Identifying the Information and Skill Gap Between Where You Are and Where You Need to Be
The 5 Types of Book Editing Overview
Proofreading
Copy Editing
Line Editing
A Quick Look at the Big Picture Before Moving On
What Readers Expect
What Authors Want
Structural Editing
How Developmental and Substantive Editors Think
How Developmental and Substantive Editors Help Clients
The Structural Editing Process & Feedback Delivery
Book Doctoring & When Ghostwriters Come In
Which Type of Editor Is Right for You?
Since you’re here, you’re probably already aware of many of the challenges associated with building your author platform and writing, revising, and pitching a high-impact, commercially viable book.
But if you’re like most people I talk to, you’re confused and a bit stressed out by all the industry jargon and options available.
Soooo many options...soooo many steps...soooo many “it depends” answers.
I feel ya. I had to learn all this stuff too. Some of it came easy, but most of it came the hard way—either the slow, hard way or the forced and fast, hard way.
In this post, I offer a detailed overview of the 5 types of book editing every aspiring author and editor must understand.
I could give you a shorter version of this, but I’m offering this deep dive because…
10 years’ experience as a professional writer and book editor has taught me that most aspiring and published authors (and editors!) flounder and fail at predictable stages in the author journey and for predictable reasons.
And I’m assuming that you’re here because you’re preparing to hire an editor and want to get a better idea of what you’re in for.
If you’re looking for the best editor or consultant fit for you and are prepared to invest your precious time, energy, cognitive bandwidth, emotional bandwidth, and hard-earned money in a professional relationship, each of us who position ourselves as educators and editors for hire owe you a no-engagement, no-strings-attached glimpse into who we are, what we know, and what we do.
And your willingness to understand the flow and fundamentals of publishing, writing, and editing helps us better serve you and all our other clients with excellence and enthusiasm.
As the saying goes: Marry in haste, repent in leisure.
Ready? Let’s start with an overview of the different types of editing—the what, who, how, and when that confuses so many people—followed by my approach to serving authors efficiently and effectively.
There are five types of editing that every writer and publishing professional needs to understand.
The five categories of editorial services are:
• Book doctoring
• Structural editing
• Line editing
• Copy editing
• Proofreading
We’re going to start with proofreading and work our way up list, moving from the lightest editorial touch to the most complex and collaborative.
A proofreader is the last editor to look at a book before it’s printed/published.
The proofreader reviews a pdf or printed proof (galley) copy of the book. Proofreaders are responsible for catching formatting errors, eyesores, and any remaining typos.
This makes sense when we think about book production. Significant changes to a book at that stage would require a lot of tedious reformatting (typesetting). That’s why hiring the right editor(s) prior to typesetting is so important.
A copy editor is the editor who most often comes to mind when aspiring authors picture an editor.
Great copy editors have mastered the rules of written English: grammar, punctuation, and the many book publishing industry style guidelines found in The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th edition (CMOS), the 1,192-page holy book of trade publishing.
Copy editors work directly in the manuscript–typically a Word document. Microsoft Word is the industry standard word processing tool. (Don’t even get me started on the limitations of Pages and Google docs!) With the track-changes feature turned on, a copy editor corrects grammar and punctuation and may rewrite sentences here and there to improve clarity and flow. Copy editors are also responsible for formatting the manuscript per CMOS and the publisher’s in-house style guide.
The author or publisher or both review the changes and accept or reject each. After all changes are finalized, a “clean” copy of the document goes to the typesetter (book formatter/book layout person). (A “clean” Word document has been cleared of all comments and track change history.)
Like copy editors, line editors work directly in the manuscript using track changes.
As the label suggests, line editors tend to look at individual sentences in a manuscript and revise them to improve clarity and flow. They sometimes also need to rearrange a paragraph to improve clarity and flow within and between paragraphs.
It’s important to know that although copy edits and line edits relate to different aspects of sentence-level writing craft, most copy editors do both at the same time. That’s why you’ll also see the term “copy and line editor” or “copy/line editing.”
Although it is efficient to combine copy and line editing because both editors are polishing the prose, it’s not necessarily as effective as authors and publishers need it to be because copy editing is meant to be the final polish prior to layout.
Copy and line editors need a tight draft to do their work quickly and with excellence and enthusiasm because the editor will struggle to make choices that align with the author’s vision and voice if the manuscript is poorly structured, lacking the necessary substance and unifying elements.
So, copy and line editing cannot be an afterthought. Thinking like a copy and line editor is a foundational skill because a writer’s command of language and the way they organize and expresses ideas reflect their perspective, topic-related expertise and insight, and understanding of and respect for their readers. All of that is within the purview of the structural editor.
It’s important to choose the right editor at the right time and for all parties to stay focused on the desired result.
Before we move on to what structural editors do, it’s worth pausing for a moment to ground ourselves in the bigger picture.
Savvy readers expect the books they buy to meet their quality standards. The more aware a reader is of the rules of written English and current style norms, the higher their standards are likely to be.
The fastest way for an author to lose credibility and collect negative reviews is to allow readers to be distracted by grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors and inconsistent or distracting formatting.
Most readers simply won’t hang with an author long enough to even begin to notice structure and substance issues. But if readers aren’t immediately put off by a lack of polish, the author gets the opportunity to prove their value to the reader.
Authors want to earn and keep their readers’ interest and respect from back cover or sales copy to The End.
Most authors have some level of awareness that they are being judged by two groups of people:
The ideal customer-reader sees the author as an entertainer and educator, someone who has a deeper understanding of something than they do and who can, therefore, enlighten, delight, inspire, and empower them. Readers want to come away better off for having read the book. In other words, when an ideal reader purchases and begins to read a book, they’re looking up to its author.
If we think of the ideal reader as looking up, we can think of peers, skeptics, and competitors as looking across, sideways, or down at the author.
Yes, there can be crossover between the two groups, but what’s at stake for an author varies based on the position (prior knowledge and experience) and motivation or approach (positive, neutral, or negative) of their reader.
The formatting, grammar, and punctuation can be flawless, but none of that matters in the absence of structure. Clarity and momentum cannot exist without it.
Structural editors focus on the big picture. However, few people use the phrase “structural editing.”
Structural editing is most often referred to as developmental editing, and “developmental editing” and “substantive editing” are almost–almost–always used as synonyms.
Further complicating things is the fact that some individuals also use the term “book coach” to describe a wide variety of author-publishing pro relationships.
It’s ironic that in an industry that prides itself on precise communication, we’ve failed authors and each other by not clearly defining terms and encouraging consistent usage. On the other hand, this makes sense because we’re also a creative, nonconformist bunch working with creative, nonconformist individuals each with their own needs and preferences.
So, what follows is my best attempt to define terms per general usage, offering my perspective for context.
Structural editors are genre and topic specialists who have a deep understanding of their clients’ and their clients’ readers’ perspectives. They assess how well a book is constructed from its Table of Contents to its back matter.
These editors examine how the flow of ideas (story) moves identifiable reader profiles through a series of concepts, examples, and actions to a final, satisfying conclusion.
Structurally editing a memoir requires deep knowledge related to the craft of writing novels. Understanding the fundamentals of filmmaking is also tremendously valuable.
These awarenesses and competencies are equally useful when examining all other forms of nonfiction because almost every academic, trade, or academic-trade crossover book follows a hero’s journey arc. The author’s intent is to educate and empower their reader, taking them from one way of thinking and being to a new and better way of thinking and being.
In addition to understanding the form and craft of narrative storytelling, developmental editors and substantive editors of nonfiction need to understand rhetoric—"the art or study of using language effectively and persuasively.”1
In my opinion, all great writers are—and, therefore, all professional structural editors who support them must be—second-order, high-level, and systems thinkers.
We are analytical and creative risk managers who hold and examine deep emotions and vast amounts of information in our bodies and minds for days, weeks, months, and sometimes even years. Examining things from multiple perspectives is baked into this practice.
Developmental/substantive editors help their clients identify and expand their current zone of competence to reach and meet the expectations of publishers and specific groups of readers.
The subtitle of Robert McKee’s book Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting sums up what I believe all developmental/substantive editors must consider: substance, structure, style, and related fundamentals.
Substance
Structure
Principles and Style
The Bottom Line: How does every choice right down to individual words and phrases work to create a cohesive and dynamic expression of the author’s vision and voice?
Each developmental/substantive editor have their own cognitive and work styles. Those thinking and working styles and the editor’s experience working with specific client profiles influence the way we deliver feedback. The client’s current levels of awareness and craft and their budget also affects the depth and breadth of analysis and feedback—value—we can provide.
Regardless of constraints, in my experience authors want and need the following from their structural editor:
When I deliver feedback to clients, I encourage them to take what resonates and disregard the rest.
The one thing I encourage all writers to remember is that your editors—each and every one of them—should be on your side. Our job is to help you be confident and competitive when you pitch and publish your book.
Being on a client’s side often includes providing feedback that is both uncomfortable for the client to hear and uncomfortable for the editor to provide. But would you prefer to receive that feedback from:
Sometimes an aspiring author will decide that what they really need and want is to work with a book collaborator. A book collaborator is an experienced editor-writer who can execute the necessary changes efficiently and effectively. That’s where book doctoring comes in.
Book doctoring (aka book collaboration) is a combination of developmental/substantive editing and ghostwriting.
Ghostwriters tend to work from the ground up, working with their client from the earliest stages of the project. They interview the client and other key players, develop the outline, and write the entire book, getting feedback along the way to stay in sync with the client’s vision and voice and any literary agent or publisher requirements.
Aspiring authors (or sometimes their publishers) hire book doctors/ghostwriters to rewrite a full draft or complete a partial draft. In fact, 70% of traditionally published nonfiction books are ghostwritten.2 And an ever-increasing amount of fiction—genre fiction in particular—is ghostwritten or produced assembly-line style in a practice called “book packaging.”
Here are two important points you need to be aware of:
Literary agent Suzy Evans puts it this way: “[Acquisition editors and agents are VERY busy and swamped with submissions, so we need to focus on the very best of the best. Like any other creative industry, the book publishing industry is an incredibly competitive, increasingly crowded market, and it is probably just as hard to write and sell a bestselling book as a blockbuster movie in Hollywood.”3
The type or types of editors you need and when you’ll need to work with them boils down to this: your current levels of awareness and competence compared to your stated goals and the standards of any investors and future customers.
Former literary agent Thomas Umstattd Jr. offers this insight into the standards of trade publishers and recommendation for individuals who plan to self-publish: “Developmental edits are responsible for the high quality usually associated with traditionally published books. If you want to compete with traditional books as an indie, you must be willing to pay for developmental edits, and good developmental editors are not cheap.”4
If you aspire to be traditionally published and secure a contract with a publisher, you’ll have the benefit of working with an in-house copy editor and proofreader or freelancers hired by your publisher.
If you aspire to be traditionally published, you’ll most likely need to work with a developmental/substantive (+line) editor and perhaps even a copy editor prior to pitching to literary agents or publishers that accept unsolicited submissions. I know because literary agents and publishers refer contracted clients to me, and many of my clients have found me after an agent or publisher recommended that they find and hire a freelance developmental editor or book collaborator before pitching again.
The publishing industry can be challenging to navigate, and writing can be a frustrating and lonely endeavor, but it doesn’t have to be.
The right developmental/substantive (+line) editor or book doctor/collaborator is what most authors really need and want—an ideal reader, skeptic, coach, consultant, and cheerleader rolled into one.
And what every ethical editor, agent, and publisher wants to see and celebrate at the end of the copy editing and publishing phase is a bright and shining testament to the author’s intellectual and emotional effort–a high-impact, commercially viable book.
Visit my Work With Me/Services page.
1 American Heritage Dictionary online
2 “Why Agents Reject 96% of Author Submissions” (accessed 7 December 2024) CI Note: The situation has only gotten more competitive since this post was published.
3 The Darling Axe. Book Broker: an interview with Suzy Evans. July 18, 2024. (accessed 7 December 2024)
4 Author Media. “How to Get Published with a Traditional Publishing House” by Thomas Umstattd Jr. | Sep 30, 2020. (accessed 7 December 2024)
copyright 2024
Cristen Iris
WriteNow, LLC
