Assessments
Tales of Fontania
Join Barbara on Facebook
We are members of the New Zealand Association of Manuscript Assessors (NZAMA).
Please note: we do not assess poetry.
An assessment from TFS is an objective report designed to help you resolve any problems we see in your manuscript and offering suggestions on how to rework it.
We give positive feedback by indicating your strengths. Comments and specific points cover topics such as characterisation, structure and style. If your project is close to publication standard we will give you suggestions for selling it.
Comments and advice relate directly to the text.
A typical report on a book length work is 7 to 12 pages.
We deal with fiction and general non-fiction, including children's books. We do not take on specialised non-fiction unless we have at least minimum competence in the subject area.
You can send us part of a ms if you wish but if you do, there will obviously be certain aspects, such as overall structure, which we won't be able to comment on.
We prefer to receive manuscripts as email attachments in MS Word format. However, contact us before you send anything.
If you would pefer to send hardcopy, it must be as follows for ease of reading:
Include a prepaid return envelope for the ms and report.
You can find our postal address on our Contact Us page.
However you send the ms, include a covering email or letter with:
If you have sent us an ecopy, we will email our report to you along with along with additional notes and references. We will also send an ecopy of the text that includes detailed comments using the Word comments function.
If you have sent us hardcopy, we will return a printed report (plus additional notes) and the paper manuscript with written comments.
The cost of an assessment is based on the word count of each piece. As a rough guide, an assessment of an 80,000 word novel would be around $810. Use our calculator to get a better idea.
Collections of short stories have separate assessment rates, depending on the length and number. Send them to us and we will give you a quote.
Between us we have extensive experience in writing, teaching, publishing and bookselling and have in depth knowledge of business of writing in a New Zealand context. For further details see separate pages for Chris and Barbara.