Essential Edits has also developed a number of approaches to help keep costs down. For example, rather than contract for the entire project, clients often find it helpful to pay for a few chapters at a time, so that they can apply what they learned from that initial edit to the subsequent manuscript themselves, rather than pay for the editor to keep making the same changes or comments over and over.

Long answer: Essential Edits can give you an objective appraisal of the commercial potential of your novel or book; in fact, we insist on doing a sample edit before taking your contract. If there is little or no chance of your book earning back your investment in editing, Essential Edits will tell you.

Some clients choose to go ahead with editing anyway for reasons of self-fulfillment; to produce a book they can be proud of to distribute to family or friends; to write for a niche market they know is not large enough to be commercial, but is nevertheless important; or because they view the editing process as a personalized writing course (in which the instructor uses their own practice novel as the example), in the hopes of honing their writing skills for future projects.

Essential Edits can make your book better; we cannot make a publisher or consumers buy it.

Download the free Essential Edits guide, Writing Strategies for Theses and Dissertations to understand why writing a thesis or book is so difficult, and suggestions that might help.

Occasionally, where a supervisor sees a need for improved written expression but is not comfortable with providing that instruction themselves, they may seek the assistance of the Senior Academic Editor at Essential Edits to provide specific tutoring as part of the student's learning process. Such tutoring consists of identifying strengths and weaknesses in the student's writing to help the student develop the meta-skills necessary for rapid improvement. Here the emphasis goes beyond editing the current manuscript to providing coaching for life-long improvement in written communication. Because the Senior Academic editor has over twenty-five years experience as a researcher and thesis supervisor, he is able to provide ethical substantive input concerning written expression as if he were a member of the thesis committee. This can only occur with the knowledge and approval of the thesis supervisor and the thesis committee; that is, the student must sign a contract, and obtain the supervisor's signature on the appropriate forms provided by Essential Edits.

If one is writing a thesis or dissertation, one's supervisor and/or committee provide quality control, but one may still wish to engage an editor to identify those tiny mistakes that are invisible to the author: doubled "the the"s for example, or minor typos, or that one still has the citation for Harold Garfinkle in one's references even though one has cut the paragraph that referred to Harold Garfinkle in the text (and the reference therefore has to go). These sorts of errors are both trivial and inevitable, so although it is important to identify and eliminate these annoying blips, they are not considered significant and can be delegated to a professional proofreader or copy editor. In my own case, for example, after carefully proofreading every line of my Master's thesis to ensure it was perfect, I hired a professional proofreader who found hundreds of additional typos. I was shocked at how many tiny little errors had crept past my meticulous review (and that of my supervisor and committee) but it is almost impossible for authors to catch their own typos or formatting errors.