More than just editing

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We incorporate all three editing phases in the first pass

1st Pass. However, and this is important: New writers expect their book to come back from an editor on first pass looking perfect. This may not be the case. The onus is always on the author for final approval of edits. You will rarely receive a “perfect” document ready to offer to a top publishing house on the first pass. There may be the occasional misplaced comma or backwards quotation mark or, God forbid, a dratted spelling mistake. This is why Best Book Editors recommend taking a second, half-price edit. On the first pass, we give our solemn promise that your book will be significantly better than when it came to us. After the first pass, we would expect your book to be at least 99% perfect. When we say there will be errors, we don’t mean that it will be littered, we mean that there may be the occasional thing. As you accept or reject our track-changed suggestions it may leave words with double spaces or no spaces. First pass will be good, but there may still be errors. A book can always be improved. Edit 1 makes it clean. Edit 2 makes it golden.

2nd Pass. This is entirely up to you with no pressure to book your work back in with Best Book Editors.  However, the 2nd Pass is where we really wipe its nose and shine its shoes. You have done your edit after 1st Pass. All the red crossing out from tracked changes is gone and we have a cleaner document to be able to see what’s what. I look closely at spelling, punctuation and grammar. Sometimes a book needs a dozen edits to make it “perfect.” But after 2nd Pass, it will be clean and presentable and ready for a final run-through of your own.

Some clients want to come back to us for 3rd Pass. We offer a third pass at half of the full price plus a further £25.00 saving. This is generally not necessary, and I only recommend it if significant changes have been made to the books after 2nd Pass.

Our contract is complete when we send back your two documents. This paragraph applies to both first and second pass. One document will have track-changes made, where all suggestions can be seen and accepted or rejected. The other is a clean copy with all changes accepted and comment boxes removed. This document goes through 3 edits, one with tracked changes. Then, after the changes are removed, we run through spelling/grammar/punctuation etc. This one removes extra spaces left as a consequence of the tracked changes and adds them where needed. And, then we give the document a final, third edit to see that it is clean and ready to return. We advise working from this document and using the tracked-changed doc as a reference to put back anything you don’t agree with.

At any point, we are available to speak to in person, and we like to build a long-term working relationship with our clients. We’ve had some of them for many years and have had thirteen books from one author. We will do anything we can to help and promote your work on an ongoing basis.