Professional Book Editor in Minneapolis-St. Paul

An affordable, professional editor for nearly three decades, I’ll deliver a thorough edit of your manuscript. I’m the author of several published books as well as short stories, hold a Master’s degree in English and a Bachelor’s in journalism, am a long-time writing teacher, and am an award-winning publications editor and writer. Well over 350 of my clients – many from the Twin Cities – have gone on to publish their books.

I handle:
• Fiction (novels, short stories; all genres; Chicago Manual of Style)
• Nonfiction (all topics; spiritual works particularly welcomed)
• Query letters and synopses for book proposals
• Dissertations and academic papers (broad range of subjects; APA, MLA styles)
• Admission essays
• Business plans, documents, brochures/fliers, catalogs
• Website text, blog posts
• Poetry collections, chapbooks

My editing services include:
• Proofreading – Editing for spelling, punctuation, capitalization and grammar
• Copy editing – Editing of mature manuscripts close to being published
• Substantive edit – Editing of an early draft of your manuscript
• Developmental editing – Guidance through the writing process
• Self-publishing – Formatting, uploading, writing back cover blurb/author bio
• I DO NOT GHOSTWRITE BOOKS OR ACADEMIC ESSAYS

Learn more about me and my writer-friendly rates at my website or email your manuscript’s word count for a price quote and estimate of turnaround time. Payment is accepted through safe and secure PayPal; references available upon request.

5 Great Quotations about Books

“Books have to be heavy because the whole world’s inside them.” – Cornelia Funke

“I love the smell of book ink in the morning.” – Umberto Eco

“Nothing is more human than a book.” – Marilynne Robinson

“A life without books is a thirsty life, and one without poetry is…like a life without pictures.” – Stephen King

“A book is a dream that you hold in your hand.” – Neil Gaiman

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing guidebooks:

Through the Act of Writing, a Writer Learns More about Himself than He Could Ever Imagine

For many writers, the greatest yield from their writing is not a royalties check or the adulation of fans at a book reading. Instead, it’s self-discovery.

To that end, many writers keep journals. By writing each or every few days about what occurred to them or their thoughts about some past event, they use the empty page as a friend or a counselor, describing and explaining what most bothers them, all the while making new connections to better understand their feelings, experiences and beliefs.

Even fiction writers whose focus is creating entertaining books enjoy the benefits of self-discovery. In a sense, all authors write about their past. A person is the sum of his or her own personal experiences, and bits and pieces of what has occurred to us can’t help but wind up in our writings. A character may be a conglomeration of two people we once knew, a setting may be our cousin’s house that we visited each summer, a name might be drawn from that kid in third grade just because it sounds right for the character.

In many ways, the writing seemingly directs the author. Indeed, some writers say the characters told their own story. Of course, those characters were only constructs in the author’s mind – and those constructs tell a lot about the author.

Why? Because writing allows us to reposition ourselves so we can see what is otherwise in our mental blind spots or those things about oneself and the world that we neither can see nor understand from the spot where we stand. It’s really not much different from reading a book – another person, who has a unique perspective from our own, sometimes can get us to turn our gaze to new ideas, concepts and ways of looking at things. Writing is the neck muscle allowing us to see the important stuff in our periphery.

Often as writers, we are surprised by what we learn about ourselves. It runs counter to what we we’ve thought about who we are. But it is closer to the truth.

And for those writers, the virtues of truth and authenticity outweigh their books’ value in gold.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing guidebooks:

5 Great Quotations about “Why Write?”

“I was inspired to write this book by those who are skeptical of the power of freedom to change the world.” – Nathan Sharansky

“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” – Anne Frank

“I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren’t open that early.” – Daniel J. Boorstin

“It just happens to be the way that I’m made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.” – Haruki Murakami

“…Writing tells us we have choices. Writing tells us what those choices are. Writing tells us when we are shirking responsibility. Writing tells us we are overburdened…” – Julia Cameron

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing guidebooks:

Pay Attention to Tone on Your Author Website

Along with achieving the right level of readability in your web text, you need to strike the appropriate tone. Tone is the author’s attitude toward a subject. It might be angry or weary or irreverent or any of a thousand other emotions and physical states.

Visitors to your author site who find your tone unbefitting almost certainly will leave. Though the desired tone varies among your website readers, we can anticipate what the average person expects.

Culturally, people have come to associate certain tones with specific genres. If your website’s tone is flirty and suggestive and you write westerns, you’ve likely misjudged your reading audience. Of course, each genre can possess a range of tones, but even then each one often is related to a subgenre.

A good strategy is for your website’s tone to match that used in your books. Readers often expect that. The website, after all, is like a book blurb. If the tone of either is humorous while the tone of your books are dead serious, the reader usually will feel jilted.

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If you’ve written multiple books in which each has a different attitude, then your website will need to use more of a default tone that works for any genre. To achieve that, follow these four basic guidelines…

Be personable
Write as if you are speaking directly to the reader by using words like you and your. In addition, use active voice to sound less bureaucratic and formal (passive voice also unnecessarily lengthens your sentence, reducing readability). Suppose you write a travel guide to national parks; your website text might say something like, “You’re visiting a national park but don’t have a lot of time. Maybe you’re just passing by or have only one day of your vacation to stop. What should you see, and how will you find those spots?”

Be upbeat
Always be energetic rather than dull and positive rather than negative. This helps generate interest and then excitement in the reader. Writing “The books’ trails are short enough that you can spend just a couple of hours on them so you can enjoy a leisurely day with plenty of time to do other stuff!” is a lot better than saying “Each trail takes about two hours to do. You’ll probably want to do a couple a day to keep the fat off.”

Be useful
If writing nonfiction, you want to show how visitors can benefit by reading your books. If writing fiction, you want to show that your books are suspenseful. Let your content or your writing style reflect this. To that end, a travel book website might include words such as “The series ensures you make the most of your limited time by focusing on the must-see wonders at our most visited national parks.”

Be descriptive
You don’t want to write long prosaic paragraphs, but you do want to sprinkle in descriptive phrasing and apt similes that connects the reader to your books’ subject matter. For example, in a travel guide to Wisconsin, you could write, “Bayfield County boasts crystal blue waters, lush green forests, and friendly Mayberry-like villages.”

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Usually issues with tone can be resolved by fixing a couple of sentences. Be forewarned, though, that sometimes you may need to take a whole new approach to the web page and start from scratch. As you outline each of your main points that you want to make in the text, focus on delivering them in a personable, upbeat way that demonstrates your book’s usefulness.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing guidebooks:

62 Authors Website

What is Self-Publishing and Should I Try It?

Among my favorite ever Christmas presents ever came from a classmate during our fifth-grade Secret Santa exchange. She knew I liked to write stories and so give me a wonderful mini-printing press kit in which I could punch out tiny rubber letters and arrange them in words and sentences on thin bars. Press the bar into the accompanying ink pad and then into paper, and viola! I was a published author. Finally, I could get my stories “printed”!

The kit unfortunately didn’t work too well. The letters usually didn’t stay in the tiny bars, and after the first use the ink tended to smudge when pressed on paper. In addition, lining up all of those letters backward so they would look right on paper proved too time-consuming for this 11-year-old to handle. Still, the thought alone made it among the best of many presents given to me over the years.

Thirty years later, printing our own short stories is a lot simpler. Thanks to computer technology, anyone now can get their book printed, and it’s fairly instant at that. But not that many writers really understand self-publishing or how to get it done all on their own at virtually no cost.

Self-publishing is the publication of a book (or any other media, but we’ll concentrate on books in this blog) by the author without using a traditional publishing company. It’s also known as print on demand, because typically a self-publishing company doesn’t print large numbers of books to be warehoused but prints them as they are ordered.

Self-publishing is not a vanity press, though some critics denounce it as such. A vanity press typically involves your poem or story being accepted for publication not because it has any merits but because the publisher thinks you’ll then purchase the book containing the piece. Or perhaps the publisher sells other “services” to you that come with the publication of your piece. In self-publishing, the author often is the publisher. Anyone who owns or has ever owned a printing press – such as Ben Franklin in colonial America – is self-publishing if they print their own thoughts and writings. With modern technology, anyone can be their own publisher.

Ever since the invention of the printing press until the past decade or so, the way to get your book printed was through what has become known as mainstream publishing. This system typically involved having a literary agent sell your book to large company that edited, designed a cover for, printed, distributed and marketed it for you. Unfortunately, especially in the tough economic times of the past few years, mainstream publishing houses have cut back the number of titles they sell and distribute. The result is that they reject too many great books, spend too little money promoting books that are accepted, and return too small a chunk of the revenues to the author.

The answer for many a jilted author has been to self-publish. In 2022, an incredible 1.7 million books were self-published during just that year alone. And what is being self-published are hardly novels by unknown writers or nonfiction texts on some obscure subject. In addition to paper books, self-publishing includes eBooks, photo books, calendars, cookbooks, poetry, educational materials and more. The number of materials that will be self-self-published undoubtedly will grow in the years ahead.

There are a lot of good reasons to self-publish besides that mainstream publishing has shut its door to most authors. Most notable is the high royalty that can come back to you. With a mainstream publisher, you’re lucky to make a dime for every dollar of books sold. Up to 70 cents for every dollar can come to you, though, if you self-publish. Another good reason to self-publish is that it’s quick. Within a few hours, your book can be available for sale to the public when you self-publish. Mainstream publishing may require months from the time you complete a manuscript to its appearance on bookstore shelves. In addition, you instantly can sell your book across the globe when self-publishing. Expect several more months and attorneys to be involved with global distribution and sales if you go the mainstream publishing route.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my self-publishing guidebooks:

5 Fascinating Science Fiction Writing Prompts

Science fiction stories typically arise from a novum, a scientifically plausible concept that is a “reality” in the tale. The novum might be an mechanical device like robot servants, artificial intelligence, or faster-than-light spacecraft; it also can be a hypothetical idea such as “The Earth is a scientific experiment run by aliens to determine the meaning of life” or “The government outlaws books.” The author then asks “What if?” exploring how the world with this novum is different than ours.

Among the problems of many novice science fiction writers is instead of introducing a new novum they rely on used furniture – that is, they borrow novums from popular SF series. After all, how many novels have you read that use starships exploring the galaxy for the Earth-based Federation? Barely changing names to appear as if you are not appropriating – a starcraft seeking M-class worlds for the Earth-centered Alliance – still doesn’t cut it as original or fully using the potential that science fiction offers to examine our culture or humanity.

To help SF writers, here are some novums of potential near-future inventions from which stories could be built:

Bag it asteroid retrieval
What if we captured and retrieved small asteroids – say up to 23 feet in diameter – by using a bag-like attachment to a spacecraft? The asteroid then would be pulled to a mineral processing station. How does this affect the space industry and exploration?

Virus-proof cells
What if scientists could create synthetic cells that were entirely resistant to viruses? What if these synthetic cells could be incorporated into the human genome? How would this impact what being human means?

SuperEarth added to solar system
What if a rocky world twice the size of Earth but 10 times as far from the sun as Pluto were found at the edge of our solar system? How would world be explored?

Autonomous city services
What if to reduce street and sidewalk traffic, “smart cities” were constructed so that underground robots did menial chores such as deliver products and mail and go to and from buildings to perform maintenance? How would this alter society?

Designer molecules
What if with new quantum computer technology we could design molecules? This would allow chemists and biologists to create more effective drugs and for engineers to fashion better materials that generate and distribute energy. How would this change civilization?

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing prompt guidebooks:

Pray There’s No Mix-up: Angel vs. Angle

Oh what a difference a letter makes! Transpose the letters “l” and “e” in these two words, and you end up with very different meanings.

An angel is a supernatural being with feathered wings on its back, as in An angel descended from the sky and said she was here to help me through these difficult times.

An angle, however, is a figure formed when two lines meet and share a common endpoint, as in We studied angles during geometry class.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing guidebooks:

Use Caution when Shifting Story’s Location, Time

As a plot develops, you’ll often need to change locations and times in a story. Your characters may be on a journey to some destination or they may need to investigate a matter. You might shift between the characters so that a scene involves the villain who is at a different location than the protagonist.

When making such changes, always ask yourself if it is necessary to further your plot. If the change is merely done because you want to share interesting notes that you’ve researched about a new locale, then it’s probably being done for its “ooh-and-ahh” factor rather than for dramatic tension. This is a problem particularly with science fiction and action-adventure stories in which elements of the story are more about the science or wonder of a place than any useful information that advances the story.

In addition, readers can become confused if the author suddenly shifts the story’s location and time. One easy way to resolve this is to leave a blank line between scenes, which experienced readers will recognize as a demarcation between scenes. In ebooks, where blank lines typically appear between paragraphs, instead use asterisks or a typographical equivalent to mark the scene change.

Regardless if a blank line or asterisks are used, most location or time switches likely require describing the new scene’s landscape, if only via a phrase or clause, simply to orient the reader. Short stories due to their brevity can’t waste words on unnecessary description that slows the drama, however. Because of this, balancing the amount of description that must be provided against the dramatic need to do so.

While setting is a powerful element in a number of genres – especially science fiction, fantasy, horror, action-adventure, and westerns – remember that keeping your story’s focus on character and action almost always will yield a bigger payoff.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing guidebooks:

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