Trade Book Publishers Editing and Proofreading Services

A trade publisher's decisions are made in meetings and executed in documents, and the document that determines a book's commercial life is not the one anyone outside the building has heard of. Long before a reader sees a jacket, a sales rep has ninety seconds to sell the title into a chain buyer's list from a tip sheet someone wrote in an afternoon. If that ninety seconds does not land, the print run falls, the marketing spend follows it, and the book's fate is largely settled before publication.

We edit what trade publishers produce — jacket and cover copy, catalogue and seasonal listing copy, tip sheets and sales handles for reps, acquisition and profit-and-loss supporting documents, editorial and marketing memos, author questionnaires and their outputs, publicity pitches and press releases, submission and rights material for fairs and co-editions, series and imprint positioning documents, metadata including categories, comparative titles and keywords, blurb and endorsement solicitation letters, author guidance for the publication process, and prize submission and awards material. Our editors work in the register of your list, since a literary imprint's catalogue copy and a commercial one's are different documents.

The tip sheet is the highest-leverage document nobody optimises. A rep carrying forty titles into a buyer meeting needs one sentence that makes this book placeable — the handle — followed by the two or three facts a buyer weighs: who the reader is, what it sits next to on the table, what the publisher is doing to support it, and what the comparable title actually sold. We write these so the handle is a claim about the book's position rather than a description of its plot, since a buyer decides on category and comparison rather than on story; so comparative titles are recent, at a plausible scale and drawn from the buyer's own shelves rather than from the bestseller list; so the marketing commitment is stated in specifics the rep can quote rather than as "major campaign"; and so anything genuinely distinctive about the author's reach is quantified. A handle that survives being repeated by a rep who has not read the book is the test, and most tip sheets fail it because they were written by someone who loves the book.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unannounced acquisitions, commercial terms and material under embargo. We are editors rather than sales or marketing professionals and offer no view on positioning, print run or commercial prospects. What we can do is make the copy sharp and consistent from acquisition memo through to jacket.