True Crime Writers Editing and Proofreading Services

Somebody in your book was never charged. Somebody else was charged and acquitted. A third person was convicted, has served the sentence, and maintains they did not do it. Every sentence you write about those three people carries a different weight, and the difference between a book that stands and one that is pulped is largely a matter of which verbs you used.

We work on what true crime writers produce — full manuscripts and chapters, proposals and sample material, podcast scripts and episode narration, longform articles and features, passages describing suspects and the never-charged, victim and family material, court and inquest reporting worked into narrative, correspondence with participants, author's notes on sources and method, and the material that goes to agents, publishers and legal readers. Our editors work on the sentences that make claims about people.

Distinguishing what can be stated as fact from what can only be reported is the discipline the genre lives by, and it collapses under narrative pressure. A book building a case wants to write the case, and the grammar starts doing work the evidence cannot support. We work through manuscripts so a conviction is described as a conviction rather than as what happened, since those are different claims and only one of them is a matter of record; so an allegation is attributed to whoever made it, with the forum and the date, because "police believed" and "his sister told me in 2023" are different kinds of statement wearing the same clothes; so anyone never charged is written about in terms of documented conduct only, given that juxtaposition and implication carry meaning that a court will read as an accusation even where no sentence states one; so speculation is separated from the narrative rather than woven through it, as a chapter that alternates fact and theory transfers the authority of the first to the second; so the victim exists as a person beyond the manner of their death; and so the sources for each contested claim are visible enough that a reader can weigh them. Manuscripts handled this way survive the legal read, and more importantly they survive the family reading them.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including manuscripts, correspondence and material about living people. We are editors rather than lawyers, investigators or publishers, and we offer no view on guilt, innocence, legal risk or what is safe to publish. What we can do is make each sentence claim only what you can support.