You've written a book—congratulations! This is a huge achievement. The amount of grit and creativity that's required to stare at a blank page or screen day after day and create a whole world from scratch cannot be overstated. It's a long and immersive process that sometimes takes years and always costs authors the impartiality needed to turn a good book into an even greater one. That's why outside editorial help is so valuable. Reading your manuscript with fresh eyes, I put myself in your intended readers' shoes and identify the areas that could benefit from some improvement. Each kind of editing described below is useful at a different stage of the writing and revising process.
Manuscript Assessments
Manuscript assessments are a crucial first step for identifying where a book’s strengths lie and where there’s room for improvement. Concentrating on the big picture, I'll read the manuscript carefully, making notes of my first impressions as I go. You’ll get a written editorial report providing honest, specific, and encouraging feedback about a few (usually three to five) aspects of the book that could be more effective with revision, such as its structure, plot, character development, pacing, and use of point of view, setting, or genre conventions. The goal of the manuscript assessment is to help you determine your priorities for your next round of revisions and give you tools you can use to craft a more vibrant, compelling, and streamlined story.
Substantive Editing
In this big-picture edit, I'll take a thorough look at the content and organization of your book. Keeping your intended audience and genre in mind, I’ll pinpoint potential stumbling blocks for your readers and propose solutions every step of the way. You’ll get an edited manuscript file with encouraging comments, questions, and tracked changes to help you envision different possibilities and decide what works and what doesn’t, and a written report explaining my main recommendations. The goal of the substantive edit is to empower you to make difficult but necessary cuts, to try out alternatives, and to generate new material if needed.
Stylistic Editing
Once substantive editing is complete and any big issues are resolved to the author's satisfaction, then stylistic editing can take place. Stylistic editing is also known as line editing, and at this stage I'll focus on clarifying the meaning of each paragraph, sentence, and word. I'll help you eliminate jargon and clichés, smooth transitions, and improve word choice, all while preserving your unique style and voice. Using comments and tracked changes in Microsoft Word, I'll make specific suggestions that you can easily accept or ignore during your review.
Copy Editing
Copy editing is the next stage. Guided by industry-standard dictionaries and manuals, I'll check and correct errors in formatting, grammar, spelling, capitalization, hyphenation, punctuation, and other matters of style. I'll also watch out for internal inconsistencies—for instance, is your character's eye colour the same throughout? Is the formatting of the bulleted lists consistent? Are all the words in uncommon acronyms spelled out the first time they appear? This phase of editing is very technical. I'll record all corrections and queries in the manuscript using the Track Changes and Comments functions in Word, and you'll also get a style sheet, which will reflect any stylistic decisions I've made.
How much will it cost?
The total cost of each project depends on several factors, including
the type of editing required;
the length and complexity of the manuscript;
the quality of the writing; and
the deadline.
Please contact me so we can discuss your project's editorial needs and make sure I'm the right editor for your book. In order to prepare an accurate quote, I'll request your full manuscript and ask you to complete a questionnaire providing more details about your project and process.