Copyediting
Combing through your writing for the hundredth time is wearying. The tediousness of the task makes spotting your own mistakes more difficult. You’ve already been staring at those pages for hours, weeks, or even years.
But awkward sentences, unnecessary repetition, and punctuation errors distract readers, pulling them out of your story. And inconsistencies and grammar issues can cause your readers to lose faith in you.
My job as your copyeditor is to find those problems for you and suggest solutions.
What does copyediting do for your manuscript?
- Prevents repetition & cuts redundancy
- Clarifies awkward sentences
- Ensures consistent use of hyphenation, capitalization, and punctuation*
- Checks for clear word usage
- Finds inconsistencies and contradictions in character and place names and descriptions, along with the story’s timeline
- Finds serious factual errors
- Finds potentially harmful language^^
- Catches typos
I like to see 10–30 pages of your manuscript and do a sample edit of 1,000 words before sending you a project proposal. The sample edit helps us figure out whether we’d be a good author-editor fit.
I edit all lengths of contemporary fiction, from flash fiction to novels. My favorite stories feature women protagonists and are in the genres/subgenres of women’s fiction, low fantasy, magical realism, thriller, suspense, and romance.
My copyediting service is offered at two levels: The Copyedit and The Copyedit Lite.
*I use the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, The Chicago Manual of Style, and The Chicago Guide to Copyediting Fiction, as these resources are widely used by US book publishers.
^^Though I learned about conscious and inclusive language during my copyediting training, I am not a trained sensitivity or authenticity reader. I’ll do my best to point out potentially harmful language, but if you’d like to find someone who can take a deeper look at your manuscript, I can point you in the right direction. Just ask!