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[Music] hello friends welcome back to my channel my name is natalia lee i'm an indie author and freelance editor and today i'm going to be tackling the question what is the difference between copy editing and proofreading i do get asked this question a lot and i understand why a lot of people think that copy editing and proofreading are very similar or in some ways or even the exact same thing which is not the case but again i understand i didn't even know the difference between copy editing and proofreading you know a few years ago i thought they were essentially the same thing as well so if you don't know the difference this is the video for you i have my coffee here with me today so we're going to enjoy coffee out of this amazing cat mug and we're going to discuss copy editing and proofreading what the differences are if there are any similarities so that you know you know with your self-published book of course if you're traditionally publishing your publisher will handle all this for you it's always good to know what's going on with your team but if you are self-publishing it's really good to know the difference between copy editing and proofreading especially if you are on more of a budget because you want to know who you need to hire to make sure your book is the best that it can possibly be okay so we're going to start out with copy editing now with copy editing i consider this the heavy lifting of editing now copy editing typically has nothing to do with the actual story structure that would be you know a manuscript critique or a developmental edit more of like a content edit would come first before the copy edit so by the time you get to the copy editing phase your story needs to be pretty much pegged down you're happy with the story on the page and now you need a professional to help you tell the best story you can and i think that's an important distinction is that some people believe that a copy editor is like a glorified spell checker you know some people might even say why do i need a copy editor if you know microsoft word tells me how to spell things but a copy editor does way more than that yes they're going to address misspelled words they're going to address grammar usage punctuation but then they're going to go so so far as to do basic fact checking for you if you need that especially if you're writing nonfiction they're going to be looking for consistency this is a big one if your character is blonde on page 10 and then on page 105 your character has black hair and nothing has happened that should have been able to change that hair color then that's a consistency error that your copy editor needs to catch or...