Fiction Authors Editing and Proofreading Services

An agent's reader gets through the first page. That is the whole of the transaction, most of the time — not the first chapter, not the first three chapters that the submission guidelines asked for, but a page, read at speed, among forty others that week. It is a brutal way to sort literature and it is also, if you are honest, roughly how you choose books in a shop.

We work on what novelists write — full manuscripts and partials, opening chapters and sample material, synopses of one page and of five, covering letters for agents and publishers, chapter outlines and structural plans, revision drafts after agent or editor feedback, competition and prize entries, and the material that goes out with a submission. Our editors work on the pages that decide whether anyone reads the rest.

The opening page is doing one job, and it is not the job most writers give it. It is making a promise about the kind of book this is, and a reader who cannot tell within a page — the register, the distance from the character, whether we are in safe hands — will stop for reasons they will not be able to articulate. We work through openings so something is actually happening on the page rather than being prepared for, since scene-setting before a first event is the commonest reason a good novel gets rejected at line eleven; so the writing sounds like the book it introduces, because an atmospheric opening page in front of a brisk comic novel is a false promise that costs you the reader you wanted; so the character wants something identifiable, even something small, given that a reader will follow desire before they will follow description; so the prose is at its normal setting rather than its best, as an opening polished into strangeness reads as effort and the second page then reads as a decline; so anything explaining the world, the backstory or the situation is moved later or cut, because a reader who is interested will wait and a reader who is not will not be persuaded by information; and so the last line of the page does something. Openings written this way get to page two, which is the only thing an opening can do.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including unpublished manuscripts, submissions and works in progress. We are editors rather than agents or publishers, and we offer no view on whether your novel will be represented or published. What we can do is make sure the first page is the book making its own case.