While proofreading, copyediting and line editing focus on the sentence level issues, the nuts and bolts of your writing, developmental editing looks at the big picture elements of your work. Your plot, characters, narrative structure, pacing, tense and point of view (to name but a few). It ensures your book is going to engage your reader and keep them coming back for more. 

Rather than a traditional approach where a lengthy report is provided to advise you what to fix yourself, mine is collaborative, using various tools to aid you to change things for the better with support. The traditional style has its benefits and lots of people are happy to take a report, read it and implement its advice, but what if that isn’t for you? – Do you like to talk things through, ensure you’ve fully understood? Do you like feedback on the changes you’ve made and guidance if they still need work? – in that case, my developmental editing style will be right up your street! Using the initial read service (above) will be of even more benefit; if I notice only one developmental issue or a couple of small things, there’s no need for a full developmental edit, we’ll simply focus on the issues that we need to, rather than write a report about things that are working perfectly, reducing your costs considerably. It is harder to estimate developmental editing costs, but a rough guide is around £25 per thousand words. 

Often I will recommend a coached developmental edit or coached manuscript assessment. If you are interested in pairing coaching with your developmental edit, find out more here.

Beta reads and book maps are also available as budget alternatives and are listed below. 

More in-depth services, including book doctoring, where your revisions are done for you or with extra support, are available on request.