Oh yes! In fact, I read it twice, sometimes more for a Developmental Edit.

The goal of the Editorial Assessment is to find anything that might have consequential ramifications on the whole story and that should be fixed or improved before going into more details. By rushing too quickly to a Developmental Edit, you risk working with a manuscript that doesn’t have strong foundations yet. If we skip the Editorial Assessment, I will be spending a lot of time at the Developmental Edit stage trying to fix issues that haven’t yet been addressed — that’s a lot of time focused on trying to fix big picture issues line-by-line. Plus, if on my recommendation you end up removing a character, or a few scenes, whole pages that I have annotated will disappear — going to waste.

It really depends. I’ll be able to give you a proper estimate once I see a sample, but on average, for a story up to 100,000 words I require 3 weeks for an Editorial Assessment and 6 weeks for a Developmental Edit. I like to work at a balanced pace: I limit the number of hours I spend on a story every day to be at the best of my focus. Taking my time also gives me the opportunity to ponder some elements and come back to them later.

Unfortunately, no. I must be working with the most up-to-date version of the manuscript.

Great question! I recommend reading this article: How Much Does an Editor Cost? It even has a pricing calculator.