Service FAQ

We go for the “hard, but fair” approach, so we’ll tell you what you did right and wrong. Of course, we may not catch everything, but we aim to give each project our best shot.

While we’d eventually like to brag and say that we’re good at picking apart every genre, we do our best work in the following areas:

• Science Fiction
• Fantasy
• Military
• Spy/Espionage
• Crime/Police
• Thriller
• History
• Alternate History
• Memoirs
• Business

If you have a project that is some combination of all of these, more power to you!

As of this writing, we have very little to no experience in the following areas:

• LGBT Romance (The Subgenre)

We do not prohibit these books, but we may or may not be able to help you because we usually do other genres with a romantic subplot.

This company is secular in nature and values logic, reason, and good storytelling. We don’t want to contradict that by putting our name on books that aim to:

• Convert people to or away from a religious opinion.
• Endorse pseudo-science, such as the Flat Earth, Alien Astronauts, Climate Change Denialism, or Creationism.
• Unironically promote conspiracy theories, such as the New World Order, Pizzagate, or the “Deep State.”
• Spread the ideals of totalitarian, authoritarian, or absurd ideologies, such as fascism, communism, or anarchism.

From a certain point of view, that would be a betrayal of our duty to the public and our mission to reach the widest possible audience.

These prohibitions do not necessarily apply to works of fiction, satire, or parody. If you’d like to use historical figures, that’s fine, too!

It depends upon the length of the project in question. After all, it’d be kind of silly to edit a 1,250-word short story for free, don’t you think?

Due to our usage of open-source software like LibreOffice, we almost always request .DOC, .DOCX, or .ODT files.

At this point in time, we are ready to do business with English-language customers in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Australia, and New Zealand.

If you write in English and live outside of these areas, we may or may not be able to accommodate you because of your local VAT or GST laws. With that in mind, we are willing to do the legwork to see if we can help you, so feel free to ask!

As of 12/5/2021, we require a 33% non-refundable deposit for all Line, Developmental, and All-In-One Edits that call for a payment interval (which shall be no less than 33%), along with a 25% deposit for Ghostwriting. This shall come in the form of a minimum payment on the same invoice, or may be deducted from your final bill if we’re backed up and have to reserve some time for you on a first-come, first-serve basis.

We like to maintain flexibility in our Service Agreement. Therefore, you can save some money and protect yourself against future price increases by purchasing as many words as you’d like in advance, so long as it can fit your projected word count for one project or more.

However, there is a catch. If you do this, you won’t have to pay for a deposit, but you won’t receive refunds either.

If you’d like to do that, just let us know, and we’ll make a note of your purchase. When you get around to your submissions, we’ll deduct the words that you use on each project until you’re out. After that, you can refill them as needed!

We have access to PayPal, Square Invoices, and Bitpay.

We need this for taxation and legal purposes.

For instance, many of our clients are in the U.S., so we have to comply with the Supreme Court’s Wayfair decision. The outcome of this case means that we may inevitably be required to follow the notice-and-report and/or economic nexus laws across the United States.

By accident, we found out that payment processors like PayPal do not furnish this information for service transactions, so it’s nice to have a backup as well.

Be sure to check out our Service Agreement. We offer a wide variety of options that can help you during this process, but we typically resort to a Pay As You Go format if you’re genuinely having trouble. Just be sure to tell us so that we don’t wind up yelling at each other in our emails!

Payment processors like PayPal offer other ways to pay as well. We don’t get a kickback for hawking their services, but their tools can make our dealings a lot easier. If you need more info, be sure to ask away!

Please note that we are not lawyers, tax professionals, or accountants, and this section should not be treated as if we are.

Long story short, it depends upon where you live. We know that Canada, the nations of the European Union, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and some states in the United States tax our services, so we will need to do our due diligence on that front.

As pointed out in our answer about personal information, our work in the U.S. is subject to the Wayfair decision. As of 5/9/2020, we don’t think that we fit the requirements for normal or economic nexus laws outside of the State of Michigan, so be sure to consult your local tax authority for self-assessment rules.

Canada, New Zealand, and Australia use GST-style systems with varying rules. We’ll examine them with you.

The UK and the nations of the European Union use a VAT system. If you own a business, we will require you to give us your VAT number or some indication of activity to trigger the reverse charge rule, if applicable.

If not, the transaction will be dependent upon the Business-to-Consumer place of supply rules of the UK and European Union. To the best of our knowledge, the rules in question would mean that our transactions are not taxable because it places taxation in the supplier’s jurisdiction.

Once again, this shouldn’t be interpreted as legal advice.

As mentioned above, this company has every reason to believe that it only has nexus in Michigan, so we are theoretically outside of the scope of that silly legislative mistake. However, we don’t know if California might try to apply some legal kung fu, so we intend to abide by the exception that has been carved out for writers and editors.

In order to keep us both out of potential trouble, we shall enforce a restriction of 35 project submissions per calendar year for any client who resides in California. Almost all of you probably won’t reach that limit, so there should be no real worries anyway.

We usually do technical support first to handle certain issues. If that doesn’t work, you can stop, but only under the following conditions:

• The service is Line Editing, Developmental Editing, All-In-One Editing, or Ghostwriting. 
• You are required to put down a non-refundable deposit for it.
• The service calls for payment intervals.
• We reach a payment interval that is after the deposit threshold.
• You did not do a bulk order or one that requires 100% of the fee before work begins.

If you do this, the invoice shall be adjusted on a “For Services Rendered” principle to reflect the work done.

It’s important to remember that editing is a reasonably subjective process that may or may not be done to your liking. Because of this, we do not issue refunds for the services that we provide once the project is done.

With that in mind, we are more than willing to help you deal with technical problems, particularly if they pop up during a formatting job. If you think you’ve spotted an error or some other issue, let us know, and we’ll take a look at it!

It depends on what it is. If you want us to look at a correction that you’ve made to a certain sentence, we’re more than fine with that. If it’s anything more than a page, we’ll probably charge you for it.

With that said, you need to tell us the chapter and page that you’re looking to correct. If you do not properly communicate your needs, there could be delays.

If you want us to look at multiple sections, you can utilize the Tracked Changes function in your word processor. If you do that,  be sure to clear our prior edits out of the Tracked Changes ledger. If they are not, we may experience similar problems.

This very website is a custom design that we created… with a little help from various online resources, of course. It isn’t quite perfect, but it works well and has several special features that our prior theme did not have.

If you like what you see, you’ll like what we can do for you!

It depends on what you want. If you want us to create a page that matches a theme that you already have, that will cost a lot less than if you need a full theme. In any case, we need a specific list of the things that you want done, your budget, and any other information that you can muster.

If you need a customized theme, we will use Bootstrap and starter themes like Underscores as a baseline for projects. We might expand to other techniques in the future, but these two tools should give us the means to tackle a wide variety of projects.

As with the other questions along this line, we’re not lawyers or tax professionals, so this is just an impression of the situation.

Long story short, it depends upon where you live. As of this writing, we have no reason to believe that we have nexus anywhere outside of the State of Michigan, so we’ll use our state as an example.

Under Michigan law, we have every reason to believe that this service is not subject to sales tax because it makes changes to the WordPress platform, which is a pre-written piece of software. With that said, we are required to list the changes made on the invoice in order to comply with the exemption, so you’ll have to be clear and concise.

Other states have different laws, and we’ll follow them as best as we can. However, we cannot offer this service outside of the United States just yet because we don’t know how VAT laws apply to this service. When we do, we’ll be happy to offer it where we can.

Unlike our other services, we are under the impression that any custom theme is subject to WordPress’ GPLv2 or later license, even if we developed it on our own without the usage of external tools. Therefore, we get credit for the changes, but you can mod and play around with it without restriction.

We will always start with the front-end design that your visitors will see. Once we get that done, we’ll move on to the back end and add special changes that meet your needs. After that, there will be a special segment of time where we’ll try our best to break your site and fix catastrophic bugs. And then, we’ll send it over to you.

As we mentioned previously, WordPress relies on a GPLv2 or later license, which gives us the ability to work with free development plugins and other things like that. If we need you to install one, we’ll let you know.

We will include instructions on how to install and activate your custom theme. It should be a breeze!

If you order a custom theme, we include six months of technical support at no additional charge. If you want some help with retooling a page, adding another scroll bar, or fixing some kind of graphical positioning issue, we’ll be more than happy to help with that.

With that said, we do not cover anything outside of that, such as extensive mods on your part, plugin malfunctions, computer crashes, a failure of the WordPress platform, and the like.

You can also purchase extensions of the warranty for as long as you want, so don’t hesitate to do that if you want peace of mind.

Check out our Art section in the toolbar above.

If you like what you see, there’s more where that came from!

It depends on what you want. The more detail that you can provide about what you want us to draw, the better.

We primarily use Krita on a tablet.

Once again, we’re not lawyers or tax professionals, so this is just our impression of the situation.

Long story short, it depends on where you are. We don’t believe that we have nexus outside of the State of Michigan, so we’ll use our state as an example.

Under Michigan law, we have every reason to believe that this service is not subject to sales tax because it involves the sale of a digital product that is not a type of software.

Other states have different laws, and we’ll follow them as best as we can. However, we cannot offer this service outside of the United States just yet because we don’t know how VAT laws apply to this service. When we do, we’ll be happy to offer it where we can.

We do, but we shall grant you a commercial or non-commercial license to use it. Just follow along with what’s below!

Since we have complete access to all of the files at any given time, you will be required to state if you are a commercial client. We shall assume that you are not one unless shown otherwise.

If you are treated as a non-commercial customer, you shall have a license to use the art for personal purposes.

Ex. You want a profile picture for your personal Facebook page.

If you are a commercial customer, you will be allowed to use a project for a specific purpose (Youtube videos, Twitch streams, etc.) in exchange for a 25% surcharge that shall be listed separately on the invoice. This includes any reasonable implied activities that are associated with the project in question, such as putting the art in a thumbnail or posting it on your social media page for promotional purposes.

We do not offer licensing for merchandising or selling the art directly, and we reserve the right to determine what is eligible for a commercial license and what is not. When in doubt of what you can do, just ask.