Business Book Authors Editing and Proofreading Services

Most business books are a good article that has been fed. The idea is genuinely useful and takes eleven pages to explain; the contract is for eighty thousand words. What fills the remaining distance is examples that illustrate a point already made, a chapter restating the premise in different clothes, and a middle section that readers abandon at roughly page ninety — which is why so many people own the book and so few have finished it.

We work on what business authors write — full manuscripts and chapter drafts, book proposals and chapter-by-chapter outlines, sample chapters for agents and publishers, the framework or model at the centre of the book, case studies and interview material, exercises and reader tools, introductions and closing chapters, 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.

The chapter that advances the argument is the unit of a business book, and the failure is chapters that restate rather than build. A book with one idea and twelve chapters is not a problem if each chapter adds something the reader could not have derived from the last; it is a serious problem if chapters three, five and nine are the same insight applied to different industries. We work through manuscripts so each chapter can be summarised in one sentence stating what the reader now knows that they did not before, since a chapter that resists this summary is usually an example collection; so examples earn their length by complicating the argument rather than confirming it, because a reader who has understood the point learns nothing from a third company that also did the thing; so the strongest objection to the idea is addressed somewhere in the book rather than nowhere, given that readers who work in the field think of it on page twenty and lose confidence when it never arrives; so the framework is applied to a case where it does not fully work, as this is the fastest way to make a model credible; so material that is genuinely an appendix is put in the appendix; and so the book is allowed to be shorter than the contract if that is what it is. Books edited this way get finished, and finished books get recommended.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including manuscripts, proposals and client examples. We are editors rather than agents, publishers or business advisers, and we offer no view on your ideas, your market or your commercial prospects. What we can do is make every chapter add something.