It’s a method of developmental editing, aimed at helping you with the structural and technical aspects of making your novel work.

This will be useful for you if you’re still at the stage of redrafting and working it out, and are looking for constructive criticism on your ideas. I take your hard work and put it under the microscope. If something isn’t working then I’ll point it out, and offer solutions for improvement. So you get to test and rework your ideas through feedback and constructive criticism.

There is no one size fits all approach for developmental editing. Whatever your particular project needs guides the approach. It is always unique, but always equally thorough.

You send me your draft manuscript, and I send back my assessment: essentially an essay or book report. It takes each area of craft in turn, and also shows how they relate and affect one another, drawing on examples from your book and finding ways to think about improving them, where necessary. It is comprehensive but also practical, offering useful ideas for the next drafting stage.

I try and make it as accessible as possible, taking the time to explain concepts and keeping the tone light. I maintain the balance between theoretical accuracy and being straightforwardly useful without getting lost in technical language and complexity.

The actual nature of an edit will be specific to the book you’ve written. For example, some common and important things that a developmental edit will consider are:

Plot: Is the development coherent, rational and gripping? Does your first act set up everything efficiently? Is the ending satisfying? Do all the scenes you’ve written have a clear and focused function?

Pace: Does the narrative move at a speed appropriate for your readership? Are there points where it sags or wanders off?

Characters: Are they interesting and relatable? Are their actions consistent? Are their goals and motivations clear? Are their story arcs satisfying?

Point of View: Is it the right one for the story? Is it consistently applied? Is it being exploited fully?

Narrative Techniques: Is there too much telling and not enough showing? Does the dialogue sometimes feel unwieldy? Is the tone inconsistent? Is your voice as strong and confident as it could be?

These are just a few examples of areas that a manuscript assessment will look at. The actual report you receive will concentrate on the areas that you book will benefit from developing, according to me.

I will make an assessment of the work needed from a sample of your manuscript, and send you a detailed quotation.

A guide price for a 60-100,000 word document is £500.

I will of course edit smaller or larger documents,

Yes they are. I will provide a short assessment based on a sample of your work.

All questions will be answered if you contact me here.

Once you’re happy with the structure and contents of your book it’s time to make sure everything in there is coherent, engaging and unambiguous.

Copy editing is the process that gets your manuscript ready for the reader by reviewing the contents and bringing the spelling, grammar and punctuation into line.

Perhaps the quickest way to answer that question is to divide the job into two broad categories.

(1) Applying an overall style and correcting the text.

This involves:

• correcting and standardising the grammar, spelling and punctuation

• checking and formatting the referencing and index

• marking up the text elements for the typesetter

(2) Looking at the content to make sure it says what it means to say, without mistakes and as clearly as possible.

This involves:

• making sure the text is coherent and doesn’t contradict itself

• picking up on ambiguities and inconsistency in the phrasing and details

• checking and editing tables, graphs and figures

• identifying material that is potentially offensive, insensitive or non-inclusive

• fact checking and amending or querying as necessary

What about things like tone, sentence structure and word choice?

Yes, they are definitely part of the overall copy-editing process. They come under the heading of line editing, which focuses on the organisation and presentation of content. It involves rewriting to improve style or eliminate ambiguity, reorganising and tightening the text line by line. So while copy editing thinks in terms of correctness and consistency, line editing thinks about flow and clarity.

It’s often easier to think of this as a separate job because writers sometimes want line editing by itself, but it is easily combined with copy editing.

The main body of the text is marked up onscreen in Word, which means it comes back to you with lots of red lines in it (other colours are available). All changes are recorded like this so that you can decide what to keep or discard.

Anything in the text which can’t be addressed without your input is recorded as an author query, and amendments are made when you’ve had the chance to look over these and respond.

What you’ll get back is an edited manuscript along with author queries, a style sheet showing the style decisions made, and any other documentation needed to explain things.

As a guide, the price range for copy editing is £13-£18 per 1,000 words.

I will provide a quotation upfront with a set fee based on my assessment. This way you know what you will pay before the work starts.

Yes they are. I will provide a sample copy edit based on a short extract from your work.

You’ll get back the marked up document along with a list of queries and a style sheet so you can get a good idea of what the job entails and how I go about it.

All questions answered by contacting me here.

It’s a kind of stylistic editing. The aim is to help you to improve the tone, flow and structure of your writing, focusing on the way you use language to communicate to the reader, so you’re saying what you want to say clearly and confidently.

I do this by editing the content, writing style and word use at the sentence and paragraph level, making sure that the text reads well and gets the meaning and message across.

• Line-by-line analysis and rewriting to enhance the tone, rhythm and language choice, keeping the intended readership in mind

• Reorganising and tightening to avoid repetitive structures, ambiguity and long sentences

• Making sure the story details and descriptions are clear and consistent

• Making sure the narrative voice and dialogue are distinct and realistic

• Avoiding overused metaphors and cliched expressions, words or sentences

The goal is to enhance it.

I do this by tuning into the way you write and use that as a baseline for the editing. Everything is brought into line with the way you want to be heard and express yourself.

Yes it can be, and often is. But sometimes putting aside the styling and correctness of a text to dive into the expression and tone is what is required, and it helps to think of it as a separate job. It also gives you some flexibility in how deeply you want me to edit the text, so I can focus on either copy editing or line editing, or do both at the same time, as required.

As a guide, the price range for line editing is £13-£18 per 1,000 words.

I will provide a quotation upfront with a set fee based on my assessment. This way you know what you will pay before the work starts.

Yes they are. I will provide a sample copy edit based on a short extract from your work.

You’ll get back a marked up version of your Word document, showing all the changes and suggestions I’ve made.

All questions answered by contacting me here.

The final check, tidy up and polish of a text that corrects problems that have slipped through previous edits and the typesetting. It’s the last quality check before publication.

That perhaps makes it sound like a quick read-through, but there’s more to it than that. It involves careful attention to detail and a practiced eye for correction on a number of issues.

The main tasks are:

• Finding errors in spelling and punctuation

• Inconsistency in style, for example hyphenated words or capitalisation

• Checking page numbering and table of contents

• Checking text headings and page headers/footers

• Checking that text is correctly laid out and formatted, including word breaks

• Identifying missing and repeated text, or missing elements like illustrations

• Highlighting wrongly placed or incorrect captions and annotations

I’m flexible in terms of format. I can mark up a PDF or InDesign file, or in Word if preferred.

Because the proofreader is usually working on formatted text, their intervention is ideally limited. Proofreading would not normally undertake rewording of sentences, structural interventions like reordering blocks of text or inserting headings, or fact checking - these things are covered by copy and line editing, at an earlier stage of the process.

However, if something seems wrong then I will always raise a query rather than overlook it.

As a guide, the price range for proofreading is £9-£12 per 1,000 words.

I will provide a quotation upfront with a set fee based on my assessment. This way you know what you will pay before the work starts.

Yes they are. I will provide a sample copy edit based on a short extract from your work.

You’ll get back a marked up version of your document, showing all the changes and suggestions I’ve made.

All questions answered by contacting me here.