Historical Fiction Authors Editing and Proofreading Services

You spent four months on the research and it is all correct. The tallow candles, the money, the way a letter travelled from Bristol to Cork, the fact that nobody said "okay". And a reader who is enjoying the book will stop, twice, at the paragraph where you explain the guild system — not because it is wrong, but because for eleven lines the novel stopped being a novel and became a very good essay.

We work on what historical novelists write — full manuscripts and sample chapters, opening chapters and submission material, synopses and pitch documents, author's notes explaining where the history ends, research notes converted into scenes, dialogue in period settings, passages involving real historical figures, and the material that goes to agents and publishers. Our editors work on the join between the research and the story.

The line between detail that works and detail that proves you did the reading is the discipline of the genre, and it is not about accuracy at all — both kinds of detail are accurate. We work through manuscripts so period information arrives when a character needs it rather than when the reader might find it interesting, since a fact delivered inside a want is invisible and the same fact delivered on its own is a lecture; so nobody explains to another character something they both already know, because that conversation is the oldest tell in historical fiction and readers hear it immediately; so the research that changes what happens stays and the research that decorates it goes, however much it cost you; so the density of period detail varies with the scene's speed, given that the same texture that makes a market scene live will strangle a chase; so anachronism is hunted at the level of thought and idiom rather than object, as the wrong concept in a character's head is far more damaging than the wrong buckle on their shoe; and so anything you have deliberately changed goes in the author's note, which is where readers who care will look and where you get to be honest without interrupting yourself. Manuscripts edited this way keep the four months of research and hide them.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including unpublished manuscripts, research and submission plans. We are editors rather than historians, agents or publishers, and we offer no view on your historical accuracy or your book's prospects. What we can do is keep the research working for the story rather than beside it.