What do developmental editing services involve?

This blog post describes developmental editing services and how they are different from manuscript critiques. The second half covers examples of developmental editing comments an author might expect on their manuscript, with a commentary explaining their purpose.

Developmental editing is all about feedback on a complete book manuscript draft to improve it.

The first step is usually a manuscript critique, which consists of a first reading of the manuscript, with the editor taking notes on big picture issues.

A manuscript critique can be incredibly helpful, but developmental editing usually goes deeper. That’s because a lot of the magic happens in the second reading.

Have you ever watched a film you thought was really bad? The first time you watch it, you likely have hunches about the problems it has, and if you’re a skilled movie critic, you may have some pretty decent notes. But watching it again is where you’d refine the nuances of your explanation for why the film is bad.

The same applies to books!

How developmental editing services can go deeper than a manuscript critique

Developmental editing services usually involve:

1. A longer, more detailed editorial letter

2. Manuscript comments (usually MS Word comments in the margins) that go into the specifics of story problems on each page of your manuscript

And they sometimes involve the editor going in and making changes to the text itself. It's worth noting that editorial letters for self-published authors are often much longer than editorial letters used in traditional publishing. With self-published authors, and especially new authors, craft points are often explained in detail. This is assumed knowledge in traditional publishing, and the feedback is much more targeted on the story problems.

An editorial letter in traditional publishing might be four to eight pages (1000–2000 words). For self-published authors, it might be sixteen pages (4000 words) or even longer.

Very long editorial letters have questionable value for the author, as they either overwhelm the author with discussion of too many problems, or include a lot of nonspecific text (e.g., explanations of what pacing and narrative drive are) that could be better found in a blog post or book.

Fiction and nonfiction developmental editing services

It’s important to know that these are completely different services, with some common ground, that require training in different things. Fiction developmental editors are trained to look for issues with character, plot, setting, point of view, style, voice, etc.

Meanwhile, nonfiction is all about the structured presentation of information and narrative, so the focus is on insight, arguments, concepts, engaging presentation, style, layout, etc.

That said, creative nonfiction such as memoir and some forms of academic nonfiction such as ethnography include elements of both fiction and nonfiction developmental editing.

How much do developmental editing services cost?

The Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading's suggested minimum rate for developmental editing is £41.10 per hour. Many people, myself included, usually charge per project or per 1000 words.

In my experience, copyeditors and proofreaders sometimes work for lower than the CIEP recommended rates, but I’ve yet to find a developmental editor who offers services at lower than the CIEP suggested minimum.

That’s because it’s more taxing on the mind than the average copyedit, and requires a lot more training and experience to do it well. The average developmental editor needs to know a field (say, cultural anthropology) or a genre (say, fantasy fiction) incredibly well to be able to offer developmental editing services in that area.

A proofreader who works in those areas, however, can also comfortably cover many other genres or fields. But also, proofreading and copyediting have historically been undervalued and feminized, despite being difficult to do well—two reasons why people offering those services should charge higher rates for them!

What kind of feedback do developmental editors provide?

Developmental editors usually provide an editorial letter with big-picture feedback. If you want to see some examples of such feedback, check out my blog post on manuscript critiques.

But developmental editors usually provide targets feedback on each page of the story. Different editors offer different amounts of feedback, and that’s partly why the prices for a developmental edit vary significantly. So do your homework and make sure you are comparing like with like!

I aim for one comment on every page (250 words) on average, but it’s typical for comments to be front-loaded – there are usually many more in the first one-third of a book and fewer toward the end. That’s because the first-third of a book is commercially more important (most readers will start at the beginning, and if they stop, they will stop somewhere near-ish to the beginning). And it’s also because it’s natural to flag problems when they first appear, and problems in the second half of the book are also likely to be problems in the first half of the book.

Feedback examples

Now let’s take a look at what feedback you might receive from a developmental editor:

I follow a great practice I learned years ago at Club Ed, which is to have a three-pronged comment where I:

1)      Say what the problem is

2)      Explain why it’s a problem

3)      Give an example of how it could be fixed (but without going in and fixing it that way myself)

Here are some of my comments from a real job. They’ve been doctored and some elements of the story have been changed to maintain author anonymity.

Example comment one (summary comment for the prologue):

I definitely think the prologue needs to go! This is because:

1) its main purpose is to reveal the fantasy conceit (the magic portal) and Amy's disability, but you can do that later on.

2) This story foregrounds external events (relationships are important but secondary), but the prologue includes lots of internalization and backstory to understanding Amy's relationship with Samuel. This is best explained once the reader is rooting for them. And by including lots of internalization and these details here, the reader will expect more of the same throughout the whole book, rather than a story focused on external events.

3) In places it's slightly overwritten in a melodramatic/clichéd style ("It was the first cold evening of fall, the air cool enough to mist your breath.") – and most of the book is not like this!

Commentary: Example one just says what the problem is and gives several reasons why it is a problem. No examples of how to fix it are needed because the proposed solution here is simply to delete it. This is a summary comment – a longer comment at the start of a chapter (here the prologue) that outlines general thoughts on that chapter and how to revise it.

Example comment two (targeted comment):

In the prologue you mention the MC being ten years old. That’s too young for lower YA. I know it's just mentioned here, and the characters are older in the story, but this is the first text most readers will read. It’s another good reason to cut the prologue – many twelve-year-old readers would be immediately put off by the idea of following a ten-year-old character here.

Commentary: This doesn't need a suggested fix because the suggestion is to remove the prologue. Even if the author decided to keep the prologue in, the fix is clear: change the ages. This is an example of how the book's audience (lower YA) uniquely impacts aspects of the narrative.

Example comment three (targeted comment):

You’ve included a long paragraph of backstory on the third page of chapter one. Backstory is best later on in the story. The details you mention, about the aunt’s car crash and how that resulted in Amy’s disability, are important and should be moved elsewhere – but definitely cover them in detail after the first few chapters. You could hint at it here, for instance, an object used in this scene could trigger a memory of the car crash that you describe in one or two sentences.

But if you decide to include it an extended flashback, later in the story is better, and I recommend paring down the description to focus on the emotional core of the memory (this is more compelling, and it’s also how humans remember things).

If you include a short memory/description that intends to raise questions in the reader’s mind, you could go for something like this:

“I was only four when the accident happened. My memories are a blur, and to be honest, I try not to think about it too much. But it’s there, all the time, buzzing around my mind.”

Commentary: This follows the three-pronged approach. It gives a possible rephrasing, but doesn't impose that rephrasing on the author because it's important that they rephrase it in their own voice. This is a fairly common issue found in early chapters, and that's why the value of a developmental editing is in explaining how to solve it in a way unique to the manuscript.

Example comment four

The description of Samuel’s aftershave as frankly rambunctious pulled me out of the text. I know that Amy is a very smart teenager and is likely to use a wide variety of words, but my preference here would be to reword to (i) not to pull the reader out of the story, and (ii) consider the audience and their reading level. You may disagree, and that’s OK, but it’s important to review instances like this.

Could Amy maybe say something like "way too strong" or "OTT"?

Commentary: This follows the traditional query pattern of identifying the problem, saying why it is a problem, and then proposing solutions.

Summary:

I hope you found these examples illuminating and that the concept of a developmental edit is now much clearer to you! If you're interested in booking this service, check out my fiction services page.