
TLC accepts submissions of: Fiction, Non-Fiction, Short Stories, Poetry, Scripts, Screenplays at all levels, written in English. For a list of Readers, see here.
Quick Turnaround. If you are looking for a Quick Turnaround (i.e., a report sent within 10 business days) please contact us directly.
If you have any questions about your submission, you can email us at .
Once a manuscript arrives with us at The Literary Consultancy, we will treat it with the utmost care. We will acknowledge received work via post or email. Your work will be matched to its most suitable reader from our team, and sent on to them securely. As the most firmly established literary consultancy in the UK, we have over the years built up an extensive team of 90 professional readers. Writers who use our services can feel confident that their work will be allocated to the reader who will best meet their needs.
Readers will read your manuscript thoroughly and write a detailed and constructive critique of your work, which will be sent to you within 5 weeks. We will confirm a likely deadline with you. We also offer a ‘quick turnaround’ service, where you will receive feedback within 7-10 working days. Please see Quick Turnaround for more details.
We believe that each writer should be treated as an individual in relation to their own background and needs. Our manuscript assessment reports are therefore not written to fit a generic formula; they are written in the most constructive manner for the writer. We offer training and guidance to all of our readers to ensure their editorial practice remains up to date. A TLC critique will generally range in length between 1,500 and 4,000 words (guideline only) depending on the material you are submitting.
We expect writers to be able to manage and accept editorial intervention in the belief that this is an important capacity for writers at any level. If you have a genuine query concerning your report please write to TLC directly at . We will forward relevant queries to your reader, and our in-house team is on hand to answer more general questions.
No initial letter or phone call is required. However, if you do wish to contact us with any queries we are available to discuss any questions or concerns you may have at any stage.
Your covering letter to TLC should include some brief information about what sort of manuscript it is you’re submitting (thriller, literary, fantasy, romance etc), a bit about yourself, if you have attended any writing courses and any history of previous submissions to publishers or agents. Include any specific anxiety you may have about the text itself, and if there is anything you would particularly like your reader to address or advise you on. TLC reports will include a market appraisal; please therefore indicate if you already have a particular market in mind i.e., whether you wish to submit to an agent, self-publish, if this is a personal project etc., to ensure your feedback is tailored appropriately.
A synopsis should provide a succinct one-page summary of the plot of the book. For detailed guidelines on how to write a synopsis, click here for an article by TLC founder Rebecca Swift, and here for an updated How to Write a Synopsis article, with top tips and a template.
If you are submitting non-fiction to TLC, please include a chapter outline with your submission, and either sample chapters (for an extract assessment) or the full manuscript as per our formatting guidelines. For information on non-fiction submissions as they would be accepted by publishers, click here.