Our book editing services catch the plot holes, the tangled sentences, and the typos — and leave the way you tell a story alone. Every edit to your manuscript shows up as a tracked change you accept or reject, one by one, so the finished book still sounds like you.
Editing companies love to make this sound complicated. It isn't. There are four jobs, done in this order, and here's each one with a real example of what it changes.
This one looks at the whole book before anyone touches a comma. Does chapter 3 give away the ending? Does the middle sag? Did a character vanish for 80 pages? You get honest notes on structure and pacing — the things readers feel but can't name.
Before: thirty pages describing the farmhouse, then the fire, the funeral, and the move squeezed into four.
After: an editor's note — “The fire is your story. Give it the thirty pages. The farmhouse needs six.”
Sentence by sentence: rhythm, clarity, repeated words, sentences that make a reader go back and read them twice. This is where a manuscript starts to feel professional — without starting to sound like someone else wrote it.
Before: “She was walking in a slow manner toward the door, which was old and worn.”
After: “She walked slowly to the worn old door.”
Grammar, punctuation, spelling, and the small contradictions authors can't see in their own work. If your heroine has green eyes on page 12 and brown eyes on page 140, this is the pass that catches her.
Before: “Its a long way to Boise John thought, 400 miles at least”
After: “It's a long way to Boise, John thought — four hundred miles at least.”
Done after your book is formatted, because formatting introduces its own errors: a doubled word at a page break, a missing period, a widowed line at the top of a page. It's the final read before anything goes to press.
Before: “He opened the the letter with shaking hands”
After: “He opened the letter with shaking hands.”
One thing we've learned from 1,200+ manuscripts: most come in about 15% too long, and almost every author is nervous about the same thing — that editing will sand off the way they sound. So let's talk about that.
If you write short and blunt, your book stays short and blunt. If you write warm and wandering, the wandering that works stays in. A good editor removes what's in the reader's way — and nothing else. And you don't have to take that on faith, because of how the edits are delivered.
Your manuscript comes back with every single edit visible — what was there, what we suggest instead, and a margin note where the reason isn't obvious.
Accept the changes you like. Reject the ones you don't. No edit becomes final without your click — and plenty of our authors reject a few. That's the system working.
Where something's unclear, you'll see “Did you mean her brother or her cousin here?” — not a silent rewrite of what you meant to say.
100% of rights stay yours, an NDA is available before you send us a page, and nothing publishes until you approve the final proof. All three promises go in your contract.
“I was terrified an editor would make my memoir sound like a textbook. Instead I got my own pages back with little notes like ‘this paragraph is doing the same job as the one above it.’ She was right every time. It still sounds like me — just clearer.”
Two ways to get it. Neither one involves a mystery quote.
Editing and proofreading are built into all six packages — along with cover design, formatting, and publishing on Amazon and beyond. Currently 50% off.
Already have a publishing plan and just need the manuscript edited? We edit finished manuscripts on their own. The quote depends on length and how deep the edit needs to go — and it goes in writing before you pay a cent.
Still writing? We work in drafts — many authors send chapters as they finish them. And if the writing itself is the hard part, our ghostwriting services start at $1,600.
If you're publishing with us, editing is already in your package — packages run $699 to $7,999, one payment, currently 50% off. For standalone editing of a finished manuscript, we quote by word count and depth of edit, in writing, before you pay. Industry-wide, freelance editing commonly runs 1 to 4 cents per word, so be wary of anyone quoting a price before they know your book's length.
No — and you're the enforcement mechanism. Every edit arrives as a tracked change you personally accept or reject. If an editor's suggestion doesn't sound like you, reject it and it never happens. Our job is to remove what trips readers up, not to make your book sound like ours.
Copy editing happens in the manuscript: grammar, punctuation, and consistency, like a character's eye color changing between chapters. Proofreading happens later, after the book is formatted for print — it catches the errors formatting itself creates. You need both, which is why our packages include both. In 1,200+ books we have never once seen a formatted proof with nothing to fix.
Editing is the biggest slice of our typical 60-day publishing timeline — usually a few weeks, depending on length and how quickly you review the tracked changes. We won't promise a calendar date before we've seen the manuscript, and we'd suggest not trusting anyone who does.
Yes — we work in drafts. Plenty of authors send us their book chapter by chapter and revise alongside their editor. If you're stuck partway, a developmental read of what exists so far often gets things moving again.
A friend tells you it's good. An editor tells you page 40 is where they stopped wanting to turn pages — and why. Friends and family are too kind and too close, and they read the story you meant to write. An editor reads the one that's actually on the page. That gap is the whole job.
Doing your homework first? Smart. See everything our book publishing services include, read what publishing really costs, or walk through how the whole process works. Once the words are right, the next step is a cover that sells them.