What We Do

Developmental Editing

 

Developmental Editing represents the best opportunity for you to substantially reshape and revise your draft. It’s also the thing we do best.

Our deliverables:

  • Developmental (dev) edits from Bahr Books provide you with a sizable critique in the form of an editor’s note (usually ~4,000 words). Feedback focuses on large, structural elements of your manuscript. Critical elements of good writing like pacing, characterization, continuity, and the internal logic of the story are all put under the microscope. If you have additional areas of concern, we’ll address that as well.

  • In-text edits. If we see problems in the text with typos, punctuation, or confusing or awkwardly phrased lines, we’ll address them directly using Track Changes and Comment Bubbles in Microsoft Word. 

  • (Optional) A one-hour follow up phone/video call after you’ve received your edited manuscript. Sometimes it’s easier to express ideas in conversation than in text. If you have any lingering questions or you feel like the editor’s note didn’t quite address a specific concern that you had, this is your opportunity to speak directly with the editor about how they experienced your manuscript. 

  • (Optional)  Follow up messaging is available to authors we work with. If, weeks or months after our collaboration has finished, you stumble upon a very specific question about a scene/passage/chapter and you’d like input on it, reach out to us and we’ll gladly help guide you through it.

Editorial Assessments

 

If your manuscript isn’t quite ready yet for a developmental edit — maybe you’re still hashing out the third act or are feeling shaky about a character arc — but you still want to get some feedback on it, an Editorial Assessment might be what you’re looking for.

Editorial Assessments don’t provide the in-text comments and re-writes that you’d get in a Dev Edit, but you’ll still receive a detailed editor’s note that highlights the strengths and weakness of your pages. With this in hand, you’ll have an idea of what’s working, what isn’t, and how you’ll be able to get where you want to go. Think of an Editorial Assessment as roadmap to revising your draft.

Copy/Line Editing

 

Once your story is structured the way you’d like it, a Copy/Line Edit will help smooth out any errors or confusing language that remains in the manuscript and punch up your prose. With an eye on clarity and consistency, Bahr Books copy edits address:

  • Spelling

  • Grammar

  • Capitalization

  • Word usage and repetition

  • Dialogue tags

  • POV/tense agreement

  • Inconsistencies within the text

Copy edits ensure that the manuscript is a good as it can be before beginning the manuscript finalization process.

Proofreading

 

You’ve got a manuscript where everything is in place, consistent, and clear? Great! You’re ready for a proofread. Here, our editors scour the manuscript to ensure that the manuscript is error-free before being finalized.