Self-Published Authors Editing and Proofreading Services

A self-published author is doing every job a publishing house distributes across a dozen people, usually alone, usually while working. The writing is the part they wanted to do. The rest — the description, the categories, the keywords, the series page, the sample that readers actually judge — is done last, quickly, by someone who has been living inside the book for two years and has entirely lost the ability to see it from outside. That gap between the book and its presentation is where most self-published titles are lost.

We edit what independent authors produce — manuscripts across genres, book descriptions and blurbs, series descriptions and reading order pages, author biographies and about pages, sample chapters and the opening pages readers preview, front and back matter including author notes and calls to action, newsletter sign-up copy and reader magnets, advertising copy for retailer and social platforms, metadata including categories, keywords and comparative positioning, review request and street team correspondence, cover brief documentation for designers, query and submission material where an author is also approaching agents, and website and landing page copy. Our editors work in the conventions of your genre, which are specific and which readers use to decide.

The book description is the most consequential 150 words an independent author writes and is almost always the worst thing on the page. Authors summarise: they explain the setup, introduce three characters, describe the world, and gesture at what is at stake, producing a paragraph that reads like a synopsis and sells nothing. Genre readers are not looking for a summary; they are checking whether this book delivers the specific experience they came for. We rewrite descriptions so the first line establishes the hook and the register simultaneously, so exactly one character is named, so the central problem is stated as a problem rather than as a plot summary, so the genre's own signals are present because a reader scanning for them will not find them under literary phrasing, and so the last line is a question or a threat rather than a summary. We also fix the categories and keywords, since a well-written description in the wrong category is read by nobody.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished manuscripts and material under submission. We are editors rather than agents, marketers or publishing consultants, and we offer no view on commercial prospects, pricing or platform strategy. What we can do is make the book better and the presentation stop working against it.