The book editing process 

Editing happens in the third phase of your course year with us, during The Big Edit. The program mirrors the book publishing process; beginning with developmental editing, proceeding to copy editing the manuscript, and onto matters concerned with book marketing. We take your book to the market of literary agencies and submit your work with our recommendation to our literary agency colleagues.

Developmental editing is concerned with story development, looking at the big picture of your story. Just as with a book editor at a publishing house, this will be a collaborative process with your developmental editor, discussing any major or foundational changes to be made before you work on your next draft. Does the story fulfil its promise for readers of the genre? Is the opening the most intriguing it can be? Is the ending satisfying? Are there any missing or extraneous scenes? Are there plot holes to fix? Are we interested in each of the characters? And so on.

Line edits are sentence-by-sentence improvements. Once the structure is all in place, copy editing begins. Are there words you use too much? Are there metaphors that don’t quite work? Jokes that don’t land? 

Copy editing is fact-checking and sense checking. Copy editors will ensure that real things you’ve referenced are accurate. They will also check for internal consistency. Proofreading is concerned with correcting typos, minor errors and spelling errors.

We will guide you through these aspects of the book editing process, developing and polishing your technical writing skills, on a sentence by sentence basis teaching you how to self-edit with The Big Edit course. The Big Edit course helps independent authors learn to master these aspects of fiction editing in all genres whether literary fiction, historical fiction, contemporary fiction, women’s fiction, fantasy, science fiction, children’s and young adult fiction and even some forms of non fiction like memoir. Editing skills learned now will set you in good stead for a few books!

Towards publishing 

Our creative writing students learn book editing skills for a lifetime of writing to publishing standards with The Big Edit course and your course begins with a session to meet your editor and review the storyline for a wise new draft likely to please publishers.

A professional editor will guide each writer before they begin the process of book editing with developmental editing advice to structure the revision of their manuscript. With The Big Edit course, our writers progress through the stages of the editing process from developmental editing, to copy editing and on to line editing, before they submit their revised manuscript to our editorial services team for review.

An experienced book editor from our team will give detailed line by line feedback on the work, and consider its potential to meet the standards of a traditional publisher before undertaking a query letter review and preparing the submissions package for our trusted literary agencies to secure representation towards becoming a published author. We review each and every writer’s submission as a team to ensure we meet the highest standards for your best chances of success at submission. (If you’re not there yet, we’ll show you why and how to fix it. We’ll get you there.)