As an author, you have two paths to publishing, and both require a ton of hard work by yourself as well as some luck and blind faith to get your book in the hands of an audience. But there are a few options to find help along the way.

Working with a developmental editor is a great opportunity to build a team to bring your story to life. Better work is more likely to receive attention, so it can help kickstart a career that way. But there are other ways a developmental edit can help you with your career as an author even if you eventually choose to shelve your novel:

It Provides Actionable Editorial Direction

There are a lot of methods to develop your novel, but you won’t get the same kind of feedback in each:

Beta readers are by far most common. Their feedback largely looks like opinion, and you have to weed out which are largely correct and worth acting upon and which don’t understand your vision for the novel.

Critique partners often bring some industry knowledge to the table, but they also have their own manuscript that likely falls in your same genre. Their valuable time will be spent on it, as will their opinions. Take heed.

A developmental editor is the paid option of these, but feedback is often most in depth and based upon story mechanics and industry trends with guidelines on next steps rather than opinions. Of course, some opinion will always be involved, but it’s possible to vet editors in advance and ensure they have the same vision for your story before a big bill.

It Connects You with an Industry Professional

I’m not saying your developmental editor is going to be able to hook you up with an agent. But it’s useful to have a personal connection to someone who is working in the industry. Even better, they have insight into your authorial voice, your genre, and your particular story and can give you advice based upon it. This is not the blog point I put the most stock in, but it is one that cannot be ignored.

It Provides Feedback Tailored to Your Authorial Voice

So many blogs like mine have writing advice that can help authors plan, write, clean, and develop a novel. It’s a great way to grow as an author! But you can only get generalized advice from a blog. As I write this, there is no way I can know what your strengths and weaknesses are in your writing, and therefore I have no way of telling you which parts of any given blog post will apply to you and which will hinder your progress. Obviously, a developmental edit can! It's the number one way an editor can teach you about your writing style and how it fits in the industry.

It Can Train You to Self-Edit

The concept is simple: paying for a developmental edit is going to give you a peek behind the curtain for how editors build a strategy to make editorial suggestions and personalize them to each author’s story. It’s going to be more in-depth and more applicable to your writing than any blog post or book could ever be. It’s a great course in how to edit for yourself. That said, if you’re interested in working alongside an editor while you do it yourself, that can also be achieved with the help of a book coach.

It Gives You a Colleague Invested in Your Success

There’s no way for me to know if this is true for my fellow independent editors, but for me, I get really invested in stories that I do a developmental edit on. It’s very common for me to beta read stories I love, but I just don’t get to spend as much time thinking about the characters as I do when I’m deconstructing a plot and helping rebuild it. And it means a lot to me when my authors update me with progress revising, querying, publishing, and marketing. I’m always here to bemoan and analyze rejections and celebrate the wins, and it’s clear to me that my authors love it too. We’re a team, after all! And I don’t make editorial suggestions I don’t believe in. I want to see you succeed too!

Finding the right editor for your book isn’t the only way you can invest in your future career as an author, but it is one of the most well-rounded ways you can. Not only will it provide you with unbiased editorial feedback, it’s also a great way to build community and support for your novel with a greater depth than a tweet ever can. And I don’t know about you, but some days I really am glad to have that kind of camaraderie.