A little context for this question:
A few years ago, I enrolled in the Company’s Arche Year Cohort and worked from home in North Carolina. After completing the Cohort and my novel, I set the work aside to let it breathe, and my muse went nuts. Since setting the Cohort novel aside, I’ve drafted two more novels in that universe, one of which I’m certain is the actual series starter (assuming it does well enough to earn its sequels)
In December ’25, I bit the bullet and got a developmental edit for the series starter manuscript. My developmental editor was amazing and extremely thorough, but the number of changes needed caused me to freeze up, and I’ve barely been able to make myself touch the novel this year.
I’ve been doing some research and someone in another author space mentioned getting what she called a manuscript review.
What exactly is a manuscript review (and how does it differ from a developmental edit)?
Would something like this be helpful, or am I better off letting beta readers see the raw manuscript and then doing the edits with both sets of feedback?
Hey Erin,
A “manuscript review” could mean anything. It means whatever the person saying it thinks it means.
In a general sense, there is little agreement in the publishing world on many terms. Universities, publishers, writing groups, etc. can all use the terms differently. Even pretty longstanding things like a “copy edit” can mean different things in different circles.
So something called a “manuscript review” could mean anything from a developmental edit type of thing, to maybe they just read it and then share a few thoughts. I have no idea.
Most likely a “manuscript review” is a made-up service of little benefit, trying to cater to people unable or unwilling to commit to a real developmental edit.
The best thing that you can do is to hire one developmental editor and then do what they say.
I’m not sure I totally understand the last part of your question about using both sets of feedback. But one of the worst things you can do is overwhelm yourself with lots of different opinions and perspectives on how to fix something, this is a big reason that beta readers are often counterproductive.
There’s a reason the biggest publishing houses hire developmental editors, and then typically have one editor guide that manuscript from start to finish. If there was a better or cheaper way (especially a cheaper way!) to achieve the same results, I can assure you they would fire all of their developmental editors and do the cheaper way today.
Since you worked with someone from The Company, your developmental editing report should have a “next steps” section. The amount of feedback on a manuscript can be a lot, so try to tunnel-vision onto one step at a time from that “next steps” section. There is a specific number of tasks you need to complete, so just try to do one at a time.
Stick with one project, and see it through. You’re going to learn a lot in the process of implementing your developmental editor’s feedback, and that’s going to be a huge asset to you as you self-edit those other manuscripts and decide what to do next.
-Brad
Erin,
I just wanted to add that the developmental edit I got is something I keep on using over and over again to check and edit my work. The goal of learning from it is the best we can achieve, but not sure I can get a lot of the writing correct on my first try. When I go to read my latest I feel better about knowing what to look for and what it should look like.
So Brad’s answer was a great response.
Hi, Brad. Great advice, thanks!! Re: the “both sets of feedback” — I’d been really paranoid about letting anyone see the manuscript (I had to force myself to stop working on it on my own and get quotes for the dev edit). When Lucy got it, it had not even been beta-read. I hadn’t let anyone else even see excerpts of that draft.
Because there was so much involved in the next steps, I’ve been questioning if I did things out of order. Your response cleared all that up.