Alison Imbriaco – Editor

As a freelance copy editor who has worked on hundreds of fiction and nonfiction books, I've developed great respect for authors who can imagine a story and shape it into paragraphs and pages, who can develop characters and give them personalities and conversations.

Let me show you what I will do to ensure the integrity and enhance the flow of your story. Request an offer from me, and I'll use your attached sample to give you a sample of what I do.

You'll see that I use the Word's Comment feature liberally to explain my thinking. And you'll also see that working entirely in Word's Track Changes means you maintain complete control of your manuscript.

As a wordsmith, I “listen” to the words I’m reading so I can “hear” when alliteration becomes distracting or when an action sentence drags with too many “ing” phrases.

Ensuring the integrity of your manuscript means making sure the pieces—from point of view to timeline and from dialogue to action—fit together to make a whole. I'll check that time is allowed for the action, whether it's hours or months. And I'll help you give the reader a "moving" picture of what's happening, checking, for example, that a character who has been leaning against the door doesn't suddenly get up from a chair.

In fiction, fact-checking includes real world names—of people, places, and songs, for example—as well as the facts of the fictional world. I’ll check that this character has blue eyes throughout and that Stephen doesn't become Steven later in the story. To do that kind of checking meticulously, I’ll develop a style sheet which you will receive with your copyedited manuscript.

Historical fiction adds another layer of fact-checking because one anachronism can break the connection you've made with your reader. I’ve learned to recognize what needs to be checked, from the types of carriages in 1820 to fashion in 1920. “Historical” facts occur in contemporary fiction too. For example, the forty-year-old character could not have played Pokémon as a ten-year-old.

After so many years working with publishers and indie authors, catching spelling and grammatical errors is almost automatic. Still, I'll go through your work meticulously, again and again—checking Merriam-Webster online and the latest Chicago Manual of Style—to be sure I've done the best I can.

Please scroll down to reviews from authors I've worked with and let them speak for me.

I'm looking forward to working with you!