Children's Authors Editing and Proofreading Services

A picture book is not thirty-two pages of text. It is fourteen or fifteen decisions about when to make somebody turn a page, and everything else — the rhythm, the surprise, the reason a three-year-old asks for it again — is built on those decisions. Manuscripts arrive at publishers as a continuous block of prose, and the writers who thrive are the ones who have already thought in spreads.

We work on what children's authors write — picture book texts and their pagination, chapter book and middle grade manuscripts, submission packages and covering letters, series proposals and outlines, notes to illustrators and art briefs where they are wanted, school and event material, non-fiction for young readers, board book and early reader texts, and rhyming texts where the scansion has to survive being read by a tired adult. Our editors work on how the text is broken up.

The page turn is the picture book writer's real instrument, and the most common weakness in a manuscript is text that would read identically as a continuous paragraph. A turn is a small suspense: something has been set up, and the answer is on the other side. We work through texts so each spread ends at a point that makes the reader want to turn, whether a question, an interruption, or a word that promises something; so the surprise is never on the same spread as its setup, since a joke and its punchline visible at once is a joke read at half strength; so the amount of text per spread varies deliberately, because fifteen spreads of four lines each produce a lull that no illustrator can rescue; so anything the illustration will show is removed from the words, given that a text describing a red bicycle beside a picture of a red bicycle has spent its budget twice; so the ending lands on a right-hand page with nothing after it; and so the whole thing is checked aloud at a real pace, as a text that scans in the head can trip a reader at the same word every time. Manuscripts prepared this way read as though the writer has held the book.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including unpublished manuscripts, series ideas and submission plans. We are editors rather than agents, publishers or illustrators, and we offer no view on whether a book will sell or find a home. What we can do is make the text work in spreads rather than in paragraphs.