Like most published authors, I get a number of requests from aspiring authors to read their manuscripts and to offer advice. I understand the desire to get personal advice from published authors. Often, however, those who ask don’t seem to appreciate that every hour I spend helping them with their manuscripts is an hour less that I can work on my own. So, while I routinely do extensive critiquing on contest manuscripts and manuscripts in my critique group, I am beyond the point of offering the extensive free service that some aspiring writers seem to expect once they learn I’m a published author.

Although I don’t want to get big into the critiquing business, I recognize the many authors aren't connected with more knowledgeable writers and have limited opportunities to get professional feedback. So, I have decided to offer critiquing for a fee for writers who believe they need such help..

For a fee of $3.50 per standard page (see page formatting guidelines), I will critique as many as 50 manuscript pages. I recommend you submit 10-20 pages, as often my critique of those pages will be sufficient for you to make overall improvements throughout the manuscript. Most problem patterns show up in those first 20 pages, so often I’m just marking the same variety of errors over the remaining pages.

I have reviewed the editing/critiquing-service offerings in the back of Writer’s Digest magazine, and I believe this rate is quite reasonable for the service I will perform.

Page Formatting Guidelines: A standard manuscript page averages about 250 words-per-page over the entire book. I will accept standard pages formatted in the following way: One-inch margins all the way around leaving an area of six-and-a-half by nine inches between those margins. Use a Courier font, a fixed-pitch font that spaces characters at 10 per inch. Double spacing on manuscript pages gives you 27 lines per full page (with not widows/orphan adjustment at the top or bottom of the page).

NOTE: The defaults for Microsoft Word Documents will cheat you on the number of words you get on a standard Word page. Reset the side margins to 1 inch from the 1.25 inches to you have 6.5 inches between the margins instead of the 6 inches the defaults leave you with. Word’s standard double-space gives you about 24-25 lines per page instead of 27. I reset Word’s paragraph line spacing to a multiple of 1.79 to get 27 lines per page. If you make those adjustments with a Courier font, you will get the standard manuscript page.

I will accept up to 3-pages of synopsis printed in single-spaced (54 lines per page) Courier font at the standard fee per page.

If you believe my critiquing would be useful to your progress as an author, send an e-mail to me at JHBNovels@jimmiehbutler.com. Explain a bit about your manuscript and how many pages you would like to submit, and we can come to an agreement about likely schedules, etc.