E-Book Self-Publishers Editing and Proofreading Services

The book is good, the cover is good, the description is good, and it sells four copies a month. It is filed under Fiction / General, its seven keyword slots contain the author's name and six words that describe the themes, and it therefore appears in no list that any reader browses. Nobody has rejected this book. Nobody has been shown it.

We edit what independent e-book publishers write — category and keyword selections and the reasoning behind them, series and title metadata, subtitle and series-name fields, author biographies for retailer profiles, back-matter and read-next pages, pre-order and launch communications, and the descriptions used in advertising. Our editors work on the fields that decide whether a book is ever displayed.

The metadata is where a self-published book is found or is invisible, and its failure is fields filled with what the book is about rather than with what readers type. Discovery is a matching problem, not a quality one. We work through these so categories are chosen for where the book's actual readers browse rather than for where it most accurately belongs, since accuracy in a category nobody visits is worse than approximation in one they do; so a smaller category is preferred where the book can rank in it, because visibility in a list of two hundred beats invisibility in a list of forty thousand; so keywords are phrases a reader would type rather than themes the author would name, given that "grief" is a theme and "small town mystery series" is a search; so no slot is wasted on the author's name, the title or anything the retailer already indexes; so the subtitle and series fields are used deliberately, as these are searchable in ways the description is not; so the reader-facing promise in the first line of the description matches the category it sits in, since a mismatch there is why a browsing reader bounces; so the comparable titles that shape the recommendation engine are considered in the wording; and so every field is reviewed again after three months against what actually sold. Metadata written this way puts the book in front of people.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished manuscripts, sales figures and advertising data. We are editors rather than publishers, retailers or marketing advisers, and we offer no view on retailer systems, categories or sales. What we can do is put the words readers type into the fields that matter.