Serialized Fiction Writers Editing and Proofreading Services

Your reader last saw these characters eleven days ago, between a work deadline and someone's birthday, and has read four other things since. They remember the feeling of the story and roughly two facts. Everything you do at the top of an instalment is aimed at that person — and the two standard solutions, recapping and ploughing on, both lose readers, one by boring them and the other by leaving them behind.

We work on what serial writers produce — instalments and chapters for serial platforms and newsletters, web serial and light novel chapters, season and arc plans, series bibles and continuity records, chapter endings and their pacing, recap and re-entry material, collected volumes assembled from instalments, reader-facing notes and author commentary, and the material that goes out to platforms and subscribers. Our editors work on the first and last paragraphs of every instalment.

Re-entry is the craft problem unique to serial fiction, and the solution is to remind without recapping. What a returning reader needs is not the events but the position — where everyone is standing, what is at stake this week, and the one fact from three chapters ago that is about to matter. We work through instalments so the necessary information is carried by a character acting on it rather than by a paragraph reminding the reader of it, since "Devlin had still not replied to her message" placed in Anna's hand as she checks her phone does the job invisibly; so the opening line puts the reader somewhere physical rather than in summary, given that place re-establishes a world faster than plot does; so any name that has not appeared for several instalments is reintroduced with the smallest tag that identifies them, because a reader who cannot remember who Cazalet is will not go back and check; so the ending is a change in position rather than a cliffhanger every time, as a serial that ends every instalment on a gasp trains readers to distrust them; so the gap between instalments is treated as part of the form, with endings that survive eleven days of thinking; and so the collected version is checked for the re-entry material that becomes repetition when the chapters are read back to back. Serials written this way keep readers across the weeks when they are busy.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including unpublished instalments, arc plans and subscriber material. We are editors rather than platform advisers or publishers, and we offer no view on your audience, your schedule or your prospects. What we can do is get the returning reader back in without making them read what they already know.