How Many Edits Does a Book Actually Need? And What TYPE of Editing?

By Astra Crompton, FriesenPress

Professional editing gives a book a chance to succeed in the market. Especially with the glut of hastily produced, poor quality books on the market, engaging in editing will not only give you a better chance with reader reviews, it will also establish you as a serious author of quality books. If you are investing in book marketing and book promotion, then the quality of your book and its editing needs to be done at a professional level.

But “editing” is a broadly applied term that covers everything from developmental editing to proofreading.

When we say every book needs editing, what exactly do we mean and how many rounds are necessary to create a polished book? Here we’ll clarify the different types of editing and explain why editing is best done in rounds.

Editorial Assessments

The reason there are so many types of edits is because each manuscript has its own needs. Depending on a writer’s experience, skill, and the amount of time they’ve spent on their manuscript before seeking an editor, the needs of their text can vary greatly. One text might need help reorganizing content, fleshing out ideas, clarifying messaging, streamlining prose, and cleaning up errors. Another text might only need a line edit to clean up the mechanical details.

It’s almost impossible for an author to assess this by themselves because you know what you mean to say. It takes an outside reader to pick up on places where the text isn’t as clear as you meant, where the vocabulary doesn’t match your intended readers’ reading level, or where the order you’ve presented information leaves something to be desired.

The best way to determine what kind(s) of edit you might need is to get an editorial assessment, such as an editor’s manuscript evaluation. A professional editor will then read your manuscript in full to get a sense of how the text on the page reads, where there may be missed opportunities or unanswered questions, what technical and/or grammatical state the text is in, and propose the ways they can help you improve the manuscript. This will usually include sample edits, specific suggestions for improvement, and a recommendation for what editing services will best support your manuscript’s needs.

Those editing services might include substantive, stylistic, and/or mechanical editing.

Substantive Suggestions

Substantive editing includes services like Developmental Editing, Content Editing, and some types of book coaching. It takes a high-level holistic view of the project to assess what’s working and where there may be missed opportunities.

• For nonfiction, this can include highlighting areas where: the point meanders, an explanation is confusing or missing, citations might be needed or facts verified, and changes could be made to organize the writing.
• In fiction, this can include identifying: plot holes, pacing problems, inconsistency of point of view (POV) or characterization, stilted dialogue, anachronisms or internal inconsistency, and inconsistent chapter lengths and whether reordering things might resolve narrative issues — such as cutting a prologue or adding in a final chapter.

This level of revision requires close working with the author to ensure their vision is achieved. The editor can make suggestions (sometimes on a sentence-by-sentence basis), but they cannot write your book for you. Authors need to engage in the revision process, implementing revisions in their own words, and can even discuss proposed changes with their editor to ensure the best solutions are implemented in the book. With this level of rewriting, though, it’s common that new errors are introduced into the mechanics of the text. It’s therefore necessary to follow substantive editing with a second pass for stylistic and/or mechanical improvements.

Stylistic Consistency: Clean, Concise, Correct and Complete

Stylistic editing involves assessing whether what’s on the page is functioning as effectively as possible. At this point, the skeleton and substance of the book are in place, everything that should be in the book is present, and anything unnecessary has been cut. Now it’s time to massage the sentences so that they shine.

This level of editing can be included in Content Edits, but is usually seen in Copy Editing. At this point, the editor is aiming to make the book as clean, concise, correct, and complete as possible. They strive to preserve the author’s unique voice (what makes the book sound like the author), while ensuring the language is appropriate for the intended audience.

This can mean suitably explaining jargon, assessing word choice or connotation, untangling overloaded sentences, or removing tautology (where the same thought is re-stated in slightly different phrasing). In fiction, stylistic work also ensures that genre conventions are maintained, such as when to intentionally break grammar rules to retain the way a hard-boiled noir’s narration sets the scene, or to ensure that each character in a multi-POV book sounds distinct.

This level of editing also works to establish styles, usually by building a style sheet for the book. This ensures that spellings are consistent (both the regional spelling convention, like Canadian vs. American English, as well as ensuring that a character doesn’t slip from John to Jon to Jonny throughout the story), that numbers are consistently spelled out or in numerals, that punctuation placement is clean and consistent, that emphasis or thoughts are italicized properly, and a number of other minor details that add up to create a professional reading experience.

Mechanical Cleanup

A stylistic editing pass may still result in details the author needs to address: cleaning up those last inconsistencies caught by the editor, making a few last changes to phrasing, adding in an extra line to resolve a query, etc. Or, in preparing the book’s layout for print, you may find little things that slipped through the cracks that you want to change or address. Taking the time to set up the manuscript cleanly will improve your experience working with a book designer, so it’s important to pay attention to the mechanics of language and formatting. Yet, this is a very specific sort of attention that many authors don’t have the time or training to tackle alone. This is where the Proofread comes in.

This level of editing isn’t technically an edit; it relies on the style sheet and decisions made in previous rounds of editing to determine the “correct” changes to make. For instance, both “OK” and “okay” are acceptable spelling variations, but only one variation should appear in your book. It’s the proofreader’s job to catch any stragglers and correct them to match the style choices established. They look for inconsistencies in spelling, punctuation, fonts, paragraph styles, captions, footnotes, table of contents, and so on. Essentially, their keen eyes trawl for anything left out of place.

How Many Round of Editing?

So, how many rounds of editing do you need? On a standard manuscript: at least three. One round of developmental or substantive editing, one round of stylistic copy editing, and one mechanical proofread clean-up. If you have the time and grammatical talents to go through your text with a fine-toothed comb, you may be able to minimize the number of rounds your manuscript requires. However, it’s not humanly possible to catch everything in a single round of editing—even for the professionals. The more rounds you get, the cleaner the text gets with each pass.

All quality editing relies on an educated (often accredited) human editor who understands the rules of English grammar, syntax, spelling conventions, punctuation usage, audience needs, and genre conventions — and when breaking those rules can be used to best effect. To ensure you’re getting your investment’s worth, start with an editorial assessment to get an accurate proposal for which editorial services will best serve your needs and to ensure the editor’s vision for your book matches your goals. Carefully review any edits the editor provides you (in track changes), and you can ensure the final copy reads its absolute best.

Finally, from a book publicity perspective, having a professionally edited, polished book to present to media and audiences will help an author put their best foot forward with an overall goal of gaining readers, fans and followers.

Astra Crompton is a writer and illustrator with twenty years’ experience in self-publishing. Astra’s short stories have been published in magazines, fundraising anthologies, and used in school curriculums. She has taught courses and written articles on creative writing for over five years.

As Editing & Illustrations Coordinator, Astra also manages, coordinates, and vets FriesenPress’s industry-leading editing and illustrations teams.