Accuracy Reading: Important Information
Areas of Expertise
My comfortable areas are:
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LGBTQIA+ characters/ issues
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Neurodivergent characters/ issues
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Mental illness, self harm and suicide
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Physical and mental disabilities
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Religious trauma
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Manipulation, gaslighting and coercion
Please note that while I am comfortable with and do have experience doing reads for sexual abuse (SA and CSA), I have limited personal experience. I also identify as asexual and am uncomfortable critically reading levels of intimacy which might be termed or “smut”.
Please understand that I will not publicly disclose my own diagnoses, although I do speak about them sometimes on my Instagram/ “Bookstagram” platform. If you would like to know if I have personal experience or understanding of a certain diagnosis, feel free to contact me and we can talk further.
Is your manuscript ready for an accuracy reader?
I take manuscripts which have been through several rounds of self-edits and are well and truly in the Beta stages, either before or after developmental edits (although after might save you time and money).
What does this mean in practice? Well, the first stages are known as Alpha edits, where you have yet to share your work with anyone, or only a few close and trusted people have laid eyes over it for basic advice. It may include notes interspersed throughout for yourself or research notes to flesh out later on. After the manuscript is complete, you continue to do a few rounds of edits yourself.
Tip: you can spot your mistakes easier if you view your manuscript in various formats - change things like font, size, spacing, format between each edit round to help you spot things your brain skipped over last round.
Once you believe the manuscript is polished enough to be showing clear character personalities, motivations, movements, etc., that’s when it moves into Beta stages and is ready to be sent out to outside eyes with a little more experience. This is the stage where I come in.
In short, this saves us both time due to the fact that wording and plot points are ever-shifting during the Alpha stages, and more stagnant towards the end where most changes become grammatical, punctuational, and structural, ready to be formatted. If the manuscript I review is seen too early, all my work is likely to be erased in the natural progression of edits. However, if the phrasing and expression of themes I’m working on is more polished, I’m better able to be of help and worth your money.
Click the PDF icon to view an easy-to-understand flowchart graphic I've created to illustrate the Alpha, Beta, and final steps to publishing!
Cancellations
There is generally only one reason I will ever cease work on your manuscript (in my experience) and that is if the quality of work is not in line with a Beta-stage manuscript. This means more than just spelling issues, but issues so deep that I cannot make sense of the core parts of your manuscript and require more core storyline edits on your part before an editor could work with it.
For example, I had to cancel one which was a historical fiction with terminology and objects that were several centuries too advanced, and a magic system which didn't make sense to me as a reader and was directly at odds with itself. The issues ran so deep that I had to stop and fact check at least once per paragraph, and couldn’t follow the storyline in its simplest form. I finished up at the halfway mark of their manuscript, and gave the author constructive feedback, including the next steps in their process, things to focus their research on, and sent some resources for their genre such as how to refine their magic system and writing historical fiction.
If this does eventuate, I will keep the 50% deposit already paid and cancel the remainder. Similarly, if you cancel and decide not to work with me after paying the 50% deposit, I will keep that portion.