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: peer reviews
Once you’ve honed and polished a complete first draft of your book, you’re ready for some constructive early review. If you don’t have experience as a researcher or a journalist (or both) and most particularly if you’re writing your first nonfiction book and it’s a book of any weight — an explainer, a self-help book, a book of ideas — you should consider lining up some peer reviews.
These are reviews done by colleagues in the industry who either have similar backgrounds to you (if you are the subject matter expert) or who know more about the material than you (if you are not). Peer reviewers focus on the content, on the ideas and how you’re working with them. Do those ideas hold up? Is the overall argument solid? Is the evidence verifiable? Are there valid counterarguments you’ve not considered, points you’ve not covered? And so on.
The purpose of the peer review is to help ensure the solidity of your content. You don’t want the first you hear of any flaws in your material to be after the book is published and in the hands of readers and reviewers. You want any such weaknesses (or potential weaknesses) highlighted early on, when you’re still writing, so that you can address them then, thereby making your presentation solid, your argument air-tight. Even experienced authors can benefit from the process.
Peer reviewers should be focused on the substance of the book, not on writing style or mechanics or anything of that nature. Set the scope for the review beforehand. Make sure your reviewers know how they can best help you: by enabling you to craft a stronger argument, a clearer and more comprehensive set of ideas. You can also write up a list of questions, if you feel that would better guide the review. Nonfiction “big idea” books that go the traditional publishing route typically have peer review built into the process, and for good reason. It’s the best way to ensure high quality. The nonfiction writer who faces his toughest critics and opponents — because that’s what you want early on: testing of the ideas — is the writer who puts together a stronger book. Just make sure that those applying the critical evaluation are well versed in the topics within which, or against which, the book works. In traditional publishing, you have no control over who peer-reviews your material. With a book you’ll be publishing yourself, it’s all under your jurisdiction. Choose well.
How many peer reviewers should you work with? At least a couple, to really hone and strengthen your material. Key here is to make sure that they’ve the background to help you ferret out any weaknesses or missteps. You want a complete and multifaceted read on your content, so send the draft out to all the reviewers at once. You’ll want to weigh and judge the responses of them all together before deciding upon what changes to make.
For peer reviewers, you can look to your own professional networks, either those you work with or those you know through a membership organization. It is best not to ask friends to take on this role. Ordinarily, peer reviewers are not paid, but you would thank them for their contributions in your acknowledgments. And of course, you would be ready to offer your services at some point as someone else’s peer reviewer.
Work with reviewers you can trust. If the material seems to warrant it, you could ask whether they’d sign an NDA, but that’s not typical outside of the corporate context and it might be off-putting.
Professional editing
Peer review 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 nonfiction, she reviews the draft for structure and organization, soundness of argument, completeness and comprehensibility, persuasiveness, pacing, voice and tone, and so on, always with your goals for the book and the needs of the audience in mind. If there are narrative components, she’ll look to see that they are governed by the expository goals, rather than vying with them for center stage. (Alternatively, it might be more appropriate for that narrative to drive the structure of the whole and for the exposition to be encompassed by it?)
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 changes they see that need to be made, questions or issues for the author to consider, and any outstanding questions.
In the traditional publishing world, the preference is for the author to then take those notes and run with them. With nonfiction, however, the author is often a subject matter expert, not a writer, and 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 — depends 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 nonfiction, the emphasis is twofold. The LE reads for clarity and concision, coherence, cohesion, all those attributes of clear, tight, effective writing. But she also reads for rhythm and pacing, cadence, voice and tone — in other words, the quality and the music of the words on the page. To be most effective, the writing should also be a pleasure to read.
Not every ms needs line editing. Authors who are themselves professional writers and accomplished stylists may need little to none. Authors who are subject matter experts, and not trained writers, typically need a good solid line editing pass.
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.