From £15 per thousand words

Line editing is one of my favourite types of editing (and my most popular service). It’s all about ensuring the reader enjoys every single page of their journey through the story. It’s about style as well as substance, helping your readers remain immersed in the world you’ve created by removing any distractions that will drag them out of it.

Copyediting is about ensuring your writing is clear, consistent, and correct. This includes everything from checking the timeline of your novel all adds up, to making sure words like “co-operate” are hyphenated consistently (or not!) and correcting any spelling errors that crop up.

The two types of editing often take place side by side, though line editing focuses on the effectiveness of your prose while copyediting focuses on consistency and correctness. Line editing and copyediting should happen once the big-picture elements of the story are in place, but there’s still scope for changes to the text.

This is a combined line editing and copyediting service that addresses all of the things a stricter copyedit would (errors, inconsistencies, clarity, confusing wording, etc.), but also includes wider line editing suggestions where I think they might be helpful to eliminate distractions for the reader and make your book the best version of itself it can be – things like slips in perspective, word repetition, or the same sentence structure used repeatedly.

It’s a line-by-line edit of your work with a combination of track changes and comments on the following:

• Narrative and effectiveness of prose
• Point of View
• Authenticity and consistency of characters
• Dialogue
• Pacing
• Tenses
• Flow (including repetition and awkward phrasing)
• Spelling, grammar, punctuation
• Consistency
• Basic fact-checking

I’ll also include a separate feedback report expanding on any issues raised, with more advice on how to address them. Other clients have found this feedback particularly helpful in their future writing.

And I’ll also include a style sheet recording key style decisions (“OK” vs “okay” etc.) as well as character and place descriptions and a timeline to help ensure consistency and logic throughout the novel. This style sheet is especially useful if your book is part of a planned series as it can be used to ensure consistency in all of the future books too!

See below an example of a manuscript in Word with the types of corrections and comments I might make during a line and copyedit.

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If you’re looking for another type of editing, check out all the services I offer here.