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Guest post by professional editor Jessica De Bruyn. @true_imaginary
A note from So You Want to Write…
“Write drunk, edit sober” —Peter De Vries
Whether you have only an idea for a book, a few chapters written, or a fully formed first, second, or nth draft, one thing is certain: that more editing is probably in your future.
- Big Picture Edits
- Paragraph-Level Edits
- Word-Level Edits, and
- Proofreading
Let’s turn it over now to professional editor Jessica De Bruyn to outline the 4 types of edits.
Big Picture Edits
There are a few different names for this type of editing – developmental, structural, substantive and story editing all usually refer to this first stage of evaluation.
“A substantive editor looks at building blocks of your story.”
Paragraph-Level Edits
Once you have the overall story elements worked out, the next stage will be to get a line (or stylistic) editor who can help you improve your sentence structure, fine tune the language and help to clean up any issues related to consistency, clarity and flow.
“A great line editor can be your guide to presenting a book that is both enjoyable and sellable.”
Your editor should give you a sample of their work before taking on a large editing project and you should mutually decide what level of editing is best for your work.
Word-Level Edits
The third person to look over your manuscript is the copyeditor. There is so much nuance and changing rules of grammar within the English language and this expert’s job is to make sure there are no grammatical, spelling or syntax errors within your work.
“Those self-publishing should absolutely invest in a copyedit.”
Proofreading
A proofreader is the last line of defence in fixing any issues before the book gets sent off to the printer.
“It is natural that a few issues will slip through the cracks.”
Jessica De Bruyn leads our [How to Edit Your Book] online workshop and is our in-house editor here at So You Want to Write?
Photo by Pineapple Supply Co. on Unsplash
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