Collectively, Book Butchers edit almost one hundred books a year, and we have decades of book editing experience. But more and more frequently, good editors are becoming “writing coaches” for authors who have never taken the time to learn how to tell a great story.

If you’ve never studied the craft – plot, dialog, pacing, story structure, tension and character description, etc. – we’re going to spend the majority of our time going over the basics and turning your ideas into a real book, instead of a mess of scenes and notes that are unsatisfying. We want to make your book great – or at least good enough to satisfy readers so they don’t feel disappointed with the content – but we need your help. Don’t pass your book over to an editor too early. Make sure you learn the basics. If authors read more on writing, and did a round of self-editing to fix major problems in plot, we’d be able to help them take their books from good to great.

Here are some of our favorite books on writing: most of these are actually about story and plotting, because if authors spent ONE DAY on plotting out their story using universal story structure they’d save themselves a year of frustration. I also recommend going through this list of common writing mistakes.