I am a part of a few different writing and editing communities on Facebook and Instagram, and it is not uncommon that when I am browsing the different questions people have asked I see many people questioning whether or not they really need a developmental editor.
Isn’t having beta readers enough?
What really is the value of a developmental editor if they don’t fix any of the spelling and grammar mistakes?
If a dev editor isn’t even going to help tighten up my sentence structure, why would I pay them?
The answer can be as simple as pointing out that dev editors are trained to help fix things that beta readers aren’t. However, I think it may be more constructive to explain what exactly it is that developmental editors do and how this is different from what other editors accomplish.
First of all, developmental editing is a very fundamental building block for a story.
An author types up a shoddy first draft. (Afterall, words on paper can be changed and built upon, words in their head amount to nothing.) This author has spent hours upon hours with their head stuck inside the story and is all but completely over their story. They are ready to send it to a publisher and never think about it again. However, they know they didn’t do a perfect job, and so it is time to find an editor.
The easy thing to do here would be to assume that all of the narrative elements are perfect. The story is ready to go. There are no other options for the story than what has already been put on the page.
If this was the case, it would be time to send it to a copyeditor to fix any small errors. They could clean up some sentence structure work. And voila! You have a book to send to a publisher. (And later down the line, once the book had been formatted, a proofreader would look over it to ensure no typos or formatting issues had made it through to this point.)
Of course this is not the case.
Why do we have beta readers? Why do we have dev editors?
In some ways, beta readers do fulfil a similar role to that of dev editors.
The idea of a beta reading group is to send either a portion or a complete document to a group of people to get a general response as to how they felt about the book. Some beta readers may leave more notes than others, but at the end of the day, the beta readers act similarly to a focus group in marketing. The author will get a feel for what characters resonated the most with readers and find out which areas are confusing people. They might get a resounding “Yes, this is great!” or they may find that most people just don’t get it and are uninterested. However, it is very unlikely that beta readers will have ideas for how to fix any of these issues. There won’t usually be feedback as to why a character isn’t working, only that it isn’t.
This is where it becomes obvious why a developmental editor is such a fantastic resource.
A good dev editor will be able to point out every element in your story that is working and every element that isn’t. They will be on your team every step of the way working towards making your story as captivating as possible. They will have suggestions for narrative elements and plot devices. They will point out patterns and themes in your story that you may not have noticed but can now lean into. They will have plans for how to bring your characters to life and push your story to the next level.
Sometimes the problem is a simple organizational issue. Sometimes the characters haven’t been developed enough. Sometimes there is so much telling when the audience wants to be shown. Sometimes there is too much showing, and the audience just wants to get to the next scene.
Whatever the issue, a good dev editor will be able to point it out, suggest ways to improve it, and then leave the author feeling boosted up instead of torn down. As a good dev editor is not only a coach, but also the authors biggest cheerleader, pointing out all of the fantastic things that the author has done and pushing them to do more of that.
All levels of editing are so important in creating beautiful copy, but a developmental editor is a baseline that can help pull the beauty out of an authors brain and onto the page, and I think that is pretty damn cool and worth the time, money, and effort to go through the process.
The Editing Klingdom 