Last week Looseleaf’s Kristy S. Gilbert was an editing special guest at the Life, the Universe, and Everything Symposium, and we’re going to post a few snippets from her panels. Today’s bit is from the panel “Developmental Editors.” Excerpts are lightly edited for clarity (and some parts are summarized).
Brittany Passmore: A lot of writers get really excited when they finish their book, and sometimes they’re just not sure if they’re ready for that or if they need to go through some other editing process first, so how would people know they’re ready for developmental editing, if it’s too soon, or maybe they should have done it sooner . . . what do you guys think?
Amy Michelle Carpenter, Emma Heggem, and Nic Nelson shared some wonderful advice, including working with writing groups and beta readers so you can get more bang for your buck (and so you can have a hivemind help you brainstorm fixes for the biggest revisions) and remembering that many developmental editors are happy to look over your outline and give feedback there even before you draft the book.
Kristy S. Gilbert: Yeah, I think especially in nonfiction, developmental editing can mean something different. Developmental editing can mean looking at an outline and giving feedback on how to develop the actual book that will eventually come of it. And it can also, on the other side, mean taking a full book and developing it further, so it is important to know what you’re getting when you sign up for developmental editing just ‘cause there is that fuzziness in terminology use.
And there are ways to get large-scale feedback without paying for the strict developmental edit. A lot of people distinguish between, like Nic has mentioned, the story critique, but also a manuscript evaluation, where someone reads your whole book and they give general feedback on it—and it could be very extensive feedback and very useful feedback—but they’re not going to be going on every single page, writing up a review of every single chapter. It’s going to be more generalized to the entire book. And so you can generally get that sort of feedback for a lot cheaper and that might be something I’d get into a little earlier if you’re like, “I don’t know if I’m ready, and I think I’m ready, but I’m not sure.”
It can be hard to be willing to commit to the process of a full developmental edit on an entire manuscript, and so there are smaller steps you can take to practice the skills you need to use a developmental edit. You need to sharpen your revision skills, your ability to take feedback and incorporate it into your vision—those are all skills that you need for a developmental edit to be helpful. And you can practice those skills with critique groups [like Amy Michelle Carpenter said], with alpha readers, with beta readers. You can practice those with a story critique [like Nic Nelson mentioned], with a manuscript evaluation. You can do a bunch of smaller steps to build the skills you’d need to really get the value out of a developmental edit.
Brittany: So let’s say a writer is ready for a developmental edit. How do they know how to find an editor that’s right for them, and what’s the process of hiring a developmental editor?
Kristy: There are lots of ways! One of the best ways is to talk to other writers you know and see if they have anyone they recommend. There are lots of ways online to find people. You can just Google, but really all Google tells you is who has the best SEO. And sometimes that means they’re the best editor and sometimes it just means they’re amazing at SEO. You can look at databases like the Editorial Freelancers Association (the-efa.org), they have a database of editors, you can look at—well, ACES is mostly copyeditors, but some of them do developmental editing—so that’s the American Copy Editors Society [here’s a link to their database], here locally we have the Utah Freelance Editors club, which we have a database—that only gets updated once a quarter, so don’t be judgy about it (I’m the webmaster). [Here’s a link to the UFE database.] So you can go to those databases to start your search, but you really need to investigate each person, and that just works a lot faster when you can ask your network, “Hey, have you ever worked with a developmental editor or know anyone you’d recommend?” You can kind of vet the editors a lot faster that way, which is great.
You can also contact them, let them know about your project. You can get a sample edit on a portion of your manuscript. Some editors offer that for free; some do not. It’s not necessarily a red flag one way or another. Some editors just don’t have the time to do those free samples and some of them—like, I sometimes get 10-15 requests a week, and I just can’t do a free sample edit for that many. I don’t have that kind of time. But I also don’t think it’s bad that other people do free samples. It just depends. So you can get samples from different editors to try to see who really gets you and provides feedback in a way that works for you. Just ’cause someone’s an awesome editor doesn’t mean they’re the right kind of awesome for you, and that’s fine. It’s important that you find the right fit.
Emma followed up by (wisely) pointing out that the right fit is not just about communication and personality, but also about genre and audience—make sure you’re getting an expert in your book’s thing. An excellent adult horror editor might not know what to do with your middle-grade fantasy.
These brief snippets hit on some key principles:
- A developmental edit is most useful if the author receiving the edit has robust revision and critique-receiving chops, but there are smaller steps (and less expensive investments) to help develop those skills and assess where you are.
- Vet and interact with an editor before hiring them for a full developmental edit. Ask for referrals, check databases, ask the grandmaster Google, but get sample edits.
- Find the right fit for your working style and for your specific project.
Interested in a sample edit, manuscript evaluation, or developmental edit from Looseleaf? Contact us and tell us about your work!
Update
LTUE has posted most of the panels from this year’s symposium on YouTube. Here’s the full panel on developmental editors!
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