Has your manuscript been professionally edited? If not, it needs to be.
You’re feeling psyched about your book cover ideas and completing the interior layout, but has your book been professionally edited? (By someone who provides editing services for a living, not a friend or relative.)
Compass Flower Press and AKA–Publishing provide editorial services of all types, from developmental editing to final proofreading. We know how the brain spoils a pair of eyes. It gets familiar with the words after a pass or two, and the fabulous (but terrible) brain uses that familiarity to to gloss over mistakes, so the error goes undetected—again! A new editor or reader offers new hope if he or she has never looked at the story before. This makes those errors jump off the page and fill their fresh eyes with a jarring blemish — and their minds with the mission of correcting any errors!
Types of book editors:
- Developmental Editor: A development editor is a person who deals with the overall organization of a book’s manuscript, rather than incremental changes including wording or sentence structure. A development editor also addresses reordering entire blocks of text, which sometimes includes reordering entire chapters to provide clarity. The edit may also address tone and voice, the addition/subtraction of material, complexity of material and transitions between paragraphs of the book. This editing is often the first suggestion from an agent or publisher.
- Content Editor: A content editor is someone who looks at content (or subject matter) of a book, in addition to its form. This person will often recommend substantive corrections to a manuscript, such as those affecting presentation, believability, relevance and so forth.
- Copyeditor: CEs edit or redact copy in the manuscript submitted by the author in order to correct grammar irregularities and inconsistencies, or correcting punctuation, spelling, tense, usage and style.
- Line Editor: Line editors perform a larger edit to include voice, tone and phrasing, compared to a typical copy edit. Fiction line editing takes the story’s pacing, character development, handling of details, vocabulary of the period and place where the novel is placed, and how natural the dialogue sounds. A line editor also focuses on correcting errors in grammar, punctuation and writing style. Often a Developmental Editor will perform duties of a Content Editor and Line Editor.
- Stylesheet: The document prepared during a copyedit which enforces the standards and consistency of how numbers, abbreviations, word usage and punctuation are to be handled. If you’re using acronyms or unusual spellings, then it’s useful to include them in a stylesheet for the editor to expand upon when the manuscript is submitted. A stylesheet will also often include character, place, and event lists if the story is complicated. Stylesheets are prepared by editors on request.
- Proofreading: A proofreader reads through the typeset material to ensure the content matches the book’s final edited manuscript. Incorrect grammar, punctuations, spelling or usage are queried to the editor. The last step in the editing process, proofreading could include several sets of eyes at different readings.
- Ghostwriter: This person is contracted by an author or publisher to write or co-write a book from material provided by the author. This “starter material” may include author’s notes, manuscript, even photos and audio or video interviews. The author provides as much material as possible and the ghostwriter takes it from there.