Line or Copy Edit

After you’ve had a developmental edit carried out, your next task will be to have a line or copyedit carried out by a professional book editor. This looks at the technical side of your writing and focuses on clarity and consistency.

As your book editor I will:

Collaborate with you – I am not here to tell you what you’ve “done wrong”, but rather to help you address any issues which allows you to focus on what you do best: storytelling.

Assess the effectiveness and necessity of each word and sentence.

Highlight any inconsistencies or issues with point of view.

Adopt the old adage of “show, don’t tell” to make your writing more engaging.

Highlight any issues with passive voice.

Ensure tone is consistent throughout.

Check your manuscript for any inconsistencies with spelling, hyphenation, and capitalization.

Correct grammar and punctuation.

Address anything else you specifically want to work on.

Developmental Edit

An in-depth assessment would be more of content or substantive editing, providing detailed feedback on “big-picture” issues. It will refine your ideas, shape your narrative, and help you fix any major inconsistencies. It contains much more detail—an annotated manuscript, a marked-up version of the original manuscript with specific suggestions for each issue, as well as the overall notes.

Another version (more scaled down) of a developmental edit is a standard, global assessment is broad feedback on any major strengths and weaknesses in your characters, structure, organization, tone, language, etc. It’s a document usually 3-7 pages long that addresses overall issues.

Proofreading

The final step of the editing process, proofreading is often done after typesetting and layout are completed (when the book is “in pages”).  Here’s where I put your completed and copyedited manuscript under the editorial microscope, correcting those last, pesky details—page numbers, tables of content, line breaks, orphaned or widowed words, reference numbers, and index references. In proofreading, issues of structure, content, style, and grammar are generally not considered (though I will point out such errors if I discover them during my proofing). In proofreading, it’s all about the fine details.