Iowa Book Doctors is an organization that was founded to help writers create publishable work. If any of you have had any dealings with them, you know that these people are incredibly conscientious and hard-working, and that they give you that much-needed quality feedback that is so hard to get for the unpublished writer who is no longer a beginner, and does not have the advantage of being able to call up his editor on the telephone.
I asked the Iowa Book Doctors for help in 2007. To my surprise, they asked to see my 100,000-word manuscript, spent 2 weeks reading it, and then gave me some wonderful advice, all for free. I hired them on the spot, and was delighted with their reply, in which they provided me with various options. At that time, I was struggling with the plot, and so I asked for the large-scale structural editing, because I wasn’t yet ready for the line-by-line copyediting. Their advice lifted my novel to a new level, causing me to turn my three-book novel into a four-book novel. From them, I learned how to handle complex information without boring the pants off the reader.
If you are interested in getting this kind of help for a very reasonable price (it was $35/hour when I asked for it), click here.
NOTE: If you have read to the end of this piece thinking that Iowa Book Doctors may be the place to go for your editing, let me add a word of warning. It appears that they are not the place they were in 2007. Earlier this year (2011), when I tried to get in touch with them, I found them extremely unresponsive. I ended up going with someone who USED to work there, but now owns her own editing business. I would suggest that you really check them out before paying them any money. Perhaps you should check the Better Business Bureau or Editors & Preditors, so that you don’t have an experience like one of my readers.
