Content editing, also called developmental, story or structural editing, is the broad strokes, macro-level editing of your novel. It looks at characterisation and dialogue; length and level; organisation and flow; plot; pacing; setting; narrative style, structure, tense, tone and viewpoint; theme.

It’s the first and most in-depth editing stage. It’s also more conceptual and subjective than the other editing stages. This isn’t about hard-and-fast rules that are objectively CORRECT ✓. This is about creative problem-solving based on editorial judgment. By the end of it, your story can be simultaneously quite changed and more itself than ever.

Copyediting is sometimes called line editing (which itself is sometimes called substantive or stylistic editing), but the two are slightly different. Line editing comes before copyediting if an editor does them separately – which I don’t. If you hire me to do a copyedit, you will be getting a line edit too.

This service improves the sense and flow of your story by fixing inconsistencies in character, location, logic, terminology and timeline, as well as poor word choice, repetition and verbosity. Copyediting is a more granular, sentence-level process than content editing. It corrects spelling and grammar, and optimises punctuation to assist pacing and clarify meaning. It also standardises the language and style according to genre, time period or other parameters such as a publisher’s House Style or a series Style Guide.

Put simply, after the content edit has honed your story, the copyedit polishes and formats your writing to ensure that it’s equally compelling. It aims to allow the reader to be swept along smoothly, without distracting obstacles.

We’ve honed, we’ve polished – now it’s time for the varnish! Proofreading is the final quality-control stage, where literal errors and layout problems are flagged prior to a book being sent to print, or a manuscript submitted to an agent or publisher.

Proofreading is the micro to the content edit’s macro. By now all of the big creative decisions have been made and thousands of increasingly tiny errors have been caught – but not all. Editors are human, and as such we make human mistakes. We may have missed things. We may have even introduced brand new errors in the course of fixing the original ones. Proofreading is the last line of defence to catch these.

As the only editing stage that happens after typesetting, proofreading is also the only one that can catch issues introduced at design level, such as incorrect or missing indents, line spaces, page numbers, running heads or text, as well as the inconsistent use of fonts or paragraph styles.

Et voilà! You have reached –

The End