The purpose of developmental editing is to take your book to the next level.
Developmental editing is used for manuscripts that are complete or nearly complete. If you are still looking for help organizing your ideas or have many loose ends that need to be connected, we can help you with planning.
If you know what you want to say but haven't quite hit the right notes, or if your beta readers point out a lack of consistency or clarity in your manuscript, developmental editing can help immeasurably. We'll guide you through the process of assessing the order of sections or chapters (even sentences and paragraphs), making sure that nothing feels superfluous and, at the same time, that there are no gaps in logic. We'll point out general issues of consistency in terms of pacing and voice.
Developmental editing requires collaborative, iterative work. Iteration can result in tasks for you, the author, to clarify the existing text or add new text.
Additional Notes:
- Please note that additional hours are required when working together (you and our editor) or when an additional conversion of the text into a different document format is required.
- We track changes to your manuscript during developmental editing, which you can accept or reject (please note that this might require conversion into a different document format).
- What has worked with past clients is to go through the edited text together and discuss issues we have found.
- You may have new tasks (rewriting, research, adding additional text, removing text, etc.).
- If you are happy with the result, we can provide additional copy-editing services, consistency checking services, and proofreading services.
- We recommend, though, that we do another round of editing, focusing on the changes you have made to the manuscript.
- Depending on the number of changes, each iteration will probably be quicker than the previous one.
