Development Editing · Technical & Practitioner Titles
Structure is structure.
I am a development editor at Manning Publications, and I take freelance clients directly. If you are commissioning practitioner titles and need an editor who can coach a first-time author through a book-length manuscript on schedule, this is the shortest version of my record.
// capabilities
What I do on a technical manuscript
- 01
Author coaching
Most technical authors are expert practitioners and first-time book writers. The job is teaching book-shaped thinking without flattening the expertise that made them worth commissioning — chapter by chapter, through the whole draft.
- 02
Chapter architecture
Scope, sequence, and the mental model a chapter has to install before its examples can land. I read for the gap between what the author knows and what the reader has been given so far, which is where practitioner titles usually fail.
- 03
Audience calibration
Who this is for, what they already know, and whether the manuscript agrees with the marketing. Misalignment here is expensive late and cheap at outline stage.
- 04
Competitive positioning
Reading the shelf a title has to compete on, and being specific about where it differentiates — not as a marketing exercise but as a structural one, because it changes what the book should contain.
- 05
Figures and code
Whether a figure earns its place, whether a listing is doing explanatory work or decorating the page, and whether callouts and terminology stay consistent across a long manuscript.
- 06
Schedule management
MEAP cadence, review rounds, and honest early warning when a chapter is going to slip. Publishers do not need an editor who never has a late author; they need one who tells them in week two rather than week nine.
// a line edit
From a practitioner manuscript. Unedited on the left of the mark.
It should be noted that the configuration file is able to be modified by the user in order to change the default behaviour of the system. Edit config.yml to change what the system does by default.
27 words to 12, one concrete filename introduced, and the reader now knows what to do. Technical authors rarely need their meaning changed — they need the scaffolding they wrote while thinking removed once they have finished thinking.
// titles developed
Books I have developed
- Manning Publications
Spring Start Here, Second Edition
Laurențiu Spilcă
Development Editor - Manning Publications
Vibe Engineering
Tomasz Lelek and Artur Skowroński
Development Editor - Manning Publications
Hidden Influences
Luca Belli
Development Editor - Manning Publications
Web Component Development with Modern Libraries and Tooling
Mark Volkmann
Development Editor - Manning Publications
Quantization and Fast Inference
Vivek Kalyanarangan
Development Editor - Independent
Leading Effective Software Teams
Francisco Trindade
Development Editor
// what clients say
In their words
Erik has helped me edit my first book from zero to launch. Throughout the process he provided great recommendations, in terms of content, style, and grammar. I can certainly say that I would not have finished my book, without his help!
Erik is very time-efficient and skilled. I asked him to finish the article within 24 hours, and he did it in just two. Give a full description of a job and your expectations and leave the rest to Erik. Looking forward to working with him again.
Erik is a professional with excellent writing skills.
VERY TALENTED GUY. HIRE HIM!!!!
Send me a chapter.
The fastest way to evaluate a development editor is to watch one work. Send a chapter from a manuscript in progress and I will return it edited, with the queries I would send an author — no charge, no obligation.