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For my U.S. readers, I hope you had a great Thanksgiving! This month I'm going to tell you about editors.
Before you publish your completed manuscript, you’ll want to make sure it’s as error-free as possible. It’s difficult to have a completely error-free book (even traditionally published books have errors), but you want it to be as clean as possible so readers have a good experience.
Editors can help. The three main types of editors you should know are: developmental editors, copyeditors, and proofreaders.
Developmental Editor
A developmental editor (also known as a content editor) looks at the manuscript in totality, analyzing your story’s structure, character arcs, plot, and pacing and offers advice to improve them. They can also point out inconsistencies in the story.
If you’re a beginning author, you might find that having someone give advice to make your story more compelling, capturing plot holes, and giving advice on character growth to be very beneficial to making your story stronger and a page-turner for readers.
Copyeditor
The copyeditor, sometimes called a line editor, takes over after you’ve made revisions based on the developmental editor’s comments. They focus on the sentence level, fine-tuning your language, eliminating awkward phrases, checking your grammar and punctuation, and making sure the style throughout the story is consistent.
Some will also do minor fact-checking. For instance, my copyeditor in the past pointed out that Jet Ski is a brand name, and she’s also corrected the proper names of places I mentioned in my stories.
Proofreader
The proofreader does the final quality check of your manuscript. They focus on typos, spelling, and formatting inconsistencies that might have been missed by the copyeditor, or added when you made the revisions the copyeditor recommended.
Do you need all three editors?
Not necessarily, though I do think all three are beneficial for beginning authors. Hiring them can transform your manuscript, teach you a lot about the process of storytelling, and help you put your best foot forward. Once you become more experienced, you might find you can drop one or two, such as the developmental editor.
As a self-published author, you make the decision about which editors to hire. Just remember that anyone who buys your work is spending their hard-earned money, and you want to give them a good experience. If they have a good experience, they’ll tell their friends, book clubs, and post about you on social media—therefore getting you on your way to a successful career as a self-published author.
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Participants in the giveaway were offered a discount on my consulting services, and I'm making the same offer to regular newsletter readers. Details below.
Until next month!
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