From raising the stakes to finding your blind spots, here’s how to get the most out of working with a professional book editor.
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The case for a professional book editor
Every author needs a professional book editor. That’s not a sales pitch. It’s a creative reality. No writer can fully see their own work the way readers will. This is true across every art form, and publishing is no exception.
Jason Kirk grew up in and around Detroit and earned an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan. He has edited more than 200 fiction and nonfiction books. His editorial work has won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the British Science Fiction Award, and multiple UTOPiA Best Edited Book Awards, with additional nominations for the Philip K. Dick and Bram Stoker Awards. He works across a wide range of genres, from science fiction and fantasy to thrillers, literary fiction, memoirs, and poetry.
His core belief is simple: time with a professional book editor is valuable. How you use that time matters even more.
Getting your manuscript ready first
The stronger your manuscript before editing begins, the more you’ll gain from the process. A professional book editor can only work with what you bring them. If the big-picture problems are already solved, they can focus on deeper, more nuanced work.
That means doing the hard work first. Review your manuscript with fresh eyes. Use every available resource, human and technological, before you hand it off. When you can honestly say, “I cannot make this better on my own,” you’re ready.
Jason offers four practical steps to get there.
1. Raise the stakes
Go through your manuscript and ask: what does each character have to gain or lose? If the answer doesn’t feel compelling, the stakes probably aren’t high enough. Readers care about characters who have something on the line. The more pressure your characters feel, the more invested readers become.
This applies within a single book and across a series. Stakes should escalate. Each turning point should feel weightier than the last. Jason describes this as his editorial mantra — he returns to it with nearly every author he works with.
Think about the key plot points in your story. What happens at the 25%, 50%, and 75% marks? Each of those moments should carry real dramatic weight. If a reader reaches the midpoint and nothing significant has changed for your characters, you may lose them — especially in today’s market, where platforms like Kindle Unlimited pay based on how much of a book readers actually finish.
2. Read your work aloud
Language is the vehicle for your story. It’s not just what happens, but how it’s delivered. Authors are too close to their own prose to hear it clearly on the page. Reading aloud changes that.
Record yourself reading a passage. Listen back. Then ask someone else to read your work to you. When you hear your sentences stumble in someone else’s mouth, you know something needs fixing. When a sentence lands beautifully, you know you’ve got it right.
Bestselling fantasy author Charlie N. Holmberg describes the experience of hearing her own audiobooks as catching “everything I missed.” By the time she hears the narration, it’s too late to fix it. The lesson: don’t wait for the audiobook. Read aloud during drafting.
One practical trick: Change the font of your document before rereading. It forces your brain to process the text as new, rather than skimming past familiar sentences. Anything that breaks you out of your authorial comfort zone helps you read more like a reader.
3. Seek your blind spots
If any of your characters claim an identity different from your own — a different race, religion, cultural background, sexual identity, or ability — seek out readers who share that lived experience. Ask them to read your work. Pay attention to their feedback.
This is one of the most important steps you can take before working with a professional book editor. Blind spots are, by definition, things you can’t see yourself. Readers who find misrepresentation in a published book don’t hesitate to say so publicly.
When you find those readers, compensate them. That doesn’t have to mean payment — an acknowledgment in your book, a signed copy, or a dinner can all work. The point is to make it worth their time. Their perspective is genuinely valuable, and treating it as such matters.
4. Consult with technology
Marlowe is Authors A.I.’s non-generative artificial intelligence manuscript evaluator. It reads your novel and produces a detailed report, across 20+ story elements. It analyzes pacing, narrative arc, story beats, dialogue, overused words, sentence length, and much more. The report arrives in just a few minutes.
Think of Marlowe as the framing of a house. It shows you what’s structurally sound and what isn’t. A professional book editor comes in after, for the insulation, the drywall, the finish work, the things that can only happen once the structure is solid.
Jason describes his reaction to seeing his first Marlowe report as genuine astonishment. “Everybody needs to do this before they come to me,” he said, because the report flags exactly the kinds of large-scale issues he would otherwise spend editorial time identifying himself.
Charlie has run every manuscript through Marlowe. Every single time, her highest-used word is “only.” She uses it constantly and never noticed until Marlowe flagged it. Another time, Marlowe identified that her longest sentence was the very last line of a novel — six lines long, tangled and unclear. She fixed it before it ever reached an editor.
Marlowe will also tell you how much dialogue your manuscript contains, and how that compares to commercially successful books. If you’re at 18% dialogue and bestsellers typically run around 21%, you know where to focus. If you’re at 75% dialogue, you know something is off long before a human editor has to tell you.
How editors grow with you over time
Working with a professional book editor is a relationship that deepens with each book. The goal isn’t just a better manuscript, it’s becoming a better writer.
Give a writer one editorial fix, and you improve one book. Teach them to see their own weaknesses, and you improve every book they’ll ever write. Each round of feedback becomes a lesson the author carries into the next manuscript. By book two or three, an author who needed help with pacing in book one arrives already knowing their plot points. They come ready to defend them or refine them — rather than waiting to be told something is missing.
Charlie describes absorbing this kind of feedback as a slow process with lasting results. She learned where to cut unnecessary scenes and how to keep world-building concise. One recurring habit proved especially costly — point-of-view chapters for side characters already covered from other angles — and cutting them made her books noticeably tighter. That kind of growth builds over years, across books, through trust.
The editing team you actually need
A professional book editor typically isn’t just one person — it’s a sequence of them.
Developmental editing comes first. This is the big-picture work: structure, pacing, characterization, narrative arc. Jason describes it as the primary architecture of the story. Once that’s in place, line editing focuses on the language itself — sentence by sentence, tightening and clarifying.
Copy editing follows. This is where consistency gets checked. Character names, timeline continuity, internal logic. A copy editor catches the things that slip through every other stage. Everyone needs a copy editor. Even editors.
After copy editing comes proofreading. A proofreader is a meticulous second pass, looking for anything a copy editor or author may have missed. Think of it as the final polish before the book goes into the world.
Charlie went through all of these stages on most of her published books, often working with the same developmental editor through multiple rounds on each manuscript. The familiarity built between author and editor — where the editor learns how that specific author thinks — is something that compounds over time.
Chapter by chapter or full draft?
One of the most common questions authors ask: should you share chapters as you write, or wait for a complete draft?
Most professional book editors, including Jason, strongly prefer a full draft. Without seeing the complete story, an editor can’t assess how well the beginning sets up the ending, whether foreshadowing lands correctly, or where the pacing truly breaks down. Editorial guidance on chapter one may be entirely wrong once chapters twenty through thirty exist.
That doesn’t mean you’re on your own while drafting. Beta readers and writing groups are ideal for chapter-by-chapter feedback. They’re your actual readers — people who can tell you what’s confusing, what isn’t working emotionally, what they wish had happened differently. Their instincts as readers are exactly the data you need before a professional editor sees the manuscript.
Save the professional book editor for the complete draft. Use your community in the meantime.
Where Marlowe fits in the editing process
Marlowe works best after your own revision passes and before your manuscript reaches any of the editors described above. Address Marlowe’s feedback first — pacing gaps, overused words, dialogue balance — then hand the cleaner manuscript to your developmental editor. By the time a human editor opens your file, the large-scale structural flags are already resolved. That frees them to do the work only a human can.
This blog post was developed from a previous First Draft Friday conversation between Fantasy author Charlie N. Holmberg and award-winning editor Jason Kirk. Watch the full interview here on YouTube.
More about Jason:
Jason is also the composer of “The Mirror of Simple Souls,” an opera collaboration with Canadian poet Anne Carson, and the author of several poetry chapbooks. He can be found on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at @brasswax. His website is brasswax.com
About Charlie:
Charlie N. Holmberg is a Wall Street Journal and Amazon Charts bestselling author of fantasy and romance fiction. Her books include the Paper Magician series, the Spellbreaker series, and the Whimbrel House series. She also writes contemporary romance under C. N. Holmberg. Her work is published in more than 20 languages. She has won multiple Whitney Awards — including the 2020 Whitney Award for Novel of the Year: Adult Fiction — and has been a finalist for the Goodreads Choice Award, the ALA Award, and the RITA Award. She is a BYU alumna, born and raised in Salt Lake City, and lives with her family in Utah. Visit her at charlienholmberg.com.
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