Do I Need Editing Before Sending My Novel to a Literary Agent?

The short answer is "it depends".

The tl;dr is: no copyediting is needed, but you may require professional content feedback and/or stylistic editing if you want to put your best foot forward.

And the longer answer:

This is a frequent source of confusion among new authors. To answer it, let's go over what will happen if you do find a literary agent and publisher.

What editorial support will the publisher offer?

First up, if it's published traditionally, the publisher will take care of cover design, formatting, copyediting and proofreading. And they should help with marketing and promotion but you'd do well to check what they will offer exactly.

And publishers will often do some content (developmental) editing and line editing, usually in house, although they do increasingly less, so I hear.

What editorial support will the literary agent offer?

If an agent says "yes" to your manuscript, then that's just the first step. I know authors with agents who have been waiting several years to find a publisher.

The agent may give you some content feedback and even line edit sections if they really love your manuscript but feel it needs a tweak before sending to a publisher.

So overall, if you have a manusript that an agent and publisher really want, you can expect some editorial help from them.

This means that in principle, you don't have to have any professional editorial input before sending your novel off to an agent (a process called querying). And if you're on a tight budget, then you should absolutely do this for a first round of querying and only reassess if you get a large number of rejections and are keen to keep going.

What kinds of editorial support might it be judicious to invest in?

The fact is, agents and publishers are looking for manuscripts that are highly polished in terms of storytelling. This is because they have hundreds to choose from and can only accept a couple. So you shouldn't dream of sending an early draft of a novel to a publisher. The first thing you should do

is write a full draft and then revise it at least once, and probably a few times.

Then I'd recommend getting beta feedback and critique comments (a topic for another blog post).

Finally, if you want to put your best foot forward, you should get some content feedback from a professional editor (a content/developmental editor) who specializes in your genre, and consider a line edit of the sample. This is increasingly the case as publishers trend toward doing less work in house and expecting better polished manuscripts from authors in the first place.

(Sidenote: this trend isn't good from a social justice perspective because not everyone can afford editing at industry rates – that's why I'd recommend people on a budget sourcing other kinds of feedback from their support network and giving querying a go first of all).

In conclusion

So to summarize: publishers or agents will provide copyediting, line editing (heavier language editing for voice and style), and often some developmental (content) editing.

You also want to make sure your synopsis and query letter are great, as the agent may only read these. The synopsis can be quite a tricky format, but here's a resource on how to proceed!

Good luck with revising and hope this helps anyone planning on querying soon!