Business Book Authors Editing and Proofreading Services

Eleven pages is what the idea actually takes to explain, and the contract is for eighty thousand words. What fills the remaining distance is examples illustrating a point already made, a chapter restating the premise in new terms, and a middle section readers abandon at around page 90. The idea itself is genuinely useful, and a reader who reaches page 40 has already had all of it. That is the reason so many people own the book and very few have finished it.

The documents we edit for Business Book Authors

Full manuscripts and chapter drafts, book proposals and chapter-by-chapter outlines, and sample chapters for agents and publishers arrive here at every stage of a book's life, and they are the bulk of what we edit for business authors. The framework or model at the center of the book, case studies and interview material, exercises and reader tools, and introductions and closing chapters come with them. So do endorsements and author biographies, article and extract versions for publication, and the talk or keynote the book grew out of. Our editors work on whether each chapter earns its place.

What the editing involves

The chapter is the unit of a business book, and the common failure is a chapter that restates rather than builds. One idea spread across twelve chapters is not a problem if each chapter adds something the reader could not have derived from the last. It becomes a serious problem when chapters three, five, and nine prove to be a single insight applied to a different industry each time, which a reader notices somewhere around page 90. Our working test is whether a chapter can be summarized in one sentence naming what the reader knows at its end and did not know at its start. A chapter that resists that summary is usually a collection of examples rather than an argument.

Examples earn their length by complicating the argument rather than confirming it. A reader who has understood the point learns nothing from a third company that also did the thing, and cutting that third company shortens the book without costing it anything. The strongest objection to the idea has to be answered somewhere in the book, because readers who work in the field think of it by page 20, and they lose confidence when it never arrives. The framework becomes credible at the moment it is applied to a case where it does not fully work, and one such case is worth more than four that confirm it. Material that is genuinely an appendix belongs in the appendix, and a book is allowed to come in shorter than the contract if that is what it is. Books edited this way get finished, and finished books get recommended.

Confidentiality and the limits of our role

Everything you send us is treated in confidence, including manuscripts, proposals, and client examples. We are editors, not agents, publishers, or business advisors, and we offer no opinion on your ideas, your market, or your commercial prospects. What we can do is make every chapter add something.