All Things Manuscript

Manuscript Assessment

Officina offers general assessments of an author’s work based on the full reading of a manuscript. In an effort to keep the author’s costs down, this is conceived as a ‘first impression’ reading rather than anything more detailed. While authors should not necessarily expect a sustained chapter-by-chapter analysis, our recommendations should include, where applicable, some reordering of chapters, the reworking of introductory and concluding chapters and an overview of any stylistic quirks that we feel may get in the way of a reader’s understanding and appreciation. For fiction specifically, there may be times when we advise on whether or not the narrative standpoint is effective and how new characters are introduced. For the price of this service, please see the Officina Rate Card.

Assessment often goes hand in hand with our Developmental Editing service, and we offer a discount (see our Rate Card for the exact amount) to those authors who choose to take up both services.

We expect to be extending our assessment services to include genre-specific reading in the near future. Watch this space!

Manuscript Preparation

It’s likely that the main use of our manuscript preparation service will be to turn a ‘hard-copy’ (print-only) manuscript into a digitial one. However, there are many other reasons why an author might want to use this service: extracting text and images from an existing pdf, for instance, or even cleaning up a document already written in Microsoft Word so that it can be submitted to a publisher or other institution.

These various types of source will require very different treatment, from the multi-stage complexity of turning a printed artefact into an electronic manuscript to the comparatively straightforward reformatting of a Word file. In addition, the type of manuscript, from simple novel to complex coffee-table book, will have an effect on the work involved. See our Rate Card to find out how these different factors are broken down.

In every case, the resulting document will be in Microsoft Word, with appropriate paragraph styles applied throughout.