Trade Publications Editing and Proofreading Services

A trade publication is read by people who know the subject better than the writer does and who will notice immediately if a piece has been shaped by an advertiser. That is the whole business model's tension: the readership is small, expert and valuable precisely because it is small and expert, and the revenue comes largely from the companies that readership buys from. A trade title that loses the distinction between editorial and commercial does not lose it gradually — its readers work it out in one issue and stop treating anything in it as information.

We edit what trade, professional and B2B publications produce — news and feature copy for specialist readerships, technical and product coverage, market analysis and sector reports, interview and profile pieces, opinion and expert contributor columns, sponsored content and its labelling, supplement and partner content, awards and ranking methodologies, buyer's guides and product comparisons, event and conference programme copy, media packs and rate cards, editorial policies covering advertiser relationships, contributor guidelines for industry experts who are not writers, and newsletter and digital edition copy. Our editors work in the technical register your readers expect and check that commercial material is labelled where a reader will see it.

The boundary between editorial and commercial is maintained in specific, visible ways or not at all, and trade titles fail at it in small increments. A supplement produced with a sponsor takes the sponsor's framing; a buyer's guide quietly excludes companies that do not advertise; an awards programme charges an entry fee and never publishes its criteria; a contributed column from a vendor's technical director runs without a disclosure because he is genuinely an expert. We work on these so sponsored material is labelled at the top of the piece in the same typeface as the surrounding text rather than in a small line beneath, so any commercial relationship with a named company in an editorial piece is disclosed in the piece, so buyer's guides and rankings publish the inclusion criteria and the methodology before the results, and so contributed pieces carry the author's affiliation prominently enough that a reader assesses the argument accordingly. Titles that do this are read as sources; titles that do not are read as catalogues.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished copy, commercial arrangements and material under embargo. We are editors rather than legal or regulatory advisers and offer no view on advertising disclosure requirements in your jurisdiction. What we can do is make technical copy readable, expert contributions coherent, and the commercial boundary visible.