Plan ahead now for smoother success later
While you’re in the process of writing your book, you’ll want to think ahead to early reviews and the edit cycles. If you plan these into your schedule early on, they’ll be less likely to throw you off-schedule when the time comes to tackle them. Schedule in time not only for reviewers and editors to do their work, but for you to tweak and revise in response. The time it will take depends on the length and complexity of your draft and on the nature of the revisions to be undertaken.
Early feedback: beta readers
Once you’ve honed and polished a complete first draft of your novel or memoir or other work of narrative nonfiction, you can send it to beta readers — avid readers of your genre accustomed to reading pre-publication work — for their honest feedback about the reading experience. If you’re a new author, you should plan on getting feedback from several beta readers, ideally those with experience in this role. Some authors continue the practice with each book.
Beta readers read and record their responses: where they were fully engaged, where they felt confused, where bored, where the story seemed to lag or become uninteresting. They function as exactly what their label declares them to be: early readers of a not-yet-finalized book. Their responses help you as writer to better know, not just to guess, where the story works and where it doesn’t for your target audience.
Be cautious about accepting advice for solutions from your beta readers. They should be reflecting back to you their responses to the story as readers. They should not, unless they are also professional editors — or beta readers so astute and experienced that they themselves border on being editors — be attempting to identify issues or suggest how you might fix those issues. From early readers, you want to know the symptoms. Then you the writer will reverse-engineer to the appropriate solutions for your storyline. Or you might also consult with a developmental editor.
How many beta readers should you use? Several, but not all at once. Start with a couple, and see what changes you might want to implement following that review. Then, you might send the revised draft out to a couple more. Just keep the focus on their responses: they’re standing in for your eventual actual readers and you want to understand how the book is coming across to readers in your genre. If you work with very good and experienced beta readers, and if you’re experienced enough yourself as a writer to determine the fixes needed, you might be able to go from this stage directly to copyediting. But beta reading normally precedes developmental editing. It does not ordinarily take the place of it.
For beta readers, the typical place to look is writing groups. The writers in writing groups tend to swap roles and beta-read for each other. So if someone reads and responds to your early work, you would then return the favor at a later date. Such communities are tight, and trust is mutual. Just make sure that you’re getting a beta-read. Spell out, if necessary, that what you’re looking for is the response of a reader come fresh to the work. You can even generate a set of questions if you think that would be helpful, but many writers in the writing community are well familiar with beta reading. If you’re able to pay for a beta-read, you can post in the professional beta readers group on Facebook.
Professional editing
Beta reading precedes the editing phase. It does not take the place of it. Professional editors will be looking at the work from a different perspective. In the context of editing, your book draft is known as a manuscript, or ms for short.
Scheduling. Most experienced editors are scheduled out months in advance, particularly for book projects, which are time and energy intensive. Short projects can be wedged into an already busy schedule far more easily. That’s for editors who work on their own. If you’re looking to individuals, the only way to land someone who’s ready to start immediately is to catch them between jobs. Or with a light schedule. You might also consider working with an agency. With a whole host of editors to call upon, agencies can pivot faster. (Be cautious, though, of packaged services. You’ll want to know what editor you’re working with and to have direct access to that editor.)
Keep in mind, too, that the editing itself will take some time if it’s to be done well. The deeper the edit, the longer it will take.
Levels of edit. “Editing” is not one thing. There are different levels of edit — developmental, line, copy — which move from deep, substantive inquiry to lighter, more surface-level work. As such, these different levels are undertaken in sequence: think of them as stages. Each level addresses the matter of the book in different ways. The copyedited ms then goes to the designer.
With respect to the starting point, depending on circumstances, you might also begin instead with a manuscript evaluation.
Formatting. At every level of edit, hand off your work to your editor in a plain and simple Word file. Times Roman 12 font. Double-spaced text with standard margins (1 inch all around), so that each ms page is approximately 250 words. Simple styles for the paragraphs and headers. Make sure that the paragraphs are standard as well: with indents set for the first line of each paragraph, no extraneous hard returns anywhere, and no additional line spacing between paragraphs. You do not want to pay someone editing rates to reformat your ms.
Developmental editing
The developmental editor (DE) looks at the big picture.
For narrative nonfiction and fiction, the focus is on story. She’ll be reviewing for the structure and development of that story: in narrative nonfiction, with an eye always to the deep insights to be gleaned from actual events; in fiction, with such insights to be developed from events that are under the author’s jurisdiction. She’ll read for setting, plot, characterization, POV, pacing, mood, and theme. The basic building blocks of story. She’ll look for whether the setting is fully utilized, whether the plot develops naturally and organically, whether narrative summary and scene are well balanced, whether characters are fully realized, whether the dialogue is natural and fluid, whether it always drives the story forward or reveals character (or both).
Full developmental edit
In a developmental edit, DEs mark the issues they’re seeing in the ms — exactly how they do so depends upon the DE and the nature of the issues — and they also write up a detailed editorial letter summarizing the problems they’ve identified and potential solutions to those problems, any questions or issues for the author to consider, and any outstanding questions.
With fiction, DEs are expected most particularly to be hands-off, letting the author take those notes and run with them. Fiction is all about the artistry of the writer.
With narrative nonfiction, it can depend. In the traditional publishing world, the preference is for the author to take on the actual work of revision. If, however, the author is a subject matter expert, not a writer, the DE may be asked to step in and do hands-on work. In the world of author publishing, it’s all about what the author wants. A DE can be as hands-off or hands-on as the author would like. If the DE does a lot of hands-on work, the work she does in reshaping the text may also encompass line editing.
If the changes were deep, with extensive revision, the ms could need another round of dev editing. Otherwise, it could be ready for line or copy editing, depending.
Manuscript evaluation
An evaluation of your manuscript is a little like “developmental editing lite.” You’ll get a report back, but not the commentary within the ms, and the report itself is less detailed. It will typically review strengths and weaknesses and make recommendations for next steps. It may not contain examples, or many examples, from the work in progress, and the solutions it offers may be more general.
There are any number of reasons to go with a ms eval rather than a full dev edit. You might have doubts about whether your draft is fully ready for editorial review. Or you might elect to go for a ms eval in place of beta readings. Experienced authors sometimes choose a ms eval just to do a sanity check on an idea in development.
With the highlights that the report supplies, you’ll have pointers from a professional for how to revise the work. Following this revision — depending on how structurally and substantively deep were the changes — your work might be ready for a line edit or it might need a round of full developmental editing.
Line editing
The line editor (LE) focuses on the language. This is literally line-by-line work. The line editor is not looking at how the overall work is organized — at whether, for example, the material flows logically, whether sections or discussions seem to be out of order, superfluous, or missing altogether — or larger issues of this nature. She is down in the paragraphs and the sentences. The LE works sentence by sentence, tweaking and reshaping as needed. The work is every bit as intense as that of the DE, but it is of a finer scope.
In narrative nonfiction and fiction, the writing needs to dovetail with the elements of story. And so in addition, the LE reads with attention to narrative viewpoint, head hopping, filter words, showing and telling, action beats, dialogue tags, and so on. In narrative, many DE-level issues surface in the line-by-line work.
Not every ms needs line editing. Authors who are themselves professional writers and accomplished stylists may need little to none.
Copyediting
The copyeditor (CE) is all about the mechanics of the language and the visual conventions of language on the page. With respect to mechanics, she’s focusing on absolute clarity with respect to diction and structure, and on correctness of grammar and syntax. In terms of the visuals, she’s looking at consistency and correctness of spelling, at markers like caps and hyphens, and at punctuation.
Some of this will have already been addressed at the line editing stage, but the focus at that stage is on fluidity and flow, on coherence, on concision and emphasis, and other such matters of the rhythm and pacing and effectiveness of the language. It’s at this stage now that the editorial focus is on making sure that what’s on the page is clean and correct.
As CEs are only human, expect some small errors to slip through. That’s the nature of the work. The proofreader will catch most of those small slip-ups.
With the copyediting done, and all those changes in and reviewed by the CE, the book is now ready for the designer.
Professional proofreading
The final stage of any book is the proofread. Proofreading is not editing, nor is it — in the publishing world — simply a final read-through of the source text. Proofreading is a distinct profession, with its own skillset, its own training. It is undertaken on a designed and fully laid out book, the file as it would go to print but before it does so.
There are a whole host of things a professional proofreader looks for, both in the layout and the text. And it’s the last chance to catch those glitches before the book ends up in your readers’ hands.
For a professionally produced and polished book, you’d not want to skip this step. All kinds of issues can creep in at the design stage. And the proofreader, looking at the text with fresh eyes, will also serve to catch any little things that have slipped by the CE.