Developmental Editing is the first editing stage your book goes through. It focuses on big picture stuff, helping you develop structure and style, as well as your book’s plot, characterizations, and story pacing in fiction.

It is a thorough, in-depth overview of your entire manuscript. It does not focus on grammar, punctuation, or layout. It focuses on analyzing the manuscript’s content to suggest and implement structural changes while identifying plot holes, your story’s theme, the premise, symbolism, tension, pacing, character development (motivation, inconsistencies, etc.), inconsistent dialogue or tone, etc.

After Developmental Editing the author does revisions, implementing suggestions to add, remove, or expand elements made by the editor.

Good Developmental Editing will be done with your genre and target audience in mind and assess your work honestly in relation to industry standards and expectations.

Developmental Editing is the first step in polishing your book into the best version of itself.

Line Editing is the second stage in the editing process. Rather than look at overarching plot and theme or the technical aspects of writing, this stage looks at the nitty gritty: syntax, sentence structure, style, rhythm, word choice, and the strength of each sentence line by line.

Line Editing helps authors keep their sentences powerful and concise. The Editor studies each sentence for wordiness and ensures that unnecessary elements are trimmed.

Line Editing also focuses on word meaning. Editors analyze whether the words chosen by the author are the best choice for conveying the intended message.

Line Editing ensures that the sentences are as effective as they can be. They work line-by-line, tightening up sentence structure so the language is sharp and clear. They look closely at how a writer’s word choice and syntax contributes to the tone or emotion of a piece of writing.

A line editor is attentive to the author’s individual style and is concerned with the overall pacing and logical flow of a piece.

Copyediting (or Copy Editing) is the third stage in the editing process. It shares a lot of tasks with both Proofreading and Line Editing, but their aims and purposes are very different.

Copyediting looks at word usage and logical consistencies more than the power of words and their impact on the style and theme (like Line Editing) or the placement of every element in the finished, formatted book (like Proofreading).

Copyeditors focus on grammar, punctuation, accuracy, and consistency. They create Style Sheets to ensure consistency across books in a series or within each book; these Style Sheets are used by proofreaders and other editors to make the best improvements to your book’s readability.

Copyeditors are the ones who notice that your character had blue eyes at the beginning but brown eyes at the end, or that their particular model of car is described inaccurately, or that mid-manuscript their name changed.

Proofreading is the fourth stage of editing and comes after the book has been formatted for print/ebook.

While it shares some tasks with Copyediting, Proofreading focuses on surface-level changes only. It looks for incorrect page numbers, header mistakes, spelling, grammar, punctuation, hyphenation, typos, and other formatting issues in the manuscript and on the cover. This is the final pass, and at this point the book should be at its cleanest and most error-free. Changes suggested by the proofreader are implemented by the formatter and designer.