What does a developmental editor do?!

[Jim]

During the publishing process, included among those assigned to help convert my manuscript into a commercially viable book, were a layout design artist, copy editor, and conceptual (also referred to as a developmental) editor.

The conceptual editor targeted specific sentences, paragraphs, dialogue, and descriptive narration that he felt could be improved or eliminated altogether. It was entirely up to me which advice to heed and act upon and which to decline to accept.

By the end of the process, I made changes to the original manuscript based upon 73 suggestions and did not agree with, and therefore did act upon, 9 of his suggestions. As a result, the original manuscript was reduced from 126,000 words to 111,000 words and the story flowed more smoothly and effectively.

[Al "Tank"]

At my old publisher, we had:
-A Story Editor who's job was to fix plot flow and similar problems. This was probably akin to a "developmental editor".
-A Copy Editor who handled the usual language problems of punctuation, spelling, etc. In addition to word choice, sentence restructuring, and occasionally, logical problems (my job)
-Cover artist
-A formatting/publishing editor to put the ms into a format suitable for publishing and to actually submit the book for publishing.
-Marketing manager (no, we didn't have a big budget).

Some of us wore more than one hat :-)