Hello! I’m Linnea, and editing is one of my oldest loves. I’ve been a fan of the Chicago Manual of Style since I was eleven (no joke!), and I’m here to help you put your best foot forward with squeaky-clean prose. I offer three services: copy editing, proofreading, and sensitivity reading. Please note that I am not a developmental editor—outside of sensitivity reading, I specialize in the nitty-gritty details of punctuation, grammar, and phrasing, not big-picture story components like plot and pacing.

Why should you trust me? Well, before going freelance, I spent two years as the in-house editor of two quarterly publications that were nearly a hundred pages each and had a combined circulation of over 200,000. I was also a volunteer editor at the online magazine Twin Cities Geek for four and a half years. In college, I worked at my school’s writing center and also did such a thorough copy edit of my mom’s fourth book that her publisher asked if I wanted to freelance for them.

Services Offered

Copy editing

Copy editing is the next step when you’ve got a draft you’re happy with in terms of things like plot, pacing, and character for fiction and memoir, or structure and argument for most other nonfiction. You like the story you’re telling or the case you’re making and feel good about the way you’ve put the pieces together, which means now is the point where it makes sense to start checking your punctuation and grammar, as well as specific wording and sentence-level flow and clarity. This is an important step to take before self-publishing—even if you think your prose is grammatically perfect, it’s hard to get enough distance from your own writing to find those last pesky typos.

Fee: $0.013/word, so $130 per 10,000 words

Proofreading

Proofreading is the last step before publication. Proofreading comes after your manuscript has been copy edited and typeset. You’re not in Google Docs or Word anymore; you’ve got a PDF that you could send to the printer. But before you get it printed, you want one last set of eyes on it to make sure that there aren’t any typos that slipped through or any formatting issues that cropped up during typesetting.

Proofreading should not be the only editing that happens to your book. Even if you’re on a budget, another human should have pointed out ways to strengthen the plot or argument, and another human should also have looked at the final manuscript before typesetting happened to check for issues with spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Personally, I don’t mind if that human was a friend or family member rather than a professional editor, though I hope whoever helped with your plot had some level of writing skill, and whoever checked for typos had some knowledge of grammar and punctuation rules. And even though I don’t mind who the human was who helped you, I absolutely do care that they’re human. “Editing” by AI often introduces more problems than it solves, and I will charge you extra if you want me to proofread something that has been “edited” by AI.

Fee: $0.01/word, so $100 per 10,000 words

Sensitivity reading

Sensitivity reading is an editing service that focuses on whether the depiction of a character is accurate to their stated race, culture, queer identity, disability, etc. As a sensitivity reader, I can help point out where your characterization strays into the stereotypical or if there are common parts of the experience your character would likely have that you’ve missed.

When you’re writing a character from a marginalized group that you don’t belong to, I highly recommend using a sensitivity reader, no matter how much research you’ve done to try to get the representation right. (If you haven’t done any research, work on that first.) Even if you’re writing about a group you belong to, it can be helpful to get a second opinion via a sensitivity reader, especially if your personal experience is atypical in some way.

I am willing and qualified to perform sensitivity reads for the following identities and experiences:

  • Disability and health
    • Autism, especially the experiences of late-diagnosed characters and/or characters who were assigned female at birth, and including autistic burnout and autistic shutdowns
    • Endometriosis, including the many hurdles involved in getting it diagnosed and getting doctors to take it seriously, as well as having and recovering from the surgery that diagnoses and treats it
  • Queerness
    • Asexuality, particularly the experience of being asexual but nowhere near aromantic
    • Nonbinary, particularly as experienced by someone who’s assigned female at birth and transitions socially but not medically
  • Culture
    • Scandinavian American: I’m proficient in Swedish, though I wouldn’t be able to edit a full manuscript in Swedish; I have been part of Scandinavian American cultural groups my whole life
    • Minnesotan, particularly St. Paulite/Minneapolitan, including both climate and culture

With my sensitivity reading service, I will give feedback via comments directly on your manuscript document as well as writing a letter with more holistic feedback after I’ve finished reading. I also offer an optional half-hour video call after you’ve received my feedback to talk about potential manuscript changes, answer your questions, and generally talk in more detail about any feedback you may have found confusing.

Fee: $0.007/word, so $70 per 10,000 words

Interested in working together?

Get in touch! Or, if you’re not sure, read some testimonials first!

Statement on AI

I do not use artificial intelligence (AI) in my editing, and I will not edit text that was produced with AI. Generative AI has been trained on stolen creative work, uses huge amounts of water and energy even for simple queries, often makes up false “facts,” and tends toward the average, with all the bigotry and mediocrity that implies. Moreover, if you couldn’t be bothered to write it, why should I bother to edit it or anyone else bother to read it?