An honest look at your book — every check in plain English, nothing hidden.
Honest Edit runs a full editorial battery over your unedited manuscript and hands you a clear, written report: what we found, where it stands, and why it matters. No black box. No vague “professional edit.” You see the whole menu, you pick your service, and you know the price before we begin.
Every Book Begins at the Gate
The Gate is this house’s front door and its standard in one. Before any editing begins, every manuscript pauses there to be checked against the content standards every Honest Edit author certifies in advance. It stands there because our name goes on the work we touch — and because you deserve to know exactly where this house stands before you spend more than a deposit.
Honest Edit is a Christian editorial house — and we edit books of every kind. You don’t have to be a Christian, and your book doesn’t have to be a Christian book. Every manuscript faces one test first: our Gate Scan, a content-integrity check against the standards every author certifies before we start. The deposit is $50.
The Gate turns away: adult or sexual content; devil or Satan material; anything explicitly anti-God; pervasive filth — and, absolutely and always, the Lord’s name in vain, maligning God, sacrilege, or blasphemy. A hard story that lands on redemption can still pass: sin shown with its cost, never glorified, never graphic.
If your book passes
The full $50 is credited toward the service you choose next — Scan Only, Scan + Obvious Fixes, or Full Service. On a book that clears the Gate, the deposit is never lost money.
If the Gate refuses the book
We return your manuscript untouched, tell you plainly and kindly what we found, and the $50 is kept as the fee for the scan that found the violation. No editing is performed.
Read the standards before you apply — we would rather you know exactly where we stand before anyone spends a dollar. Our standards & the certification · How the whole process runs
Our Story
Honest Edit began at my own desk, with my own books.
I'm an author, and the editing my manuscripts needed — thorough, honest, and fast, at a price a working author can pay — could not be found. So the building began: an editorial system that today runs 179 checks, refined book by book, my own books first.
And fairness cuts both ways at this house: every word we publish — this website included — goes through the same battery, and yes, it catches us too. That is the point of it.
Books had lived in my head for years before one of them ever reached a page — the first step kept not happening, because past it there was no map: write the book, and then what? Nobody could tell me what came after. So the map got built too.
Then we stress-tested it the hard way — on ten of the most difficult classics ever written, over three million words — to prove it could catch what matters and leave a careful author's work alone. Somewhere in that work, we realized what we had built could serve other authors the way it had served me: more checks than I ever got from anyone — ten times the standard copyediting checklist — for about a third of the cost, in a fraction of the time.
And so The Machine was born, and Honest Edit with it. We're looking forward to serving you — wherever your book is tonight: an idea, a notebook, a raw first draft. This house can walk with it the whole way, from first draft to bookshelf.
After we built this website, we ran it through The Machine — and it handed us ten findings. We dealt with every one.
— Nanette René Roberts, Owner/Editor
The Services, in Brief
Scan Only
$1 per page · $100 minimum
The full battery report on your manuscript. We fix nothing — every finding is yours to act on, in your own way and in your own time.
Scan + Obvious Fixes
$2 per page · $100 minimum
The full report, plus we make every obvious correction — misspellings, punctuation, plain mechanical errors. Judgment calls are reported for your decision, never decided for you.
Full Service
$4 per page · $100 minimum
The full scan plus complete corrections and editing. Judgment calls remain yours to decide, presented as options before anything is applied.
And the whole path under one roof, when you want it: Digitization of handwritten manuscripts ($2 per handwritten page, $50 minimum), Cover Art Development ($150 flat), and Publisher-Ready Preparation ($100 flat). Full details and exact prices: Services & Pricing.
Tested the Hard Way, on Purpose
Before this battery ever touched a client’s book, we stress-tested it on ten of the most difficult classics — over three million words, 3,042,058 to be exact. Across all ten, the battery found exactly one genuine mechanical error — and it sorted deliberate craft from genuine error in dialect, in translation, and in some of the most demanding prose ever published.
Two of those reports are public, because a house with nothing to hide should show its work: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Sample No. 1) and our own editor’s novel, Maeve, the Commanding Queen (Sample No. 2). Samples.
Our First Author
Honest Edit is new, and we intend to prove the house on a stranger’s book. The first completed manuscript that passes our Gate receives its Scan + Obvious Fixes and complete written report free — and 25% off any further services afterward. Every author after that earns the same standing thank-you our reports carry: refer another author whose job is completed and paid, and 10% of that job’s price is credited to your own account for future services.
Ask About Your Book
Questions before you apply are welcome. Write to us at hello@honestedit.net or call (707) 702-EDIT (3348). Tell us your book’s title, genre, and approximate word count, and we will answer plainly — including if the answer is that we are not the right house for your book.