How do you make sure your writing is sufficiently well edited?
Introductory post about editorial quality

The Short Story
Editorial quality is about setting expectations and using a combination of available resources to get there, or as close as possible. Those resources include time, knowledge, and skill, whether yours or someone else’s. Even if you’re outsourcing editorial quality control, it’s best not to do so completely: not all editors are equally skilled (or equally skilled at all kinds of editing), while AI tools don’t always get it right. Authors who aren’t professional scribes need to be able to distinguish good from bad (or better from worse) editorial suggestions, as well as make sober calculations about expectations and resources, to ensure sufficient quality.
The Real(ist) Story
Quality, in the realist school of editing, is about judging when a piece of writing is good enough for its intended purpose and audience right now. But how’s an author to know his or her book is “good enough for now”?
Mind you, a realist approach to editing does not mean low-quality editing. It’s a flexible standard dependent on expectations—yours and your intended readers’. “Good enough” means a quality of editing appropriate to the situation. When you’re talking about a book manuscript or an article for print publication, expectations run reasonably high because most books aren’t cheap—and post-publication fixes are problematic or impossible. In those instances, quality should probably be as high as you have time and budget to achieve.
That brings us around to the notion of limited resources. Editing is a function of time, knowledge, and skills, and maybe the money to hire others’ time, knowledge, and skills. The less you have of any one of those resources, the more you need of the remaining options. Beyond my deep reservations about AI, that’s ultimately why I started this community: to help folks with the knowledge and skills parts of the equation. The better you understand how written English works (without asking the robot brains that overthrew our search engines), giving you a structured framework for making editorial decisions, the more you can edit yourself—and the more confidently you can make use of help, whether it’s human or machine. That helps you make better use of your time and money, and it makes for better writing.
Now, when it comes to outsourcing your efforts to make writing good enough for now, you have two main places to look for help: human editors and toasters—err, AI. Of course, human editors and their computer-based counterparts are not all equally skilled and knowledgeable when it comes to recognizing and fine-tuning the intricacies, nuances, and creative expression of written English.
It’s quite the conundrum, really. Non-professional and novice writers, including those writing in a genre in which they’re not widely read, know they need help. But because they’re non-professional and novice writers, they don’t know how to tell which help is “good enough,” both in general and when it comes to specific editorial advice. So either way, knowledge and skills are good to have, and I do what I can to assist in that area.
Here are some questions you can ask yourself whenever you think a manuscript might be good enough for the moment:
Does it meet your / the author’s basic expectations? Will you / the author feel good about others reading this? Alternatively, will you feel embarrassed by the quality?
Does it achieve your / the author’s basic intended purposes?
Will it meet the audience’s basic expectations? Alternatively, will the intended readers likely be disappointed in some way?
Have you reread it at least once (aloud, ideally) to ensure no glaring errors or likely points of confusion? If you tend to reread along the way, “editing as you go,” a start-to-finish reread may not be worth your while for something low-stakes, like a casual text or email or a rough draft.
How long would another pass of editing take? How much do you reasonably expect the manuscript to improve with another pass? Experience helps in answering those questions, especially the latter. But you can get some notion of room for improvement by beginning another pass through, as a sample, and seeing how dense your edits are. Does the incremental improvement seem worth the time?
If you don’t have time for a full pass through, are there specific aspects in need of improvement that you have time to skim or spot-check for?
If you’re editing for someone else, do the terms of your work require further editing? Is there budget available to support further editing?
These sorts of questions help you to recognize the real-world constraints on your editing and make reasonable, defensible choices. Of course, to answer these questions, you need an understanding of the purposes, audience, and expectations involved. Be reassured that, as with so many things in life, editorial discernment tends to come quicker with experience.
Story Time
On the Vaporous Realms site and elsewhere, I’ve shared early drafts of numerous stories, in snippets and chapters. (My older Songs of the Vaporous Realms series and current Annals posts are good examples.) Readers’ expectations for free or inexpensive, short-form, self-published work are frankly low. Subscribers to my fantasy fiction don’t expect the Great American Novel, ready for publication, to show up in their inbox. As a Substack reader and observer, I suspect most of my Vaporous Realms subscribers—if they open my emails and read my posts at all—are casual readers who expect a quick diversion to sparks their imagination and maybe offer some sense of connection to me as the author.
For my part, I expect my posts to be well enough written and self-edited that they won’t embarrass me or waste my subscribers’ time. I aim to give folks a glimpse of what I’m up to, in hopes that my snippets and author notes will encourage my writing habit overall, brighten my readers’ day a bit, intrigue them enough to stick around until I publish another book, and periodically add up to a book’s worth of story.
I don’t expect any weekly post to secure paid subscriptions sufficient to compensate me for the time I spend writing and lightly editing it, let alone the time for more self-editing or the money to hire another editor. So my snippets need not be fine-tuned and polished any more than I have time and inclination on a given day. A bit of copyediting is in order, but seldom any deep-dive developmental editing or fine-comb proofreading—because “good enough for now” is far better than the alternative, which is abandoning the effort altogether.
Godspeed and happy (re)writing, y’all!