Is your writing clear, concise, and easy to read? Is it free of grammatical, spelling, and other technical errors?
Copy Editing is the last major editing service your manuscript will require before it’s ready to meet your audience. This technical edit focuses on creating clarity, concision, and purpose within your prose. It also deals with technical mistakes, such as grammatical, spelling, and punctuation issues.
What Does This Service Include?
- Copy Edit of Your Submission. This edit ensures each sentence is clear and technically correct. I also look at your work on a paragraph level to make sure a variety of sentence structures are utilized and that any repetition of words or phrases is intentional.
Common issues corrected during copy editing include:
- Improper punctuation
- Spelling errors
- Pronoun errors
- Unclear antecedents
- Misplaced modifiers
- Improper capitalization
- Inconsistencies in character/setting names/traits
- Factual issues
Because this edit is charged on a per-word basis, you can submit as many or as few pages as you would like. While it often makes sense to get your entire manuscript copy edited, I understand budget constraints can make that difficult.
In this case, submitting the first few chapters can be a great way to gauge how much editing your entire story may require before you move to your next step. This can also be a good approach for querying authors since it allows you to polish your submission material without paying for a full manuscript edit.
Who Is This Service For?
Copy editing should only be done once you’re confident your manuscript is as strong as it can get on a plot and line level. This edit takes a close look at the sentence-by-sentence mechanics of your story. If there is any chance those sentences might change due to plot tweaks or rewriting, it’s not yet time to copy edit.
If your story is ready to go out to readers or to agents but just needs a final look through to correct technical issues, such as spelling and punctuation, then a copy edit is just what you need.
If you feel your story isn’t quite polished enough to begin copy editing, take a look at my developmental editing and line editing services, as these might be more appropriate for you at this stage.
How Much Does It Cost?
This service starts at $0.015 per word.
Most manuscripts qualify for this starting rate, however, stories with extensive technical issues may require a higher fee. This fee will be discussed and agreed upon before work begins.
The fee includes in-doc edits using track changes (or suggestions in Google Docs) as well as comments on any areas that require further clarification.
Interested In a Copy Edit?
To learn more about this service or to sign up for a Copy Edit, please contact me today.