Line editing
Sentence-level craft—rhythm, clarity, and word choice, line by line—sharpening the prose until it reads unmistakably like you, only better.
When the structure is sound, the work moves down to the sentence. Line editing is where I tune rhythm, cut what’s slack, and make every line carry its weight—without flattening the voice that makes the book yours. This is the service the sample edit shows off: send me a few pages and you’ll see what my hand on your prose looks like.
What do you get?
You get the edit itself: your manuscript in Word with tracked changes, every suggestion visible and every one yours to accept or reject. I’ll tighten the sentence that runs long, vary the paragraph that’s gone samey, and query the word that’s almost right—with a note on why, where the why isn’t obvious. You’ll also get a list of suggested style-sheet entries—the spellings, hyphenations, and coined terms your book has settled on—ready to hand to your copyeditor or proofreader so the choices we made hold all the way to print. What you won’t get is an editorial letter. Big-picture notes belong to a developmental edit, and by this stage your book shouldn’t need them.
Is your book ready for a line edit?
It’s ready when the story work is behind you. Line editing is a sentence-level craft pass, not a fix for story problems—if a plot hole is hiding in chapter twelve, polished prose will only light it better. The developmental work should be done, whether through beta readers or a developmental edit, and the manuscript should be as clean as you can get it, including a run through whatever proofing tools you’re comfortable using. The cleaner the draft, the more of my attention goes where you want it: the rhythm of a paragraph, the almost-right word, the sentence that’s correct and still doesn’t sound like you.
How does it work?
It starts with the sample edit—you send a few pages, and I edit them the way I’d edit the book. That protects us both: you see what my hand does to your prose, and I see whether the manuscript is ready for this stage. If we both agree it’s a fit, we schedule the full line edit. Turnaround runs about two weeks with enough advance notice and four to six weeks without, and fees can be split into multiple payments.
From $0.025/word