Traditional book publishing:

Congratulations! The manuscript you sent to umpteen publishers has fianaly been accepted. The trauma of all those rejection slips has melted away in the euphoria of your book deal.

The publisher has seen potential in your manuscript – potential for them to make money from your book. Now, the work of turning your rough manuscript into a professionally published book begins. This is a collaborative effort between you and the publishing house that takes time to complete – often a year and a half or more from when you submitted your manuscript.

The development editor:

The publishing house will send your manuscript to a development editor. This may be an in-house employee of the publisher or a freelance development editor. Their job is to look at the big picture of your manuscript:

• Is there a plot? Is it coherent? How is it structured?
• Who are the characters? Do they have their own voices are are they speaking with the same voice? Are the characters strong enough to merit the position you have given them or do they detract from the story?
• Detailed further analysis of the manuscript.

The development editor is not concerned with how the book will be laid out. Nor are they looking for grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Their job is to ensure your manuscript has a coherent structure, a plot, and realistic characters.

The development editor is likely to suggest revisions to your manuscript for further review by them, and their critique can seem harsh but it is for a purpose – to get your manuscript to a standard suitable publication. You should expect your manuscript to be subjected to several rounds of review before it is ready for the next stage in the process – copy editing.

Copy editing:

Copy editing has two main functions:

• Checking for grammatical and spelling errors, as well as checking obvious facts. A fictitious story I edited was based on the battle of Kursk in the Second World War. The author mistakenly had the wrong victors. A copy editor will also check for consistency, such as words spelt with and without a hyphen, “ize” or “ise”, etc.
• Preparing the size and layout of the book for printing. This includes the size and number of pages, where any pictures or illustrations are to go and how the text wraps around them or not as the case may be.

The copy editor will go through the manuscript several times and may suggest revisions to the manuscript.

These are some key questions that a copy editor will consider when editing a piece of prose:

• Have proper words been chosen to express your ideas? Does it sounds as if you have consulted a list of synonyms provided by your word processing program? If you have, they will spot it.

• Have you used an active voice? An active voice is not always appropriate, such as in academic writing, but writing that is too passive does not make for compelling reading.

• Is the tone appropriate for your audience?

• Have you used too many words? Using unnecessary, frivolous, and filler words can irritate readers. Use as many words as are necessary, but not one more!

• Have you used gendered language appropriately?

• Have you used artificial intelligence to create some or all of your prose? I recently edited a manuscript created by a well known AI program. The setting was a series of executive meetings. Every character “leaned in slightly” before speaking, and all “paused before continuing”. These devices soon became serious distractions.

Your manuscript may require one or more redrafts, but it will emerge from this process in a form that is ready to be sent to the printer. Traditionally, this is called a “proof”.

Proofreading and line editing:

Proofreading is the final check to correcting errors in writing, such as grammatical, spelling, punctuation and other language mistakes. Detecting these errors before publication is an important process.

These are the key questions the proofreader will consider when proofreading a piece of writing:

• Are there any spelling errors? Are spellings consistent? A proofreader will check for consistency, such as words spelt with and without a hyphen, “ize” or “ise”, etc.

• Are full stops, commas, colons, semicolons, hyphens, en dashes, em dashes, ellipses, etc., used correctly?

• Have words that sound like one another but have different meanings (homophones), such as there, their and they’re, or your, you’re (I have even seen yaw and yore) been used correctly?

• Have quotation marks and apostrophes been used appropriately and consistently?

• Are there any double spaces, particularly after full stops? Are there any extra spaces where there should be none?

A proofreader will make several passes through the manuscript, each pass checking for a specific type of error.

Line editing is the same as proofreading, that is, going through the manuscript line by line checking for and marking errors.

Your manuscript may need to be redrafted more than once until it is ready to be sent to the printer.

Self-Publishing

All of the editing stages described above apply to self-published manuscripts. However, not every author employs an appropriate editor at every stage of the preparation of their manuscript. This could be for reasons of cost, or the author is unaware of the vailable services.

In traditional book publishing, the editorial costs are borne by the publisher. The self-publishing author bears these costs, which is why many of them make economies. The first for the chop is development editing. Copy editing and proofreading are conflated and described a “proofreading” or “line editing” to which the author attaches little value.

It would be an error to think that eliminating mistakes and inconsistencies in a document is a quick and undemanding job that a friend or family member, or even a computer program, could easily do. Several years ago, Penguine Australia published a cookery book. One recipe called fror freshly ground black pepper. Unfortunately corners were cut and an auto spell checker changed “pepper” to “people”. Oops! This error was only spotted after publication. All 7,000 copies were recalled and pulped!

A professional editor is a far more accomplished proofreader than your typical friend or family member and any computer program you may use as a writing aid. Both editing and proofreading take time to do as we have to be meticulous. We may have to go through your prose several times. Friends or family members are often unable to devote the time required to do the job in the way that a professional editor does.

Let me give you two examples:

In the first example, I recently had the privileged of being commissioned to proofread the typescript of a student text book, the main body of which was some 85,000 words. The author assured me that he had read through the typescript several times as had two other people. He thought that having his typescript professionally proofread was just a formality; consequently, he placed little value on it. He was more than a little red-faced when I found well over a hundred grammatical and spelling errors that he and his two friends had missed.

In the second example, I was commissioned by a professional person to proofread an important business report. The final draft of which had been reviewed by no fewer than five other professionals that had helped draft the document. Because of the importance of the document, the lead author commissioned me to proofread it. I found an embarrassingly large numbers of errors. My fee was considered to be money well spent by the lead author.

Both of these are examples of scotomisation, which is the psychological tendency in people to see what they want to see and not see what they don’t want to see. As a proofreader, I am trained to see what the author has written.

A professional editor understands the conventions of English writing and the nuances of the language. They are trained to be methodical; their experience enables them to identify and eliminate the common errors that often occur in all forms of writing from novels to academic papers. In addition, they can also identify inconsistent terminology, incorrect spelling, and formatting errors in your document.

Epilogue

Sadly, there are many authors that, having invested a great deal of time and emotional energy in creating their prose, place little value on having it properly edited and proofread. Hopefully, you are not among their number.