Our editorial services focus on a specific piece of writing, and not on the author's habits, platform, or publication strategies. You can simply ask us to do a brief, straightforward job for you or retain a Wordsmith Associate as your editor over a longer term (completion of your book manuscript or thesis or dissertation, for example).
We provide every level of editorial service:
Manuscript ProCritique
One of our pros will give you a professional assessment of your early-stage manuscript and offer suggestions, feedback, and clarity on how to move forward in your writing. This is often the first step before we do a full developmental critique.
$199
Full Developmental Critique
One of our pros will read your entire manuscript and give you a comprehensive assessment of its strengths and weaknesses, things to develop, and, together with you, develop a revision strategy.
$0.01 per word
Developmental Editing
An overall critique and section-by-section feedback concerning voice, mood, style, structure, story logic, characterization, rhetorical impact, etc. Focuses on the coherence and strength of the whole. You’ll see more comments than corrections.
$75 per hour
Copyediting
Focuses on paragraphs, sentences, and word choice, to refine style, grammar, syntax, and genre conventions. You’ll see lots of corrections but plenty of comments too, especially in the form of clarification questions and requests for specific revisions.
$65 per hour
Proofreading
Focuses on punctuation, spacing, formatting, and combing out every last error. No margin comments unless absolutely necessary to clarify something.
$55 per hour
Formatting
Traditional publishers, KDP, Smashwords, letterpresses, and custom offset book printers all require different document formats in order to accept your work for publication or printing. We can do this for you too.
$50 per hour
How do I know how many hours to pay for?
If you're buying a block of hours as a gift for a student, four hours seems to be a good-sized chunk. Ten hours will last a whole quarter or semester, for most students. General-purpose prepaid hours are not refundable, but they are transferable to others, and they do not expire.
If you're pre-paying for a project, schedule a free initial consultation. We'll give you a time estimate, and if you pre-pay for your quoted hours at our 10% discounted rate, we'll apply the same 10% discount to any remaining hours we need to bill you for when the editing is complete. If your project takes less time than quoted, we'll refund you any amount overpaid.