Manuscript Assessment Services Editing and Proofreading Services

A manuscript assessment is a report about someone's book, written for them, at a moment when they have run out of ability to see it themselves. The author has usually finished several drafts, been rejected somewhere, and paid for this. What they need is an accurate account of what the book is doing and where it is failing, delivered in a way that leaves them able to work — and those two requirements pull against each other constantly, which is why so many assessments are either unusably kind or useless in the other direction.

We edit what assessment services, editorial consultants and reading agencies produce — manuscript assessment and critique reports, structural and developmental reports, synopsis and opening chapter appraisals, competition and prize reading reports, report templates and house frameworks, reader guidelines and training material, calibration material to keep multiple readers consistent, service descriptions and pricing pages, client briefing questionnaires, sample reports used in marketing, follow-up and revision guidance for clients, and correspondence handling disagreement with a report. Our editors are practitioners and understand that the report's job is to produce a better next draft, not to demonstrate the reader's discernment.

The report's structure determines whether the author can act on it. A document that works through the manuscript chapter by chapter, noting problems as they arise, buries the two or three structural issues that actually matter under forty local observations — and an author reading it will fix the local ones, because they are actionable, and leave the book broken. We build reports so the opening states what the book is and what is working, specifically enough to be believed rather than as a courtesy; then names the central problem in one paragraph, with the evidence; then works through no more than three or four major issues, each with what is happening, why it matters to a reader, and one or two concrete routes forward without prescribing a solution; then puts everything local in an appendix where it belongs. We also state plainly what the report is not assessing, and where the reader's judgement is a matter of taste rather than craft. Authors who receive this structure revise the right things.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including client manuscripts and reports. We are editors rather than agents or acquiring editors, and we offer no view on whether any manuscript is publishable or saleable. What we can do is make your reports usable, consistent between readers, and honest without being discouraging.