The difference between a bestseller and a flop is rarely the quality of the writing, but the quality of the editing. Our unparalleled process and unerring precision propels us to make your book—and your writing career—the best it can be. As just one example, three of our clients recently hit the USA Today bestseller list with books we edited! Not many editors get so invested in your dreams. We do.
Are you ready?
It’s time to take your writing to the next level.
The book market is oversaturated. It’s a struggle to deliver your books into the right readers’ hands as thousands of books clamor for attention and algorithms can be your dearest allies or your bitterest enemies.
The only way to stand out is to create a reputation for releasing nothing but the best.
With professional editing, your book has a real chance at finding your ideal readership—as opposed to their searching retailer sites and giving up before you finally surface in a list of suggested reading at the end of a wormhole of clicking.
We won’t mince words: good editing costs good money.
- No matter where you are in your writing journey, there’s no substitute for objective, professional feedback.
- A professional edit can turn any manuscript from ordinary to extraordinary.
- No writer is able to be completely objective about their work.
- Your love for one element of your book may cause you to overlook an issue that turns off readers or agents. The only way to ensure your product is polished and professional by the time it arrives in readers’ hands is to use a professional service like RUFF!
Unconvinced?
An investment in professional editing is an investment in your long-term career.
A well-edited book gives you a solid foundation to grow your author brand and name recognition—whether this is your debut publication or you’re a veteran author.
Good editing fosters organic publicity, steadier sales, positive reviews, word-of-mouth buzz, and more zealous fans than you can shake your pen at! It sends a resounding message to literary agents, publishing houses, indie presses, and casual online shoppers thirsty for their next book hangovers: you are the real thing.
Whether you self-publish or you aim for an agent to pitch your book to one of the Big Five traditional trade publishers, it’s time to chase your wildest literary dreams. You didn’t work so hard only to clip your book’s wings at the last minute and release a second-rate imitation of your potential!
Hiring an editor is the ultimate gift in writers’ self-care.
Nurture your relationship with yourself, the most important person in your writing career, by enlisting a pro to give your manuscript the expert attention all manuscripts need. Set yourself up to explode onto the literary stage like the supernova you are.
Hire an editor so you’ll have zero regrets about the effort you poured into your dreams.
We don’t like regrets.
When we work with creatives who dare to believe in themselves, our passion gets all fired up.
Here’s what you get when you choose RUFF!
The joy of art
Self-editing can hamstring your creativity.
If you think too much about marketability, story consistency, or grammar, your inspiration could freeze. You write because you have a story, an experience, or a message to share with the world. You probably didn’t become a writer to agonize over Oxford commas, omitted elements of a saucy subplot, age appropriateness for your target audience, comma splices, or whether your characters follow one of the six emotional arcs.
Leave all that to RUFF!
Your job is to be your most creative self.
Stretch your artistic soul to the limits, while we apply our expertise to refine your manuscript to articulate the story you want to tell, using your own eloquence polished to a gleam.
You focus on what you love—the writing—and we at RUFF! delight in perfecting the rest.
You do the fun stuff, and we’ll handle the anxiety-inducing parts.
Those parts are what we love. We’re weird like that.
Absolute creative control
You’re the boss.
Often during an edit, we delight in uncovering forks in the road—multiple thematic directions you could go. Do X for a character-driven book. Do Y for a plot-driven book. We reach out mid-edit for your direction. We advise you on your options and the pros and cons of different editorial choices.
You maintain creative control. We don’t just decide for you and move on. You get to shape your work at every turn.
RUFF! will never pressure you into a change you don’t feel comfortable with. We work with you to ensure you’re confident in the edits you’ve chosen.
Editors who think strategically about your career, not just your latest work
When proposing editorial services, we take time to learn about your vision. Not just your vision for the current manuscript. Your vision for your writing career.
Every editorial choice plays a role in getting you there. Each book is one more yellow brick toward the Emerald City.
We take pleasure in offering our clients emotional support and encouragement, fueled by a sincere drive to help you achieve your dreams.
Our clients tend to contract RUFF! again and again. Together, we refine authors’ brands and play an integral role in writers’ strategies for success.
Feeling some sticker shock? You might be thinking, “Wait. I’m a great grammarian! I don’t need no stinking editor.”
We get it. Better than you might think. Confession time: Jessie, RUFF!’s Founder and Editor in Chief, once stood in your shoes, having just finished her second (currently shelved) novel. She’s an editor. Why would she need to pay anyone to edit her book? Pssh. No way.
But then she started working at a small publisher, and a twenty-year veteran in book editing took her on as a mentee and edited her book. Jessie’s mentor made nearly two thousand markups—good ones. He also suggested a significant plot rework in the middle of the book, and he was right.
As the articles linked to above and our own anecdotal experience demonstrate, no matter how great you think you are at self-editing, it’s impossible to be unbiased about your own writing.
Let us ’splain… No, there is too much. Let us sum up.
When RUFF! edits your manuscript, two team members read through the entire manuscript multiple times. We build style guides for your book and for your universes. We spend hours poring over your book, purging spelling errors, aligning it with a grammar stylebook, and much, much more.
We spot the unmissable flashback that lives in your head but never made it to the page and would poignantly tie everything together.
We catch that critical plot development that was in a ruff draft but somehow got lost in a rewrite.
Spellcheck and your eyes have scanned your pages so many times by now, subtle errors hide undetected; you only see what you expect to see. We sniff these out and set them right.
We can almost hear you crunching numbers—that’s you, right?
With our meticulous process, each manuscript can add up to hundreds of labor hours. We guarantee no surprise fees once an invoice and contract are created after the sample edit and consultation. Take all that into account and you can see our pricing is fair, transparent, and consistent with industry standards.
Besides… Karou keeps a sharp eye on our bottom line so we can keep her well supplied with tennis balls and bully sticks.
We must obey our fuzzy overlord and charge a fair market price!
Lessons in the craft
We love clients who keep up with the ever-evolving book world through conferences, classes, and other publishing events, but such things cost precious time and money.
Once again, RUFF! steps in.
Our team attends several events each year to stay on the cutting edge.
When we suggest a complex edit in your manuscript, most of our authors like us to explain our rationale.
No, silly, they’re not being defensive. They want to learn. To be better writers.
We’ll happily educate you on the latest industry trends, and we make suggestions to help readers notice your work. Our longest-standing client tells us often that she’s never learned more about how to be a better writer from any other editor she’s worked with in her (already stellar) career as a multiple USA Today bestselling author.
Proven success rate
First-time authors have become multi-published with meteoric careers.
Books edited by RUFF! have earned coveted spots on esteemed bestseller lists, including three authors whose respective books recently hit the USA Today bestseller list.
Also not an easy feat is the fact that our clients’ books consistently hit top 10 and top 100 Amazon Kindle rankings—not just in highly targeted niche categories, but in crowded, competitive categories too (e.g., Fantasy, Young Adult, etc.). Recently, one client’s RUFF!-edited novella reached #6 in the entire Amazon Kindle free store across all genres.
One writer told us she stopped getting “bad-grammar troll reviews” the moment she started working with RUFF!
On the short fiction side, our authors have earned a standing invitation to submit stories to their top-choice ezines in their genres and get published at their target publications monthly or even more frequently.
Free sample edit
That’s right. Most editors charge a small fee for a sample edit. It’s a reasonable industry standard, but RUFF! doesn’t operate like that.
Why?
A fulfilling, energizing author-editor relationship is at the heart of our mission and our first priority.
We’ll take the first leap of faith for you to prove it. You have nothing to lose.
