Advice From an Editor: The different Types of Editing
And how to identify which one your book needs
We once again have a post from professional editor Bethany Lenderink, who also happens to be my good friend. I’m thrilled to share this insight from her about the different stages of editing and what each one contributes toward a finished book. Enjoy!
- Joseph
Much like writing, editing consists of different key stages—developmental editing, line editing, copyediting, and proofreading. Each of these stages is crucial but also highly individualized; no two manuscripts will spend the same amount of time in each stage.
Aspiring authors, self-published authors, and even authors with an established history of traditional publishing will all have to answer this question at some point: What kind of editing does my manuscript need? For aspiring and self-published authors responsible for their own editing, this question is especially crucial (no one wants to waste time or money on services they don’t need).
In this post, I’ll explain the different stages of editing, the goals of each stage, the types of corrections you can expect to see, and how to identify what type of editing will be best suited to your project.
Types of Editing
Developmental Edit
Developmental editing is the most difficult stage to define because the definition depends largely on your publisher or editor. Some editors combine it with line editing, some prefer to make it a distinct step, and some give it an entirely different name like “manuscript review.” In a Q&A session conducted by editor Sangeeta Mehta, Julie Scheina defined developmental editing as such:
Developmental editing is any editorial feedback that helps the author strengthen and develop their manuscript between the initial draft and when the manuscript is ready for copyediting, proofreading, and publication.
(Check out the full Q&A session: “Before You Hire a Developmental Editor: What You Need to Know”.)
Generally, a developmental edit is going to focus on big picture issues like structure, plot, character development, tension, and style. A developmental editor’s goal is to identify book-wide weaknesses that have to be addressed before the work can be tackled on a sentence level. It usually takes place after the first full draft is written, but depending on the level of the editor’s involvement, it might get pushed back to later in the process.
The actual format of developmental editing will look different depending on your publisher’s process, your editor’s experience, the state of your draft, and your preferences (although if you’re working with a traditional publisher, in general you’ll be expected to follow their process). In my experience, this stage tends to take the form of a review and notes provided for the author without the editor actually rewriting any content.
When I perform a developmental edit, I read the entire manuscript cover to cover, pausing only to leave comments in the margin or to type up a broader note. After this read, I create a memo, which combines all of my notes and identifies areas that need to be fixed or strengthened. The structure of this memo varies depending on the weaker areas of the book. For my authors who need to tighten, patch, or rework their plotline, my notes will all address the book with the goal of strengthening the plot. For my authors who write strong plots but don’t always take the time to think through or develop their characters, my notes will approach the entire piece from a character lens. What my notes always have in common is that I start with general, all-encompassing notes that affect the entire book and narrow in from there.
Note: Some editors will identify issues within the book but leave the solutions up to the author. Other editors will provide ideas to solve the problem but avoid insisting or ordering the author to choose any of those ideas. This depends on the editor and the relationship they have with their author. (For example, I’ve worked with the authors I do developmental editing for on several projects, so I know which authors want to hear my ideas and which authors don’t.)
Additionally, I include comments in the margins of the manuscript itself. Some of these are small questions that didn’t need to take up space in the memo (Ex. “I don’t have a strong sense of space in this scene. Characters who were standing and pacing are suddenly sitting at the table with no indication of their movement. Be sure to check this.”); these are things that need to be addressed either by the author during their rewrites or by later editors, but they aren’t affecting the entire book.
Once this memo is ready, I’ll send it to the author. A good editor is going to note which items are priorities and nonnegotiable—meaning you are expected to change that element in some way, whether it’s using an idea the editor provided or not—and which items are less crucial. At this point, your job is to rewrite sections of the book (or, worst-case scenario, the entire book) to address the identified issues. You will then turn in a new draft, which is often reviewed again to check if you implemented the changes that were asked for.
Keep in mind that in traditional publishing, this step is designed to make sure your manuscript is in decent enough shape for the editing team to work with because there is a finite amount of time in the process for them to polish the book. Refusal to make these changes, or making these changes in a way that doesn’t fully solve the identified problem, will result in you being asked to make more rewrites or even with the book’s release being delayed.
Once the developmental edit is complete, the book moves on to the line edit.
Line Edit
In some cases, the line edit is combined with the developmental edit, but for the sake of this post, I’m going to treat them as separate stages.
Once the developmental edit is complete to the satisfaction of both the author and the editors involved, your line editor gets to dive into the text. In general, a line editor’s goal can be defined with one word—effectiveness.
A line editor views the manuscript both through the broad picture lens and the sentence-level lens. They go through the manuscript sentence by sentence (or line by line), making corrections to ensure each sentence is communicating as effectively as possible and that the book as a whole works together. This can result in a multitude of different changes to areas like word choice, sentence and paragraph structure, fact-checking, flow, rhythm, tone, pacing, and consistency. Line editing is not as big-picture as the developmental edit, but it’s also not as narrowly focused on things like grammar and spelling as something like a copyedit.
Sandra Wendel defined it like this:
In a line edit, an editor examines every word and every sentence and every paragraph and every section and every chapter and the entirety of your written manuscript. Typos, wrong words, misspellings, double words, punctuation, run-on sentences, long paragraphs, subheadings, chapter titles, table of contents, author bios—everything is scrutinized, corrected, tracked, and commented on.
All line editors tend to have their own processes when working through a manuscript and no two editors will edit the same manuscript in the same way. Bear in mind that during this stage, you’re going to see the most red pen marks (or the most Tracked Changes in Word, as most editing takes place digitally these days). Don’t be dismayed by this. It’s completely normal, and more often than not it means your editor has a strong eye for detail and is taking extreme care with your book.
On my first pass during a line edit, my goal is to remove any stumbling blocks for the reader. I like to focus on two areas: flow and consistency. Readers tend to get tripped up by sentences that feel clumsy or tonally different from the rest of the work and by authors contradicting themselves. A line editor is going to trim overly wordy sentences or restructure things if a sentence’s meaning is ambiguous. They’ll rework awkward and weak sentences. They’re going to perform deep fact-checking and pay attention to consistency in the details. If Sally’s hair was red on page five but turns to blond on page 73, they’ll point this out (and continue to do so every instance until they’re all the same). They’re going to flag weak words and suggest replacements, and they’ll watch for overuse of words. (My author once used the word silky 432 times in her 300-page manuscript. By the time we were done, we’d cut that down to only 15 instances.) It’s not uncommon in this stage to see sentences combined, cut, or rewritten and paragraphs restructured or moved around to a different spot.
During this first pass, I also leave comments in the margins, both for myself and for the author. On my first pass, I like to maintain forward momentum so I get a better sense of the book’s overall flow and pacing, so I try to avoid lengthy interruptions. The comments I leave for myself might be flagging a fact I couldn’t easily confirm and need to do a deeper research dive on, a paragraph that was particularly messy and that needed more extensive rewriting, or flagging something that I fixed when I noticed it but need to check the earlier pages to make sure I didn’t miss it anywhere else. On the author side, I’m flagging anything that doesn’t make sense, anything that made me ask a question I think readers are likely to ask, and requesting the author to make a choice on inconsistent details.
My second pass is about addressing all those pesky comments and fixing what I can. I don’t want my authors to have to answer hundreds of questions about their book. If the answer to a question I asked is clear (or becomes clear after I asked it), I’m going to do my best to fix it. My goal is to present the author with a file that only contains the changes that need their approval, the queries I couldn’t answer for them, and the choices I couldn’t make on their behalf.
Now, you’re probably thinking something like this: That’s a lot of changes. Is my line editor completely rewriting my book on my behalf? What if they change something but I don’t like it? How will I know?
Firstly, no. Your editor is not rewriting your book on your behalf. There are certain changes we might make silently (meaning we don’t leave it redlined in the file), such as correcting obvious misspellings or punctuation issues. We do this silently because authors aren’t usually trained to spot all of the issues a good line editor is and because we know the author doesn’t want any embarrassing typos in the book either.
But ultimately, this stage is collaborative, and a good editor practices transparency (Carol Fisher Saller’s book The Subversive Copy Editor has some wonderful commentary about an editor’s responsibility to be transparent with their authors). It’s your book, and a good editor wants your book to be something you’re proud of and that maintains your voice. If I have to make a change bigger than adjusting a single word or a grammar issue, I’m going to leave it tracked so you can see exactly what I did. If I want to move paragraphs around, I’m going to flag that for you and make sure you understand why I did it while also making sure you approve the change. And I will never try to fix a story issue for you. I will merely offer suggestions and leave the final choice up to you.
Note: It’s very easy as an author to get bogged down in reviewing every single change your editor left tracked. I usually tell my authors to read through the document with no markup shown. Odds are, you’re going to like the flow of the writing and you’re not going to notice most of the changes the editor made. If something seems off to you or you know they removed a sentence you were extremely proud of, that’s when you should look at the markup and see what changes were made to that specific section. The most important part of your job at this stage is to address any queries the editor left for you.
Other Note: I talk a lot in this post about good editors, but unfortunately, you might run into a situation where you’re working with a bad editor. I’ll address how to know if your editor is doing their job well (and what to do if they’re not) in a separate post.
All this to say, your editors expect some back and forth. We expect you to fix a problem we identified in a different way than we suggested. And we expect to have to concede some of our changes to you. A good editor wants the book to be good more than they want to be right.
Once the line editor has completed their edit, and once the author has reviewed and approved these changes, the line editor will clean up the file and pass things along to the copyeditor.
Copyedit
In short, a copyedit is best left for last, when the manuscript is structurally and developmentally as strong as possible and when only mechanical cleanup is required. Many publishers practice what I call a combined edit, which is when the line edit and the copyedit happen simultaneously, but for particularly complicated or messy books, or when your line editor has a schedule that doesn’t allow for a longer combined edit, these stages are separate.
The copyedit is the lowest sentence-level stage of editing. The goal here is mechanical correctness. This stage is what most people think of when they think of editing, because it’s the stage that focuses most closely on grammar, spelling, punctuation, style requirements from the publisher, light fact-checking (usually only if something seems off), and formatting for things like footnotes, bibliographies, and headings. There is some overlap with the line edit, but very little work on the developmental elements of the book. This is where things get incredibly technical from a grammar and punctuation perspective. At this stage, the editor is largely going to be making smaller, silent changes versus revising whole sentences and paragraphs. Think of the book less on a sentence-level and more on a word by word level at this point.
During this stage, it varies if you will see the changes your copyeditor made or not. With a traditional publisher, the author doesn’t usually see the redlined copyedited file (but they do have two more opportunities to review the book before publication). With freelance editors that you’ve hired yourself, you should be seeing their marked-up files.
Proofreading
The final stage of the process is proofreading. Sometimes there are two rounds of proofreading, both in the Word document or galleys stage and the designed pages/PDF stage, but some publishers only have proofreaders for the designed pages.
A proofreader’s job is to be the last line of defense against absolute errors. An absolute error is a genuine, true mistake that could not be construed as correct. Things like misspelled or entirely missing words, inconsistent name spellings, misnumbered footnotes, etc. As Wendel puts it, “Those crazy stupid errors you as the author have missed and your editor missed, and you question your sanity. Those errors.”
In the designed pages stage, they also are going to be looking for bad word breaks in the margins (for example: I once saw shattered broken across two lines as shat-tered, and shat is just not a pleasant word), word stacks (the same word appearing at the beginning or end of a line three or more times in a row), tight and loose lines, and the list goes on and on.
Bottom line: The proofreader will try to make sure the book is as accurate as possible and to catch anything that might have slipped through the cracks during previous stages.
What Type of Editing Do I Need?
This final section is mainly for self-published authors who need to work with freelance editors. With traditional publishing, your publisher will determine exactly what editorial steps your book needs and walk you through it. But with self-publishing, you have to know your timeline, your budget, and your book’s specific needs.
Determining the type of editing your project requires is going to require one crucial thing: An accurate (and often humble) assessment of your own strengths and weaknesses.
As an editor who is also a writer, I know how hard it is to be objective about your own skills. I tend to see writers who fall into two camps—Camp Everything I Write Is Garbage, and Camp I Am God’s Gift to Writing. The former will often believe they need deeper, more extensive editing than they truly do, and the latter will fight their editor over every comma because they think they can do no wrong. (The latter will also insist they “only need a light proofread,” and I will call them a liar.) An honest writer falls somewhere in the middle.
If you struggle with being objective about your writing, my best piece of advice is to have three to five strong beta readers work through the draft. When they’re finished, compare their feedback and find the similarities. If they’re all noticing a lot of plotholes and structural issues, you might need a developmental edit and you’ll definitely need a line edit. If they liked your book but the typos and general messiness hurt their eyes, hire that copyeditor.
Note: Good beta readers will be constructive without blowing any smoke in your face. Potential good beta readers include other writers whose work you enjoy and who are familiar with the genre you’re writing in; widely read friends who are known for blunt honesty; and strangers who have been successful beta readers for other authors.
Unpopular opinion: Close friends and family do not tend to make good beta readers because they don’t want to hurt your feelings. A beta reader unwilling to critique your work isn’t worth your time.
If you don’t have people you trust to be beta readers, use your best judgment. Most often, writers need and want a line edit. They need someone to spot those lingering plotholes while also cleaning up the writing on a sentence-level. Line editing usually acts as a sort of catchall in terms of both the style and the mechanics of writing. So when in doubt, my advice is to assume you need a line edit. It will most likely be humbling, which is also part of being an honest writer.
If you struggle with the rules of grammar and punctuation, you’re writing in a language other than your first, you’ve never looked at a style manual, or you’ve never published a book that was formally edited before, it’s a good idea to either work with a line editor who will incorporate the copyedit into their line edit or to hire a separate copyeditor. Generally speaking, writers are good at coming up with ideas and constructing beautiful prose, but when it comes to the technical aspects, they’re largely self-taught and don’t know what they don’t know. There are certain rules in writing (such as the formatting of dialogue and all of its complexities or when to hyphenate words) that aren’t widely covered in basic writing and grammar courses. It’s an editor’s job to know the details the author has never even heard of before.
If you hire a copyeditor, it’s probably safe to skip the extra proofreads if you have budget or time constraints. If you’re only doing a line edit, I advise to have at least one formal and professional proofread.
Note: I don’t recommend completing proofreads yourself unless you’ve been able to set the book aside for several months. You know your writing, and more importantly what you meant to write, better than anyone else, and you are much more likely to miss or autocorrect errors in your head as you read. If you must complete the proofread yourself, I recommend reading it out loud. It’s tedious, but it forces you to slow down enough to spot when your brain is tricking you.
If you’re still struggling to decide what type of editing would be best for your project, you can also consider hiring an editor to perform an editorial assessment of the work. This often ends up being very similar to the developmental editing stage I illustrated above, but the end goal is to really home in on what type of editing the book needs before it’s ready to be shown to the world.
If you have more questions on the stages of editing I outlined above or how to determine what type of editing you might need, drop them in the comments. I’m always happy to discuss the craft with fellow writers and readers!
Don’t forget to subscribe to Bethany’s Substack as well!
And if you’re interested in more resources on the subject, check out some of the following:
“The Differences Between Line Editing, Copy Editing, and Proofreading” by Sandra Wendel
Jane is widely known in the publishing world both for her editorial savvy and her reporting on the business side of publishing and her work to educate authors on the craft and process.
Her book The Business of Being a Writer is a great resource.
Her resource list has helpful links to help authors with writing, editing, querying, designing and producing, multimedia, marketing, working with agents, legal issues . . . okay, so you get the drift—everything.
The Subversive Copy Editor by Carol Fisher Saller
Saller works for The Chicago Manual of Style (widely known as the industry standard for long-form writing). This book is mainly about how editors should be approaching their craft, but it’s a great resource on what an editor’s goals are, what they should be doing, and how to better relate with your editor.