Whenever a writer approaches me with a new project, I say the same thing: ‘Congratulations on everything you’ve achieved so far!’
Getting a manuscript – whether it’s an article, your thesis, or your first novel – to the point where you’re ready to work with a professional editor is a huge milestone, which is why it’s just plain mean that authors are met with a wall of publishing jargon when they’re ready to take their next steps.
In this post, I break down some of the different types of editing available to authors.
We’ll tackle common questions like:
- What type of editing do I need first?
- What can I expect when I work with each type of editor?
- What’s the difference between a developmental edit and a copy edit, and what on earth does a line editor do?
- Do I really need a proofreader if my manuscript has been professionally copyedited?
Once you understand the process, you can choose the services you need, compare editors more effectively, and give your book the best chance of success.
Developmental editing
Developmental editing (also called ‘substantive editing’) is usually the first step in the editing process. This is the big-picture phase where you can expect the most drastic changes to your manuscript, as well as the most collaborative relationship with your editor.
How does your developmental editor approach your piece?
A developmental editor is concerned with taking your manuscript from your first (or second, or fourteenth) draft to a text that’s ready to meet a wider audience.
Typically, their feedback will focus on:
- Structure and organisation. After developmental editing, your text should have a more logical flow of information. Expect chapters or sections to be rearranged and gaps and plotholes to be found (and hopefully filled). Your editor will also focus on your overall structure and pacing, letting you know where the reader could use a breather, where you’re starting to drag, or where there’s the opportunity to add more richness to your writing.
- Clarity and coherence. Your editor should make sure that your ideas are clearly expressed, your arguments have evidence, and the world you’re building is engaging and effective. If you opt for a line edit either after or as part of developmental editing, your editor will go through your work literally line by line, interrogating every choice you’ve made and asking if every sentence is the best version of itself.
- Argument or character development. Fiction writers, find an editor who can help you develop more well-rounded characters who speak and behave consistently, know their goals, and act on them. For non-fiction, find someone to do the same with the red thread of your argument. By the end of the process, your text’s theme should be crystallised, leaving you with a more direct, memorable manuscript.
- Consistency: Specifically, your editor is looking for contradictions within the world you’ve built and identifying factual errors in your manuscript. You can also expect a developmental editor to correct any glaring typos they come across, though they won’t be concentrating on the minute grammatical details enough to notice them all.
Depending on your professional developmental editor’s process, your timeline, the changes required, and your budget, you can approach this phase as one task or as a series of ‘rounds’ of developmental editing.
What happens after developmental editing?
After developmental editing, you’ll have a long list of direct edits (where a change has been made on your behalf), suggestions, and observations to help you develop the final draft of your manuscript. If requested, your editor might also give you a form of editorial assessment with observations about your book’s suitability for publishing.
This should put you in a great position when you’re ready to work with a copyeditor – or even to approach an agent if you’re going the route of traditional publishing.
Copyediting
Copyediting is all about the details rather than the big-picture elements. At this stage, you can’t expect any major structural editing of your manuscript (beyond fixing mistakes in the paragraph breaks, or sometimes changing the sentence and paragraph order). It’s about consistency, meeting your publisher’s stylistic requirements, and gearing up to see your book in print.
Most importantly, your copyeditor is there to preserve your unique voice, even when stylistic changes are necessary.
How does your copyeditor approach your piece?
Typically, a copyeditor’s feedback will be targetted at these areas:
- Grammar and syntax: Copyeditors pay close attention to grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure. We’re sticklers, but we’re mostly concerned with consistency. Unless we have a style guide from your publishing house telling us otherwise, we don’t really mind what your stance is on an Oxford comma – we just want to be sure it’s the same from start to finish. Again, if you work with a line editor, expect more pushback on your word choice and sentence structure during this phase.
- Spelling: Copyeditors will correct as many typos as they can. They’ll also choose a dictionary (often Merriam-Webster for US titles and the OED in the UK) and ensure that all the more ambiguous spellings (like wellbeing vs. well-being) match the same dictionary. If you have a spelling that’s unique to your manuscript, like a character’s name or a particular technical term, we’ll keep an eye on that as well.
- Style: Especially for non-fiction or for online content for big brands, copyeditors work very closely with a style guide. This could be a standard academic style, like Chicago or AP, or simply a house style guide detailing how they’d prefer to receive manuscript submissions. Style guides tend to answer questions like, ‘How should I format this reference?’ ‘How should I write the dates, times, and distances in my book?’ and ‘Should I set B.C.E in small caps?’
- Referencing: If your book has footnotes or a bibliography, your copyeditor will concentrate on how you’ve written your references, where you’ve placed your footnote tags in relation to your punctuation, and the alphabetical order of the references in your bibliography.
- Formatting: Copyediting gets your book ready to be typeset and printed, so your copyeditor will also look at formatting. We’ll also check how you’ve set up your bullet or numbered lists, your quotes, and your illustrations.
- Fact-checking: Although fact-checking is a separate discipline for many academic projects and publishing houses, copyeditors will often double-check the details of your text – especially for elements like dates of birth and death. After all, we’re already looking at them to make sure they’re not repeated too often in the course of each chapter.
- Inserting typesetting tags: Sometimes, a copyeditor will be asked to insert ‘tags’ in square or angled brackets to mark the different design elements of your text. These help the typesetter who comes in next to transform your raw manuscript document into its final printed layout. Tags can describe the heading style, delineate quotes, and indicate where illustrations should be placed in your manuscript.
What happens after copyediting?
After copyediting, you’ll probably receive a marked-up document with tracked changes to approve and comments explaining the copyeditor’s line of thought. They may also send you comments to respond to –for example, where a sentence could be corrected in multiple ways.
Your copyeditor should also produce a ‘style sheet’ that details the rules they’ve followed and lays out the special features of your work (like a table of spellings unique to your manuscript, departures from house style, and the location of any quotes that you, the writer, will have to seek copyright permission to reprint).
It’s important to review your copyeditor’s work in detail, as this is really your last opportunity to make adjustments to the wording or structure of your text.
One-word typos or errors with page numbers can be corrected during proofreading, but reordering your chapters, introducing a new quote, or deciding that you’d rather use a different anecdote to illustrate a point can all have a knock-on effect on every subsequent page of the book and cause a major (and expensive) headache for your designer.
Proofreading
Proofreading in the traditional sense is exactly that: reading your proofs.
Proofs are PDFs or printed documents showing exactly how the finished version of your book or document will be laid out. They include the design elements added during typesetting, the final page numbers, and all the front-matter pages (like copyright notices, dedications, and epigraphs) that will be included in the final version.
If your book has been copyedited by a professional, there should be very minimal changes after the proofreading stage – but that doesn’t mean your proofreader isn’t putting in long hours or that you can afford to skip this step.
How does your proofreader approach your piece?
Proofreaders will typically focus their attention on two areas: the layout of the text and the minute details of the writing.
In terms of layout, we’re typically leafing through the document to check:
- The headings and chapter titles, including the font, style, case, and the line space before and after. We’ll also check the hierarchy of the titles. For example, you should never skip straight from a ‘H1’ chapter title to a ‘H3’ subtitle without nesting it under a ‘H2’.
- The page numbers, including how they match up to the numbers promised on the contents page.
- The ‘running heads’, which are the book or chapter title you see at the very top of each page, including how they match up to the chapter titles in the contents page, and whether you have the right heading on the right-hand (recto) page and the left-hand (verso) page.
- The lists, including the number order and the way they’ve been introduced and punctuated.
- The quotes, especially inset quotes, since these are often formatted differently to the rest of your text.
- The placement of illustrations and diagrams, especially if the text points the reader towards them directly. No one wants a line that says, ‘See Fig 2 below’ when the diagram has actually been placed on the previous page.
As well as this, your proofreader will go sentence by sentence through your entire text, with the style sheet and style guide in their hand, to identify every possible error or inconsistency. At this stage, it’s still normal to find small corrections, such as minor typos, repeated words that were overlooked in the original document, or small changes in punctuation.
What happens after proofreading?
Proofreading is the final step. After it’s done, you should have the chance to review the final changes (which you’ll usually see in a PDF, with comments, highlights, and sometimes the traditional proofreading stamps favoured by some publishers).
Your typesetter will go back into your file and make the final changes indicated by the proofreader. Then, it’s down to the company you’re working with as you move through the very last steps of the publishing process.
Three reasons to budget for a proofreader
More and more writers are opting to self-publish. In this case, many of them want to lower their costs, so there’s an increasing push for editors to combine copyediting and proofreading to stay competitive and do more with less.
The problem with rolling copyediting and proofreading into one is that the book you’ll have in your hands is not identical to the Word doc you send to your publisher. It’s always transformed during typesetting – otherwise, it would look really boring and be difficult to read. And whenever you make drastic changes, there’s a risk of introducing errors.
In my experience, separating copyediting and proofreading can make all the difference between a professional final product and something that feels homemade. It’s down to these three reasons:
1. Typesetting usually introduces errors
In the last year, I’ve worked on several books that have been professionally copyedited and typeset, but still had issues in the proofreading phase. These have included:
- Lines of the body text included in the inset quote, which made it difficult to gauge the meaning on the first pass.
- Bullet lists formatted without the bullet points, which looked really unprofessional.
- Chapter headings that didn’t match the contents page, which made the book harder for your readers to use.
- Placeholder information in the front matter that wasn’t removed when the copy was updated, which risked running into legal issues with permissions.
All of these came off the back of Word documents that were perfectly formatted when they left the copyeditor’s desk.
While none of these compromised the quality of the author’s writing or the strength of their argument, they looked cheap, and ran the risk of distracting the reader from the story.
2. Copyeditors are fallible
Copyeditors work really hard. We comb your work at the rate of only about 1000–1500 words per hour and catch every error we can. But we’re also human.
Sometimes, a document needs a heavy edit that concentrates more on formatting, so small mistakes with punctuation can slip through.
Sometimes, an error that’s easy to spot in the PDF proof was hidden in the original manuscript, like a repeated word at the beginning and end of a line.
Sometimes, Word decides to throw in some errors because it’s feeling petulant. The risk here is particularly high if your editor has used the find and replace function liberally, or if you have a lot of chapter and section breaks in your text.
Bottom line? Even when I proofread for the best copyeditors, I expect to find a small typo every 2–3 pages.
3. Copyediting and proofreading are different skill sets
At the end of the day, copyeditors read for meaning and clarity, whereas proofreaders read only for detail.
It’s impossible to properly combine these viewpoints and levels of detachments in one pass of your manuscript. It can even be difficult for the same person to proofread a text they’re already familiar with without a significant pause or a formatting change. When you separate these final two phases of the publishing process, you have a much stronger chance of a flawless final product.
