Services
Book Coaching, Editing, and Specialties
Services include book coaching and copyediting. We offer book coaching at any stage of writing, but find it’s most effective early on. If you have a limited budget, we recommend working with a coach on the blueprint for your book, including the electricity (the juice that Lisa Cron, in Story Genius, calls the third rail)—how your protagonist makes sense of what’s happening to overcome the problems that the plot poses.
Copyediting services are rated by level of effort. The charge is per word at one of these levels: light, moderate, or heavy.
• Light edits: includes formatting, mechanical consistency, basic querying, style sheet—three cents per word.
• Moderate edits: includes previous items, plus logic and content queries—five cents per word.
• Heavy edits: includes previous items, plus restructuring, recasting of sentences or paragraphs—seven cents per word.
Sample edits of 3–5 pages may be provided on request.
Special Projects:
Legacy Letters, Memoirs, & Eulogies for the Living
We can help you create a moving, memorable gift for your loved ones and friends. These keepsake documents are perfect for minimalists and essentialists. You can give your loved ones a beautiful, print-ready document that shares your stories and values. This gift won’t wear out, get used up, or sit in a closet waiting to be rehomed.
Legacy Letters & Ethical Wills
These are documents that convey values and stories from one generation to the next.
We coach you in the writing and then format the document into a PDF or an eBook, including your photos and images.
Sample from a Legacy Letter
Harry Browne wrote this to his 9-year-old daughter on Christmas, 1966:
I want to give you something that will stay with you for more than a few months or years. I want to give you a gift that might remind you of me every Christmas.
If I could give you just one thing, I’d want it to be a simple truth that took me many years to learn. If you learn it now, it may enrich your life in hundreds of ways. And it may prevent you from facing many problems that have hurt people who have never learned it. The truth is simply this: No one owes you anything.
…
You owe it to yourself to be the best person possible. Because if you are, others will want to be with you, want to provide you with the things you want in exchange for what you’re giving to them. Some people will choose not to be with you for reasons that have nothing to do with you. When that happens, look elsewhere for the relationships you want. Don’t make someone else’s problem your problem.
Once you learn that you must earn the love and respect of others, you’ll never expect the impossible, and you won’t be disappointed. Others don’t have to share their property with you, nor their feelings or thoughts. If they do, it’s because you’ve earned these things. And you have every reason to be proud of the love you receive, your friends’ respect, the property you’ve earned. But don’t ever take them for granted. If you do, you could lose them. They’re not yours by right; you must always earn them.
Source: A Gift for My Daughter
See an example of a short ethical will.
Memoirs
Your story. A memoir is the story of a specific slice of time in your life or the stories that share a specific theme in your life. The magic of memoir is that anyone, at any age, can write a good one, and you can have many memoirs with different themes or time spans. A memoirist reports what happened and what it meant. We work with you to create a manuscript ready for sharing in either a PDF or an eBook.
In addition to the words, we love to work with images and are skilled at photo restoration.
Here’s an example of an essay from a memoir, called After the Rain.
Eulogies for the Living
I regret that I did not share the eulogy for my friend Sam with him when he was alive. I think he would have liked it. Sharing eulogies (good words) with the living makes sense. It might even make the world (or your corner of it) a better place.
Eulogies are usually shorter than ethical wills and memoirs. We work with you to make every word count.
Photo Restoration
Part of making your manuscript special is including photos. See an example of our photo restoration work.
