Basic Manuscript Reading
We’ll read your manuscript and tell you whether we think it’s ready to submit to agents and publishers; if not, we’ll examine your work and relay what we think needs improvement.

Manuscript Editing
Before we edit your manuscript, we’ll discuss your needs. We can line-edit for grammar, spelling, and punctuation to assure that agents and acquisitions editors will see your words, not your typos; we can do our editing on a printed manuscript or in Microsoft Word. Or, we can read your manuscript, editing for style, plot, and character development, and write you a two-page edit letter telling you what we think you could improve upon before sending it to agents. And naturally, we can edit for all the above elements.

Query Letter 101 and Query Letter Editing
After getting familiar with your manuscript, we’ll sit down with you and help you write and edit the best query letter possible. We’ll walk you through what you should highlight in your query letter, and once you write it (after all, you want your voice to come through), we’ll help you edit it so it sparkles.

Agent Selection
Finding an agent is tough: who should you pitch? Should you call them? Should you e-mail them? What do you do if you mail them a query and never hear back? Who is accepting new clients? Should you send a query letter for the slush pile in the hopes that agents at William Morris and Creative Artists Agency will be dazzled by it? Or should you bypass the agents and go right to the editors themselves? We’ll sit down with you and your manuscript and discuss your project, and give you the advice that we think will land your book with the right person. We will compile a list of agents and editors who have pursued projects like yours, so all you’ll have to do is lick your envelopes closed. We’ll keep a dialog going with you as you hear back from agents, and help you turn the rejections into future acceptances.

Full Fiction Services
In a longer-term partnership with you, we’ll give you all our services (both a line edit and a content edit, query letter writing and editing, and agent selection) for fictional book preparation. Plus, we’ll arm you with a fact sheet of the blogs, books, and web-sites that you should know about to get ahead in publishing. We’ll serve as your first editor and your personal coaches.

Short Fiction and Poetry Publication Preparation
Whether you want to start sending out a few poems to literary magazines or you have a stack of finished poems that you want to turn into a chapbook, we’re here to help you find success with publishing your poetry and prose. We can create a specific plan for you to achieve success with being published in literary magazines, showing you which literary magazines are the best to break into, how to format your poems to be submitted, and how to keep tabs on your submitted poems. We can also edit your poems for style, content, structure, and spelling.

If you’re ready to move on to the next phase and want to publish a chapbook or book of poetry, we can help you edit your poems, assemble your manuscript, pick out the best presses to submit to, and stay on top of responses and returned manuscripts—and celebrate your future publication! In a longer-term partnership, we can also recommend which conferences and workshops are the best for working on your poetry and prose and we can help you work on your applications.