As an editor, I love edits of all kinds (I know, I know—NERD. I can hear you all now). While I think my favourite is a developmental edit (also called a content edit or a manuscript critique, fairly interchangeably) to really figure out where all the big-picture pieces go, all edits have their place. That is not to say that all edits are possible or even necessary for every project, which might be a big relief to your wallet and also to your piece of mind. You might not need a dev edit (here is Zoe York with an excellent Twitter thread on how to determine if you need a dev edit), but if you don’t, you will probably need either or both a line edit or a copy edit. So how do you decide which one?
First of all, let’s get our terminology straight so we’re really clear on what we’re talking about here:
Line edit: A line edit is all about smoothing out the prose, the story timeline, and the overall style of the sentences. (Zoraida Córdova, on the Deadline City podcast, once called line edits “big diction energy,” which is GENIUS.) It makes sure that everything flows together and that there’s not too much or too little info included. A line edit will also tighten up the prose so you’re not wasting your words so your words are lean and taut.
Copy edit: A copy edit is all about following the chosen style guide (for fiction, it’s usually the Chicago Manual of Style, or CMOS) and correcting spelling, grammar, and punctuation. It also makes sure that you’re being consistent with your word choices and forms (for instance, in this post, I used “copy edit” rather than “copy edits” or “copy editing”) and with details within the story so that your character doesn’t have brown eyes on p. 63 and green eyes on p. 104.
Personally, I prefer a line edit over a copy edit because I think that readers pay more attention to how the words sound and what they evoke rather than the correct placement of a comma. Not that proper usage isn’t important—because it is, and I’m one of those people who does get irked at incorrect placement of commas!—but most people don’t know or care about what CMOS says about every tiny matter of style. (Look, I am an editor by trade, and even I have to look up proper comma usage all. the. time) And those rules can be rather flexible, especially when it comes to dialogue in fiction. If you have great prose and a great story, the overall impression your book will give should outweigh a stray comma or misplaced hyphen.
I do not want to undermine the value of a good copy edit—an excellent copy editor is worth their weight in gold—but I do want to be sensitive to people’s budgets and I know that paying for a dev edit, a line edit, a copy edit, and proofreading is not possible for most writers. So how do you know if you should get a line edit or a copy edit?
If you think your story feels saggy or you’ve made a lot of changes in the narrative as you wrote and then self-edited, go for a line edit. The line editor will identify places where you’ve repeated things, where you can cut, where you can add, and where you can strengthen the story. This will result in a much tighter, more cohesive book.
If you feel that you’ve got a good handle on how the prose sounds, but you’re concerned that you haven’t been consistent in your word usage or that you don’t have a strong sense of rules of English grammar (they don’t really teach this enough in schools anymore!), go for a copy edit. The copy editor will polish up the manuscript and make it beautifully consistent throughout.
I don’t offer copy edits as a service because it’s not my skill set—I’m a stronger developmental editor and line editor and I just prefer those kinds of edits over the fussiness of a copy edit. But that said, as an editor, I just can’t let errors slide if I see them, even when I’m acting solely as a line editor, so I’m usually correcting comma placement and things like that anyway. That’s not every editor, though, and you should make sure you get the service that you need and that will be the best for this particular book of yours.