5 Types of Editing For Your Book

“Copy” is how the publishing world refers to text. Think of copy editing as text editing. This type of service goes word-by-word and finds issues with grammar, word usage, and consistency.
This type of book editing is where copy editors find any typos, spelling, grammar, or syntax errors.  Copy editing also checks for the correct use of punctuation, like commas, semicolons, quotation marks and dashes.
Often, copy editors will leave comments to explain why they made the change or suggest revisions for the author to look over. Once the copy is fully edited, the author can accept or reject the changes set out by the editor.
No one writes a perfect first draft, no matter how hard they try. It’s not hard to use a comma the wrong way. That’s why copy editing is important to a manuscript.
It’s a good idea to copy edit once you’ve finished revising the plot, characters, and story structure for fiction and the overall book chapters for nonfiction. 

Line editing and copy editing are often used interchangeably, but these are two different types of editing. Where copy editing focuses on correct grammatical uses, line editing focuses on the flow of prose.
A line editor is concerned with how ideas flow from one to another. Are the different elements transitioning smoothly? Are the tone and writing style consistent?
A line editor’s comments suggest making changes that make sentences tighter by removing issues with redundancy and verbosity. Their work improves awkward sentences and paragraph construction but is not a rewrite.
Their goal is to create an engaging and pleasurable reading experience by removing small inconsistencies. A consistent tense, good word choice, and proper tone are essential to the overall flow.
Line editing makes your prose more stylistic and smooth. In non-fiction books, line editing can also catch factual errors but not research or fact checking.
Line editing ensures your book is well-written, so you’ll want to start this process when most of the larger issues have been resolved. This ensures a polished final draft that will have the most impact on the reader.

Moving on to more extensive types of book editing, substantive editing is where you might start overhauling your book. The goal of substantive editing is, as it sounds, to improve the overall story/content structure.
This type of editing looks at your narrative and helps it become the most engaging for the reader. A substantive editor will make sure your story makes sense chronologically.
A substantive editor may suggest adding flashbacks to increase the suspense. They might also suggest that you have too many flashbacks that distract from the story. Maybe you need to cut the flashbacks altogether for a linear approach.
Substantive editors also tackle whether you should split or combine your chapters or sections. They will consider the chapter order. They may suggest areas where you can expand, tighten, or delete for more clarity.
Substantive editing often goes along with developmental editing and can be done together. Since this type of editing can result in the most revisions, it’s a good idea to start this process early, soon after you complete writing.

As stated, a developmental edit often goes hand in hand with a substantive edit. That’s because both of these types of editing work on the big picture of a manuscript.
However, they may be similar, but developmental and substantive are two separate types of editing. A developmental edit is extensive and focuses on every part of the novel.
Developmental edits focus on the setting, timeline, plot, structure, characterization, pacing, and marketability of the book. All these features get a revision before producing a finished manuscript.
A developmental editor is like a beta reader. They may find that your main character needs to be more fleshed out, or certain parts of your plot don’t make sense. You may need to create more tension to ramp up the stakes.
This kind of editing will start early in the writing process, creating a collaborative relationship between editor and writer. A developmental editor helps work through ideas and get to the nitty-gritty of perfecting a manuscript.
A development edit will also narrow down your target audience and marketability. The right developmental editor can figure out if your book is what’s current in the industry and where its place on the shelf might be.

The final step to editing is proofreading. The name derives from the “proofs” that typesetters produced before the writing went to its final print run. When your book gets to this stage of editing, all the major overhauls have been done.
Colloquially, many people use proofreading and copy editing interchangeably. In publishing, however, they are two different types of editing. Copy editing happens towards the start, and proofreading is the final step.
The text is formatted onto its pages with any photos, diagrams, or tables added to the page layout. Now in the final format, no more major changes can be made. You can’t add or delete pages, paragraphs, or chapters.
Any more major edits that can change the final proof can cost a publisher a lot of time and money doing a redesign. That’s why before proofreading, it’s essential to do all needed edits and get your book to a near-perfect stage.
Proofreaders will look for any leftover typos, spelling mistakes, or inconsistencies. They’ll make sure dashes, spaces, and quotation marks are in the right place.
Before printing, they’ll also check for any words that split awkwardly at the end of a line. They’ll make sure that a single sentence isn’t carried over to the top of a page from a previous paragraph. This is called a widow in publishing.
Similarly, they’ll check for orphans, a sentence left at the bottom of a page that should go with the paragraph on the next page. Once your book is proofread, it’s ready for publication and distribution.