What This Particular Book Editor Does

What a "content edit" is, Jenny Redbug style

I started this newsletter to share what I was doing as a debut memoir author, and focused it on my adventures marketing and promoting Honeymoon at Sea, as well as sharing the fun and adventurous aspects of my life on a small sailboat. But as this Substack has grown and expanded, so has my readership—three new people joined us just this month—and my recent post about commas got the most feedback of any posts this year, so I thought I’d talk a little more about my “day job” as a book editor. Feel free to let me know in the comments if you find these posts of interest or not, but don’t worry, I’ll keep doing travel/sailing stuff as well as book reviews in future posts.

Lately, I’ve read a great many articles about editing, all titled something like “Do Your Need a Developmental Editor?” or “What Can a Content Editor Do for You?” or even “What Exactly is Copy-editing?” Often, the pieces are authored by a writer who had a good (or bad) experience with an editor and is trying to steer other authors toward editorial assistance (or away from trouble). Usually the comment sections will be full of questions seeking clarification or answers, and often there’ll be comments from other editors, like me. Clearly, this occupation can’t always be explained easily.

So I’m going to concentrate on what I do, which I believe is one of the most important steps in publishing a book—the content or structural edit, also known as developmental editing. I don’t use the term “developmental” because I work with complete manuscripts. The author should be done writing/rewriting to the best of their ability before I step in; some authors even have their MS read by Beta readers before they get a content edit (not a bad idea). I’m not a book coach, so I am not here to help someone decide what to write, but I can definitely tell you what part of your finished MS needs more “development,” so that word does come into it.

Semantics aside, in my work I’m concerned with big-picture editing, not line editing or copyediting (I’ll talk about those edits in a future post). I am not reading looking for grammar issues, punctuation errors, or misspellings, though as my clients know, I still mark a few dozen of these things when I am reading. What I do is read the MS like a reader, just absorbing the story and trying to get swept away by it. While I read I make a bunch of notes and then I go back over the MS to refine those scribbled, barely decipherable notes into five or six pages of Notes to the author.

In those Notes, I address content/structure issues, like problems with story arc (often that’s things like it took too long to get started, or there was too much expository, or there’s not enough tension/conflict, or not high enough stakes) and also character arcs (Why doesn’t the protagonist do X when faced with Y? Why did the antagonist appear so late in the story?) or other character issues, like having too many characters without enough to separate them or make them key.

I highlight style/writing issues only if they are global/repeated problems like the overuse of certain words and phrases, like I, me, my in a memoir or a novel told in first-person, or patterns like She did X in a novel told in third person past tense. There is nothing wrong with those phrases but it becomes tedious if every sentence starts with I did X or She/he did X. Or if every sentence is Hemingway short or if they are all long winding roads. Readers need variety, though they might not think about it consciously.

Bottom line, I point out what already works in the MS, and what doesn’t. And, most importantly, I tell the author what they can do to make the MS stronger and more sale-able. Speaking of sale-ability, I usually address that, along with marketability, whether the author plans to look for an agent and publisher, or intends to self-publish the book themselves or with a hybrid publishing partner. In short, I bring up anything that bothers me, and everything I love about the MS, and any next steps I suggest.

Every now and then I get the joy of being able to suggest something very specific, like here’s an agent you should contact when you have made all of these changes, but usually that doesn’t happen until I have read it again. Or the author and I have done another pass, like a line edit, and I can see that the book is really ready to submit. Successful agents get so many submissions per week that only a finely crafted, well structured, and professionally polished MS will get them excited about signing someone.

So, that’s what I do—any questions? Please ask me in the comments, rather than by email, so I can give the answer to all the readers who are joining us here. If you are interested in talking about scheduling a content edit or know someone who is, go to my site: www.jennyredbug.com to see more about me and my work.

Thanks for following along on this journey with me. I appreciate you being here.

hasta pronto!