A manuscript assessment by a professional editor can provide crucial feedback, especially to novice writers and those seeking to attract an agent or a traditional publisher. After carefully reading your manuscript and making notes along the way, I will write an overview with detailed, in-depth feedback on areas that need improvement, your writing strengths and pitfalls, issues with consistency, style, and structure, and much more. I will discuss ways you can refine, enhance, and polish your writing, your narrative arc, your plot, point of view, and characterization (fiction), your message, your mechanics, and other elements of the book.
Before you hire an editor to do your professional assessment/critique, please make certain the person is experienced with your genre. Obviously, you wouldn’t want an editor who exclusively works with fiction writers to evaluate your nonfiction book. However, you will do well to refine your search to more specific genres.
I assist writers in many genres. I have worked extensively with authors of self-help and metaphysical/new age books as well as memoirs and have edited my fair share of fiction. (I do not take clients in the horror genre, but I am happy to provide help to other fiction authors.) As a writer of spiritual fantasy novels and new age books and an editor of manuscripts in these categories, I am well equipped to offer my services to others in these genres.
Depending on the length of your work, the assessment may take a month or longer to complete. This type of evaluation requires considerable time and a deep inspection of the manuscript as well as expertise and experience.
My minimum charge for an editorial assessment is $450 (short books up to 40,000 words).
Book lengths with costs:
50,000 words: $750
70,000 words: $950
100,000 words: $1,500
If you can’t afford the cost of an evaluation of the full work, you may want to consider a partial assessment. Most stylistic issues reveal themselves in your first 10,000 words, so it’s possible to receive valuable insight for $150. However, be aware that many of the big-picture considerations such as narrative arc, plot, character development, themes, and structure cannot be addressed by an editor when working on a short sample.