#copy editing

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[sigmoneditorial]

Types of Editing: For New (Overwhelmed) Independent Authors

Congratulations! Your hard work has resulted in a manuscript, and you’re ready to share it with the world. You probably fall into one of two camps right now.

You’re so excited that you’re done, and you’re ready to hit submit! You’ve been writing and researching for months, or even years, and you’re confident in your work. You give yourself five stars, and you can’t wait to see everyone you know agree.

You’re stressed that you’re done with the initial manuscript, because what do you do now? You’ve heard big words like “queries” and “copyrights,” and you’re pretty sure you’re supposed to hire an editor. You almost wish you were still writing; at least you know how to do that.

Either way, take a breath and celebrate your hard work so far. This is a huge accomplishment! There are lots of steps to go, but they’re not as difficult as you may be fearing. Second things second (the first was celebrating)—getting the necessary information so your upcoming decisions are informed.

You might associate the word “editing” with the phrase “kill your darlings,” or maybe you dread the price tag on a professional edit. You’re not alone. Many writers balk at editing and choose to either edit their work themselves or pay a bare minimum to their cousin’s nephew.

The good news is, editing is not for ripping your writing into pieces against your will, nor is it for draining your wallet. A good editor will cooperate with you to make your manuscript the best it can be while preserving your vision, and there are many ways to make the process more affordable.

There are many stages of editing. After evaluating the types of edits and your current manuscript, you will be better suited to choose what’s right for you.

Self-Editing

Self-editing comes before everything else. For readers to understand your story, some basic housekeeping needs to be done first. At minimum, make sure your spelling is (mostly) correct, you’ve used punctuation (including quotation marks around dialogue), everything is split into paragraphs (you need a new one every time someone new speaks!), and you’re consistently in past or present tense from the same character’s point of view. You’re not trying to cross every T, just making sure the writing is good enough that it doesn’t hinder the story.

Alpha Reader

An alpha reader is not an editor, but someone who reads your story very early in the writing process. They’re your first audience and will give you big-picture feedback on whether the story makes sense, if the characters are believable, and if anything is confusing. This is like story validation—your alpha reader will help you understand whether you’re telling the story you meant to tell and whether readers will enjoy it.

Manuscript Evaluation

Also called story critique, manuscript assessment, and editorial assessment, an evaluation is a multi-page report on major story elements like your plot, pacing, structuring, characters, dialogue, and more. It doesn’t include in-document changes, but is a separate developmental-level document to help you figure out what needs to be changed.

Beta Readers

A beta reader is not an editor, but represents an average reader who will tell you what they think worked and what didn’t. Much like an alpha reader, they’ll give big-picture feedback, but slightly more zoomed in. Where an alpha read assumes the story is going to change significantly, beta reading focuses on plot holes (etc.) that are still large-scale issues but won’t override the whole manuscript.

Developmental Edit

A developmental edit suggests changes in the structure and narrative of a manuscript. Your editor will look for genre conventions, story logic, organization and restructuring, character arcs, and emotional payoff. Changes will be made in-line for scene-level edits, as well as a chapter-by-chapter report that addresses pacing and flow, as well as plot and character development.

Line Edit

After the story is complete and solid, a line editor will help make sure your writing is effective, sharp, and clear. Your editor will work with word choice and syntax, tone, consistency, and reorganize phrases to make your manuscript smoother and more consistent. Where previous stages have made sure the story is engaging, line editing makes sure the writing is engaging.

Copy Edit

Copy editing works to perfect your language technically. In this stage, errors in spelling, grammar, and punctuation will be corrected, along with stylistic consistency and tense usage. If you’ve used written numbers in some places and spelled them out in others, your copy editor will fix it.

Proofread

After all other editing, proofreaders focus on technicalities such as sentence fragments, comma splices, typos, and all other word-by-word edits that have thus far slipped through the cracks.

Whew! That seems like a lot, but not every manuscript needs every type of editing, and many editors offer multiple services in a single package. For example, copy and line editing are commonly done in the same pass. In the coming articles, we’ll be addressing some of the most frequently asked editing questions from new (overwhelmed) independent authors.

How do I know what type of editing I need?

Where do I get beta readers?

How do I find an editor anyway?

I’m scared for people to read my work.

I can’t afford any of this!

~Allison of Sigmon Editorial

From idea to ISBN, Sigmon Editorial's got your back.

[wronghands1]

[melanie-ohara]

Do you need a proofreader or an editor?

I'm a writer and editor with years of experience, a degree in literature and creative writing and another in film. I've been working as a freelancer in indie film and audio production for the last six years, but I'm building up my portfolio to move into copy-editing.

Rates are decided on a per-project basis, and I'll definitely take some things on for free. My work is on this blog and on AO3 here, I'll work on any project from fanfic to non-fiction to original work, and my turn-around time is extremely fast

I look forward to working with you

[bl-mitchum]

I’ll get all hyped up seeing a job posting like, “looking for a proofreader,” and then click on it and it’s for training AI. Look, I want to do this full-time but I’m not that desperate. We’re in the bad timeline for sure.

[lauralot89]

There Is No Excuse

I believe everyone has at least one piece of media that got something so impossibly, unbelievably wrong that the utter stupidity stays with you forever and all it takes is one little reminder for you to go flying off the handle and start foaming at the mouth, screaming "THAT'S NOT HOW THAT WORKS"

For me, as a child in the 90s who devoured every piece of pulp fiction kid lit on the library shelves, that media was a seemingly innocuous Sweet Valley Twins title: The Incredible Madame Jessica

The Incredible Madame Jessica was published in 1996. Though the characters of the Sweet Valley twins were created by Francine Pascal, the writing of the series is credited to Jamie Suzanne. Jamie Suzanne is not an actual person, but rather a pen name used by multiple ghostwriters, some of whom are listed on Wikipedia. Unfortunately, I'm unsure which of the ghostwriters is responsible for this particular book. I've heard that the name on the dedication page tends to be the name of the ghostwriter, but the dedication is to "Bradley Scott Halpern," and I can't find any writer by that name, ghost or otherwise.

So, unfortunately, we have a nameless ghostwriter to blame for this upcoming atrocity. The editors also deserve to be shamed in the streets, but they are not credited and my searches for the editors of children's pulp fiction from the nineties have not been fruitful.

Things begin innocently enough, with the members of the Unicorn Club planning their booth for the Sweet Valley Middle School Fair. They're setting up a dunk tank, but with a signature Unicorn twist!

Jessica, as you may have gathered from the title and cover, sets up a fortune telling booth instead. Her fellow Unicorns vow to make their Jell-O dunk tank put Jessica's stupid idea to shame. But there's just one little problem:

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that everyone stares at Mandy with disgust, asks how she didn't learn that red and BLUE make purple back in preschool, and kick her out of the Unicorn Club for bringing shame upon them all.

But alas.

Sorry to dash your dreams again, but Janet did not, in fact, just remember basic kindergarten lesson plans and realize that red and green make brown. No, her concern is only that five massive bags of Jell-O will still not fill a whole dunk tank.

Now, before anyone gets smart and tells me that in some cultures, green is just considered a shade of blue, I am aware. But I have looked up every known ghostwriter for this series and none of them are from such a culture.

Similarly, you might want to give the author the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they're colorblind. Maybe they meant to write "berry blue," but then hit their head and typed "lime" repeatedly in its place. And either of those is possible, I suppose, but the book still had editors. How did no one step in and say "This is some hogwash"?

And the final nail in the coffin, in case you were holding out hope that the Jell-O would come out brown and the characters would learn an important lesson about paying attention in art class:

The murky purple liquid.

The murky purple liquid.

THE MURKY PURPLE LIQUID.

You know what the worst part of all of this is? I thought, because my brain still couldn't fully grasp the stupidity at play, that blue Jell-O must not have existed in 1996, and therefore the ghostwriter, not wanting to mislead the children on Jell-O flavors, went with the next best thing instead of just having the characters mix strawberry gelatin with blue food coloring.

But no, berry blue Jell-O was introduced in 1992, FOUR YEARS BEFORE THIS ABOMINATION

To this day, I am filled with rage. Had I know how to look up Random House's mailing address back in the nineties, they would have received a scathing letter of complaint. I'm still so mad about it that I ordered a copy of this failure of quality control off the Internet just so I could photograph it and prove to you this wasn't a fever dream.

This isn't a self-published work from a vanity press. It had to have an editor. MULTIPLE EDITORS. But no one cared to correct even the most obvious of flaws, because it's just junk to keep the kids quiet for a while, so who cares?

No matter how badly you fuck up in your own writing, no matter how ashamed you feel for putting out a chapter with a typo, comfort yourself with the knowledge that at least you didn't do this.

[mavro-nation]

get yall a beta reader who will leave 300 comments and suggestions on a 25k word fic tearing ur ass apart because you will be a better person for it