Religious Publishers Editing and Proofreading Services

Religious publishing operates under editorial constraints that most of the trade never encounters. Sacred texts carry conventions about quotation, capitalisation and permitted alteration that vary by tradition and by translation. Readers hold the material to a standard of care they do not apply to other books, and they notice. A publisher serving several traditions, or one tradition with internal disagreement, is making editorial decisions on every page that will be read as theological positions whether or not they were intended as any.

We edit what religious and theological publishers produce — trade and academic titles across traditions, devotional and study material, commentary and reference works, scripture quotation and its permission requirements, liturgical and worship resources, curriculum and religious education material, denominational and institutional publications, translated and multilingual editions, children's and family religious titles, apologetics and popular theology, memoir and testimony, journals and periodicals, and catalogue and marketing copy for religious retail and institutional markets. Our editors work to your tradition's conventions and to your house position, and we do not substitute our own.

Scripture quotation is where a publisher either looks careful or does not, and the failures are visible to exactly the readers who matter most. A single title may quote from three translations without saying so, capitalise divine pronouns in one chapter and not the next, alter a quotation silently to fit the surrounding sentence, or exceed the word limit a translation's licence permits without seeking permission. We work on these so the translation is identified at first use and any change of translation is signalled and justified; so the house convention on capitalisation, on the divine name, on brackets for interpolated words and on ellipsis within quotations is applied consistently across a title and across a list; so quotations are checked against the edition cited rather than against memory or a website; and so the permissions position is tracked as the manuscript grows, since the copyright notice a translation requires and the cumulative word limit it permits are both easy to breach without noticing. This is unglamorous work and it is what readers in this market use to judge whether a publisher is serious.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished manuscripts and material under denominational review. We are editors rather than theologians or clergy, and we offer no view on doctrine, interpretation or any theological question. What we can do is make the text consistent, the quotations accurate and the conventions applied the way your tradition applies them.