A How to Guide: Basic Look at the Business of Critiquing Manuscripts

Manuscript critiquing is a big business, and many freelancers make a good living at it yearly. How do they do it? Here's an insider view.

Elsa Neal, professional writer and manuscript critiquer extraordinaire has been kind enough to explain the business end of her manuscript critiquing service at her website www.hearwritenow.com. She states that, "The critique service has made up 80% of my income over the past 6 months." So manuscript critiquing can be a make up a substantial part of your income as a freelance writer.

Critiquing is slightly different from professional editing. Editing looks for errors in grammar, punctuation, layout, and structure. The editor will look over your manuscript or document and look for ways to improve its usability and readability. Manuscript critiquing also looks at the manuscript's appeal to the readers, and literary techniques like symbolism, foreshadowing, and even how believable your characters are. If this is a genre story the critiquer can also look at how well the story fits with the standard ideals of the rest of the genre, for example the romance genre's use of the alpha male character.

Qualifications:

There are no specific requirements to critique manuscripts but it helps if you've had some experience looking at friend's writing or even having worked as an editor at a publisher. Elsa started out with a degree in creative writing and by helping fellow students and writers with revising their work. In 2005 she decided to set up a critiquing service page on her site:

"I decided to offer my critiquing services on my website - really as an experiment to see if there was any interest. Within a month I had my first client, and the service has grown from there." ~Elsa Neal