…the copyeditor who makes me scream the least!

…the best CE I’ve ever had.
Richard delivered the cleanest copy edit I’d ever seen unto me, complete with stylesheets (which I’ve only gotten once or twice in my career) and questions rather than corrections when turns of phrase were new to him. I’ve never before had a copy edit that didn’t piss me off at least once. We actually had fun getting stroppy at each other in comments over nitpicky details, but none of it was stuff to burn the house down over. This was a wonderful, heartening experience in that regard.

RB: Touch on the copy-editing aspect of this collection a bit. We both know Richard Shealy through twitter, how helpful was he and what kind of suggestions (in brief) did you provide to you?

AM: Without Richard’s copyediting, I couldn’t have looked you straight in the eye and tell you that Tide of Shadows and Other Stories was a professional product. He took an unpolished stone and turned it into a sparkling gem.
Richard is a copyeditor, so his entire role in the editorial process was to go through the manuscript line-by-line and clean up punctuation and grammar, spelling, tense, and typos. He’s not there to tell you how to spice up your dialogue, or improve the pacing of your action scenes—that’s what beta readers are for, since traditional editors don’t really exist in the self-publishing world—but he will make your manuscript sing.