You may have decided that you want to own the rights to your story and publish it yourself, but that doesn’t mean you don’t want every advantage a traditional publisher has to offer. But if you’re new to the editorial scene, you might not know what that is!
Don’t worry. An independent editor can walk you through the steps of a traditional process to provide a full-service editorial review of your book or else help you pick and choose which levels of editing your story needs most:
Step One: Beta Reading
Beta reading is the first editorial experience most writers receive and is done independently and in advance of their agent or publisher having seen the material. The best beta readers will be writers of your genre because they typically have the tools and knowhow to give you notes that translate easily to edits. Writers are often looking for beta readers and will often offer to swap stories if you can find a good social group.
Next best sources for readers would be those who like to read your genre. They may not have the technical language down, but their intuitive understanding of the genre will pick up when something is a bit off and needs adjusted. It can be fun to have family and friends read your book, and you should have some cheerleaders in your corner to keep you motivated, but they’re less likely to give you actionable, unbiased feedback. Some professional editors offer beta reading services for a reasonable rate, which can be impactful to your early rounds of edits and get your foot in the door if you’re looking to self-publish your book.
Step Two: Developmental Editing
This is the first professional editing services a traditional publisher offers. In fact, sometimes authors will go through two rounds of these big-picture edits with different members of the same publishing house. In case you don’t know what to expect from an editorial letter, it’s a detailed analysis of your plot structure, characters, genre, theme, marketability and more as well as a list of suggested changes.
At this level, you might lose and add whole scenes, characters, or subplots to make room for a more captivating reader experience. So, you don’t want to dive into the nitty gritty of your story before making sure you’re 100 percent satisfied with the foundation of the story.
Step Three: Copyediting / Line Editing
Copyediting, sometimes called line editing, is the second traditional level of editorial services. This step deals with prose on a paragraph-by-paragraph level to analyze each sentence for consistency, clarity, style, and whether it is serving your story and your characters to keep it.
Ninety percent of the grammar, spelling, and syntax changes will be made during this step, and it’s also the time where authors experience the most shrinkage to their overall word count. You're going to want to work with an editor where this is the case because this level of editing doesn’t leave big gaps to fill in by an author like during developmental editing, and you want your editor to use your existing words as much as possible to modify for clarity and nuance to bolster your authorial voice rather than insert their own.
Step Four: Proofreading
Finally, you’ve made it to proofreading! It may feel like it’s been forever since you started your editorial journey at this point, but there’s good news. Proofreading is the quickest editorial service to turn around. Soon you’ll be off to finalize formatting and production details. But before you do, this level of review is for cleaning up grammar and spelling, catching formatting errors, and maybe the occasional comment of something that needs changing. Overall, you don’t want to be making changes to the text at this point, but in case you do, make sure you send over a new copy with the changes highlighted so your team can proof it as well.
Self publishing your novel doesn’t mean you have to go it alone. The biggest advantage is that you have the power to choose which steps you want professional help with and which you want to take on yourself for personal touches. We’re here to work with you to make your book the best it can possibly be.
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