Developmental Editing
You’re ready for Developmental Editing if you have completed your manuscript, self-edited your story to the best of your ability, and feel ready to begin cooperative, deep work on your book.
You will receive highly detailed feedback via an annotated manuscript. These in-line comments are the highlight of a Developmental Edit. While you’ll also receive an editorial letter, annotations provide you with throughlines on the page to follow as you revise. There will be questions in the manuscript to help you think deeply about your work, characters, themes, and plot; suggestions and/or recommendations for change or revision at the scene level; recommendations for story structure; and story-wide comments about how a reader might react to help you gauge if your story is saying what you meant to say.
Your editorial letter summarizes the overall work, its strengths and weaknesses, what’s working well, what might not be and suggestions for improvement, as well as actionable steps for your revisions. An editorial letter is meant to give you a clear starting point for revisions, removing the guesswork and overwhelm behind “I have to edit my book.”
Additionally, during the editing process, I like to have 30-minute catch-up calls every couple weeks to keep you informed on where I am in the manuscript, what I’m seeing that’s working well and what might need heavier revising, and ask any questions I have to help me better understand your work and intentions for it.
I also do this to alleviate anxiety for authors. It can be terrifying to hand our work to an editor and not hear a peep until you get it back. Instead of trepidation and fear, our conversations allow you to begin processing during editing. You’ll have no major surprises concerning revisions, allowing you to feel prepared, confident, and energized about revising!
Together, an annotated manuscript and
editorial letter are powerful tools.
They help you cultivate your unique writing style, revise well and with confidence, and keep up the momentum needed to write the final “The End!”
Fiction rates starting at
$0.03 USD per word
Payment Plans Available
10% Discount for debut authors
During a Developmental Edit, I’m looking for . . .
- Big-Picture (Main Story) Problems: Are the obstacles presented to your characters relevant to the plot, or do they feel like side quests that don’t strengthen the main plot? What are the stakes in the book, and how would winning/losing affect the main character? Are your themes clear and consistent? Is the story trying to say and do too much for just one book?
- Character Issues: Do the characters, whether they have a large or small role, feel like people? Do your main and side characters feel like individuals with their own fears, needs, and wants? Am I able to tell what they want more than anything and what they’re willing to do to get it? Do personalities and desires clash, even sometimes? How does your main character change from beginning to end?
- Cohesiveness: This looks at your story as a whole. Do the plot points fit together? Does one problem lead to another or to a solution? Are there confusing events (that don’t get resolved) or out-of-order storytelling?
- Worldbuilding Consistency & Believability: (in context with your story and genre) Do you follow the rules you’ve created for your world, be they magical, political, economical, etc.? Are there worldbuilding elements missing that could provide a more solid skeleton for your book? Is there too much worldbuilding?
- Overall Story Structure: When I’m looking at the structure of a story, I’m truly looking at it as a whole and from a distance. Imagine an eye-in-the-sky. I question the chain of events: does the story begin in the best place? Is there context missing somewhere? Is a prologue necessary? If you wrote a multi-POV story, I’m also questioning if each chapter is told from the best point of view. Maybe the escape chapter would work better from Character B’s POV instead of Character A because of something that happens later in the story.
- Head-Hopping: Say you wrote your story in 3rd person limited—he/she/they/it pronouns but in only that character’s head—but maybe you jump to another character mid-chapter. I’m on high alert for these incidents. Does your main character know something they shouldn’t because they didn’t see it happen or hear about it? Maybe your POV character knows what someone is thinking when that shouldn’t be possible. There are many possible examples of head-hopping, but those two are the most common.
As a bonus, because self-sustaining momentum can be difficult, I continue to support authors after the original developmental edit is complete.
For two months after the project completion date, I’ll provide feedback via a short editorial letter on major revisions up to 15k words. This support has been integral for many authors, because it allowed them to keep the ball rolling on their work and revise with confidence and purpose!