Manuscript Assessment + Coaching
Manuscript assessment
Your manuscript read and edited through tracked changes and comment boxes with my points summarised in a separate overview document. If you are submitting an early draft, my guidance takes the form of a structural edit. If your draft is in good shape, my guidance takes the form of a line edit.
For two years I was a manuscript assessor and editor for The Do-Not Press in London (which specalised in crime fiction). After moving to Australia I was contracted for manuscript assessment and development for WestWords, Western Sydney’s Literature Development Organisation.
I have now worked on manuscripts on a freelance basis for four years, with three books being published by traditional publishers: Seana Smith’s memoir Going Under (Ventura), Sally Rippin’s non-fiction book Wild Things (Hardie Grant) and Samatha Byres’ novel Dead Ends (UQP).
A competitively priced $1500 for up to 50,000 words, and $100 per 10,000 words thereafter.
I’ll be your writing coach
If your journalism career is starting or stalling, or you don’t know where to begin with your book, perhaps you need to talk strategy. Take advantage of my 20 years of journalism experience and my teaching of first-person writing to fine-tune your pitching, work on article structure and understand more about what editors and publishers want. My writing coaching is via Zoom. $100 for an hour, with an additional $50 for reading up to 3000 word beforehand (optional).
Do you need an editor?
Whether you’re working on a book, a PhD or something else, you might have got to the point where you need another pair of eyes, some grammatical tweaking and some suggestions. I can clean up your copy, restructure for optimum effect, trim it of flab and make it consistent in tone. Alternatively, some clients come to me with just the bare-bones idea of a book, with no idea how to progress it. I can also give you the lay of the land of the publishing industry and talk about your options when it comes to agents, conventional publishing and self-publishing.
I’m happy to discuss projects of any length. I charge $80 per hour for editing if you’re a company or $60 if you’re an individual; or $150 for a 45-minute brainstorming Zoom call, so contact me for an estimate.
