Get Your Red Pen Out!

Here’s how the editorial process works

When I tell people I’m an editor, they assume I fix typos. In my case, this is technically not untrue – I do work on all stages of the editing process, so sometimes I am hired to fix typos and errors, and nothing else. But my specialism, and the kind of editing I do most often, is developmental editing.

Often authors enquire about a developmental edit, but then tell me about the words they overuse or frequently misspell. I will often flag these things when I spot them – certainly if they are indeed a frequent occurrence – but it’s not really the point of the developmental stage of editing. At this point you don’t want me to focus on typos, both because the goal of a developmental edit is to provide a roadmap for a fairly transformative edit, and so you’ll be rewriting/deleting/adding so much that whether there’s the odd typo in the original draft is neither here nor there, and because if I waste time pointing out typos I’m not doing the big-picture editing which a dev edit requires.

So here is a rundown of the editorial process from start to finish, as you might come across it in a publishing house. My goal here isn’t to terrify you at the amount of editing a novel goes through (if anything, let it reassure you that the published novels you read have gone through numerous rounds of editing, rather than being written as perfect first drafts), but to show you what editing might look like at each stage, so you can work out what kind of editing you might want to do on your book, whatever your publishing plans are.