Developmental editing is usually done either before or during the writing process. You can certainly do it after, but it’s better to know when something isn’t going to work early on (like a glaring plot-hole) rather than coming back and completely revising your story. Developmental editing focuses on the big picture, good work quality, market potential, and it gives you feedback for issues that could be fixed. It’s always useful!

Evaluation editing is a manuscript critique where an editor assesses structure, flow, completeness, and overall quality of your work. This is usually accompanied by an editorial letter that summarizes the key points, areas of concerns, and their suggestions on how to tighten things with your work. There will also be some mark-ups when it comes to structure, but they do not go in-depth like they would with a developmental edit.

Content Editing is still when an editor is thinking about the big-picture, but they also focus a little more on the words on the page. With this, editors go paragraph-by-paragraph, chapter-by-chapter, and tell you where they see incompleteness and offer corrections about the flow and construction of your work.

Line editing is usually for after your book has the right structure and organization, and it allows the editor to jump in head-first and focus on word choice and whether each and every sentence is worth the space it takes up. It focuses on word choice, syntax, and tone to improve your voice as a writer and your text's overall impression.

Copyediting is absolutely your best friend. It covers spelling, punctuation, and grammar mistakes. One thing I’ve talked about before is becoming de-sensitized to your work—meaning, you stare at something for so long and it starts to lose meaning and you can’t tell if having five commas in a sentence is right or if it’s just slightly off. Copyediting takes all of that worry away from you!

Proof reading is the final step before publication. It focuses on things such as typos, small grammatical errors, and layout issues. Proofreading can also involve checking for consistency in spelling and reading aloud to identify mistakes.