Behind every great book is an excellent editor. The author’s name may be the one on the cover, but books that achieve starred reviews, that win awards, and that are incorporated into curriculums are thoroughly edited.

What makes editing so transformative? 

A strong editor provides much more than a spell-check; they work through the content to assess not only what’s on the page, but what’s missing that might improve the book. They suggest ways to hone the content to better connect with its intended audience, highlight places where clarity or accuracy are lacking, and — yes — wrangle those dangling modifiers, mistaken word choices, misattributed antecedents, and run-on sentences. 

In short, editing is a whole toolbox of ways to tune up your writing. Some manuscripts may need to be taken apart and put back together in better order while others may only need a buff and polish. The amount of work that falls to the editor will be impacted by how engaged an author is in achieving the best version of their book. You may need to weigh in on your editor’s suggestions by providing more information, reworking text, or making an informed decision on certain style choices (like capitalization, italics, or formatting). 

But not all editors are made equal. Many people tout their editing services but lack the training to truly improve a book. Others overstep, changing the tone of the book, or implement arbitrary changes due to their own personal preferences. Unfortunately, skimping by getting an English teacher friend or local journalist to “edit” for you is likely not to provide feedback appropriate for a commercial book. 

In this guide, we’ll explore the importance of good editing, how to determine whether an editor is the right fit for you, and how to get the most out of your editing experience.

Can you self-edit? To a point. If you have some training in English language principles, you may be able to scour your work for typos (potentially with the assistance of a tool like your word processor’s spell check or an assistive AI tool like Grammarly) — but this requires actively making choices on which recommendations to accept. 

Keep in mind that assistive AI tools are designed for business writing; they are intended to make your work sound appropriate for a professional letter — which is not the same as creating an engaging tone for your readership or achieving tongue-in-cheek humour, let alone the sweeping lyrical prose of a literary fiction.

If you want to be an author, it’s a good idea to review your draft, in detail, before you submit it for professional editing. Taking this step will allow you to clean up many of the most glaring issues. A cleaner manuscript can result in a lighter editing service recommendation. 

Ways to effectively review your own work to try to improve it (before or after an editor’s assessment) include:

• taking a break between writing and revision to let the content settle and allowing you fresh perspective

• reading the work aloud to yourself (or using a Text-to-Speech tool) to catch issues of repetition, wrong word choice, or topic changes

• reading your content out of order (starting with the last paragraph and working backwards) to catch pesky homonyms or typos

• getting beta or sensitivity reader feedback to give you outside perspectives on your work.

However, you will always see what you expect to see on the page. You know, after all, what you are trying to say. It takes a skilled professional to pick up on pieces you may not be aware of, including expectations for your genre, possible misunderstandings in the text, logical fallacies or inconsistencies, and so on. 

So, by all means, make your text as clean as possible before proceeding with an editing service. It will ensure your editor can focus on items you couldn’t see on your own, rather than spending their time pointing out issues you already knew were there but hadn’t cleaned up.

Before delving into the different types of book editing and the effect they will have on your writing, let’s talk about the expert bona fides of the people behind the pen.

The skills a newspaper editor needs are not the same as those employed by an editor of dissertations or of government policy. The first thing your manuscript needs is an editor with training in how to edit a book, and specifically a book that you intend to publish for a commercial audience.

Within that broad category, you’ll then want someone with expertise in fiction or nonfiction; then in your specific genre or subject matter; and ideally with knowledge of your intended audience demographic. Different linguistic rules might be employed for an adult self-help than for a young adult fantasy romance or a children’s picture book.

An editor first needs training in the rules of grammar, syntax, spelling, and punctuation — as well as when it’s appropriate to break these rules to suit the audience’s needs. Ideally, this is represented by an editing accreditation and/or high ranking on an editing qualification exam. These tests are broken down by different types of editing (developmental, structural & stylistic, copyediting, proofreading, indexing, etc.). Beware anyone offering services for “editing” without understanding the difference between a developmental and a copy edit.

Editors are also trained in style guides: books or writing rules that help a text remain internally consistent. This includes choosing from options that may be correct in different circumstances but aren’t suitable for the readers you’re writing for. This is often more noticeable in nonfiction, where supplementary information — like headings, citations, references, footnotes, or quotes — need to be handled correctly for authorial integrity. In fiction, it may be subtler but is still crucial to prevent distracting or confusing your reader. Things like whether numbers are spelled out, how emphasis is handled, how to present words from other languages, how to signify scene breaks, and so on.

The most common style guide for books sold to the public in North America is the Chicago Manual of Style, but there are niche styles for academic audiences (American Psychiatric Association, Modern Language Association) and for journalism (Canadian Press or American Press styles). Whichever one is most suitable for your book, it should be consistently applied throughout.

Finally, experience is the magic ingredient for a skilled editor. The wider their base of knowledge, the more authors or books they’ve worked with, the more training they’ve done, the bigger their toolbox grows and the more insight they can offer. A minimum of 2 years of hands-on book editing experience separates the pros from the amateurs.

Not only does this give them practice in implementing track changes and untangling formatting concerns, experience also helps them hone a good bedside manner. Striking a tone that balances authority with compassion and good advice with good delivery is crucial to receiving feedback you can actually implement. The best advice in the world is useless if you don’t know what to do with it. Tailoring tone to the author’s needs is likewise important; some authors want the unvarnished truth while others want a gentler approach to remain encouraged when working on their manuscript.

FriesenPress ensures our editors have the skill to effectively assess manuscripts’ needs, implement smart edits, provide helpful feedback, and meet a high standard of accuracy. Our editing team have backgrounds as professors, academics with multiple degrees, published and award-winning writers, industry advisers, and curriculum development — not to mention their personal experience in topics as varied as military service, religious study, theatre, LGBTQ+ issues (and many more!). We test our editing team using the principles laid out in the Editors Canada Professional Editorial Standards.

The many tools in an editor’s toolkit can be applied in different ways for different ends; we identify them as separate professional editing services. Just as two manuscripts may have very different needs, the services to meet those needs look quite distinct. 

While you may hear different terminology bandied about throughout the editing industry, here are the usual ways the services differ.

Editing that addresses the structure of a book, the development of its content, or the big picture of how its text works together are referred to as structural or substantive edits. This typically breaks down into the Developmental Edit and the Content Edit.

Editing that addresses the mechanics of the writing, the consistency of its styling and syntax, and the accuracy of its spelling and punctuation are referred to as mechanical or line edits. This typically breaks down into the Copy Edit and the Proofread. 

Generally, it’s best to handle the substantive pieces first before moving into the line editing. After all, there’s no point in polishing the details if the foundation is unstable and likely to undergo further changes.

Here we’ll dig into each type of edit, what it focuses on, what level of engagement the author is expected to provide, and some examples of what it looks like in practice.

Developmental Editing

Developmental Edits, as the name implies, develop the manuscript to better achieve the author’s goals. At this stage, the editor acts as a guide to help the author through their revisions, leaving comments where content may need to be reorganized, clarified, added, deleted, or moved to a better position in the manuscript. 

This is often the case when the word count is far from the reader’s expected range (either much too short or far too long), when some of the segments are under-developed or incomplete, or when clarification is needed in order for the editor to accurately implement line edits. 

The editor can’t do the rewriting for you, however — nor should they; it’s your book, so it’s important it’s told in your own words. This means that before any work is done to address the mechanics of the text, the editor expects you to review their notes and feedback and decide how to implement their suggestions. You may find that you come up with alternate or better resolutions to their concerns! 

Once your revisions are completed, the manuscript’s word count and/or organization may be quite different from where you started. This revision process effectively creates a new draft that your editor hasn’t yet seen. It’s normal that this might introduce new typos, or give more context that results in other ripple-effect changes. 

You should have a stronger raw manuscript than when you started — one that’s ready for further editing.

Content Editing

Content Editing is suitable when the overall structure of the book is largely intact or the material needed is already present on the page … with some massaging. At this level, the editor will work directly with the text, implementing substantive and mechanical changes at the same time. In other words, it’s a holistic edit that deals with both the big picture pieces and the details in a single pass. 

The editor may reorder sentences, move paragraphs, and correct errors in the writing. If a proposed change requires further input or approval, they’ll also leave Comments for the author to implement during their review. Usually these changes are smaller or more self-contained; they won’t cause the same degree of ripple effects that can happen with the revisions suggested in a Developmental Edit. 

One of the things a Content Edit addresses is the appropriateness of the language for its genre and audience. This may mean intentionally flouting certain grammatical standards for a desired effect — this is something a human editor is uniquely able to provide.

For example, consider which of the following versions is better suited to a hardboiled detective story:

Mister Abernathy walked forward and tilted up the brim of his hat to shield himself from the rain. 
     “Good morning, Johnson. What have we got today?”
Rebecca Johnson looked up from where she was scooping evidence into a plastic bag.
  “Not much, Detective Abernathy. It’s poor weather for gathering much intelligence.” She shrugged.

Abernathy strode forward, tilting up the brim of his hat against the rain. 
“Mornin’, Johnson. What’ve we got?”
Rebecca Johnson looked up from where she was scooping evidence into a plastic baggie.
 “Not much, Detective.” She shrugged. “Rotten weather for gathering much intel.”

As this sample shows, just because writing is more correct doesn’t mean it’s as effective as it could be. A great editor can help you get your ideas across in the clearest, most appropriate way possible — and that includes knowing when to follow and when to break the rules of writing. 

After you receive your Content Edit, you’ll likely still have some changes and adjustments to make as part of your review. This may result in new errors being introduced, but the manuscript is largely polished and clear. Those final details can be addressed in a follow-up line edit.

Copy Editing

Now we get to the most common type of editing, and what folks who haven’t read this guide might think “editing” refers to. Copy editing does not make adjustments to the content of the book; it’s assumed that all of that has been finalized by the author by this point. It focuses only on the text that’s on the page. 

What a Copy Edit strives to do is apply the four C’s: correctness, concision, clarity, and completeness. 

Correctness means the language used is accurate: the right word choices, factual statements, internal consistency of character/plot, and grammatical accuracy for its intended audience. It can also apply to the reading level; different word and sentence structures are more suitable for a high-powered business exec than for a middle grade reader.

Concision means the syntax (the “way” something is said) doesn’t use more words than it needs to for its tone, audience, and genre expectations. Sometimes this means removing filler words, repetition, or tautology (repeating the same idea in different phrasing). Other times, this means untangling convoluted phrasing that may be unintentionally changing your meaning (such as with dangling modifiers, misattributed antecedents, or comma splices).

Clarity means the meaning is delivered in a way that makes sense. It may involve word choice changes, restructuring run-on sentences, fixing slips in point of view or tense, and assessing the use of jargon, names, references, and acronyms to prevent unintentional ambiguity.

Completeness means ensuring that everything that should be on the page is — at the line level. The editor might call out when there is a factual error or when a needed citation is missing, but they’re also ensuring that words aren’t missing, that a sentence doesn’t end abruptly, that the chapters don’t skip from 10 to 12, etc.

All of these adjustments are done in Track Changes in Microsoft Word. You can review each and every one if you wish. This is a great way to learn about your writing foibles to improve your craft. Or you can accept all the revisions as is, and then read through the clean (changes accepted) copy and only make adjustments if something sticks out to you.

Proofreading

Last but certainly not least comes the Proofread. Contrary to popular belief, a Proofread is not a full edit and it’s not possible to provide a thorough and complete Proofread on a manuscript that hasn’t received any editing. It would be like asking a cleaning service just to dust — but leaving all the piles of laundry and dirty dishes where they are! 

During the editing rounds, your editor should have created a style sheet: a document that records the stylistic choices they made for your book, including what spelling convention they’ve adhered to, which style guide they’ve followed, any special spellings or formatting choices that have been used in the book, and any exceptions to the standard rules that should be retained. 

A Proofread should be a final pass after all other editing is complete. The editor then reviews the style sheet to ensure they aren’t implementing inconsistencies with the previous editor/author’s choices. They then review the whole manuscript to ensure these stylistic choices have been implemented consistently. 

This means they will not be making further substantive changes or line edits. Instead, they will look for errant typos, homonyms, slips in font styling, inconsistencies in numbering or captions, formatting issues, and any last details. This is crucial, as even the best editors can make simple human errors (the professional standard FriesenPress follows is an accuracy rating of 90–95%). Getting a second pair of eyes on the text after the edit — and any subsequent adjustments the author has made during revisions — will catch straggling issues that might otherwise undermine a good edit.

To find out the best-fit editing service, ask for an editor’s assessment of your manuscript. This involves the editor reading your book and providing a report on the text’s strengths and weaknesses and what solutions they recommend. This will include a pitch for the service(s) the editor feels are most appropriate to hone your manuscript into its best shape. At FriesenPress, this is the important first step of every author’s publishing journey.

The best editing is done through multiple rounds of service over the course of several months. You’ll be expected to carefully review your editor’s notes after each round and implement those changes you agree with and resolve any outstanding queries. You may even converse with your editor to resolve any questions you have, clarify your vision, brainstorm alternate solutions, or ask for advice. 

Ideally, the service recommendation aligns with your goals to make your book the best it can be.

However, it will depend on a few factors: your budget, your engagement, and your timeline. 

If your primary concern is getting professional support, you may not be comfortable or able to do as much work on the implementation of developmental work. This may mean you opt for more in-depth editing services, or it may mean you forgo making certain improvements to your text in order to keep the changes within the realm of what you feel able to implement. 

If your primary concern is working within a tight budget, you’ll need to tackle more of the revision and review work yourself in order to lessen the editorial work needed by the professional. This may involve learning more about the craft of writing, relying on a support network to help implement technical changes, or taking the extra time to get the manuscript ready for an editor’s touch. 

If your primary concern is speed, you will have to cut corners — both in your own revision work and in the amount of editorial support you receive. This may result in a less-developed product for your readers and/or a higher rate of errors in the finished text. Consider whether you really want to sacrifice quality to hit your self-imposed deadline before choosing this path.

After reviewing all the things editing could provide your book, you’ll need to decide on your priorities and pursue the editing path that fits your project best.

Drop our team of employee-owners a line at 1-800-792-5092, publishing@friesenpress.com, or via the form below to learn more about how our industry-leading editing process can give your book the shine it needs to succeed in the market.

We look forward to hearing from you — and helping you bring the hidden power of editing to your manuscript!