Grand Publishers
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Stage two

Edited, not rewritten.

The commonest way to ruin a book is to edit the author out of it. Everything here is a conversation, and nothing changes in your manuscript without you seeing it first.

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The four passes

Different edits
do different jobs.

Worth knowing which you are being quoted for. These words get used interchangeably by people selling them, and they are not interchangeable.

  • Developmental

    The shape of the book. What it opens with, what order it goes in, what is missing and what should go. The biggest changes, and the ones that have to happen first.

  • Line editing

    How it reads, sentence by sentence. Rhythm, clarity, repetition, the paragraph that says the same thing twice. This is where a manuscript starts sounding like a book.

  • Copy-editing

    Grammar, consistency, house style, the fact that your character's eyes were blue in chapter two. Unglamorous and unmistakable when it has been skipped.

  • Proofreading

    The last pass, on the typeset pages, catching what survived everything else and the errors that typesetting itself introduced.

What we will not
do to your book.

An editor's job is to make the book more like itself, not more like everything else. That sounds obvious and it is routinely ignored: a heavily edited manuscript often comes back smoother, flatter and less distinctive than it went in, because the easiest way to fix awkward writing is to make it ordinary.

So the working rule here is that every change is visible and every change is yours to reject. You see tracked changes and a note explaining why, not a clean file with your voice quietly sanded off.

Where authors get it wrong in the other direction

The opposite failure is refusing every edit. If three readers all stumble in the same place, the place is the problem, not the readers. The point of an editor is to be the person who says so before a reviewer does.

Who does it

A person, and you will know their name. You can talk to them. Editing at a distance through an account manager is how the conversation gets lost and how books come back generic.

A hand running a highlighter across a page of a printed manuscript, the stack clipped together.

Every one of these
was edited here.

The catalogue is the only editing portfolio that means anything, because an edit is invisible by design — you cannot show the work, only the book it produced. Open any of them and read a few pages.

Cover of Bipolar Sunset by David SummervilleCover of Frank's Guide to Caring for Bonsai by Frank WeaverCover of The Mystery on Greenfarm Road by Gail SimmonsGrand KidzCover of The CPO & The Wren by Geoffrey SpinksCover of The Complete Guide to Barbering by George BembridgeCover of Grandpa Billy's Book of Life by William H WebsterCover of The Adventures of Bert the Worm by Jade EntwistleGrand KidzCover of Honour Amongst Mercenaries by James Vincent O'DonnellCover of Little Hedgehog and the Moon by Cat RushtonGrand KidzCover of The Fathers in my Life by Louise Wynne JonesCover of Reg Dudley's Camping MemoriesCover of William and the Secrets of the Enchanted Forest by Idris JamesGrand Kidz

Bipolar SunsetDavid Summerville

What our authors say

Authors are hardest on their editors, so this is the section worth reading sceptically. These sit on platforms we do not own and cannot edit.

4.9out of 5Excellent

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Editing
questions.

That is what the assessment is for. Most manuscripts that come to us need developmental work first, and paying for a copy-edit before the structure is settled is money spent twice.

Send us a chapter.

We will tell you which edit it actually needs, which is usually not the one people expect.

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