Price range: Between £30 and £45 per thousand words

Line and copyediting for board games and TTRPGs

What are line and copyediting?

Line editing is one of my favourite types of editing. It’s all about keeping the reader engaged on every single page and ensuring the personality of your game shines through – whether it’s a fun, family board game or dark, spooky RPG. It’s about style, as well as substance.

Copyediting is about ensuring your writing is clear, consistent, and correct. This includes everything from checking the timelines add up to making sure elements of your game are all formatted consistently (and correcting any spelling errors that crop up).

The two types of editing often take place side by side, though line editing focuses on the effectiveness of your writing while copyediting focuses on consistency and correctness.

Having your game line and copyedited before it’s all formatted for print can save lots of time and hassle down the line. You should, of course, still do a final proofread when your work is ready for publication, but it’s far easier to make changes and corrections to a Word document than it is to make them when an incorrectly spelled word has already been incorporated into finished artwork…

What’s included?

A detailed line-by-line edit of your game and its components, checking the following:

• Spelling, grammar and punctuation
• Clarity
• Consistency
• Tone and appropriateness for your target audience
• Style
• Sentence and paragraph structure
• Repetition that could be avoided
• Awkward phrasing that could be improved
• Gaps in information
• Basic fact-checking

I’ll work in Word, making changes and suggestions in track changes, adding comments where necessary or helpful.

I’ll also include a style sheet recording key style decisions (“OK” vs “okay” etc.) to help ensure consistency across all of the components. This style sheet is especially useful if your game is part of a planned series or shared universe, as it can be used to ensure consistency with all the related material too!

What does a line and copyedited game look like?

See below an example section of an RPG with the types of corrections and comments I might make during a line and copy-edit.

(Best viewed in a desktop browser. Images and embedded files may not load on mobile or tablet.)

Ready for a line and copy-edit?

Great! You can send me a message here.

If you’re looking for another type of editing, check out all the services I offer here.

TESTIMONIAL

Kate did a wonderful job with editing and proofreading the rules for our board game. We are impressed by her attention to detail and how she managed to bring the rules across in a precise, yet an easily understandable way. She also provided us with her own invaluable thoughts and ideas, which we greatly appreciate. We are looking forward to working with her again in the near future!

TICKLE BEAR GAMES – CREATORS OF ‘SOMEWHERE UNDER THE RAINBOW’