Erik PillarThe honest read

For Novelists

An editor who has actually read your genre.

Epic and progression fantasy, LitRPG, cultivation, space opera, horror, romance. I read them for pleasure, I write them at length, and I develop books professionally — on deadline, for a publisher — every working day.

Send 1,000 wordsA free sample edit, returned within a week.

Before you ask

My paid editing credits are in technical books.

I would rather you heard that from me than worked it out later. I am a development editor at a technical publisher, and that is where my named credits are. I am building a fiction list now, deliberately, and taking a small number of fiction clients at reduced rates while I do.

Here is why I think it transfers, and you can judge it yourself from the work further down this page.

  • Structure is structure

    A chapter that loses the reader and a tutorial that loses the reader fail the same way — an unearned leap, a promise made and not paid, a reader who no longer knows why they should care. Developmental editing is one discipline. The genre conventions are the part I had to learn, and I learned them as a reader and a writer, not from a manual.

  • I have written the thing I would be asking you to fix

    Not a sample chapter — novelettes, at length, across five genres. If you want to know whether I can hear a sentence or hold an arc, you can read several thousand words of mine and decide before you pay me anything.

  • A million readers, with the data attached

    I was lead writer on a branching interactive fiction project that passed a million readers. Branching narrative is developmental editing with the results visible: you can see which route people abandon, which chapter they stop at, which promise they came back to collect. I spent that project watching structural decisions succeed and fail at a scale most editors never get to observe, and I have been editing against those instincts ever since.

I. The Audition

Read me before you hire me

No editor should ask of you what they have not done themselves. All of it is free, and none of it is an excerpt from something you have to buy.

II. On the Record

I have written about these books in public

7,203 words of published criticism on progression fantasy and LitRPG. Not a claim that I read the genre — the reading itself, dated and with my name on it.

III. Serials & Long Arcs

Two hundred chapters in, the problem is never chapter two hundred

Web serials break in ways a standalone novel does not, and most editors have never had to think about it. If you are publishing chapter by chapter, this is the work.

Escalation curves

Power has to grow or readers leave, and once it grows past a certain point nothing can threaten your protagonist. That is a design problem with a design solution, and it is far cheaper to fix in the outline than at chapter ninety.

Promise and payoff, compounding

Every chapter break makes a promise. Across a long serial those promises accumulate faster than most authors track them, and unpaid ones are the single most common reason a climbing readership stalls.

Stakes that survive scale

When the protagonist can level a city, a bandit ambush is no longer tense. Stakes have to be re-founded on something that scales with them — and the answer is usually character, not a bigger monster.

Revision under a release schedule

You cannot stop the world to do a rewrite. Structural work on a live serial means changes that land forward rather than retroactively, and I will plan the edit around your posting cadence rather than against it.

IV. The Offices

What I can do for the book

Most authors ask for the wrong one. I will tell you which you actually need before you pay for anything.

  1. Developmental Editing

    Structure, arc, character, and pacing, worked chapter by chapter as you write or across a finished draft.

    You receiveNotes on each chapter, calls to talk the revision through, and a running back-and-forth from first page to finished book.

    Ask for this at any point, from a first chapter to a full draft.

  2. Line & Copy Editing

    Sentence by sentence for rhythm, clarity, and voice, with grammar, continuity, and house style checked and verified true in the same pass.

    You receiveTracked changes through the manuscript, with a query at every point where the call is yours to make.

    Ask for this any time you have a completed draft, a chapter or a full book, when the content is final but the prose still needs work.

  3. Proofreading

    The last pass before it goes out, catching typos, spacing, bad breaks, and anything the previous rounds introduced.

    You receiveMarked proofs, or tracked changes if you are working in Word.

    Ask for this last, on the laid-out proofs.

  4. Manuscript Development & Editorial Consulting

    Work at the outline and the plan before the writing starts, plus a standing second opinion once it has.

    You receiveA structured plan you can write from, and consultation by email, chat, or call, whichever suits how you work.

    Ask for this before you commit to a plan, or when you want judgement by the hour.

V. What I Read

Genres I work in

If yours is not here, say so anyway — but I will tell you honestly if you would be better served by someone else.

V. What Authors Say

In their words

Erik has helped me edit my first book from zero to launch. Throughout the process he provided great recommendations, in terms of content, style, and grammar. I can certainly say that I would not have finished my book, without his help!
Francisco TrindadeLeading Effective Software Teams

Send me a thousand words.

Any thousand — your opening, the chapter you keep rewriting, or the one you already know is broken. I will edit it properly and send it back with real queries, free. One document is enough for you to decide whether I am the right reader for your book.

Start a sample editRead my fiction first