Self-Help Authors Editing and Proofreading Services

Somebody buys your book because something in their life is not working. They read three chapters, nod at all of it, and then reach the part where you ask them to do something. That is the whole transaction — everything before it is preparation, and everything after it depends on whether they could actually do the thing, alone, on a Tuesday evening, without you in the room.

We work on what self-help and personal development authors write — full manuscripts and chapters, exercises, worksheets and reader tools, proposals and sample chapters, case studies and reader stories, introductions and framing chapters, workbooks and companion materials, course and programme material adapted from the book, and the material that goes to agents and publishers. Our editors work on the parts the reader is asked to act on.

The exercise is where a self-help book either changes something or joins the pile, and its failure is almost always that it was written by someone who has only ever run it in a room. Instructions that work with a facilitator present collapse without one. We work through these so each exercise states what it is for before it starts, since a reader who does not know what they are meant to get will stop halfway; so the first step is small enough to be done immediately and does not require anything the reader does not have, because "find a quiet hour and a journal" loses half of them at the first clause; so the instruction is specific enough to be followed wrongly — an exercise nobody can get wrong is one nobody is really doing; so an example of somebody else's completed answer is given, given that this is the single most useful thing on the page and it is almost always missing; so what to do if nothing comes is addressed, as the reader who stares at a blank page assumes the failure is theirs and closes the book; so the time it actually takes is stated honestly; and so the reader is told what to do with the result rather than left holding it. Exercises written this way get done, and books whose exercises get done are the ones people give away to friends.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including manuscripts, reader stories and unpublished material. We are editors rather than therapists, coaches or publishers, and we offer no view on your method, your claims or their effects. What we can do is make the exercises work for somebody sitting alone.