Josh Hyatt — Freelance Editor | Has This Ever Happened To You?

Has this ever happened to you?

You finished the manuscript. It is 94,000 words. Fourteen of them are the word “very.” Chapter 9 contradicts Chapter 3. There is a semicolon in there you don't remember putting in, and frankly, neither does anyone else.

Friend, you don't need a miracle. You need an editor who has done this at Inc., Fortune Small Business, Money and The Wall Street Journal.

Sound familiar? Of course it does.

Retro comic illustration of a writer buried under stacks of paper covered in red comment bubbles

400 unresolved comments

Your Word document has more conversation in the margins than text on the page. Someone named “Reviewer 2” has opinions about your em dashes. You have stopped opening the file.

Retro comic illustration of a writer clutching a chapter while giant scissors loom nearby

You cannot kill your darlings

Chapter 7 is a beautiful 4,000-word digression about your grandfather's boat. It does not belong. You know it does not belong. You will defend it in court.

Retro comic illustration of a horrified author spotting a circled typo in a freshly printed book

The typo you find after publishing

Page one. Second sentence. Right there in the headline, in print, forever. Somewhere, a comma splice is being passed down to your children.

There has to be a better way!

The Fix

Josh Hyatt has spent his career editing and writing for national business publications. He started as a business reporter at The Boston Globe, became a staff writer at Inc. magazine, then executive editor at Fortune Small Business, where he edited, wrote and oversaw the magazine's major projects. He was a senior writer at Money.

More recently his work has appeared through Deloitte Insights, syndicated to The Wall Street Journal, and in CFO magazine. Today he works with authors, executives and publishers as a freelance editor.

Which is a very formal way of saying: he has read approximately eleven thousand drafts, and yours does not scare him.

Services

Manuscript & Book Editing

Full developmental and line editing for book-length work. Structure, argument, pacing, voice — then sentence by sentence until it reads like you meant to write it that way.

Article & Long-Form Editing

Features, essays, thought leadership and reported pieces edited to national-magazine standard. Leads that land, endings that don't trail off.

Executive & Brand Content

Bylines, reports and research write-ups made readable by a human who has done this for Deloitte Insights and CFO. Jargon removed at no extra charge.

Editorial Consulting

A straight read on whether the thing works, what's missing and what to do next — before you spend another six months on a draft.