editing

In order to help finance its publishing ventures (some of which donate all profits to worthy causes and on which its staff work for free – very willingly), La Gr@not@ is accepting mss. for editing and translations. We are so confident in the quality of our work that we offer a money-back guarantee.

[In the unlikely case that you’ll want your money back, please keep the following points in mind:

a) La Gr@not@ functions on a shoestring budget. We are aware that some unscrupulous people might take advantage of this money-back offer. For this and other reasons, we’ve divided it into stages.

b) If you are completely dissatisfied and reject all our changes, we will refund 100% of the fee.

c) If you aren’t 100% satisfied, but feel that we have been of SOME help, you may set the %age of the fee that you wish to have returned, according to how dissatisfied you are. Please give reasons for your decision.

d) If we disagree with your judgement – and since you have declared that you are not 100% happy with our work – we will assume that you won’t wish to avail yourself of our services in future. Therefore, you will be blocked.

e) If you claim to be dissatisfied with our work, but then use it when you publish (or self-publish) elsewhere (i.e. if we realise that you have tricked us into a refund), we will raise a stink on all possible channels: blogs, FB, YouTube, the press…]

OK, that was us being nasty in point e). We trust that it won’t be necessary. But we were NOT born yesterday, and we AREN’T idiots.

Please note! Because we want to concentrate most of our energy on our main work – the production and promotion of quality books for children – we will only be able to accept a few novel mss. for editing each year. And the decision will not be on a first-come-first-served basis, but on how positive we feel about your mss. So you might want to check out our likes and dislikes at http://la-granota.com/crazy.htm

You will increase your chances of being selected for our editing services if you make your ms. as attractive as possible, i.e. doing as good a self-editing job as you can BEFORE sending it to us. We can deal with mss. which have 2 errors in every sentence… but we’d prefer not to.

In order to build up our CV, we will edit mss. aimed at children and of 1,000 words or less for free. As many as we can handle, and subject to our liking them. If yours is a picture book, please send it with illustrations as a .pdf attachment (if possible), as well as including the text in the main body of the e-mail. Short, not-illustrated stories ditto, but as .doc attachments. There is no money-back offer on this free work!

In the case of novels, please include a synopsis and the first dozen paragraphs in the main body of the e-mail. CVs are not necessary… and don’t suffer agonies writing just the right covering letter. If your work interests us, we will contact you.

Not all of our staff uses computers than can work with .docx, .odt, etc., so we prefer .doc. If you use free word processing programs, most of them permit saving documents as .doc.

And now to prices: In this tryout year, we’re offering a full editing job (spelling, grammar, pointing out inconsistencies, suggesting improvements in the plot) for 0·5p/word, i.e. 200 words for £1.

Send work to be edited as .doc attachment to editing222@la-granota.com (first remove the 222) with “editing work” as the title of the e-mail. Do not send money until we contact you.