Editorial
Services

Editorial services for traditional publishing

These days, literary agents and publishers increasingly expect work to have been professionally edited before it reaches them. If you send them a submission that contains the kind of errors that a professional edit would correct then you're needlessly compromising your chances of success.

firstwriter.com offers two levels of editing: proofreading, and full editing with critique.

Proofreading

Proofreading checks your work for spelling errors, grammatical errors, and errors of sense, and corrects these errors where they are found.

At the minimum, we suggest that you should have your query letter, synopsis, and first three chapters or 50 pages (whichever is greater) proofread. This should cover the material usually requested by agents and publishers for an initial approach.

If possible, you should also have the rest of the book proofread. Otherwise, if an agent or publisher does request your full manuscript, you will either have to submit unedited material to them (which may damage your chances of acceptance) or keep the agent or editor waiting for a period of probably weeks while you have the rest of the material edited.

Full edit with critique

You may also want to consider having a full edit and critique done of your work. A full edit and critique includes all the checking for errors of a proofread, but also includes suggestions for improvement. These suggestions range from proposals for alternative words and phrasing at the micro level, up to more general suggestions about plot, character, and structure. The critique will provide a narrative appraisal of all these areas, identifying what works well, what works less well, and making suggestions for improvement.

Writers often come to us with what they think is a finished product, and are amazed by how much they are able to improve what they have written after receiving a full critique. To get an instant quote online, click here.