Writing & MediaFree
Developmental Edit Letter Revision Plan
Every guide says to work structural before line-level, and not one of them says what the other order costs you.
An edit letter arrives arguing about the whole book, and the manuscript arrives beside it carrying notes at particular sentences. A good pass explains itself. In the developmental edit the University of Chicago Press publishes alongside Scott Norton's handbook, every one of the 56 numbered queries gives a reason for its change, and 34 of them put a question back to the author. What no page of either document states is which to settle first, or what settling them in the wrong order costs. The developmental edit brief tool writes that letter first.
The advice you will find is unanimous, and it is not merely convention. The Editorial Freelancers Association's service definitions state that line editing is performed "in conjunction with developmental editing after big-picture issues have been addressed". What none of that advice does is put a number on the alternative. Working the passes in the wrong order wastes work you have paid for, and how much it wastes is quantified nowhere.
It can be quantified. That same pass names 7 passages for removal and moves 28 blocks into new positions. Measured against the clean manuscript one passage at a time, the 7 hold 1,490 words of a 7,085-word body. Line edit first and 21% of that invoice buys sentences no reader will ever see, before you count the transitions the 28 moves break. That is the figure this page gives you, and it is the one thing the guides leave out.
Where the number comes from
The EFA publishes a rate chart each year, and the 2026 edition rests on a survey of over 1,100 members run from November 2025 to mid-January 2026. It gives a per-word range, an hourly range and a pages-per-hour range for each service and genre. Its per-page column is defined as 250 words, and the definition holds: per-word times 250 reproduces the published per-page figure on all 89 editing rows, so the chart converts cleanly between its three units.
So a word count converts to pages, and pages convert to hours. Fiction line editing runs 2.7 to 3.5 cents a word at 5.0 to 9.5 pages an hour, so a 4,000-word chapter is 16 standard pages, $108 to $140, and 1.7 to 3.2 hours. Cut that chapter afterwards and the whole figure is the cost of the cut. Cut half of it and half the figure goes, which is why this asks what words a note reaches rather than how many notes there are.
Two claims the chart will not support, and this page does not make. Nonfiction developmental editing and nonfiction line editing both run 4.0 to 8.0 pages an hour, so nothing there shows one is slower than the other. And the EFA states it "neither sets rates nor advises members on what rates or rate types to use", so these are reported medians rather than a standard. Your own editor's quote replaces every figure here the moment you have it.
How it works
Read both
The letter's argument and the manuscript's queries are taken together, because neither states an order
Place each note
Every note goes into a structural, chapter-level or sentence-level pass, and anything it has to follow is named
Count the words
The text each note reaches is measured against the manuscript, so the exposure is a figure rather than a feeling
Price the orders
Each candidate sequence is costed at published per-word and hourly rates, and the difference between them is shown
What you get
- Every note in the letter and every query in the manuscript, gathered into one list
- Each note assigned to a pass, with the note it has to follow named explicitly
- The words each note touches, counted off the manuscript rather than estimated
- What each candidate order costs and destroys, at rates the professional bodies publish
- The notes whose location you still have to supply, listed instead of guessed at
- A sequence you can hand to an editor, with the reason for every position in it
Common questions
Does this just tell me to do structural work first?
No. That the dependency exists is already settled, and the EFA's own definitions settle it. What is missing everywhere else is the size of it. This gives you the words each note reaches, the cost of the passes in each order, and the gap between them, so you are choosing between two priced options rather than following a rule.
How much does a developmental edit cost?
Per the 2026 EFA chart, fiction developmental editing runs 3.0 to 3.5 cents a word and $52.50 to $70.00 an hour, and nonfiction runs 4.0 to 5.0 cents. In the UK the CIEP's suggested minimum for the tier covering development editing is £42.66 an hour from 1 March 2026. Both bodies say they do not set rates.
My letter never mentions a chapter or a page. Now what?
That is the normal case, and it is why this is not a lookup. The Norton plan cites no chapter at all, anchoring its removals to draft page ranges, while the edited manuscript renumbers into its own sequence after the moves. So the join is inferred, and every inferred one is marked as inferred, the same way a transcript workup separates what was heard from what was guessed.
Is this a pricing calculator?
No, and it will not quote you for editorial work. If that is what you need, the ghostwriting pricing calculator is the tool for it. This prices orderings of work you are already committed to, which is a different question from what a job should cost, and every figure names the body that published it.
I have already paid for a line edit. Is this still useful?
That is the case with the most at stake. The exposure is then real rather than hypothetical: on the Norton body, line editing all 7,085 words at nonfiction rates is $248 to $354, and the 1,490 words the plan later removes account for $52 to $74 of it. Knowing which notes threaten what is worth having.
What does it do with the notes I disagree with?
It keeps them and prices them anyway. A note you intend to argue with still has a dependency and a word count, and knowing what rejecting it saves or costs is part of the argument you will have with your editor. Nothing is dropped from the plan because you dislike it.
No letter has arrived yet. Can I still use this?
Not usefully, because there is nothing to sequence yet. If the manuscript itself is handwritten notebook pages, get those transcribed first, since this sequences notes against finished text, not scans. Generating the notes is separate: structural comments produce them, a voice check covers the stylistic ones. If the book is not sold yet, the proposal comes first. Come back with a letter and this prices the order.
Developmental Edit Letter Revision Plan
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