This guide explains what each editing service does, who needs it, and how to choose which stage you’re at when writing your first novel.

Substantive editing and developmental editing are not the same, though they are closely related and the terms are sometimes used interchangeably in the publishing industry.

Hiring an editor is an important milestone. It usually means you have reached the point where you are ready to stop looking at your manuscript as a work in progress and start looking at it as a book.

A developmental editor works at the highest level of a manuscript — not the sentences, but the architecture. Their focus is on structure, narrative logic, pacing, character development, argument construction, and overall coherence

A line editor works at the level of the prose itself — sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. Their focus is on how the writing reads: the rhythm, the clarity, the word choices, the transitions, and the overall flow of the language.

A beta reader is one of the first people outside your immediate circle to read your manuscript in full. They are not professional editors — they are representative readers who respond to your work the way your target audience would. Their job is to tell you honestly what is working, what is not, and where they lost interest, got confused, or wanted more.

A sensitivity reader is a professional reader with lived experience of a particular identity, community, or set of circumstances who reviews a manuscript specifically for the accurate, respectful, and nuanced representation of that experience.

A copyeditor is the editor responsible for accuracy, consistency, and correctness at the technical level of a manuscript or document. They work through the text methodically, correcting grammar, punctuation, and spelling, ensuring consistency in style and terminology, checking that facts and figures are accurate, and making sure the text conforms to a relevant style guide — whether that is Chicago, APA, house style, or something else entirely.

A proofreader is the final professional eye on a piece of writing before it is published or distributed. Their job is to catch what everyone else missed: spelling errors, punctuation inconsistencies, formatting irregularities, repeated words, and anything else that slipped through earlier stages of editing.

A developmental editor looks at your manuscript with the mind of a reader - checking to make sure there are no plot holes, the characters are distinguishable from one another, and the timelines all match up.

Of all the questions that come up around editorial services, this is one of the most common — and the confusion is understandable, because both involve someone reading your work carefully and marking it up. But editing and proofreading are fundamentally different activities, happening at different stages, for different purposes.

Peer review is the process by which a piece of scholarly work — a research paper, a journal article, a conference submission — is evaluated by other experts in the same field before it is accepted for publication.

A structural edit focuses on the overall architecture of a manuscript or document. It examines how the work is organised, whether the pacing serves the reader, whether the argument or narrative logic holds, and whether the whole hangs together as it should.