email: sjgansen@gmail.com
Editorial Assessment
An editorial assessment is an extremely valuable first overview of your manuscript by a professional editor. Your editor will read through the entire manuscript and provide thoughtful, in-depth feedback concerning elements such as plot, characterization, structure, consistency and style. Feedback from an editorial assessment can lead to significant changes to your manuscript. The assessment will identify your book’s strengths and weaknesses, and help you devise a revision strategy that dramatically improves the execution of your idea.
What it looks like
Here is a small representative sampling from an actual 15-page editorial assessment I performed, with information redacted for client confidentiality.
Each report is 100% personalized to you and your manuscript.
When should I seek an editorial assessment?
An editorial assessment can be useful at several stages in the writing process. Some writers may seek this deep-level feedback once the first draft is completed. Others might solicit an assessment after the manuscript has been through several rounds of beta reading or even professional editing; an assessment provides the kind of careful reading that leads to better theming, nuance, characterization and structure.
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A manuscript assessment can even be valuable if you have already self-published a book. With the ease of re-publishing new editions of ebooks, authors are able to remove a book that isn’t selling well or is being badly received. An editorial assessment can address specific areas where you’ve received critical feedback. But unlike the average Amazon review, an assessment won’t just point out what’s not working; it will help you devise exactly how to fix it. This advice is especially useful because it is specific and objective: it provides you with feedback that casual readers cannot provide.
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An editorial assessment can also help you determine if your work is ready for query. The assessment, especially when paired with a query letter review, can help bring needed polish to your querying package before you start contacting agents.
Do I really need an editorial assessment or can I skip directly to a full content edit?
Some manuscripts aren’t ready for the line-level involvement of content editing. If big pieces of your manuscript are apt to change — if there are major plot points that need to be addressed, or if there are a few darlings to kill off — an editorial assessment of your manuscript is a better choice.
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An editorial assessment can also save you time and money for when you move on to developmental editing and proofreading. If you ask an editor to spend time on a full content edit of a manuscript that hasn’t yet had an editorial assessment, much more time will need to be spent on structural changes that could have been sorted out at an earlier stage.
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Seek an editorial assessment ahead of other editing if you want to understand the structural strengths and weaknesses in your manuscript. If you address those, working with an editor on a content edit or copy edit afterwards should be much less time consuming for the editor and more affordable to you.
Pricing
The form below provides estimates based on project size. Prices are subject to change based on additional details about your project. Think of this form as a starting point for a dialogue as we get introduced and develop clear expectations ahead of our first collaboration as author and editor.
