Nonfiction encompasses many categories and genres. It is fundamentally different from fiction. Fictitious stories are made up. Writers don’t have to stick to facts or formulas, although it’s Important to keep even science fiction and fantasy novels within the realm of possibility. Fictional stories need to be plausible, but nonfiction books must be accurate and organized.
At Book Magic, we examine your nonfiction manuscripts for structure. We want to ensure that the Table of Contents is organized and the topics you’ve chosen to discuss appear in the correct order. Does everything make sense sequentially? Does it flow? Do you have enough about one topic and not too much about another? We review all this when we evaluate nonfiction.
We also ensure that you don’t have excessive repetition so that a topic that you’ve covered in Chapter 3 doesn’t pop up again in an almost identical fashion in Chapter 13. We ask ourselves if you’re using the correct vocabulary and tone for your audience and look for inconsistencies in your message or parts of the manuscript that may make sense to you but might confuse the reader. We check hyperlinks to ensure you have not cited a broken or out-of-date website, and we review your reference section.
Our editors look for wordiness; perhaps you have used three paragraphs to express something you could have said in ten words. Or maybe you went off on a tangent and put something in Chapter 7 that belonged in Chapter 4. Perhaps your nonfiction manuscript started well and held the reader’s attention, but halfway through, our editors began to lose interest. We bring these issues to your attention, and then we suggest solutions. We will never critique a manuscript without providing a potential fix; everything we say and do is meant to make your manuscript better. Many people are nervous about turning over an unread manuscript to a stranger. Believe me, many of us here at Book Magic are authors, and we are sensitive. We treat every manuscript as if it were our own, and we give you the best feedback in the most kind, helpful, and constructive manner. Our only goal is to help you and improve your manuscript.
Even if your manuscript is already good, you could benefit from an evaluation, a second pair of eyes: somebody objective reviewing your material. After writing for months and sometimes years, many authors can no longer see the forest for the trees. They lose objectivity. We have that objectivity because we’ve never seen your manuscript. It’s all new to us, but the evaluation process is something we have refined over the decades.
We are also trained in plain language. We can highlight and delete many unnecessary filler words to help clarify and polish your text. Your readers will appreciate that!
Manuscript evaluations for nonfiction contain multiple comments in the margins where our editors have posed questions or made suggestions for change. This way, you are in control. You decide which of our recommendations to implement and which to dismiss. Ultimately, having a manuscript evaluated before proofreading or copyediting dramatically increases your chances of producing a professional, polished product for publication.
Evaluations are 1.5 cents per word.
