Why Commissioning a Manuscript Critique May be Better Than Getting Your Book Edited:

Most writers hire an editor without fully understanding what types of editing there are. A copy-edit, developmental edit, or line edit can cost thousands of dollars, and will typically leave the writer with a neat, typo-free stack of unpublishable paper. In all truth, if your manuscript is publishable, somebody else will pay for things like copy-editing. The publishing company will edit the work. That’s what they are there for.

Getting a manuscript critique will cost a lot less than a full edit and will diagnose the issues that are keeping your narrative from having its maximum impact. From the first page, you want publishers and agents to be captivated, then hold their attention until the end. Copy-editing a poorly structured story is like painting a condemned building.

A manuscript critique–or a manuscript assessment or manuscript appraisal–addresses questions of story, character, pacing, and much more⎯all the elements of craft agents and publishers expect to see.  Moreover, a proper manuscript critique will offer creative solutions and even assess its commercial prospects.

If you are self-publishing and totally sure you’ve made your book the best it can be, then sure, getting the fully loaded package makes sense. But most new writers spend money on small grammar fixes before addressing the real structural issues in their projects. What happens to that costly edit when you need to rewrite paragraphs, if not whole chapters?

Just something to think about. If you are interested in my manuscript critique rates, have a look here.

– Matt