So you’ve written the first draft of a book. Congratulations!

Now the real work starts because, as Ernest Hemingway said, “The only kind of writing is rewriting.”

While you can do plenty of rewriting on your own, you’ll never be objective about the quality of your own work. Nobody is. Writing is a labor of love, so it can be helpful to have an experienced, professional developmental editor evaluate your work and tell you what works and should stay, what doesn’t work and should go, and what you can fix (and how) so that it does work.

That’s what we do at Fleming Editorial. In developmental editing, we give your work a thorough evaluation, help you organize the material, and give you guidance to streamline and flesh it out as needed. If you’ve written a novel, maybe this means developing the characters and settings more deeply, tightening the plot, and adding scenes to increase dramatic tension. If you’ve written a nonfiction book, this may mean eliminating repetition, reorganizing the structure so the ideas flow better, and adding material to fill in gaps in the thinking and give your book unique value in the marketplace.