Romance Authors Editing and Proofreading Services

Two people want each other and something is in the way. Everything else in a romance novel is craft; that sentence is the engine. Which is why the manuscripts that stall are almost always the ones where the obstacle turns out to be a conversation neither character has had — a misunderstanding, a thing overheard, an assumption that could be cleared up in four lines and is instead sustained for a hundred and forty pages by two people behaving like strangers to themselves.

We work on what romance writers produce — full manuscripts and partials, opening chapters and submission packages, series and connected-book planning, synopses that must show the emotional arc, the central conflict and its structure, intimate scenes at every heat level, dual point-of-view structures, category and single-title work, and the material that goes to agents, editors and readers. Our editors work on what is actually keeping them apart.

The conflict is the load-bearing element of a romance, and the distinction that matters is between an obstacle that would survive an honest conversation and one that would not. A misunderstanding is not a conflict; it is a delay, and readers experience it as the author holding the plot shut with a thumb. We work through manuscripts so the barrier comes from who these people are rather than from what they have failed to say, since a conflict rooted in character deepens with every scene and one rooted in information evaporates the moment anybody speaks; so both characters have a defensible position, given that a romance where one of them is simply wrong is a book about waiting for them to notice; so the reason they cannot simply choose each other is restated as the stakes rise rather than assumed to be still operating; so any moment where a reader will shout "just tell her" is either removed or given a reason the reader accepts on the page and not in your notes; so the black moment costs something real that is not undone by an apology; and so the resolution changes at least one of them, because a couple who end exactly as they started have had an incident rather than a relationship. Manuscripts edited this way keep readers up late, which is the genre's actual measure.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including unpublished manuscripts, series plans and submissions. We are editors rather than agents or publishers, and we offer no view on your book's market or its prospects. What we can do is test whether the obstacle would survive a conversation.