Nonfiction Authors Editing and Proofreading Services

Somewhere around page forty, a reader who knows something about your subject thinks of the obvious objection. It is not a clever objection; it is the first one anybody would raise. What happens over the next hundred pages depends entirely on whether the book ever acknowledges that they have thought it. If it does not, they finish the book — many do — but they finish it as a sceptic, and they do not recommend it.

We work on what nonfiction authors write — full manuscripts and chapters, proposals and chapter outlines for agents and publishers, sample chapters and openings, argument structures and chapter plans, source notes and reading lists for general readers, introductions and conclusions, extract and article versions, and the material that goes out on submission. Our editors work on the strength of the argument as a reader will experience it.

The chapter that takes on the strongest objection is the one that decides whether a nonfiction book persuades or merely informs, and it is the chapter most often missing. Writers address weak counter-arguments because they are easy to dispatch, which produces a book that feels balanced and convinces nobody. We work through manuscripts so the objection engaged with is the best one, stated in a form its holders would accept rather than in a form you can beat; so it appears early enough to catch the reader who was already thinking it, since arriving on page 280 is arriving after they stopped being persuadable; so the answer is allowed to be partial where it is partial, because a book that fully defeats every objection is one the reader stops believing around the third victory; so any evidence that cuts against you is presented by you rather than discovered by a reviewer, given that you get to frame it and they do not; so the limits of the claim are stated plainly — what your argument does not cover, who it does not apply to, what would change your mind; and so the concessions are real rather than rhetorical, as a reader can distinguish a genuine concession from a setup within a sentence. Books written this way are argued with in public, which is how nonfiction books stay alive.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including manuscripts, proposals and research. We are editors rather than fact-checkers, subject specialists or publishers, and we offer no view on your argument, your evidence or your conclusions. What we can do is make the book meet its reader's best objection.