the text – it’s much easier on both her and you, as you can then do a “diff” with your one original file and see what’s changed. I also recommend putting hard line breaks at 80 characters (e.g., in TeXstudio use “Idefix | Hard Line Break…”), as then the “diff” will be easier to view. Or use WinMerge, which shows long-line diffs without scrolling.

Also, note with the rates below that there’s an assumption the article is in relatively reasonable shape. If you know your non-native-English is not that great, she’s willing to edit, but it’s more per page, negotiable.

Here’s the info she sent:

I have over 14 years experience in academic scientific publishing, both editorial and production, specializing in mathematics and computer science (particularly in computer graphics and game design).

Available Services

o   Copyediting
o   Developmental editing
o   Typesetting in LaTeX
o   Word-to-LaTeX conversion
o   LaTeX-to-Word conversion
o   Proofreading
o   Entering edits in Word or LaTeX files
o   Project management for collections with contributing authors

Base Rates

Copyediting: $2.50 per page/1200 characters
Typesetting: $3.50 per page
Conversion: $2.00 per page, plus $1.00 per significant mathematical expression
Minimum cost of $40.00

Negotiable rates for non-native-English-speaking authors, developmental editing, and additional services

Charlotte Byrnes
STM Manuscript Services
STMbyrnes@gmail.com