Can You Really Skip the Dev Edit?

There’s no denying that budgets are tight these days. For new authors, the prospect of cutting costs by skipping the least editorial-seeming step of editing is understandable. And after months or years of writing, handing your manuscript over for developmental edits can feel like starting over.

Some cave to the temptation and skip the big-picture edit. “I’ll fix a few typos,” they tell themselves. “Maybe run a grammar check; then my book will be good enough to publish.”

But as I learned firsthand, that decision costs more than it saves.

This chart tracks the same period from launch for 4 of my sequential books. By way of context, not to flex, each of the first three bars measures sales in the thousands. Now, it’s expected in the publishing industry for book 1 in a series to be the biggest seller, then for each successive book to sell about half as many copies as the last. Book 2 was an outlier in this case, so let’s set it aside. Books 1 and 3 show the pattern we’d expect.

Then book 4 launched and sold not half, but one-quarter as many copies as its predecessor.

Here’s the point: I did some serious digging into why book 4 stumbled out of the gate. And what I found made me facepalm. See, in the run up to releasing book 4, I found myself in the biggest time crunch of my career. Facing a major missed deadline, I succumbed to the allure of corner-cutting and launched without a dev edit.

Only after the damage was done did honest readers tell me that a single structural quirk in Act I was speed bump that inhibited their further reading. And if my most loyal audience members found that hiccup a hump to get over, how many others saw it as a road block?

Suffice it to say, that blunder taught me a valuable lesson. So learn from my mistake; here’s what a dev edit can do for you …

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