Think of a developmental edit as the big-picture, is-this-working pass. It is the first step when you’re getting feedback. Does the story hold together? Does the pacing hum? Are the characters fully formed? Fix this layer first, and every other edit gets easier.
You can get a developmental edit before you hand your project to a human being. Beyond a spellcheck and a grammar pass. A structural read that tells you where your story sags, what your title promises that your story never delivers, and exactly where a reader is going to trip and fall out of the book or script.
I've been running my new book, Sell Your Book to Hollywood: How to Pitch Your Book, Find the Right Producer, and Navigate the Deal, through Claude for feedback. It gave me the same kind of notes I give my coaching clients. Let me show you how I do it.
First: Prompting Hints
- To get the best result from any AI you must use a paid version. You get what you pay for, and the free versions of the AI tools are bare bones.
- Ask AI to write your prompt. Give it as much information as you can. It doesn't have to be organized. Think of it as a stream of consciousness: what you're worried about and what you need help with. You will get thorough prompt that gives you amazing results.
- Prompt with paragraphs, not single sentences. The more pointed and specific your prompt is, the better the output will be. Give your AI a job – “You are a developmental editor.” And context for your project like the audience.
- End every prompt with: "Do you have any questions before you start?" to see what you may have left out.
- Iterate until you're satisfied. If you don't like the result, refine your prompt, give the AI more information, and ask again.
How I Prompted Claude for a Real Developmental Edit
The magic is in the prompt. Here's the actual exchange:
Me: Help me write a prompt for you to get the best developmental edit from you of the book Sell Your Book to Hollywood. I'm looking for flow to be improved, to make sure everything makes sense, and suggestions of anything I may have missed.
Claude handed back this prompt:
You are a developmental editor with deep experience in both nonfiction how-to books and the entertainment industry. I'm attaching my complete manuscript, Sell Your Book to Hollywood: How to Pitch Your Book, Find the Right Producer, and Navigate the Deal. It teaches novelists — especially indie authors with no Hollywood connections — how to pitch their books for film and TV adaptation, from crafting a pitch through negotiating the option deal and visiting the set. Read the entire manuscript before giving any feedback. Then give me a developmental edit memo in Word focused on three things:
Flow. Evaluate the order of the chapters and sections. Does the reader's journey build logically from skill to skill? Flag any place where the sequence feels out of order, where a chapter interrupts momentum, or where material should be moved, merged, or split. Check that each chapter's opening connects to what came before.
Sense. Read as if you're my target reader: an author who knows nothing about Hollywood. Flag every place where I use a term before defining it, assume knowledge the reader doesn't have yet, contradict something I said earlier, or leave a step vague enough that the reader wouldn't know what to actually do next.
Gaps. Tell me what's missing. What questions will readers have that I never answer? What topics does a book with this title promise that I haven't covered? Where do I need an example, a template, or a story where I currently only have instruction? Also flag the reverse — anything redundant or covered twice.
Format your feedback as a memo: start with your overall assessment in a few paragraphs, then go chapter by chapter, and end with your top ten highest-impact recommendations ranked by importance. For every issue, tell me where it is (chapter and section name), why it's a problem for the reader, and your suggested fix. Be candid — I'd rather hear a hard truth now than a bad review later. Do not line edit, rewrite my prose, or comment on grammar and typos. Do not change my voice — conversational, warm, encouraging, direct. This pass is structure and content only.
Two tips for best results: run it on the full manuscript in a fresh conversation (so nothing else competes for attention), and if the memo surfaces something big, ask follow-ups like “show me exactly how you'd restructure the middle section” before making changes. Want me to run this edit now on the current draft?
Note: Claude gave itself a job with a specific background and the book a specific audience and purpose. He also told me the best way to use the prompt.
Claude read the manuscript and handed back a detailed ten page story notes memo with an overall assessment and specific suggestions section by section. The notes were sharp. They pinpointed things I'd missed and spots that weren't as clear as I thought. A lot of the feedback came down to reordering the book, so I fired off a follow-up:
Me: Please give me a new list of the order of the sections of the book that you suggested in the developmental edit memo. Give it to me as a Word document. Do you have any questions before you start?
Claude: Should the new order be a clean list, or annotated with what changed (moved, new, renamed, merged)?
Me: Clean list only.
My AI Buddy Doesn't Replace Humans
You might be thinking: Lindsey, why on earth are you telling us to use a tool that could replace you?
Because it doesn't. Humans remain at the center my workflow. I use Claude to get my manuscript into the best possible shape before I get feedback from my team.
Pre-AI, I would do as many as ten edits on my own. Using Claude as my AI developmental editor saves me some of those rounds. I get AI notes first, so that when I do bring in my human team, I'm not paying them to catch the obvious stuff I could have fixed myself. It saves me time, money, and more than a few red-faced moments.
I still have a writing coach. I still use human beta readers who are industry experts or my target audience. I still have a human editor and proofreader. I've combed through my manuscripts more times than I can count, on my own and with AI proofreading tools, and mistakes still slip through. AI can flag a sagging middle. It cannot replace human insight, human emotion, and the lived-in detail that both fiction and nonfiction need to breathe.
