Developmental editing directly shapes your manuscript and usually involves large reorganizations, deletions, or total rewriting based on your vision, target audience, and industry standards. We make recommendations on order, flow, readability, pacing, characterization, setting, and (as subjective as this sounds) how enjoyable the book is as a whole. We’ll help resolve subplots or recommend deleting some, round out or merge characters, develop motivations and emotions within a plausible plot, and point out underdeveloped and overdeveloped sections, as well as aspects that seem derivative or deviate from your voice.

Developmental editing can be a jagged pill to swallow. You’ve spent months, maybe years, on this manuscript, and here we are suggesting huge changes as if every page is deficient. That’s not true! We move around your words like replanting seeds, sowing them with precision for a perfect mix of sunlight and rain for the best chance of bearing fruit.

It’s easy to spot online reviewers complaining about books that haven’t been through a developmental edit, and these reviews are hard to shake, because they target the storytelling itself.

But remember, RUFF! doesn’t just pick a manuscript apart like some editors do. Especially in developmental editing, we seek your strengths, help you develop your excellence, and enhance the aspects of your writing that make you exceptional. Rewrite suggestions aren’t a criticism of your ability—they merely serve to help you put your best foot forward. Developmental editing comes with lots of emotional support and encouragement. We want you to succeed, and that’s why we decided to partner with you!

Copyediting is our most popular editing service. It’s also our most robust. We do copyediting unlike any other editor in the marketplace. Generally, two RUFF! editors will give your manuscript a complete pass, so you get two eyes for the price of one. We work through every single sentence of your manuscript to help you make it the best it can be—both in terms of the writing itself AND the storytelling.

For this service, we combine what other editors call copyediting and line editing. We also don’t hold back on giving you some developmental feedback, especially if you already did a round of developmental editing with RUFF! before getting to the copyediting round.

With copyediting, we correct errors in spelling, punctuation, grammar, style, usage, too-long sentences, overuse of italics and exclamation points, and excessive passive voice. We flag doubtful facts, weak plot points or plot holes, contradictory passages, and jumbled timelines. We scrutinize for consistency—both within a project and across a series—including character and place spelling, descriptions, point of view shifts, grammar style choices, and more.

Content: missing or redundant text, illogical chronology, statements that don’t make sense, language that is insensitive or biased, etc.
Structure: overlong or wandering sentences, paragraph breaks not introducing new speakers or actions, inopportune chapter breaks, etc.
Wording: Age-inappropriate language or themes, unexplained terms, inconsistent tone or vocabulary straying outside current genre expectations, etc.
Storytelling: While we don’t suggest giant rewrites at the copyediting stage, we point out plot and character problems that can dramatically affect the finished work. If you made it past developmental editing with some significant story issues, we won’t pretend we don’t see them just because substantive developmental and structural advice is supposedly beyond the purview of this round of edits. That’s why our copyediting rate is higher than our developmental editing rate. Because we do so much.

If your copyedit involves many changes (spoiler alert: a RUFF! copyedit usually does), we strongly recommend proofreading afterward. This is because the process of approving and rejecting tracked changes will, without fail, introduce new errors you don’t want readers to see.

Website copyediting is also available. Because it takes at least twice as long to copyedit a website, our rate for website copyediting is by the hour, not per word. You’ll be billed $40/hour, which is less than the EFA’s recommended industry rate.

For proofreading, we check your manuscript for grammar, punctuation, spelling, style adherence, and verbiage. Proofreading is the last step in the editing process, the final polish to prepare your manuscript for publication. We make few changes at this point to avoid the possibility of introducing errors, only correcting a couple words or a bit of punctuation when it’s absolutely necessary. We do not check storytelling, plot and character development, inelegant wording, or line-by-line improvements. It is rare for a manuscript to come to us ready for proofreading, though many authors hope so. Proofreading is usually necessary after other editing rounds; if we recommend rewrites or lots of wording changes in another stage of editing, it’s likely to introduce new typos and mistakes as you approve and reject changes. Proofreading is the only way to catch these before publication.