This list will be expanding as I receive more questions or think up topics I feel should be asked, even if they aren’t. If you have some question that you’ve never had the chance to ask from an editor, don’t hesitate to reach out!

How much does it cost?

This has to be one of the first questions. The cost of editing varies wildly from one editor to the next. I’m not exaggerating that one editor can easily be 20 times more expensive than another. There are so-called guild rates that are used in very professional circles, but those will look high if we’re talking indie landscape and semi-professional authors and editors. I’ll start with them.

Example prices based on Editorial Freelancers Association:

• Development editing: $0.03-$0.035/word x 120,000 words = $4000

• Line editing: $0.027-$0.035/word x 120,000 words = $3000

• Proofreading: $0.012-$0.02/word x 120,000 words = $1500

Now, for comparison, I have heard people offer dev editing a book for $200. Line edit + beta read for $300.

That’s a big difference to $4000.

How to audition an editor

How do you know if an editor is worth $200 or $4000? Especially if you haven’t worked with an editor before this. The sad truth is that it’s very hard. Proofreading you can actually try: give the editor something and find out if the person can put commas in the right place and knows how to use a semicolon. Evaluating dev editing is much harder, as it’s fundamentally only opinions, and much harder to test.

The best way is to talk to the clients of the editor.

Editors live and die by the reputation. Ask them for clients who they have worked with and who you could talk to. If they don’t have anyone to give, that’s likely not a good sign. The more experienced or noteworthy author they can give, the better sign it is. An experienced author can give more useful feedback about the feedback they received.

Don’t be too worried about bothering someone. Authors are usually very happy to yap about their writing. Be awkward and ask them if they can actually show something the editor gave them. A snippet copy-pasted from an editorial letter or an example of the line edits they did. Editors can’t share any of this stuff themselves, but the client can. These will tell you A LOT about both the quality and the style of the editor.

Second tip: always, ALWAYS, do a test edit. This is important for all parties. The editor might be excellent, and totally worth their rate, but still the wrong one for you. Or seen from the editor’s side, maybe your book is full of sexual assault and the editor doesn’t want to work on that. Sometimes the material doesn’t match, sometimes personalities don’t. I feel the test edit should be free once everyone is seriously considering the project and just needs the final compatibility check.

Will the editor force me into doing something I don’t want?

No.

Yeah, but for real? I heard a story and…

Yeah, ok. Those situations have happened, but it’s wrong.

The author always, always always, has full creative control (unless you’re writing a Star Wars or WH40K novel or something, but that’s outside the scope of this FAQ). The editor can have whatever opinions they have, but if the author says that they don’t want to turn their fun romance book into a grim literary fiction about the failing of the ethnostate, then the editor backs away. It’s the author’s name on the cover. They decide.

If the editor disagrees with a scene, they usually have a reason for it. It still doesn’t mean that the author needs to change the scene in question. If the author says “No, this is important. This is load-bearing,” the only real answer to that for the editor is “Cool, thank you for telling it to me. So let’s turn it to 11.”

If any editor tries to force something on you, that’s not a good sign.

What are the different levels of editing? Do editors get level-ups?

Editing happens in phases. Dev → Line → Copy/Proof. There are multiple ways to describe each level or phase, but the general idea is that we’re starting on the level of a whole book and zooming closer level by level. Here is a primer on the levels and their differences.

Developmental edit

Dev (or structural) editing means working on the structure of a book. On a higher level, dev editing answers questions like: What is this story even about? Who are these people, really? What is promised in the beginning of the story and are those promises paid off? Does the pacing sag or is it too fast on a manuscript level?

On a more micro level, dev editing answers questions like: Does this chapter go somewhere? Do these characters feel like real people and act like themselves? Does this emotional moment land?

Dev edit should be done first. It makes no sense to polish the prose of some chapter that ends up being cut completely as the dev editor pointed out that it didn’t fit the theme of the book at all. Dev editing is the most expensive type of editing as it takes the most experience and confidence about storytelling in general. Note that it’s also probably the cheapest type of editing you can find. The price and quality of a dev edit will vary WILDLY between different editors.

I have also made a video about development editing that you can watch on YouTube.

Line edit

Line-editing means polishing the intended meaning of what’s on the page. Is this sentence beautiful? Can I track what’s going on in this fight? Why is this line of dialogue wonky? Does this pastoral scene evoke tender feelings?

Working with a good line-editor is like going to prose school. The author is not only getting their manuscript polished, they are learning about how to work with language and hone their voice. A line-editor doesn’t make the writing sound like it was written by Stephen King or Ursula K. Le Guin. They make it sound like you, only more so.

Line-editing should be done after a dev edit, but before proofreading. The prose is being polished, but more grammar mistakes and typos are also being introduced that will need to be caught later. No one is perfect, not even line-editors.

I have also made a video about line-editing that you can watch on YouTube.

Copyediting / Proofreading

Copyediting and proofreading are the final pass to tighten the nuts and bolts. Is the dialogue formatted correctly? Is there a typo or grammatical mistakes somewhere?[sic]

I’m clumping copyediting with this category, as it’s about making sure the formatting is all similar, all the names are the same across the whole book, Fire Punch doesn’t become Fiery Punch at some point, etc. There are software tools (Grammarly, LanguageTool, ProWritingAid, etc.) that can help you with proofreading, but they won’t catch everything. Also, if you use them, beware of the extremely ham-fisted AI-powered stylistic suggestions they all now spew. Those are almost always bad.

How does the editing process actually look like?

TBA

When is the right time to get an editor?

TBA

If a story did well as a web serial or in some other format, will it need an editor before being published as an e-book?

TBA

We continue editing. This time it’s all about the developmental or structural editing! This time I’m linking to the video on YouTube, as I put a lot of effort into cleaning up the subtitles and everything, so it makes sense to watch it on that side. Let me know if you’d prefer the video to be natively here in Substack, though!

In this video I’m looking at a short story by Zhaernon, the author of Wolf Girl Evolution. You can read the short story and the comments here.

You can also read Zhaernon’s Wolf Girl Evolution on Royal Road.

Find the mentioned self-editing guide here.

In this short video I’m looking at chapter of the Royal Road story Clara Casewell, Attorney to the Villainness.

Thank you for the author cocopi for letting me do it 🙏 Read the amazing story itself on Royal Road.

And here’s the self-editing guide mentioned in the video as a fancy Substack embed:

Find my self-editing guide here on Substack.

What is editing?

Editing means polishing a draft to resemble a finished work of art.

This usually happens in steps: a rough first draft can be borderline nonsensical mess that is shaped into a decent RR fiction with the first edit pass. An almost finished manuscript can be polished from a great book to an excellent one by one more intense pass of line editing, making the prose sing from one sentence to the next.

How important is editing?

The simple answer: Web serial readers crave content. It’s fine, just ship it.

The slightly more nuanced answer: Editing is not really about perfecting the grammar or turning the prose “more professional”. The more important facet of editing is making sure the story itself holds together and excites and rewards the readers, keeps them turning the page.

Also, and maybe even more importantly, editing is where learning happens. How would you even know if your writing is getting better unless you read it and think about it?

Editors?

An editor is a person helping an author edit their book. The author always stays the ultimate authority on their story. It’s their name on the cover. No matter what the editor says, the author decides on every single suggestion.

Editors have the advantage that they don’t suffer from author blindness (more on that later). The main skill of a proper editor is that they will be able to accurately articulate their opinions on the work. A reader can say the pacing is too slow, and the author can retort that this is supposed to be a slice-of-life book, but an editor can point to how these four chapters retread the same emotional question in the same way three times even when the details of what happens are all different from each other.

Additionally, a good editor has read extensively and thought about writing and stories a lot. They will have things to teach you, no matter which one of you is the “better writer”.

In addition to all of this, editors speed up things. Maybe you could do everything an editor could, but it might take six months and extra two hundred hours of working time. Instead, you can recline on a sofa or write new chapters, while the editor tells you that there are continuity issues on pages 45, 124, 242, and 396.

Levels of editing

Edits happen on different levels. This is the rough shape so you know what people are talking about.

Developmental edit

Dev (or structural) editing means working on the structure of a book. On a higher level, dev editing answers questions like: What is this story even about? Who are these people, really? What is promised in the beginning of the story and are those promises paid off? Does the pacing sag or is it too fast on a manuscript level?

On a more micro level, dev editing answers questions like: Does this chapter go somewhere? Do these characters feel like real people and act like themselves? Does this emotional moment land?

Line edit

Line-editing means polishing the intended meaning of what’s on the page. Is this sentence beautiful? Can I track what’s going on in this fight? Why is this line of dialogue wonky? Does this pastoral scene evoke tender feelings?

Copyediting / Proofreading

Copyediting and proofreading are the final pass to tighten the nuts and bolts. Is the dialogue formatted correctly? Is there a typo or grammatical mistakes? [sic]

I’m clumping copyediting with this category, as it’s about making sure the formatting is all similar, all the names are the same across the whole book, Fire Punch doesn’t become Fiery Punch at some point, etc.

Self-editing?

For many web serial authors, hiring an editor is not feasible or sensible. Hiring an editor can cost thousands of dollars. The alternative is to do it yourself, and that’s what this document is really about.

So let’s go.

Author blindness

To prime things, let’s discuss author blindness. The way I phrase it is: “I know what I meant, so I don’t see what I wrote.” You know how cool the fireballs look and how they rattle as they fly through the air across this field that’s about 90 feet across, but you might actually not have described any of that at all, as you already imagined it. Or there might be a word missing from the sentence and you skip noticing it every time, as you know what is supposed to say. And sometimes even the spell checker won’t save you.

Most self-editing tips and tricks focus on fighting Author Blindness: how to trick yourself into seeing the writing on the page instead of the story in your mind.

Being a better writer than you are

Another weird thing about self-editing is that it requires you to be a better writer than you are. But what does that even mean, man?

The key is that appraising the quality of a thing is a separate skill from creating a thing of quality. A writer needs both skills, and the appraisal skill is always the one that is stronger. Unless you knew how to say if something is good, how would you even know if you’re getting better or worse?

Self-editing flexes the appraisal skill and forces us to figure out ways how to try to catch up to it with our creation skills. We take one step with the left foot and catch up with the right one. This is actually one of the main reasons why you SHOULD do self-editing. You can’t get stronger by lifting the same weights forever. Self-editing is a way to put more metal on your metaphorical writing barbell.

Requirements

Self-editing doesn’t cost money, but it’s not free.

The main requirement is time. To self-edit, preferably you should have a lot of calendar time reserved for that: actual weeks spent not looking at the text to let yourself forget it, so you can read it more like a reader would. This might be feasible or not. When you start working on an ebook, you might already have two years since you’ve seen that first chapter you posted on RR back in the day. The problem is that preferably you should have time to forget again between every pass of editing.

Ain’t no one got time for that, so we have some tools to try to trick ourselves and avoid holding the writing in a drawer for six months multiple times, but self-editing also takes working time. You could be writing new chapters, but instead you’re wondering if describing shadows as looming or creeping is more effective. No way around that unfortunately, so let’s get into the trenches.

Practical Guide to Self-Editing a Book

I’m assuming you’re starting to self-edit a book or a sizable arc of a web serial. If you’re working only on one chapter, then apply only the parts that make sense.

This guide assumes you’ve already had people read and give feedback on your work in critique circles or such etc. All that’s important and nice, but doesn’t cover what we’re going to be doing here.

When editing, always start with the highest possible level. There’s no use in fixing dialogue formatting of a scene that you’ll end up rewriting or cutting completely.

This is a practical guide. I’m going to prescribe concrete steps instead of listing ten different frameworks and weighing the good and bad of each. I’ve picked up these ideas as I like them and think they are a pretty good guess of what would benefit any book and best bang for your time spent editing.

Dev edit

1. Put down your draft. Don’t pick it up for two weeks.

2. Create a dev document. Write down the following on it. No need to answer at this point.

   1. What promises does my book make to the reader?

   2. How does my book deliver on its promises?

   3. Themes and arcs.

   4. List every chapter of your work in order.

3. Read your whole book in one go. No stopping for line edits, no stopping for anything. You can and should write notes on your dev document, though.

4. Answer the questions on your document. Instructions below.

Making promises: Your cover, blurb and the first chapters of your book make promises to the reader. Is this going to be a fun LitRPG romp? A brutal cyberpunk critique of capitalism? A fun guy being funny? Look honestly at what you’re doing with your first chapters and write down what a reader would assume based on them.

Delivering on promises: Think honestly if you delivered on the promises you made. Did you actually end up writing a harem story with smut? Don’t break promises. If you want to, really know what you’re doing.

Themes: Maybe you weren’t going to write a story about racial trauma and being colonized, but now that you squint at the work, can you spot something? Even for a lolzer-pantser, there are often leads buried in a story that can be pulled out and made stronger and more coherent when you focus on it intentionally.

Arcs: Same applies with arcs. Now that you read the story, the young apprentice seems to actually be the most clever person of this group, so what does that mean for their character and how can you thread it across the whole book?

Chapters: For every chapter, check if it deserves to stay in the book. Answer these three questions:

• Do I care about the stakes of this chapter?

  • Is something at risk that is worth the risk?

• Does something change in this chapter?

  • Safety turns to danger, love turns to hate, slow turns to fast, man turns to woman, etc.

• Does the chapter work enough jobs?

  • Aim for at least three.

  • Jobs include things like: advancing plot, developing characters, worldbuilding, foreshadowing/paying off things, making us feel emotions, changing relationships

If you can’t answer YES to all of the three questions, think about what would need to change so you could. Write down your answer.

5. Look at all your answers and implement the changes they inform you should do.

Line edit

The story holds water and the structure is sound, so next we want to make the prose as good as it can be. This is the part where you get to be the best writer you can be.

However, this document isn’t really about craft or what good dialogue looks like. That you have to mostly figure out for yourself by reading books, listening to people talk, looking at a leaf and seeing the lighter green stems reaching and curving up, the drops of dew rolling off it. That part is going to take the rest of your life, but self-editing this book can’t.

That’s why I’m mostly giving you tricks on how to fight past author blindness and try to see what’s on the page so you can make it sound to other people like it sounds in your head. I’ll also add in some very general writing craft tips that should be applicable to any written work.

Fighting blindness

• Distance

  • Do one editing pass, hide the manuscript from yourself for two weeks, then do another.

• Changing medium

  • Print out the whole book on paper or use an e-ink device. Read it and make notes using a physical pen. The idea is that the different format tricks your brain to notice the actual text more.

• Text-to-Speech

  • Run the story through a text-to-speech thingie. I suggest using a simple machine voice instead of using the AI voice services like ElevenLabs etc. Even if you don’t care about the very murky IP practices some of those have, I feel a “higher quality” narration might mask problems that a very flat reading would make apparent. Figure out a way to make notes as you listen, so you can easily mark down things like echoing words or places that sound dumb. As an example, when I listen to stuff while walking or cycling, I ask Siri to “remind me when I get home to remove echoing wand in chapter 9” etc.

• Retyping

  • The nuclear option. Retype your whole story. Open the writing on one monitor/window. Open a blank document on another. Retype every single word by punching letter on the keyboard.

  • This sounds insane, and it’s a lot of work for sure. With a respectable 40 WPM, a 100k word book would take a solid 42 hours of typing, no breaks. Retyping is still probably one of the most efficient and effective ways to self-edit a book. The way wonky stuff just JUMPS out at you when retyping is really something.

  • But do be careful as this is also a great way to break your hands if you have any trouble with RSI. While retyping you can accidentally go straight for four hours and your wrists will fall off afterwards.

Le Cráft

Genre web serial writing is very different from traditionally published literary fiction and each serial is different. “Show, don’t tell” or other instructions might not apply at all, but I’m trying to give you some generally applicable things for you to consider, no matter your genre. Find some examples of applying these concepts in the comments.

• Voice

  • You, your narrator, and your characters have a voice. Does your POV character describe things in a snappy way? Does some character speak like they were airlifted from a Jane Austen novel, even when everyone else is from Glasgow? When reading, pay attention that the voice stays consistent and doesn’t overwhelm the rest of the story.

• Environment and blocking

  • The readers need anchors to understand what’s going on. They don’t know the corridor is 10 feet wide, that the light is behind the orcs, or that the fireball rushed past from the right. You have to tell them this stuff. Describing the environment and making sure readers know where stuff and characters are is important.

• Taking the reader out of the story

  • Which leads to the second general thing. The main problem with grammar mistakes, weird anachronisms, or bad flow is that they stop the reader and make them go “Wait, what?” when you’d want them to keep reading and enjoying the story. When a fire mage shouts “I love the smell of napalm in the morning!” it might be a pretty good joke, but it will also cost you in immersion.

• Varying sentence rhythm

  • General wisdom is that when things are slow, prose can be expansive. When things are surprising or fast, the sentences go fast too.1 If everything on the page has the same rhythm, the reader will get mechanically bored, no matter what the events are.

• Avoiding over explanation

  • If you describe something well and write impactful and gripping dialogue about it, you don’t need to explain what you are going to do or what you just did2. This is a hill I’ll personally die on, but some people disagree.

• Crutch words prune

  • Find a tool (there’s one created by the RRWG server!) that counts for you most used words and see if you spot something that probably shouldn’t be there. Additionally, ctrl-f at least:

    • Just: the single most over-used word in all drafts. Reasonable number to have per 100k words: 75 - 100. Check out how many you have and be surprised 😉

    • Categories to squint at:

      • Hedging: basically, simply, very, really

      • Throat-clearing words (when starting a sentence): Suddenly, Immediately, Then

      • Useless intensifiers: totally, entirely, completely

LLMs

At this point I’ll address the elephant in the room, that is using large language model AIs like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc. Disclaimer: this is written more a random person with a free chatGPT account than for someone with a finely tuned professional editor project built for Claude Pro (which will still suffer from most of the problems outlined here…).

LLMs can be an excellent help for editing, BUT this comes with pretty big caveats. Always remember that LLMs are statistical prediction machines regurgitating the most probable replies to any prompt.

The amazing and useful thing about AIs is that they don’t suffer from author blindness. They will notice things that you’ve read 10 times and thought are fine, but aren’t actually even English.

Some guardrails for using these:

• LLMs are unreliable little shits. Do not let AI touch your writing directly. It will do something stupid and you won’t notice. Only let it suggest you things, and make every single edit yourself.

  • Do not expect AI to actually finish what you told it to do. If you ask it to proofread a chapter of 2000 words, it will generally bother handling maybe 60% of problems.

• LLMs will tell you any random bullshit with absolute confidence, so YOU have to know what advice to take. Be especially wary about their suggestions, as those are often wonky AF, especially if they are trying to reach for some effect.

But still, AIs are reasonably useful if you are a confident writer and want to run a blind test on your writing. It’ll pick up things for you to consider and sometimes it will even be right.

Find a general use prompt you can try to use on this footnote3. On unprimed ChatGPT, this will give you about 50% usable feedback and 50% bullshit (Claude does better). It is what it is.

Damn it, Jim. I’m an editor, not a prompt engineer.

I wouldn’t trust LLM to do dev editing or proofreading unless you, the user, really know what you are doing.

Proofreading

Just use Grammarly, LanguageTool, ProWritingAid or one of those tools. Note that all of them have had AI crammed into them and nowadays offer you godawful stylistic suggestions that you should probably always ignore. Inspect even the grammar fixes, because they keep getting some of those wrong as well, so the same applies as with real LLM chatbots.

Closing notes

This guide tries to give you a framework on how to approach self-editing your story, but this is only scraping the surface of how far you could go thinking about the Monomyth or using Story Grid to find the perfect All is Lost Moment or something.

Self-editing is a lot of work. Possibly even lots and lots of work. But remember that you’re not only making your story better, you’re going to the writer’s gym to build muscles that will help you write all your future stories. And editing will be fun too, when you see how much stronger your writing gets!

But if it ever starts to feel like too much, that’s why there are editors 😉

You can find this guide also as a Google Docs document.

Full developmental edit and targeted line-edits on the book Neodrius.

“Jaakko challenged me without holding back. He went through my manuscript, proposed several ideas about how to make it better, and helped me think of how to improve any aspect I wanted to land harder. He suggested the idea to build a secondary overlapping timeline into the book, shown in intermission and crashing into the main plot at the end. I’m proud of the book he helped me create, and I highly recommend him.”

Bertt

Working with increasing tension for the new edition of the book Stormborn Ascendant.

“Jaakko provided insightful feedback and suggestions that definitely benefited my story. It felt like he understood my vision for the scene and worked hard to align his feedback to enhance it, rather than detract from it. Communication was direct and easy, and the overall process was very smooth.”

K. H. Nullste

General review of text quality and plot progression of web serial Oblivion, with special attention to working with the story’s tone.

“Jaakko was able to identify places in my story where certain components were slowing the story’s momentum. He went above and beyond what a developmental editor would normally do. He examined my prose at the molecular level, finding inconsistencies and suggesting clearer ways to word things. His suggestions also came with guidelines that I learned and can now apply across the rest of my writing.

Jaakko also didn’t limit his editing to line-work, he got into the meat of my story, identifying plotholes and offering suggestions. If you’re considering working with him, it’ll absolutely be worth your time and money.”

Anthony (Toadsage)

Developmental and line-edit of the romantasy web serial The Reckoning of Us.

“Working with Jaakko over the past several months has completely transformed my writing. I have learned more from him in this short time than I have in years of writing on my own.

From him I learned how to pace the story, how to linger in the moments that matter, and how to carefully budget exposition. The difference between the drafts I wrote before Jaakko and the work I am producing now is staggering. I barely recognize my earlier pages.

I highly recommend him not only as an editor but as an exceptional teacher and writing partner.”

Nicole Restelli

I’m Jaakko or kzzh, and I write fantasy stories and edit them. My own stories have twisted timelines, moral and magical dilemmas, and both dark and healing themes.

Author

My flagship story is THE ACADEMY, a progression fantasy situated in a necromancer academy, now being serialized on Royal Road with over 2000 followers. I’m especially proud of my character work: natural dialogue, character authenticity, grounded physicality.

Editor

My journey as an editor started on Scribophile editing literary fiction before moving into line and developmental editing for LitRPG and Progression Fantasy writers. I believe in clean writing that trusts the reader — good writing should feel effortless even when it isn’t. I work with authors to strengthen themes, tune the pacing, and improve the prose. I’ll walk with you to sharpen your book, but the work always stays yours.

Curious what all this looks like in practice? Check out my videos on editing or my Self-Editing Guide.

I live in northern Finland, where the winters are long and the coffee is strong. I’m an avid reader and when I’m not reading progression fantasy I enjoy the classics, new weird and literary fiction. I’m also a trained baritone and live with my two wonderful children.

Contact me via email at jaakko.koivula@justeeraus.fi or through Discord kzzh_velonea.