The essence of my role as a book editor is to improve authors’ manuscripts. When I take out my red pen, nothing is safe: I might make changes to your book’s big picture (such as pacing, plot and character development, story structure and loose ends), issues at the paragraph and sentence level (like improving the flow and rhythm of sentences, breaking up too-long paragraphs, fixing issues with the logic and clarity of scenes), or even last-minute changes like issues with spelling, grammar, or punctuation.
But in my years working professionally as a book editor, and having edited over 400 manuscripts to date, I kept seeing a problem: I was correcting authors’ manuscripts…but I wasn’t doing anything to teach them how to improve their writing skills for their future books.
And thus, the Editor’s Report was created.
The Editor’s Report is a short, one-page letter I write to every author at the end of every editing project. In it, I highlight the most common issues I found during editing, and the strengths of the manuscript. This short letter is designed to help authors become a better writer and know what to look out for when writing future projects. In short, the Editor’s Report is geared toward showing you how to avoid your most common writing mistakes and what to focus on most to improve.
In this letter, I also include a brief report of how many errors I found in an author’s manuscript. In an 80,000-word book, I typically find 6,000 to 8,000 errors.
What does an Editor’s Report look like? Let’s break it down with a sample Editor’s Report, modified from one I recently sent to a client.
February 7
George:
Thank you so much for choosing me to edit The Darkness! I did three passes on the manuscript: developmental editing, line editing, and copyediting.
In the first pass (developmental editing), I looked at the book as a whole and focused on improving character development, pacing, perspective, and the story’s organization. The most issues I noticed were in areas that needed more explanation, usually in developing the scene some more for “showing” instead of “telling” (see p. 109: “I grit my teeth, resolved that Dr. Michael…” For future books, try to incorporate action and dialogue into scenes to “show” them instead of “telling” or summarizing the action.
I also did a line edit, where I focused on improving sentence structure, looking at the logic and clarity of scenes, and breaking up too-long paragraphs—see p. 139: “The warrior shoved the gun away, leaving Brian without a weapon.” When writing sentences, be sure to use active verbs for clear meaning. The basic sentence structure—subject, verb, object, like “The warrior (subject)” + “shoved (verb)” + “the gun (object)”—is a clear construction and will always work well for clarity and conciseness.
During the final copyediting pass, I focused on correcting surface errors including issues with grammar, word choice, punctuation, syntax, missing or repeated words, and spelling. One thing that stuck out to me as being problematic was an exaggerated use of “there was” or “there were” to start a sentence. I took out as many instances of these as I could to improve the flow, although this might be an area you should be mindful of in the future.
Although your story was full of action and had some great themes, I noticed that the tone was a bit too formal at times, and I was confused with the timeline and setting. It might be worth going back over those areas once more before publishing.
In all, I made 8224 changes to your manuscript. Let me know if you’d like to set up a phone call next week to chat about the edits. Enjoy your weekend!
Kristen Hamilton
Since I began offering this brief letter, I’ve received an enormous outpouring of support and gratitude from my clients. (It makes me so happy!) It’s definitely worth spending a few minutes of my time putting this together to help an author improve his or her craft. I now include the Editor’s Report as a standard “extra” I offer at the end of each full-length manuscript editing project.
Book editor Kristen Hamilton is the owner and sole employee of Kristen Corrects, Inc., where she provides manuscript editing services for traditionally and self-publishing authors. Several authors whose books she has edited have won awards and have topped Amazon’s best sellers lists.
Reading is Kristen’s passion, so when the workday is over, she can usually be found curled up with a good book alongside her four cats. She loves watching cat videos and scary movies, eating pizza, teaching herself French, and traveling, and she is likely planning her next vacation. She lives outside of Boise, ID.