I work with humanities and social science scholars on academic books, usually across several stages of one project and often over years.
Most editors take one stage of a book. I take the whole arc: proposal, development, peer review, copyedit, proofs, index. By the time I'm building your index, I've read the book more times than anyone but you.
I work to press schedules and tenure clocks, and I plan backward from the dates that matter.
Four stages, in the order a book meets them.
A proposal has to do two things at once: convince an acquisitions editor there's a book here, and convince them it's a book for their list. I work on the framing, the field positioning, the sample chapters, and the cover letter. I'll help you get years of research down to two sentences an editor can repeat in an acquisitions meeting.
Development first: what the book is claiming, where the argument goes slack, which chapter is carrying weight the others should be sharing. Then line editing, sentence by sentence, working from your own words rather than replacing them with mine.
Much of my work is with scholars across Latin America and Europe, most often those writing in English out of Spanish, Portuguese, or French. For scholars writing in English as an additional language, what usually needs attention is syntax carried over from the first language, not vocabulary or fluency. I also know how tenure and publication requirements differ from one national system to another.
You get an editorial memo that lays out the revision plan in the order you'd do the work, with the changes that unlock other changes first. And you get a manuscript edited throughout: line work in the text, comments in the margins wherever the decision is yours to make.
Two readers' reports come back and they don't agree. I help you sort what's binding from what's advisory, decide where to concede and where to hold your ground, and draft the response letter that goes back to the press. Then I work with you on the revisions themselves.
Copyedits to press style, press-ready proofs, and indexes for scholarly and trade nonfiction. The press assigns a copyeditor after acceptance, but a manuscript that arrives clean at submission gives a reviewer one less reason to hesitate. An index is a reading of the book, not a list of its nouns. It should hold the arguments, not only the terms.
I'm Rio Hartwell. Before I went freelance I worked in acquisitions at Boydell & Brewer, reading proposals and deciding which ones went forward. That's still how I read a manuscript: with an eye on what an acquisitions editor, a peer reviewer, and eventually a reader will make of it. Those are the three people a book has to get past, in that order.
I came to editing through my own scholarship. I did doctoral work in American history at Arizona State, so I know the state most projects come to me in: years of research, and no reader yet who can tell the author what the book is. That's where I come in.
All of my work comes by referral, one author sending the next. Often that means several faculty in the same department, then several departments at the same university. The referrals cross borders, too: much of my work now is with scholars in Latin America and across Europe. It's why I pay attention to how differently tenure and publication requirements work from one national system to another, and why a manuscript written in English out of Spanish, Portuguese, or French gets edited for the syntax it carried over, not for the author's English.
I trained in the University of Chicago's Editing and Publishing program. The rest came from the books, six years of them now, most for university presses.
What I want is for the book to be better than it would have been, and for you to know at every stage what happens next: what the press needs, what the reviewers mean, what the tenure clock allows. You do the scholarship. I keep the book moving.
Books I've worked on are published or under contract with Cambridge, Chicago, Columbia, Illinois, NYU, Oxford, Rochester, and Yale.
Ethnography and forced migration. Latin American politics and policing. Religious studies and rhetoric. Postwar US Black history and social movements. Native American and Indigenous studies. Late-twentieth-century art history and visual culture, music and sound studies, literary and American studies, history of medicine, Jewish studies, and African and diasporic studies.
Send me a chapter and tell me where you are with the book. I'll read it and send back a page on what I'd do with it, along with options for scope and cost. I work on a flat project fee.
Thank you.
Your message is with me and I'll be in touch shortly. If you'd rather add anything in the meantime, write to me directly at riohartwell@gmail.com.
Prefer email? Reach me at riohartwell@gmail.com