On the topic of copy editing you raise: I wrote a book in DocBook for Manning in 2010. DocBook is XML, so I structured it with opening / end tags on their own line, content in the middle. As you would with a HTML document.
After copy editing multiple chapters, they sent it back to me with all the content on a single line. I was so incredibly upset that they ditched all my painstaking format that I almost abandoned the project there + then.
Not needing to care in the slightest is one of the major value propositions of that sort of syntax, at least IMO. If it does happen to matter for whatever reason that's what formatting tools are for.
After copy editing multiple chapters, they sent it back to me with all the content on a single line. I was so incredibly upset that they ditched all my painstaking format that I almost abandoned the project there + then.
It sounds like from your experience that it has barely changed. I ended up moving to self-publishing so I have a greater control over the whole process. I wrote it up long-form here: https://ryanbigg.com/2015/08/my-self-publishing-success-stor...