4 Critical Book Editing Options

A recent newsletter I received from Ally Machate, who runs a editing and marketing firm, mentioned three costly mistakes authors make when publishing. The first mistake is rushing to publish without proper editing.

“Skipping professional editing might save time (and money in the short term),” she writes, “but it often lead to … negative reviews.”

I know how right she is. One book project I worked on saw the author ignore my edits and publish the book as is. The reviews were, as expected, terrible: “a boring book with tons of grammatical errors. Pass!”

Machate’s solution was simple: Work with a professional editor. And again, I know how right she is. I had a client who didn’t listen when I said that once the ghostwritten manuscript was complete, it should be edited by an independent third party. She thought the writing would be clean enough to be published, so when she took it to her publisher, the company demanded it be edited. By then, she had run out of money, and the project stalled.

However, what kind of book editor do you need? The ghostwriter can advise, but here is an overview of various types of editing that might be required. 

Developmental editing—This is the process where the editor critically focuses on the big picture, examining the manuscript and addressing all the major issues, including style issues, sentence phrasing, and pacing. The key word is critically because the work can result in substantially changing the manuscript for the better.

Developmental editing involves recommending how to break down the book’s overall message into understandable bits. To do this, the editor will ask a lot of questions that deal with the goals of the reader, author, and books as well as genre, category, theme, and structure. The author’s answers these questions can help the editor highlight points that need to be further explained so the audience has the same understanding as the author wants them to have.

A developmental editor will act as a reader and help you gain perspective and show what works and what doesn’t from the reader’s perspective. Then the editor will make suggestions on what needs to be done so that you can fix the problems.

Many authors consider their book their baby, and a developmental editor provides guidance for how to fit all the big-picture elements together into a cohesive book.

Copy editing—This type of editing focuses on word choice, punctuation, capitalization, style, typographical errors, and grammar. Copy editors also ensure the voice is consistent throughout.

Line editing—This is similar to copy editing in that line editors also look at word choice, style and grammar. However, the line editor focuses on more creative uses of language and how the word choice affects how clearly the story is communicated. Line editors seek out and fix extra or unnecessary words, run-on sentences, redundancies, tonal shifts, unnatural phrasing, and confusing narrative digressions. They also tighten paragraphs.

Proofreading—At the end of the editing process, after the manuscript has been formatted into book form, the proofreader takes a final look at the manuscript and checks for misspellings, punctuation and capitalization errors and grammatical problems.

Beta reading —These people aren’t editors but instead are people who are part of the author’s target audience. They provide a valuable perspective: that of a test group of people the author wants to read the book.

Maybe the author knows them, maybe not. Maybe they’re paid, maybe they’re not. Regardless, they read the manuscript when it’s almost done and tell you how the target audience will likely respond to the book. They usually make note of the book’s tone, how they felt reading it, whether the ending worked or not, when exactly they started or stopped being interested, and any questions they might have about what they read. If a story within the book makes no sense, they bring that to light, too.

Not every project will need all of the above editing services, but it’s good to know them so you can make the best choice(s) to suit your and your manuscript’s needs.

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