Book Packagers Editing and Proofreading Services

Book packagers deliver finished books to publishers who do not want to make them, which puts the packager in the unusual position of managing an editorial process for someone else's list while carrying the production risk themselves. The margin lives in whether the specification was tight enough. Every element left to be agreed later — the extent, the illustration count, how many rounds of author revision are included, who pays when the publisher changes the trim size in week nine — is money the packager will spend and may not recover.

We edit what packagers and their partners produce — project specifications and delivery schedules, pitches and proposals to publishers, contributor and author briefs, work-for-hire and contributor agreements, illustration and photography briefs, series style guides and template documentation, editorial and production schedules, copyediting and proofreading briefs for freelancers, permissions and clearance logs, quality standards and handover checklists, co-edition and foreign language partner documentation, and print specification and supplier correspondence. Our editors check that a brief tells a contributor everything they need and that the specification says who bears the cost of each foreseeable change.

The contributor brief is the document that determines whether a packaged book comes in on schedule, and its weakness is always the same: it describes the book rather than the assignment. A writer commissioned for eight spreads of a children's reference title needs to know the exact word count per spread, the reading age with a named measure, the vocabulary constraints, what the illustration will show so the text does not duplicate it, the house conventions on numerals and measurements, the number of revision rounds included in the fee, and the date after which changes are chargeable. We write briefs that carry all of that on one page, with an approved sample spread attached, because a sample answers more questions than a page of guidance. Contributors delivering against a brief like this need one revision round rather than three, which is the entire difference between a profitable title and a break-even one.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unannounced titles, publisher agreements and contributor terms. We are editors rather than agents, lawyers or production managers, and we offer no view on commercial terms or rights. What we can do is make specifications precise and briefs complete, and we are used to working across the several style sheets a packager runs simultaneously.