Manuscript Editing
We find what your readers would have found first.
Your book is read many times over, each read hunting something different. Every finding comes back located, explained and rated — and nothing in your manuscript changes unless you say so.
We do not rewrite your book
Every finding is flagged, not applied. You get a report telling you what was found, where it is, and why it matters. You decide what to do about each one. The most common fear about hiring an editor is coming back to a book that no longer sounds like you — that cannot happen here, because we never touch the prose.
What each read is looking for
Nobody catches everything in one pass. Each read has one job, which is why things get found that a single edit would miss.
Space, body and time
Characters cannot hold quiet conversations from separate rooms. Injuries persist until something heals them. If four hours pass, four hours of things have to fit inside them. Every position, physical state and clock reference is checked against every other one.
Continuity
Objects do not teleport. A character cannot use the knife she handed over two chapters ago, or react to news she has not been told. Every object, every fact and every character's knowledge is tracked forward through the book, and across the series if there is one.
Voice
Whether the prose sounds like you, and keeps sounding like you at chapter forty when you were tired. Filter words that put distance between the reader and the character, hedging where the sentence should commit, and the tics that creep in without anyone noticing.
Craft and the senses
Whether scenes are lived or summarised. Whether the reader is inside a body with sound and smell and texture, or hovering above a description. Whether the moments that deserved a full scene got one.
Emotional truth
Whether people in crisis sound like people in crisis. Nobody is articulate at their worst moment. Whether grief is given the time grief actually takes, or resolved in half a page because the plot was impatient.
Plot, genre and series identity
Whether the story's logic holds under pressure, whether the book delivers what its genre promised the reader on the cover, and whether it reads like it belongs beside the others with your name on them.
Repetition
The same action, the same image, the same construction, returning far more often than anyone noticed while writing it. Intimate scenes and violent ones are where this bites hardest — a phrasing works once, and the hand reaches for it again forty pages later, and again. Every recurrence is counted and located, so you can see the pattern instead of trusting your memory of it.
Whether each chapter earns the next
Chapter by chapter, whether the end of one gives a reader a reason to begin the next. This is almost always where a book goes flat: a chapter that resolves too completely, or one that ends without asking the reader anything. Every chapter is marked earned or not, with the reason.
The reader pass
A cold read, as a reader rather than an editor. Where does trust break? Where does somebody stop and think wait, what happened to — the dropped thread, the character who left in chapter nine and never came back, the promise the book forgot it made.
Proofread
Last, always. Grammar, spelling, punctuation, and the missing word your eye fills in automatically every time you read the sentence.
The whole book
Read start to finish in one sequence, which is how a reader will meet it and how you never can. The pacing curve, whether the energy manages itself, whether the ending is compressed (it usually is), whether a new reader can enter at Book Two, and whether every arc that opened actually closed.
What the report looks like
Chapter by chapter, every finding located and rated. One page of a real report, abridged.
Chapter Twelve — The Archive
8 findings · 1 critical · 4 major · 3 minor- CRITICALContinuity — object· ¶9 and ¶17
Ilona hands the photograph to Béla at ¶9 and does not take it back. At ¶17 she is holding it again. Either add the return or move the handover after the later scene.
- MAJORContinuity — knowledge· ¶23
Béla refers to the 1918 turnings. He learns about 1918 in Chapter Fourteen. As written he knows it two chapters early, which also removes the surprise from the later reveal.
- MAJORDropped thread· chapter-level
The letter from the solicitor, introduced in Chapter Six and described as urgent, has not been mentioned since. Three chapters is the point at which a reader starts to wonder. Resolve it, reference it, or cut the urgency from Chapter Six.
- MINORSpace and time· ¶31–34
Twenty minutes are stated. Six actions are described inside them, one of which is a drive across the city. The timing does not fit.
- MINORVoice· ¶4, ¶11, ¶28
Three filter constructions in close succession — she felt, she realised, she noticed. Each places the reader outside her rather than inside her.
- MAJORRepetition· 14 occurrences, chapters 6–22
The same construction for the same action appears fourteen times, nine of them inside intimate scenes and four within a single chapter. A reader registers a repeat by the fourth. Full location list in the appendix.
- MAJORChapter does not earn the next· end of Chapter Twelve
The chapter resolves its own question completely and asks nothing new. A reader has no reason to begin Chapter Thirteen tonight rather than tomorrow. Hold one thread open, or move the resolution into the following chapter.
- MINOREmotional truth· ¶40
Ilona moves from the discovery to composure within a paragraph. The reaction is right; the speed is not. This wants space before the scene turns.
Findings
The full report. Every issue found, located, explained and rated by severity, chapter by chapter. You fix them your way, in your voice, on your schedule.
Findings and suggested revisions
The same report, with proposed wording for each fix. Finding a problem and solving it are different jobs, and the second is craft work on your book, so it is priced separately. You are still free to use none of it.
How it is priced
By length, and by what the manuscript actually needs. A clean draft with a handful of minor findings is not the same job as one carrying thirty critical ones, and it should not cost the same.
So the first read establishes both. You see the tally, you see the severity, and you see exactly why your book landed where it did. No estimate pulled out of the air.
A manuscript that was planned properly arrives with fewer critical findings and costs less to edit. That is the honest argument for doing the planning first.