Children’s Book Publishers Editing and Proofreading Services

Children's books are bought by adults, approved by gatekeepers, and judged by a four-year-old who will demand the same one two hundred times or never again. The text has to work read aloud by a tired parent at bedtime, survive a teacher reading it to thirty children, satisfy a librarian's collection criteria, and hold up to a child who now knows it by heart and notices every rhythm you got wrong. Very few kinds of writing are re-read at that intensity.

We edit what children's publishers and authors produce — picture book texts and read-aloud manuscripts, early reader and levelled reading material, chapter books and middle grade fiction, young adult manuscripts, non-fiction for children across age bands, series bibles and character continuity documents, illustration briefs and art notes, back matter including glossaries and further reading, teaching notes and classroom resources for schools, catalogue and jacket copy, submission guidelines for authors and illustrators, and translated and co-edition text fitted to existing artwork. Our editors work to the reading level and vocabulary constraints you use, and we know that a manuscript for six-year-olds is not a shortened manuscript for ten-year-olds.

The read-aloud line is the thing a picture book lives or dies on, and it is almost impossible to assess silently. Text that scans on the page can trip a reader consistently at the same point — a stress that lands wrong, two adjacent hard consonants, a sentence whose meaning only resolves at the last word so the reader's intonation is wrong for the whole line. Children notice and correct you. We work on manuscripts by reading them aloud, marking every place the voice stumbles, and fixing the rhythm rather than the grammar, because the grammar is usually fine. We check that page turns fall where the tension is, since the turn is the picture book's only structural device; that any repeated refrain is genuinely identical, because a child will catch a variation; and that the text leaves the illustration something to do rather than describing what the reader can already see. These are small edits with a disproportionate effect on whether a book gets read twice.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished manuscripts, illustration roughs and material under submission. We are editors rather than literacy specialists, and we offer no view on a title's suitability for any curriculum or reading scheme. What we can do is make the text work aloud, hold together across a series, and sit properly alongside the pictures.