Developmental Editing
that fixes the story first

When your manuscript is ready for a developmental edit

The best time is after you've finished a complete draft and revised it at least once on your own. You should know how the story ends or what the book argues. If you're still changing the premise every week, an editor's notes will go stale before you can use them.

Run your draft through our word count checker too. A debut thriller at 160,000 words or a business book at 25,000 is a structural conversation in itself, and it's better to know that before the edit than after.

If you only want a lighter, cheaper read first, a manuscript critique gives you an overall assessment without page-level notes. Many authors do a critique on an early draft and a full developmental edit on the next one.

What we look at in fiction

We read the whole novel once for experience, the way a reader would, and note where our attention drops, where we get confused and where we stop believing a character. Then we read again with the structure open in front of us.

That second pass tracks the spine of the book: the inciting incident, rising complications, the midpoint turn, the crisis and the ending. We check that every major scene changes something, that subplots pay off and that the timeline holds together.

Characters get their own attention. Does the protagonist want something specific? Do their choices drive the plot, or does the plot happen to them? Are secondary characters doing a job, or just taking up space? We also flag point-of-view slips, info dumps and dialogue that explains instead of reveals.

Genre matters here. A thriller lives or dies on pacing and escalation. Military fiction readers will catch a wrong rank or a weapon that couldn't fire. We edit to the expectations of your shelf, not a generic checklist.

What we look at in nonfiction and memoir

Nonfiction has a different spine: a promise to the reader and an argument that delivers on it. We check whether your introduction states that promise clearly, whether chapters build on each other and whether any section drifts off topic.

We look for gaps in evidence, claims that need a source, examples that don't fit the point they're supposed to prove and repetition across chapters. In how-to and business books, we check that a reader can actually follow your method in the order you present it.

Memoir gets its own blend. It needs the narrative drive of fiction and the honesty of nonfiction. We help you choose which part of your life the book is really about, find the scenes that carry the story and decide what to leave out, which is often the hardest call.

The editorial letter and in-manuscript comments

Your editorial letter is the core deliverable. It opens with what's working, because you need to know what to protect while you revise. Then it lays out the major issues in order of importance, explains why each one matters to a reader and offers concrete options for fixing it.

Alongside the letter, you get your manuscript back with comments in the margins (Word's Track Changes and comments, or Google Docs if you prefer). The comments point to specific pages: this scene could be cut, this transition is missing, this claim contradicts chapter three.

We don't bury you in corrections at this stage. Fixing typos in a developmental edit wastes your money, because many of those sentences will change. You'll also get a chapter-by-chapter outline of the draft as we read it, which is a surprisingly useful map when you start moving things around.

The follow-up call and your revision

After you've read the letter and had a few days to absorb it, we schedule a call. You can push back, ask why, test a new idea or talk through a restructure. Good editing is a conversation, and some of the best solutions come from that discussion.

Then you revise. Depending on the scale of the changes, that might take a few weeks or a few months. There's no rush on our side. Some authors ask us to read the revised draft or a few rewritten chapters to confirm the fixes landed, and we can quote that up front.

Before or after revision, many authors also share the draft with a small group of beta readers. An editor tells you why something isn't working. Readers tell you whether it works for them. The two together are hard to beat.

What happens after a developmental edit

Once the structure is solid, the book moves to sentence-level work. Line and copy editing tightens prose, fixes rhythm and voice, and brings grammar, usage and consistency in line with a style guide, usually The Chicago Manual of Style, now in its 18th edition.

After the book is designed and laid out, proofreading is the final check for typos, bad breaks and errors introduced in typesetting. Each stage depends on the one before it. Skipping straight to proofreading on a draft with structural problems just gives you a well-punctuated book that still doesn't work.

You can book any of these stages on its own, or have us handle the whole sequence and then move into design and publishing. Either way, you'll know the full plan and the fixed quote before you commit.

How to choose a developmental editor

The title means different things at different companies, so judge the work, not the label. The Wikipedia entry on developmental editing describes the role across textbook, academic and fiction work, and the common thread is an editor who shapes the book while the author keeps control of the content.

Ask any editor you're considering three questions. What exactly will I receive? Have you edited books like mine? Can I see how you'd handle my opening chapters? A vague answer to any of them is a warning sign.

Also ask how the editor delivers hard news. You want someone direct enough to tell you the second act doesn't work, and specific enough that you know what to do about it on Monday morning. Praise alone won't improve a draft, and neither will a list of complaints with no path forward.

Finally, check that the scope and price are fixed in writing. Open-ended hourly billing on a structural edit makes it hard to plan, and it puts you in the awkward spot of rationing questions to save money.

Your free sample edit

Before you hire us, we'll do a sample edit. Send your synopsis or table of contents and the opening chapters, and we'll return notes on those pages plus a short read on the big picture as we see it so far.

The sample shows you how we think, how direct our notes are and whether our suggestions make sense for your book. If the fit isn't right, you've lost nothing. If it is, we'll send a fixed quote based on your word count, genre and the depth of edit you need, and we'll start on an agreed date.