What is this book?
Who is it for?
Editing, positioning, and the strategic thinking in between.
Most manuscripts are not failing on craft. They are failing to say what they are, to someone who has already decided to stop reading.
Not the logline you settled for. What it is actually doing on the page, and where it sits among the books it will share a shelf with.
The reader who will finish it and hand it to someone else. Name them, and the cover, the pitch and the plan write themselves.
A professional read of your opening chapters — the most consequential stretch of any manuscript, and the one you can no longer see clearly.
Not a line edit. Not a template. A written assessment, in seven days.
Longer engagements open once the first audits are through. If one is where your book is headed, say so and I will keep you first in line.
Structural work on the whole manuscript — shape, pace, and where the book loses its reader.
Genre, comparable titles, and the language that places the book — on a cover, in a pitch, in a bio. Design and author branding, optional.
What to do next and in what order: how the book reaches the readers it was written for. Social media marketing plan, optional.
Design, photography and social are handled by people who do only that — brought in when a book needs them, briefed and managed here. You keep one point of contact.
I came up reading manuscripts, and working with authors on how their books meet readers.
There are millions of manuscripts, and only a fraction published. What is usually missing is not talent — it is legibility. That is a solvable problem, and another round of line edits rarely solves it.
So stet is deliberately in-between: part editor, part strategist. Small on purpose — a handful of books at a time, each read properly, by someone who will say the inconvenient thing while it is still useful.
Where the book is, and what you are hoping to do next. I answer everything myself, usually within two days.