The Concierge (Blog)

People like to pretend that you can write a book and make passive income from it. You can’t. If you write a book and stick it up on Amazon and never do anything to promote or market it, you’re not going to sell any copies. Okay, you might sell three or four from people who…

As developmental editors, our goal is to help authors figure out how to revise their stories to make them better. To do this, we are essentially comparing the work in front of us to some ideal in our heads. That ideal should not be “how I would have written this” but should be instead an…

I’m often asked, “For beginning editors, do you recommend doing some edits for free to get a start?” To answer, I want to distinguish between a beginning editor who has no idea what they’re doing and needs to learn and a beginning editor who knows what they’re doing but doesn’t have a lot in the…

Setting expectations from the start helps keep the project you’re doing from becoming never-ending. If you agree to do one round of editing, that does not also include three hundred hours of personal coaching while the author is trying to finish the revision. So, you have to define the project parameters clearly. If one round…

Readers like to see character change, even if the change is small, and even if the change is negative. Often a character will be just the same at the start of the story as at the finish, and generally this is less satisfying to the reader than when a character is confronted with the need…

To help your author develop strong GMC, try to identify the goal and motivation for each important character throughout the arc of the story. You’ll often find that goal-motivation is clear for only some of the characters or for only part of the story. Conflict is usually sharpest and most compelling when all of the…

In discussing the editing of fiction, we’re trying to make explicit what narrative competence is—that is, what makes a story a good story. At the most basic is the plot. And plot, at its most basic, is simply the story of change. There is an initial situation, some sort of challenge or reversal to that…

Many freelance editors are interested in getting editorial work from book publishers and packagers, and often they’re so focused on landing the client that they don’t think about setting expectations for their work. Then the first project is assigned, and they have less time than they normally have with indie authors, they’re asked to sit…