Two Cats and a Draft

So you’ve somehow finished a draft of your novel (yay!). Maybe you want to self-publish or maybe you want to maximize your chances of convincing an agent to pick up your manuscript. Either way, sifting through the developmental editing landscape (and the sticker shock) can feel intimidating. It doesn’t have to be confusing or expensive. So here, on the front page, is what you can expect from me and what it will cost you.

The service: You get notes on every chapter–not just what’s working and what’s not working, but why it’s working and not working. You get questions, you get solutions, you get skill-builder exercises. You get comments on the novel as a whole (in the same areas as above), and you get answers to any specific questions you may have. You get someone who reads and thinks not just as a reader but as a writer. For more information, please see the “FAQ” page.

The cost: My rate is $4 per 1,000 words (that’s less than half a cent per word!). For an 80k-word novel (industry standard for many genres is roughly 80k-100k words), that’s $320. And if your reaction is: “this seems suss, other places charge, like, four times that, why are you so cheap?” Simple: I’m a writer. My friends are writers. We all work day jobs with varying degrees of mundanity and none of us can afford $1,200 for an edit. I assume you can’t either (if you can and want to tip, please do! You’ll get an e-card with pictures of the cats thanking you for buying them extra treats).