Book Editing
I provide thoughtful developmental editing, line editing, copyediting, and proofreading to authors.
My favorite genres include memoir and fiction, including romance, thrillers, adventure, fantasy, magical realism, suspense, literary fiction, and dystopian fiction. I also have a soft spot for poetry collections.
When editing nonfiction, I particularly love working with manuscripts that engage topics such as mental health, resilience, anti-racism, gender justice, and personal finance.
If you have completed a draft of your manuscript, congratulations! I’d love to help you take it to the next stage.
Developmental Editing
I will provide feedback on your ideas, evidence, organization, characters, and plot. I’ll comment in the margins throughout the manuscript and provide a summary letter discussing both the strengths and suggested revisions.
Line Editing
Line editing includes the technical improvements of copyediting plus more significant enhancement of the style, flow, and syntax of a piece of writing. I’ll provide direct revisions in track changes mode, considering voice, continuity, and characters.
Copyediting
Copyediting resolves errors in grammar, syntax, word choice, spelling, and punctuation. I’ll apply Chicago Manual of Style grammatical rules, catch those sneaky homophones, and check your idioms. I ensure that tenses are consistent, subjects and verbs are in agreement, and proper nouns are spelled consistently. If modifiers are dangling, we’ll move them where they belong! I can often make manuscripts more concise, reducing word count without losing content.
For most book-length projects, I’ll create an extensive style sheet to document relevant rules and editorial decisions and track consistency of details throughout the manuscript.
Proofreading
This service provides a final combing to resolve lingering grammatical mistakes and typos in manuscripts that have already been professionally copyedited and formatted in PDFs. Ideally, you’ll also have a style sheet from your copyeditor.
Not sure what you need?
I’m happy to review your manuscript and advise.
Contact me for a free sample edit.
Rates
Please contact me so I can customize a quote based on the specific word count and needs of your manuscript. This allows me to tailor costs based on the scope of work and time required to achieve excellence in your project. Note that poetry editing and picture book rates are based on estimated time rather than word count.
My rates are typically aligned with the EFA median rates. While they vary by genre, turnaround, and depth of editing, here is a sense of typical rates for different levels of editing that I offer:
Developmental editing: $.03 to $.06 per word
Line and copyediting: $.03 to $.06 per word
Copyediting: $.02 to $.045 per word
Proofreading: starts at $.015 per word
You calculate the overall manuscript cost by multiplying the word count by the rate. Line and copyediting a 50,000-word novel, for example, at $.03 per word would mean 50,000 x $.025 = $1500.
