For a start, the would-be author – you -- describes his or her writing project by e-mail to Words & Company (see Contact Us). Words & Company responds in short order, answering your questions and asking a few of our own. We'll request a representative sample from your project. We'll review it and propose a package, estimating the kind and degree of editing it will require and the amount of time we figure it will take (we would probably spend more than half a year on a book-length work, for example). We'll propose a fixed price, broken down into sections. For online contracts, we calculate cost on a portion-by-portion, rather than on an hourly basis. The author pays in advance as Words & Company completes each portion and is ready to go on to the next.

When the edited portion comes back, you can approve, modify, or reject any change. If the editor has you doing a fair amount of reworking, you might want to submit a second draft. You're free to cancel any arrangements regarding the remainder of the editing agreement for any reason. By mutual agreement, original copy and editor's notated changes may be produced on Microsoft Word and exchanged via e-mail attachment. Photos, graphs, and other art also travel electronically. Scholarly texts are footnoted as needed and automatically numbered and placed on the bottom of the page or as endnotes.