Children's
A bilingual picture book, built storyboard-first
A kindergarten teacher with 780 words, no illustrator, and no idea that the storyboard was where the book…
Fiction
Craft package 6 min read
Building a crime series one decision at a time
Nadia Brennan came to us with a finished crime novel and two years of near-misses. The developmental read identified a structural problem in the second act; the production set-up was built for a series before the series existed.
Nadia Brennan Author of The Harbour Line
Video slot — embed the author interview here
Where she started
Nadia had a complete crime novel, eleven years of court reporting behind it, and a folder of agent responses that all said roughly the same encouraging, useless thing: loved the voice, not quite right for our list.
She was clear about what she wanted from a consultation: not encouragement, but a diagnosis. Was the book actually ready, or were the agents being polite?
What the assessment found
The manuscript assessment was blunt. The voice was genuinely strong and the setting was doing real work. But the second act had a structural problem: the detective spent eleven chapters gathering information without any of it costing her anything. Nothing was at stake between the discovery of the body and the confrontation.
The editor's recommendation was specific — introduce a professional consequence for Quill early in act two, so that every subsequent scene carries a cost. That was not a line-level fix, so Nadia moved from a Foundation-style production to Craft and took a full copyedit as well.
The revision
She spent eleven weeks rewriting. Four chapters were cut entirely, and a new thread — an internal review of an old case — was threaded through the middle. The copyedit that followed ran to around nine hundred tracked changes and came with a letter identifying four recurring habits: over-explaining after dialogue, a tic of starting sentences with a participial phrase, tense drift in flashbacks, and three characters whose speech had converged.
Setting up for a series
The decision that mattered most commercially was made before design started. Nadia said she intended to write four Harbour Line books. That changed the production set-up entirely.
The cover was designed as a template rather than a one-off, with a fixed typographic system and a compositional rule that later titles could inherit. The interior was built the same way. Series metadata was configured so that retailers link the books together, which is how a reader who finishes book one finds book two.
Books two and three each cost meaningfully less to produce than book one, because the design system already existed.
Where things stand
Three Harbour Line titles and a novella are now in print, in paperback, hardcover and eBook, with the first novel also available as an audiobook. Nadia handles her own marketing, sells at regional crime festivals, and has told us she has no interest in querying agents again.
“I wanted a diagnosis, not encouragement. The assessment told me exactly which eleven chapters were the problem and why. That is the most useful thing anyone did for that book.” Nadia Brennan
Sample case study — replace with a permissioned author story before launch
More author stories
Illustrated
Eleven months to get 132 photographs printed correctly
Four years of shooting, then three proof rounds and a paper change to make the blacks behave.
Business
A business book with a keynote date that could not move
A manuscript thirty per cent too long, a fixed conference date, and a schedule planned backwards from it.
Talk to a publishing consultant
Your manuscript is ready for its next chapter
Thirty minutes, no obligation, and an honest answer about what your book needs. If we think you should keep revising, that is what you will hear.
Your manuscript stays confidential. We claim no rights in your work at any stage.