Book Editing

Book Completion 50%

The Editors Review

Our editing process begins here. Every client that we work with inevitably asks a fundamental question:

“Is my book any good?”

We read your manuscript and use our experience to help you understand, whether the quality is there in the beginning. It is absolutely worth getting this review done before going through the edit in full.

The First Edit

Editing of your book is undertaken in-house by our very own David Hambling. He is an expert in this field with seriously deep experience, and a rarified personal commitment to his work.

The First Edit consists of three parts, all delivered in a tracked change format using Microsoft Word. The three parts are:

Developmental Edit

This part of the editing process is mainly about feedback to YOU the author, by the editor, to empower you to make retrospective and ongoing changes in how you write, enabling you to make editing quicker and more efficient, and ultimately produce a better book.

  • We review your adherence to the structured writing of your book to make sure it fits with your Ishikawa plan.
  • The editor provides feedback on your writing style in terms of sentence, paragraph, section and chapter structure, as well as the narrative order. Think of this as ‘function over form’.
  • We will provide feedback on the general ‘form’ of your book as a complete picture, rather than ‘zooming in’ on details. Think of this as ‘form over function’.

Structural Edit

This is the part of the work that focuses on the EDITOR themselves amending the structure of your writing – by addressing bad habits like repetition, meandering / problematic narratives

  • We review the structure of your book to make sure it fits with your Ishikawa plan.
  • Your manuscript will be assessed and modified for ‘tone’ issues to fit with the ‘brand’ of your book.
  • Our editor will address the continuity, flow, clarity and purpose of the text within your manuscript.
  • We will address text that doesn’t need to be there, or that is ‘lost’ in document.
  • The editor will provide you with options to add in as new content to bridge gaps in context, concept or writing.
  • This edit also addresses all spellings, typo’s, punctuation and grammatical errors.

Copy / Line Edit

Copy editing (also known as line editing) is the process of revising written material to improve human readability and fitness for reader consumption, as well as ensuring that the text is free of grammatical and factual errors.

  • We ask a fundamental question – “How easy is your book to read?” Our editors know how to fix your manuscript if the answer is not a positive one.
  • The editor will address how the structure of your manuscript will work with the typesetting process, in terms of narrative flow vs text placement.
  • Fact checking will literally confirm the plausibility of your narrative, and see whether you have ‘dropped any clangers’ in your writing.
  • This edit also ensures all references, sourcing, image usage and ‘signposting’ works as required, and are correct in their deployment.

After we have completed the first editorial sweep, using the three parts of the process above, we then return your fully edited manuscript to you for you to continue your work post-edit.

The Second Edit

The second round of editing we perform repeats the work performed in the first round, but also includes all of the changes, fixes and new material that you have included in the manuscript after the first edit.

This is crucial work because without it, sometimes it is very clear that books have been written in phases, and they do not comes across as a ‘complete’ or ‘seamless’ piece of work.

It is this second edit that fulfills our key aim:

“TBWR transforms good writing into truly excellent books.”

TBWR Process Stages