We are delighted to announce a new ‘Supporter’ feature to our fee structure for our core service, Manuscript Assessment.
From 7th October 2021, when you purchase a manuscript assessment with TLC, you can choose to support a low-income writer by opting to pay an additional 5% or 10% at checkout. If you are on low income or need a little extra help, you can choose to ‘Be Supported’ for a 10% discount on your manuscript assessment.
We hope that these new options allow those writers who want to pay something forward and support a low-income writer the chance to make a difference.
You can still choose to select the standard fee for the service, should you prefer.
This new feature has been developed with the support of consultant Rakhee Jasani, as a complement to TLC’s Arts Council Free Reads Scheme, which supports low-income and marginalised writers across England. The new tiered structure is available to writers anywhere in the world and applicable across manuscript assessment applications for fiction, non-fiction, children’s books, poetry, short stories, and scripts.
TLC Director Aki Schilz says:
“For a long time TLC has been interested in the relationship between cost, price, and value in the author services industry. We believe in the value of what we do, and believe in offering fair pay to our readers. The funded sector feels like it is facing a challenge around how to communicate the value of our services and products, in tandem with a worthy challenge to increase accessibility. Balancing these can be tricky, but it’s a challenge we must take on collectively. To date, TLC has offered over 2,000 writers bursaries for feedback, mentoring and events, thanks to funding from the Arts Council England. 20% of our editorial services are offered at no cost to low-income and marginalised writers. We would like to further increase access to subsidised support in a way that is self-sustaining regardless of our funding status, by introducing this new three-tiered system as a six-month pilot, with robust evaluation in place to see if we can make a useful difference to those who might not be eligible for a bursary, but for whom a discount could make a difference. The theatre sector has used the ‘pay more, pay less’ offer for years, notably the Old Fire Station whose report was vital in developing TLC’s offer. This is however to our knowledge the first time such a system has been applied to service fees. We are extremely lucky to have clients who regularly come back to us looking for ways to pay forwards the support they themselves have benefited from. Now, anyone can do just this. We really hope you will join us in our efforts to make sure high quality editorial services can be made available to more writers, across all genres and formats, whether they are writing to be published or writing for themselves. Because we truly believe that all writing is valuable, and that the power of feedback can be transformative.”
You can submit your work for a manuscript assessment with one of our professional Readers now by clicking here.
