A Medley of Editors: Types and The Order of Play
A Quick Primer on What Editors Do
If you’re writing, you want an editor. Even if that person doesn’t call themselves an editor, you definitely want an editor, hired or done as a favor.
Here, we’ll be going over the various editorial tasks typical of the revising processes, and the order in which they must usually be conducted.
Prewriting tasks:
If you’re fortunate enough to have someone willing to read your outlines, let that person do so. A lot of plot holes and logical issues can be resolved before you even start writing, saving you a lot of work down the road.
Step One: Developmental Editing
When To Have Developmental Edits
- You’re at least mostly done with your manuscript.
- You’ve finished with your first draft
Here, we fix what are called “Global Issues.” If there are pacing problems, glaring plot holes, logical fallacies, etc. These are where editors will point out issues that will require a lot of rewriting and revising.
Sometimes these will take the form of axing entire sections, or requesting that new ones are written. This is why developmental editing must be done first, lest you end up spending time, effort, and potentially money to have a section edited that you don’t even end up using in the final iteration.
This is also arguably the most difficult type of editing, since it requires a good relationship with the author and a clear understanding of the content that you’re trying to edit. Good developmental editors are hard to find, and mostly nest exclusively in one or two genres.
Step Two: Line Edits
When To Have a Line Edit
- You’ve finalized your ideas and ensured your content is high-quality.
- You’ve double-checked your manuscript for any content errors.
This is the longest part, and by far the most-costly.
This has an editor comb over each and every sentence in your entire manuscript, and check it for things like awkward phrasing, word usage, and voice. If you’ve ever been in a writing workshop, and spent several hours retooling a single sentence or two to sound better, you know what line editing in. Now, multiply that by every single line in your entire manuscript, and you’ve got a portrait of a line editor’s livelihood.
Many authors do their own line editing. I don’t blame them. A good line edit can cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars.
It’s definitely worth it though; a book that’s been edited for style, clarity and voice will stand miles ahead of one that hasn’t been.
Bonus: Fact-Checking
If you’re writing nonfiction, or historical fiction, sometimes you can hire a “fact-checker.” This person will go through the details of your story and ensure that they are factually accurate.
If you’ve done your research, it’s pretty rare that a factual inaccuracy will derail the entire plot. However, it does happen, and even if an error doesn’t cause plot problems, someone is certainly going to notice it, and the last thing you want is someone pointing out an error; authors already have enough assaults on their credibility on a daily basis.
In academic publication, this is pretty much mandatory, and usually takes the form of “peer review.”
Step Three: Copy Editing
When To Have a Copy Edit
- You’ve reviewed your line edits
- You have what you would consider a “final draft.”
Once you’ve got all your words, your FINAL words on the page, you can start looking for a copy editor who will begin looking over your work with a fine-toothed comb.
Most of what copy editors do can be boiled down to a single word: consistency.
They’re going to check your writing against a style guide, and make their own style sheet for your manuscript. They’ll be ensuring that names are always capitalized and spelled the same way and that features remain consistent throughout the novel (it’s fairly common for copy editors to keep lists of character details such as eye color and character ages).
They’ll ensure your casing is consistent, and that your hyphen rules are met. They’ll make decisions about whether numbers should be written out or rendered as numerals. All these style decisions are the burden of copyeditors, which they meticulously track.
Sometimes, copy editors also conduct proofreading tasks, if they’re glaringly obvious. Ever since digital books became the norm, many copy editors just do a joint copy-proofing since so much of it can be done at the same time.
(Incidentally, this is my area of expertise, if you’d like to order a copy edit.)
Final Step: Proofreading
When To Have a Proofreader
- When everything else is completely finished and you’re ready to ship your manuscript off into the world.
You probably know what proofreading is. Proofreaders check for grammar issues, typos, misspellings, and formatting problems.
Proofreading itself is in kind of a weird state. Proofreaders used to be a vital, ubiquitous career in the publishing world that every publishing house had on-staff. Now, they’re far more rare, even if they aren’t lumped in with copy editors.
This is mostly because spellcheck used to not exist, by the way.
Historically, the job of a proofreader was to be the first person to receive an Advance Review Copy (ARC) and comb it over for any errors that any previous editor had missed. They also had the job of ensuring that no new problems were introduced during typesetting, such as chapters being out of order, or paragraphing issues. Ever since the advent of highly-powerful word processors, dedicated proofreaders are definitely an endangered species.
Today, proofreaders mostly are just the final line of defense against any errors when the book is already on its way out the door. It’s an important job, but definitely one that most copy editors are already doing.
Why the order is important
However, so many authors spend so much unnecessary time and money to get their work edited without even understanding that there’s a certain order that this needs to be done it. One should not proofread a manuscript that’s not been edited for content any more than one should bread chicken that’s yet to be defrosted. There’s an order, and it must be followed.
