Sample edit
You might not be sure what kind of editorial service your writing needs yet. When should you get a line-edit? Can you get away with just proofreading? Is your work nearly ready to publish?
A sample edit gives us both a much better idea of the kind of changes that would be helpful to your work. It’s suitable for both fiction and non-fiction.
For £40 (invoiced after the job), you will receive:
at least 1 hour of editing and proofreading directly to your text
margin comments explaining individual edits
a detailed summary (2 pages) of the main findings, with specific suggestions and advice for your writing
During the hour that I spend on your text, I don’t limit myself to one kind of editing. I correct or flag up everything that might be improved, whether that’s characters, commas, tone, tense, viewpoint, vocabulary, or something else entirely. An hour is enough to showcase any recurring patterns. So I can get a very good idea of where best to focus any further work, ie, whether you’d benefit from a structural assessment, line-edit, or proofreading only.
I try to ensure that the sample edit reaches a sensible stopping place; your writing won’t be abandoned halfway through a paragraph! However, sticking as close as possible to 1 hour indicates how long your full work would take to edit or proofread in its current form. This enables me to give you an accurate quote.
How to book a sample edit
You’re welcome to book a sample edit whatever the size of your project. Please note: I can ONLY give a firm quote if you have a sample edit first.
For a sample edit, I need to see as much of your writing as possible (I edit from the beginning, but it’s useful to scan ahead sometimes too). Please email your work as a Word or Pages document, together with the following information:
if someone else has already read it (eg, a beta reader)
word count of the full work
genre & target audience
your first language if not English
You are not obliged to take up any other services after a sample edit.