Authoring Excellence

1 cent less on all rates for students, adjuncts, and academics at HBCU’s.

Writing Coaching

$150 an hour, 3-hour minimum. Unlike editing, which focuses on a specific text, coaching helps to address the process of writing. Writing coaching is a collaborative process designed to help you clarify your ideas, strengthen your voice, and develop strategies to overcome obstacles such as writer’s block or structural challenges.

• Goal Setting & Planning – Define clear objectives and create a roadmap for your project.

• Structure & Clarity – Organize your ideas for maximum impact and readability.

• Voice & Style – Enhance your unique voice while ensuring consistency and flow.

• Problem-Solving – Identify and overcome sticking points in your writing process.

• Feedback & Accountability – Receive constructive guidance and maintain momentum toward completing your work.

My approach is supportive, practical, and tailored to your needs, whether you want short-term guidance on a single project or ongoing coaching for long-term growth. With writing coaching, you gain not just an editor, but a mentor who helps you develop as a writer while achieving your goals.

Developmental/Structural Editing

5 cents a word for writing under 100 pages, 4 cents a word for longer manuscripts. Most manuscripts don’t fail because of grammar—they fail because the structure, argument, or narrative isn’t working yet. You may have a strong idea, but it feels scattered, with chapters that repeat or don’t build, or a draft that does not convey your argument as well as it could. I can help at the brainstorming stage to structure the book before it is written, or I can work with authors to revise drafts. Developmental editing focuses on the big picture. I can clarify your core idea and audience; restructure your chapters or help reiterate and strengthen your argument; identify what to cut, expand, or move; strengthen flow, pacing, narrative, and progression; and ensure the book works. This is not line editing or copyediting— it’s making the whole book work. Changes are made directly in the manuscript with track changes and comments, and a detailed, actionable editorial letter is included.

Line Editing

7-8 cents a word. Line editing involves copyediting plus a deep engagement with the structure of every sentence. It is work that editors at the best commercial presses once performed but is more intensive than academic presses can afford. This is not just for English as a Second Language scholars; it can also help native speakers. Line editing enhances readability and style by smoothing awkward phrasing, optimizing word choice, and making subtle insertions or deletions. This service includes copyediting and emphasizes the author’s voice, ensuring your writing is polished, compelling, and memorable.It is my command of language that has earned accolades like “beautifully,” “masterly,” and “splendidly” written. 6 cents a word for manuscripts longer than 30,000 words; 7 cents a word for shorter texts.

High-Level Copyediting

4-5 cents a word. Copyediting involves more than just correcting grammar and footnotes. It also involves checking for coherence, suggesting ways to improve the text, and recommending other sources or interpretations that would strengthen the work. It involves reading for argument and making suggestions to improve the argument and its exposition. It also ensures adherence to your chosen style guide.In other words, it is worth it, and only a person with an extensive background in academic writing such as myself could perform this form of copyediting. 4 cents a word for manuscripts longer than 30,000 words; 5 cents a word for shorter texts.

Formatting

$100-$250 For authors preparing to self-publish, follow specific submission guidelines, work with designers, or have books typeset, a properly formatted Word document is crucial. Issues like double spaces, extra hard returns, inconsistent paragraph styles, and page breaks can slow the publishing process. I can handle all formatting in Microsoft Word, making your manuscript publication-ready. This service is available alongside any editing service for a reasonable flat fee of $100 for less than 20,000 words and $250 for longer documents. (I actually produced a radio segment for NPR about the ordeal of formatting a dissertation, which you can listen to here: The Doctoral Degree Paper Chase.)

Proofreading

2-3 cents a word. This is not copyediting, it is the final stage of approval of actual page proof pdf’s before publication. It saves you from embarrassing typos that are very difficult for authors to spot because they are so close to the text. No text is ever perfect, but proofreading allows it to be as close to perfect as possible. It should always be a part of your publishing process. 3 cents a word for manuscripts longer than 30,000 words; 2 cents a word for longer texts.

Premium Manuscript Support

A full suite of services- (developmental, line, copyediting, proofreading, and formatting) - $5,000 - $16,000 depending on scope.

Book Proposals

10 cents a word. (line editing, copyediting, and formatting) Writing a book is not enough; you still have to sell it. As someone who has successfully written and sold four books, with proposals ranging from ten pages to fifty pages, depending on the publisher, I know how to sell a book to both academic and trade presses. This full suite of services saves you considerably compared to buying services individually.

Photographic Permissions & Caption Copyediting

$40 a photo. Finishing a book is like moving a mountain with a teaspoon. Even after the book is “finished,” there is still an amazing amount of work left over to get it ready for publication. The last thing I want to do after writing a book is to chase down photo permissions. Now you don’t have to!

My approach

You’ll get direct, specific feedback—not vague suggestions. I will tell you what’s working, what isn’t, and what to do next. The goal is not to rewrite your book in my voice. The goal is to help you write the best version of your book. While I am conversant with a full range of theory, and have taught graduate-level theory classes, I am a strong believer that complex ideas can be explained in language that is precise and easy to understand. As an expert in qualitative and archival research, I can help craft research plans and evaluate the strength and quality of your research and secondary source analysis, while suggesting literature and ideas that might strengthen your arguments.

In terms of craft, I can help you, stylistically and substantively, present your work more effectively and achieve greater impact. I am an advocate of “sign posting” your argument, that is, returning to the argument throughout the text so that the reader has more than one chance to comprehend the argument and so that the relationship between your argument and evidence is clear. It is also important to be very selective in supplying evidence, and to pick both what to highlight and what to leave out; what belongs in the body of the work and what would be better left in footnotes; and how to maintain flow and narrative pulse while avoiding tangents yet providing necessary background. I am a practitioner of creative nonfiction, and can suggest a host of ways to add literary panache to your writing, whether through anecdotes, character development, thick description, or narrative pulse. I also believe that chronology is usually helpful, but sometimes it is effective to break it to grab a reader’s attention. I help graduate students complete dissertations and shepherd scholars in converting dissertations into books. I can put my experience to work for you by helping to draft and revise fellowship applications.I have had great success in applying for fellowships, with two Mellon Foundation fellowships, one NEH fellowship, and two American Council of Learned Societies fellowships. Fellowship applications are generally quite brief, so they demand highly compressed writing with strong argumentation throughout.

I do not use AI at any stage of the editing process other than minor changes made by spellcheck, Microsoft Word’s grammar scanner, but all of those decisions are personally ratified or rejected. AI is quite amazing in what it can accomplish with information on the Internet, but AI has never read a book since books lie behind a moat of copyright law. As a result, AI has no frame of reference and no ability to evaluate popular nonfiction books, let alone scholarly ones. I bring thirty-four years of experience in higher education, including eighteen years as a tenure-track professor of History, American Studies, and Race and Ethnic Studies. I have imbibed secondary sources and scholarly theories, designed research plans, conducted research in more than twenty-five archives, collected tens of thousands of archival images, analyzed that evidence, conducted oral histories, and published more than 500,000 words. I know what it is like to be a grad student, an assistant professor, and a tenured professor. There is no way that AI can approximate that level of expertise.

BEFORE: The film explores cinematic language to construct meaning from the camera's gaze. The narrative visually shows the partial perspective that society generally has on the figure of Aburto and on the young people integrated into the hitmen of contemporary Mexico. This is achieved through the numerous shots that appear throughout the story in which it is not possible to see the characters in their entirety since there is often something or someone else obstructing the complete image of them while it is captured by the camera. Repeatedly, the protagonists are out of focus or on the margins of the cinematographic frame. Our view of the killers, both in the film and in real life, is an incomplete, tangential, arbitrary, out-of-focus perspective. The hegemonic perspective of the official discourse of the State is as distorted as the image of Mario reflected in the broken mirror of one of the bars in Tijuana in which his face is shown monstrously transfigured by the asymmetry of the mirror's surface. Traditional narratives about the border space and the figure of the murderers are precisely like that broken mirror, the distorted reflection of the border reality and the subjects that inhabit a geopolitical space of great cultural, economic, political and social asymmetries. Through cinematographic language, the film is able to denaturalize the construction of the figure of the murderers and the type of necromasculinity that these characters end up reproducing in their effort to adapt to the environment of Mexican neoliberalism in which the exercise of death is highly capitalized.

AFTER: Mente revólver artfully illustrates society’s poor understanding of Mario, assassins, and the border in general by using cinematic techniques to show that our comprehension of such topics is incomplete and blurry. The director employs numerous shots in which it is impossible to see the characters in their entirety, as something or someone else is often obstructing them. Repeatedly, the protagonists are out of focus or on the fringes of the cinematic frame. The hegemonic perspective of the official state discourse is as distorted as the image of Mario reflected in the broken mirror of one of Tijuana’s bars, showing his face monstrously transfigured by the asymmetry of the mirror’s surface. The film seems to suggest that traditional, hegemonic, and official narratives about border spaces and border people are as distorted as the image reflected in that broken mirror. Through cinematographic language, the film is able to denaturalize the construction of the figure of the assassins and the type of necromasculinity that these characters end up reproducing in their effort to adapt to the environment of Mexican neoliberalism, in which inflicting death can be a profitable business venture.