The Literary Minds of
J. B. Garner
Top Flight Editorial Services For All
Who We Are
JB Associates is a woman-owned, LGBTQIA+-owned, and trans-owned editorial firm focused on providing the best in editing services for all genres and lengths of fiction writing. Between our editors and their decades of combined experience, we’ve edited hundreds of manuscripts, including multiple bestsellers.
Our mission is to work with authors as a team to turn their projects into the best possible versions of themselves. We believe that editing is a conversation, where creative collaboration brings about the best possible results.
Except for grammar. We’re pretty hardcore about that!
To read more about our members, click here to check out our staff bios
What We Do
We provide a wide array of editorial services. From the full editorial process from narrative consultation/developmental editing to proofreading, as well as any subset of that process, we can do it all according to your needs. We have experience with a wide variety of genres and project lengths. However, we do not take non-fiction projects.
We also provide sensitivity reading and editing for projects involving trans femme, lesbian, and polyamorous subjects.
What Do These Terms Mean
The actual editorial process can be very opaque to newer authors and even some experienced ones. So that you know exactly what services you need and what to expect, let’s map out the editorial process by part now.
Narrative Consultation – Also known as a developmental edit, a narrative consultation is an over-arching, top-level report of the project’s strengths, weaknesses, points to fix, and points to enhance. As opposed to involving in-document changes and comments, we deliver a narrative consultation as a separate multi-page report, detailing this top-level feedback. This is the perfect first pass for any project, as it allows the author to fix and refine big issues that may involve extensive rewrites and narrative shuffling. That not only makes subsequent editing passes easier, it also saves the author a lot of future work.
Line Editing – This is what most writers think of as ‘editing.’ During line editing, we’ll go through your manuscript line by line, making direct suggestions to sentence structure, vocabulary, dialogue structure, and so on. These will be shown in your edited manuscript with both tracked changes and marked comments for larger issues. This is also where major continuity edits happen, as we’ll be approaching the manuscript sequentially. It’s possible that there may be several passes of line editing required to fully refine the manuscript based on the number of changes and fixes in the first line editing pass.
Proofreading – The other thing most writers think of when you say ‘editing,’ proofreading is a comprehensive check of the project’s grammar, spelling, and style, nothing else. In general, all proofreading fixes will be made directly to the document unless there are larger issues that slipped through the previous passes, where they’ll be noted with comments.
Sensitivity Read – The ideal choice for an author who wants to create worlds with diverse characters and real representation, but don’t themselves have the lived experiences to do so. We will read your manuscript with a specific eye towards the more diverse elements and characters of the story, then provide a sensitivity report, similar to a narrative consultation, but focused purely on the diversity elements. This will let you know if you represented those characters and cultures properly, as well as providing feedback to improve said representation.
What Do We Charge
We charge for our editing services on a sliding scale based on an initial editing consultation. That consultation will involve a free-of-charge edit of a sample of the author’s work. This serves to protect and educate both the editors and the author.
For us, this is an evaluation of how much work and time will be involved in editing the author’s work. For the author, it serves as proof of quality work on our part and a compatibility test.
Once both parties agree to work together after the consultation, exact rates and style of payment will be determined. We can accept lump sum payment at the end of a project, as well as providing a variety of payment plan options to help accommodate the fiscal needs of independent and hybrid authors.
Our baseline fee scales are as follows:
Services Required | Fee Scale |
|---|---|
Full Editing Process | $.01-$.04 USD per word |
Line Edit & Proofread | $.008-$.032 USD per word |
Narrative Consultation | $.002-$.008 USD per word |
Proofread | $.002-$.008 USD per word |
Sensitivity Read | $.002-$.008 USD per word |