Editorial Services
So, you’ve completed your manuscript and are ready for the next steps? Discover a range of editorial services with Lines and Curves Literary to get your book ready for publishing.
Development Editing
Sculpt and hone the structure of your novel. Let’s take a deep analytical dive, using industry standard methods to discover what makes your story great and where areas to improve.
Line Edit
A rigorous line-by-line polishing up of your prose. Perfect for debut authors, writers with Dyslexia or those for whom English is a second language.
Copy Edit
A thorough weeding out of errors in syntax, spelling, punctuation and grammar. This service is ideal for confident and experienced authors who may have published previously.
Proofreading
The final stage before your book is ready to go to print: an essential part of the publishing process, focusing on finding any missed minor errors in the copy or formatting issues.
What is development editing?
Let’s imagine novel writing is like growing a garden.
Now let’s imagine you have prepared a beautiful bit of land, sewn seeds, nurtured new life and you want other people to come and enjoy it too.
You stand back and decide the space is ready for visitors. You throw a welcome party and send out many invitations. On the big day, however, only a handful of close friends and family attend and although they compliment you, in time, no one returns to the garden, and no new visitors arrive either.
So, you hire a professional gardener to come and help you work out why the garden has not proved to be popular place. The gardener points out that unruly thorns ready to snag, paths that go no where, water features that don’t work and hidden holes in the ground.
Many authors will self-edit as they begin to draft and flesh out their manuscript, rewriting sections as they go. When it comes to structuring a novel, everyone is different in their approach. Some writers will have meticulously planned the story from beginning to end, some may make it up as they go along. Either way, sometimes it can be hard to see the snag points, the dead ends, the broken bits or holes in the plot.
A dedicated, thorough, experienced and educated editor can help you see where pruning is needed, paths can be rerouted,
Is the overall story good as it is? Does it make sense? Are there plot holes or inconsistencies? Is it paced well? Are the characters believable?
Just as no garden can thrive and be welcoming without careful tending, weeding and tidying, no novel should go to publication without a thorough edit.
A development edit can help to
A development edit will not
Writing, for some, is the easy part and really counts for only a small portion of the work – a quarter, lets say – the gathering of your ingredients to potentially make a good story. A raw, unedited manuscript, to a reader, can be just as unappealing as consuming raw ingredients. That’s where Editing comes in. The Editing stage is, realistically, the greater part of the process – about half the work – the method which brings all those ingredients together, shapes, tests and proves your story is ready to be baked into that gorgeous product that will fly off shelves easily. The marketing element (putting out query letters or seeking self-publishing options from which you can promote your product) is, again, a smaller portion – around another quarter of the process. At this point, your book requires time to find it’s place on bookshelves and the right temperature for it to rise within the book marketplace. Editing and Marketing can be a daunting but with a good Editor on your side, to guide you through these steps, your book will have the best chance of finding its way to readers.