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Deep insight into your developing manuscript

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Have questions about this service?

When you’ve completed your manuscript, you’ll have spent anywhere from many to countless hours looking at it, thinking about it, and living with it while you’re writing and even in your sleep.

You’re too close to see how it’s working at this point, and that’s when it’s time to get a trained outsider’s skilled eyes on the case.

If you have a late-stage manuscript you’d like to get an editor’s eyes on because you’re too close to to be able to clearly see what it needs to prepare it for publication, a round of developmental feedback is the perfect solution.

 

What Is Developmental Feedback?

Developmental feedback is a deep constructive assessment of your work in line with its genre, goals/purpose, and scope. 

During this intensive read-through, your editor will write out notes of what they see at work in your book, what is successfully marking its progress and defining it as a work of fiction or nonfiction, and also what they feel could be adjusted, added, or removed in order to cinch the book to its purpose, see it develop more successfully, and ultimately become a stronger, leaner, and more “itself” version of itself.

They do this via an extensive editorial letter along with marking up the manuscript at all turns where they were “broken” out of the narrative world or the ideas by some element of writing craft either missing or misused.

They will speak to issues such as:

  • identify the project’s purpose and organization
  • indicate developing themes, plot lines and characters
  • address cohesion, pacing and flow
  • illustrate how to structure and enhance elements of the work to ensure the manuscript is unique, dynamic, and purposeful
  • address issues of clarity at the line level
  • suggest next steps and revision strategies.

The reason developmental or deep intensive feedback is useful to writers is it helps you refine and shape your early-stage project (book-length fiction and nonfiction as well as short story, essay, article and poetry) and gives structured guidance and actionable steps that serve as a guide you can follow as you enter into revision.

Having this map to follow makes the revision process much easier and focused; plus, now that your editor is so familiar with your work, you have the benefit of accessing them for support, brainstorming, and continued editorial advice and feedback as you refine your draft.

revision pages with handwritten notes

The reason developmental or deep intensive feedback is useful to writers is it helps you refine and shape your early-stage project (book-length fiction and nonfiction as well as short story, essay, article and poetry) and gives structured guidance and actionable steps that serve as a guide you can follow as you enter into revision.

Having this map to follow makes the revision process much easier and focused; plus, now that your editor is so familiar with your work, you have the benefit of accessing them for support, brainstorming, and continued editorial advice and feedback as you refine your draft.

Want to find out more about this service and others?

Other ways we support our writers ...

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Editing Services

Your next step after you've done as much editing as you can do- we'll take your work all the way through to being ready for publication.

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PUBLICATION SUPPORT

Whether you want to publish your book yourself or go the traditional route, we're here to consult, help with submission materials, book formatting, your author website, and more-

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