When many authors first email me, tell me what type of edits they’re looking for. This is always helpful for me as it helps me assess what the author expects as I’m doing the sample edit, but in my experience, most authors think they only need a copy edit when, in reality, most of them need developmental or substantive edits or both as well.

What are the differences with each edit?

Before we can really get into this article, let me define what I mean by developmental edits, substantive edits, and copy edits.

Developmental Edits: These are the bigger picture type edits. They focus on things like pacing, characterization, plot, overall organization, etc. These help make the story work and fit reader expectations.

Substantive Edits: These edits are in the middle between developmental and copy edits. They focus on the organization of paragraphs as well as sentence structure, clarity, consistency, and flow. These make the writing sound beautiful.

Copy Edits: These are what people typically think of as editing. They focus on the nitty-gritty details like grammar, spelling, word choice, punctuation, etc. These make your writing look more professional.

Proofread: This technically refers to an edit after the book has been formatted. I’ve been seeing more and more people use this term when referring to copy edits, but they’re not the same thing. A proofread goes over many of those smaller copy edits; however, they also look at hyphenation, widows and orphans, spacing, and other typesetting things to make sure the book looks right as well.

Some editors will call these different things, so while these are the terms I’ll be using in this article, be sure to clarify with your editor what they mean with their terms.

Order of Edits

When an author needs more than one type of edit, there’s an order traditional publishers follow that most freelance editors (including myself) recommend as well:

1. Developmental edits
2. Substantive edits
3. Copy edits
4. Proofread

Doing these out of order can rend any past edits useless and a waste of time and money on everyone’s part. Let’s look at why.

Why Should I Follow this Order?

Bigger edits almost always mean more of the text changes. With developmental edits, sometimes whole scenes are rewritten or even deleted. And those that aren’t completely different by the end of the edit still have lots of changes.

For one book I worked on, the author deleted a couple scenes, added a dozen more, and completely changed how she wanted one of the characters to appear, which meant that every time that character showed up, something had to change in their appearance or demeanor or dialogue. If I’d done a copy edit on one of the deleted scenes before we did the developmental edit, that author would have paid for time I didn’t need to spend on the manuscript since all those sentences ended up getting deleted anyway.

Another author I worked with needed substantive and copy edits. We reworded many of the sentences and moved several of them around. If I’d changed the punctuation and word choice before this, the author would have paid me for things that would have changed once we started rewording the sentences and moving them around.

What if I Can’t Afford All the Edits?

Edits can start to get a bit expensive, especially if you need all of them. We’ll look at some ways you can lower this cost with some other tactics in another article, but here, we’ll talk strictly about which edits are most important to get on a budget.

I always recommend that if clients do nothing else, they get the biggest edit needed. So if you need a developmental, substantive, and copy edit, I’d suggest you at least get the developmental edit. These will be the most obvious errors, even to readers, and if your story doesn’t flow, or if there are too many plot holes, you’ll lose readers, potentially for good. However, if you get the developmental edit but not the other two, most readers will enjoy the story enough to push through some awkward phrases and wording that might not be the best. If you need a substantive and copy edit, getting that substantive edit will fix the awkward phrases that trip readers up and will make your writing irresistible, which helps readers push through some of the smaller things like spelling, punctuation, and grammar.

Additionally, like I said earlier, those bigger edits need to be done first anyway, so if you only get the biggest edit needed, assuming you’re self-publishing, you always have the option of getting the other edits later when you have a little more to spend. This way, if you do go back and have more edits done, the original ones won’t be wasted, and you’ll simply be moving forward with the novel, never backward.

And if you need some help figuring out which edits need done, never hesitate to ask an editor. A good one will always tell you is needed for your novel to be successful, even if it means telling the author that their expectations are a bit off, because your success is our success. Good editors don’t want to just meet author’s expectations; we want to exceed them.