Manuscript typing & preparation
You wrote it by hand. Agents and publishers only accept typed files. I type handwritten novels, memoirs and life stories into a clean, properly formatted Word document — every page done personally, in Sussex.
Perhaps you have always written longhand and see no reason to stop. Perhaps arthritis or failing sight has made a keyboard difficult. Perhaps the manuscript isn't yours at all — a parent's memoir, a grandfather's war diary, a novel found in a drawer after a death.
Whatever the reason, the problem is the same: almost every literary agent and publisher will only look at an electronic file. Self-publishing platforms need one too. Until it's typed, nobody can read it but you.
That is the whole of what I do. You send the pages. I send back a manuscript.
Why me and not a typing bureau
I'm a trained palaeographer — I transcribe seventeenth-century wills for a living. Faded ink, crossings-out, a shaky late hand, marginal insertions and pages written in pencil forty years ago are all ordinary work here.
Where a passage genuinely can't be read, I mark it and tell you, rather than guessing and hoping you won't notice.
I write novels myself, and I trained as a copy editor with the CIEP. I know standard manuscript format, how chapters break, how dialogue is set, what an agent expects to open.
You get a document that reads as a book, not as text poured into a blank page.
Thirty years as a legal secretary, document production technician and transcriber, including some of the top firms in London. Discretion isn't a promise on a website — it's the discipline I've worked under for my entire career.
Nothing is subcontracted. Nothing is sent offshore. I sign a confidentiality agreement before I start.
What I type
This is not a general typing service. I don't do invoices, minutes, dissertations or reports. I type manuscripts — whole books, by the people who wrote them.
Before you commit
Handing over a manuscript is not a small thing, particularly if it's the only copy or it belonged to someone you loved. You shouldn't have to take a stranger's word for the quality of their work.
So send me a few pages and I'll type the first thousand words and send them back at no charge, with no obligation whatsoever. If you like what you see, we go on. If you don't, you've lost nothing.
Priced per thousand words, so you know roughly what you're looking at before you get in touch. A typical eighty-thousand-word novel in clear handwriting comes to around £1,200.
Legible, consistent, written in ink on ordinary paper.
Cramped, hurried or shaky hands, heavy crossings-out, pencil, or an older manuscript written decades ago.
A book typed on a typewriter, or a carbon copy, turned back into an editable file.
Tell me roughly how long it is and what sort of state it's in, and I'll come back with a quote. Photographs or scans from a phone are perfectly good enough to start with — scans are preferable if you can manage it, and the manuscript itself stays with you.