#editng

Creating content is an art and a skill. It takes talent, ambition, and a genuine love for breaking new grounds. But it’s also difficult, competitive, and utterly unforgiving to new creators, making it one of the hardest fields to break into.

Especially online.

That’s why ShadowQuillsInk is devoted to bringing indie creators together in one place as a community to grow our talents. We strive to see a million indie creators, all working together to help each other reach their ideal audience. To that end, we're gathering authors, artists, editors, publishers, bookstores, and more to create the largest hub on the internet for independent creators of all kinds. At ShadowQuillsInk, we'll do our utmost to help you grow in your field(s) and reach your goals, whatever they may be. Because we're creators ourselves.

ShadowQuillsInk is a co-founded business created by a pair of editors, Em and Jay. Even before we met, we both had the idea to make an independent business to help indie creators. Those separate ideas merged and grew as we discussed the topic, and we’ve been working on making that dream a reality for the past few months. Now we’re ready to share it with you.

Currently, our primary service is Editing. We have streamlined the experience to efficiently polish both the author’s projects and their writing skills — all while keeping the costs low enough to be affordable. We’ve divided the whole, messy stages of editing down to four basic steps:

The Beta Review—a quick read-through with general thoughts and a map for how the author can proceed.

The Developmental Edit—large structural changes and minor story tweaks to ease readability and fill in potholes.

The Line Edit—combing the manuscript word by word, using analytics to optimize the manuscript’s language.

And the Formating Edit—creating document files compatible with publishing or querying. 

We also provide a free service to all users: our “Squak Space” forums. Here, creators can check out our DIY 101 articles: detailed primers to help anyone gain the knowledge they need to transition into the next phase of their journey. If those are not enough, or if a user wants more direct advice, creators can also ask each other (or us directly) about the issues they’re most concerned about.

Our pride and joy, however, is the ShadoWings list. As editors, there’s only so much we can do to help content creators outside our specific niche. (At least, for now.) In light of that, we’ve reached out to all sorts of professionals online who provide services our clients need. Our aim is that any creator using our site will be able to find all the resources they need to become the professionals they aim to be.

We’re not content with the status quo for online content creators. All too often it comes down to luck, not work, for an independent creator to become successful in today’s market. We aim to change that. We at ShadowQuillsInk are hoping to create a new Indie Community Hub where content creators of all walks of life can come to create, publish, and share their works. The first step in that journey is to forge a whole new middle ground between the Big Five traditional publishers, who overlook new authors in favor of “safe” sales, and Amazon, who accepts any works robotically, providing no guidance while underpaying their authors.