About the desk
One editor. One desk. No panel.
When you buy a review here, I read the book. Not a subcontractor, not a rotating pool, not a language model with a house style.
I am Iwan Ross. I write Scottish gothic paranormal cozy mysteries — the McTavish Chronicles — and I publish them wide across Amazon and every other retailer, which means I do all of it myself: the drafting, the editorial passes, the EPUB build, the print PDF, the metadata, the covers, the blurbs.
The blurbs are how this started. I have written every piece of cover copy and every editorial line in my own catalogue, and it turns out that qualification travels. I hold copy-editing and feature journalism certifications from the University of Cape Town, and before fiction I spent years as a technical writer in software and payments — a job that teaches you to strip a sentence to what it is actually claiming.
Authors started asking. Would I look at a first chapter, was the blurb doing its job, did the middle sag. I said yes for a long time, because I remember needing exactly that and having nobody to ask. Then the requests outgrew what a favour can carry, and doing it properly — with a price, a deadline and a standard — became the honest option for everyone.
What I bring to your book
- A novelist's eye. I know what it costs to hold a middle together, so I can tell the difference between a book that sags and a book that is doing something patient on purpose.
- An editor's discipline. Formal copy-editing training, a working style guide, and a checklist that catches the things that go invisible after your fourth pass.
- A journalist's structure. Feature journalism is the craft of making someone care in the first sentence and holding them to the last. That is what a review has to do, and what a blurb has to do in a quarter of the space.
- The indie author's actual context. I know what the Editorial Reviews field looks like in Author Central, why the description field wants HTML, and what the algorithm does to a book with a soft opening month. Your reviewer should not have to have that explained.
The uncomfortable part, stated plainly
I write and sell my own novels. That gives me the experience this service runs on — and it also means you should know exactly where the line is:
- Any editorial review of one of my own titles that appears on this site is labelled as a sample of the studio's work. It is not presented as independent praise, because it would not be.
- I do not review books that compete directly with a title I have in production, and I will say so and decline if that comes up.
- I do not ask clients for reviews, ratings, swaps or endorsements of my books. Ever. Buying a service here creates no obligation of any kind toward my catalogue.
Where I am. Cape Town, South Africa — which is the whole reason a review costs R1 350 here and US$450 in New York. Same hours, same standard, different cost of living. That arbitrage is the business model, and I would rather you understood it than wondered what the catch was.
Tell me about the book.
No payment is taken until the brief is read, the word count is confirmed and the price is agreed in writing. If the book is not a fit, I will say so and point you somewhere better.