Literary Critiques

Literary critiques are often required by book agents and publishers when submitting a manuscript to them. A literary critique reviews the work in several ways. It examines the target audience, the synopsis, the dialogue, the opening sentences, the grammatical usage, the sentence structure, the chapter breaks, the flow, the character development, the genre and any other factor particular to the given manuscript.

Until recently, I would only do a literary critique as a supplement for clients after proofreading and editing their manuscripts. I believe that it is necessary to read the complete book in order to do an in-depth literary critique. However, I have had numerous inquiries to do literary critiques without doing the proofreading and editing for a given book. In most cases, these books have already been proofread and edited but the author needs or wants a literary critique.

Therefore, I have begun to do literary critiques for books that I have not proofread or edited. The critique is not as in-depth as the full literary critique, mostly because I only read and review the first and last chapters with a brief scan of other sections as needed. This literary critique is less detailed than the in-depth one but it is valuable to the author and can help him or her refine the manuscript as needed.

I hope this new service is helpful to authors and provides the necessary guidance to adequately enhance their manuscripts.