Styles of Manuscript Editing: There Are Two Basic Forms of Helping an Author Write His or Her Own Book

When you are correcting or making changes in a book manuscript, what you are doing is editing that manuscript. I’ve been in the business of editing would-be books for over the past twenty-five years, and I’ve helped many a first-time author put his or her book together in a way that made it more readable, enjoyable, saleable and finally - marketable.

There are two basic forms of helping an author write his or her own book. One is ghostwriting. That is when you take the material the author gives you, such as through tapes, written materials and/or phone calls, taking notes as you go, and holding meetings and interviews, and then you actually do the job of writing the book yourself. You may supply new material, new characters, fresh nuances, etc. for the book. 

But ghostwriting can also be on the fine edge of rewriting. For example, the ideas laid out by the original author may fully enter your writing of the book, sometimes as originally constructed by the author. Or you may simply rewrite a manuscript that was pretty much formally written by the author. This is near the finer edges of copyediting, where what you actually do is simply correct the major and minor mistakes made by the original author.

The big difference between ghostwriting and copyediting is not always so pronounced, you see. Some people consider it to be ghostwriting when you simply take an author’s ideas and rearrange them into readable material, while other people consider that to be rewriting. A major job of rewriting might involved adding a new “voice” to the material, or making changes in the general writing style, which may be superfluous, exaggerative, or simply downright dull.