Magazines Editing and Proofreading Services

A magazine is a machine for turning commissions into pages on a fixed date. The features editor is running fifteen pieces at different stages, the art department needs to know the extent before the copy exists, and a writer who delivers 4,000 words for a 2,200-word slot has not been generous — they have created a problem that someone else will solve badly at eleven at night. Most of what goes wrong in magazine production is set at the commissioning stage, in an email nobody thought of as a document.

We edit what magazines and their contributors produce — commissioning briefs and contributor agreements, feature and news copy, standfirsts, headlines, subheadings and pull quotes, captions and picture desk copy, front-of-book and back-of-book sections, columns and opinion pieces, review copy across categories, letters pages and reader correspondence, editorial style guides and house conventions, contributor guidelines and rate cards, flatplans and issue planning documentation, media packs and advertiser-facing material, and sponsored content with its labelling. Our editors work to your house style and to the extent the flatplan allows rather than to the length the copy wants to be.

The commissioning brief is the highest-leverage document in the whole operation and is routinely three lines in an email. A writer needs the exact word count, the deadline with the time, the angle the editor has already sold to the editorial meeting, who must be interviewed and who has already been approached, what the piece is not about, whether the magazine has run something adjacent recently, the fee, the kill fee, and what happens to the rights. We write briefs carrying all of that in a form the writer can work from and the editor can point back to, because the alternative — discovering at delivery that the writer wrote a different piece — costs a rewrite, a delayed flatplan and a contributor who feels badly used. We pay particular attention to the angle, since "a piece about the housing crisis" and "why the people who fixed this in Vienna say we are copying the wrong part" are different commissions, and only the second one can be delivered.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished copy, contributor terms and material under embargo. We are editors rather than lawyers and offer no view on defamation, privacy or contract risk. What we can do is make briefs complete, copy fit the space, and the magazine sound like itself across a large and changing cast of freelancers.