What a Professional Book Editor Actually Does

And Why Friends & AI Don’t Replace It

I used to work for a professional association for value engineers. A common complaint among value engineers was that the people who could really use their services called them “cost cutters.” It wasn’t a compliment. After listening to that complaint for several years, I finally spoke up: “What’s the first thing out of a value engineer’s mouth?” They looked at me as though I’d suddenly started talking in Klingon. I relied on my own experience with them to answer my own question: “How much does it cost?”

That pointed, two-stroke Q&A revealed the root of the problem: the value engineers themselves focused on cost. Not on what the subject of the value study must do. Not on how to improve its performance. They focused on its cost and how to make it less costly.

This analogy works with editing, too, but perhaps in the reverse. Authors unfamiliar with the publishing process often think of editors as persnickety grammarians who live to correct spelling, punctuation, and grammar errors. We delight in finding copy errors.

I won’t deny that. Editors do correct errors in spelling, punctuation, and grammar. We also point out and fix errors in syntax and sentence structure. Book designer Toni Serofin acknowledges the necessity of competent editing in her LinkedIn post: “A professional editor doesn’t just polish grammar. They clarify structure, tighten language, flag inconsistencies, and make recommendations that directly affect layout.”

Levels of Editing

But wait, there’s more! Did you know there are different types or levels of editing and editors who specialize in those levels? When it comes to publishing, especially self-publishing, there are basic types of editing an author should understand and those basic types should proceed in descending order:

1. Developmental editing. Development editors take a bird’s eye view of the manuscript and focus on its structural elements. Ashley M. explains developmental editing: “Developmental edits challenge your structure, pacing, clarity, character development, and sometimes the entire direction of the book. It can feel like your manuscript is being pulled apart piece by piece—and emotionally, that can hit hard if you’re not prepared.”
2. Line editing. A line editor works at the sentence level and massages the writing to add verve, so it engages the reader. Alyssa Kruse explains: “1. Strengthening sentence structure—varying rhythm and length. 2. Refining voice—does it sound like YOU, consistently? 3. Improving clarity—cutting the fog, sharpening the point. 4. Smoothing transitions—does each paragraph flow to the next? 5. Eliminating repetition—catching those phrases you overuse.”
3. Copy editing. This is what many writers consider the focus of editing. Copy editing puts a granular focus on the written content to correct all the aforementioned errors. Again, Ashley M. has a great description for this level of editing: “This is where grammar, punctuation, consistency, syntax, and technical errors are addressed. Copyediting cleans up the manuscript—but it assumes the content and structure are already solid.”
4. Proofreading. Proofreading is not editing, but that doesn’t mean it’s not dispensable. Proofreading is the final sweep through the manuscript, that last step of quality control before publication. Not only does the proofreader identify and correct copy errors, but the proofreader also catches glitches in text formatting and page design.

Putting a manuscript, especially one that’s novel length, through three rounds of editing takes time and may be quite costly. Therefore, many self-publishing authors seek to spare their limited budgets by relying on volunteers (e.g., friends and family members) and using artificial intelligence (e.g., editing software). There’s no doubt those volunteers may provide useful feedback, but volunteers can’t be held to expectations. If your friends and family members are not the right audience for your book, then they won’t know the tropes or genre expectations. Their feedback may be gratifying (“I liked it”) but less than useful.

Editing software won’t tell you whether your ideal reader will like or dislike your book. It will rely on patterns of previously published literature to see whether your content follows suit. That’s not necessarily a good thing. Software understands rules, but not context, nuance, or slang. It won’t detect plot holes or inconsistencies in your writing (e.g., a character’s eyes are blue on page 17 and brown on page 83). Also, software is well-known to introduce as many errors as it corrects, so the writer needs to have sufficient expertise in language to apply critical judgment to the “corrections” suggested by software.

Another caveat: AI will scrape your manuscript and add the content—your intellectual property—to its lexicon of words, patterns, and algorithms. AI will then use your intellectual property however it wants whenever it wants for whomever it wants.

Frugal Editing

If you find the cost of editing prohibitive, you can reduce that cost.

1. Enlist alpha and beta readers. Alpha and beta readers are volunteers, ideally professionals willing to help you out for free and oftentimes friends, family members, and colleagues who are happy to lend you their opinions in exchange for being early readers of your manuscript.
2. Use editing software. This is not to suggest that you use editing software in place of professional editing, but software will alert you to many errors in your copy and suggest improvements.
3. Rigorously edit and revise your manuscript before sending it to a professional editor. I’ll be blunt: it costs less to edit a clean, well-written manuscript than it does to edit a hot mess of a rough draft.
4. Substitute services. For disciplined authors, a reduced level of service may suffice. For instance, if your story’s structure is solid but still needs some refinement, consider hiring an editor to provide you with a manuscript critique rather than a full developmental edit. 
5. Combine services. Editors tend to specialize at either the developmental level or the sentence level. Sentence-level editors often combine line and copy editing into one service, delivering thorough, detailed editing.

Is Your Manuscript Ready for Professional Editing?

Hen House Publishing specializes in sentence-focused editing combining line and copy editing for thorough, detailed treatment of written content. For structural editing, we offer a manuscript critique, which we call “developmental editing lite” and which is more intensive than beta reading and less expansive than a full developmental edit. And if your manuscript has been thoroughly edited and revised and is ready for that last round of quality assurance, Hen House Publishing offers proofreading.

Professional editing brings objectivity to an author’s work, with the critical judgment for literature that friends and family don’t possess. If you’re ready to elevate the quality of your story, contact us.