Hello! I’m Sarah de Souza,
your fierce – but friendly – fiction book editor.
With 8+ years experience, I've worked in-house and freelanced for BIg Five publishing houses including Penguin and Hachette, and indie publishers. Some of the books that I’ve edited and published have attained bestseller rankings and reviews in The New York Times and Vogue.
I help writers grow their voice and develop their fiction craft. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced writer, I can help you find the shape your novel is meant to take. If you have a manuscript sitting on your laptop and you’re ready to make it the best it can be, I’d love to hear about it.
Here’s how I can help you
Structural Editing
An intensive, holistic deep-dive into your novel’s structure. I’ll approach it from every angle, zooming out to a bird’s eye view to assess your plotting beats, getting in the weeds with you to scrutinise the pacing between chapters, or the protagonist’s likeability (for example). I’ll offer actionable suggestions to make your book as pageturning as it can be. We can also pinpoint your book’s Unique Selling Point, to make it stand out in the market.
Editorial Assessment
Think of this as a lighter-touch developmental edit: a big-picture assessment of your novel designed to identify your novel’s strengths, weaknesses, and market potential, while offering strategic suggestions for how to fix major issues like holes in the plot or character inconsistencies. This is a good option if you’re looking for structural editorial guidance, but your budget can’t quite stretch to the developmental edit.
Line Editing
If you’re already happy with your book’s structure but want to sand off the rough edges or elevate your writing style, that’s where the line edit comes in: a detail-orientated look at your novel on a sentence- and word- level, with the goal of enhancing your style and voice. I solve issues like clunky phrasing and tonal shifts, enhance flow, clarity, and word choice, passages that could flow better, and so on.
Kind words from past clients
"I have had a 100% full request rate [from agents] after your edits! *screams* Thank you SO much for your help. [It's] what I was hoping for in this experience, a chance to really learn what I was doing wrong. (...) I have now had 9 full requests [from agents]...3 were in the last 24 hours alone."
Alexandra Rannelli, author of Murder at the Hotel Orient
"Sarah worked with one of my authors and is incredible, her attention to detail and imagination for the potential of a book are some of the best I've seen."
Hattie Grunewald, Literary Agent at the Blair Partnership Agency
“[Sarah]’s input [was] invaluable, vastly improving the narrative with her insightful comments and suggestions.”
Robert Fabbri, bestselling author of the Vespasian series *300, 000 copies sold*
"Sarah’s editorial letter was a thing of beauty."
Sophie Berti, author of Steeped
“Sarah’s work on my manuscript was fantastic. Feedback from industry professionals is so often incredibly cryptic, so to have an expert, detailed report which actually makes suggestions is invaluable."
Joseph Coward, author of Run-Out Groove
"Sarah is the platonic ideal of an editor. The beauty of Sarah's editing work is that it is so in-depth you can just feel she is giving her all to trying to understand what the book is trying to do and being completely honest (in the kindest way) about what it needs to get there."
Summer O, Reedsy client