Manuscript Critique Services
Candid, constructive editorial critiques for complete manuscripts, book proposals, and unfinished works-in-progress
Overview of Services
The first goal of our manuscript critique services is to provide candid, constructive, and thorough feedback on your manuscript’s condition and its literary and commercial potential.
The idea isn’t to callously judge a work or its writer but to give you a professional book editor’s perspective on what works, what doesn’t work or could work better, and what you might consider doing to give your manuscript the best chance of marketplace success. This feedback helps inform your revision process and bring clarity to specific goals and objectives intended to improve the quality of your story and its writing.
The second goal of these services is to assess your manuscript’s editorial needs and what kind of further help, if any, would be most beneficial after you’ve revised with your editor’s feedback in mind.
Once we’ve read your manuscript, provided written feedback, and discussed that with you by phone or email, you’ll have a much better sense of where your work stands in relation to relevant industry standards, what you need to work on, and what editorial course may be appropriate.
Further information about critique services pricing, turnaround time, and coverage is available via links at right (desktop) or below (on mobile devices) or by contacting our author services director Ross Browne at the Tucson office.
“I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they’re going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there’s going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have, they find out as it grows. And I’m much more a gardener than an architect.” George R.R. Martin