AUTHOR SERVICES

AN INVITATION

"Writing is a joyous act. It's a delightful journey into our imagination, shining a light onto a multiverse of emotions and experiences from love to sorrow. It connects us to ourselves and to others. Great writing starts with honesty. It also starts with unique and unusual ideas and it takes us to places we never expected."

Welcome. My superpower is helping you and your writing. I love helping other authors. Below are my author services. If you require assistance with any of these, please email me at bijal@booktherapy.io. (If you are requesting the below services from outside the US, happy to invoice the equivalent US dollars in your national currency.)

Editorial Book Reviews

As a book reviewer and critic, I,m often asked to produce a comprehensive, independent editorial review.

An editorial review includes a 500+ word review together with a star rating from 1 - 5 (with 5 being exceptional). Editorial reviews qualify for inclusion on Amazon and Goodreads. An editorial assessment evaluates grammar, punctuation, structure, plot, dialogue, characters, story development and coherence of prose. Reviews usually take 14 days to complete and can be expedited to 7 days.

All reviews are pre-approved by the author before posting to retail sites: I will share the review with you first and you can let me know whether you would like it to be published.

If I find your book is also suitable for inclusion under the A-Z of Book Prescriptions, I will include it here too, with a buy link to Amazon or other relevant retail site for purchase. Get in touch for a quote.

Feature Your Book Under a Book Prescription

If you would like your book to be included in our popular A-Z Book Prescriptions (book recommendations that either qualify as literary prescriptions or meet specific reading interests for both adults and children), I will need to review your book first to assess its suitability.

Beta Readers

I offer careful analysis of your manuscript, providing you with valuable feedback in the form of a written report that assesses flow, characterisation, dialogue, potential plot holes and any other areas in your story which may not work from an actual reader’s perspective. Good, objective beta readers are hard to find. I provide detailed comments in a comprehensive report. 60% of my clients are repeat customers or come from referrals. Get in touch for a quote.

Beta readers are extremely helpful to authors, significantly improving the success rate of the book. Without them, authors cannot obtain objective feedback on their stories and could potentially end up paying more in editing costs due to the level of content editing required to take the manuscript to where it needs to be before being published.

Editing and Proofreading services - $0.05 per word

I provide book editing services for authors including structural editing, line editing, copy editing or proofreading a manuscript. I highly recommend that your work is edited and proofread by a book editor before you submit a manuscript to a publisher.

Many new writers don’t appreciate the difference between copy editing and line editing, let alone the effect an editor can have on a book’s success. Appreciating these differences can save you time and money and increase the chances of success for your book.

Social Media promotion (Get in touch for a quote)

Book Therapy enjoys a popular presence on 4 of the major social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn).

Blog Feature (Get in touch for a quote)

Book is featured on our permanent blog as part of a themed post, discussed and agreed with the author. Shared on all social media platforms and mailing list.

Sponsored Post (Get in touch for a quote)

Themed post as agreed with brand/author. Shared on all social media platforms and mailing list.

Author Coaching (Get in touch for a quote)

I also coach other authors / writers to write and self-publish their work. From idea to polished manuscript, we'll make your literary dream come true.

Reviews

Author Coaching

I found Bijal Shah through her website, Book Therapy, and we began a discussion about

bibliotherapeutic books in general because I am a clinical child psychologist

who

had a private practice for years, and used books very successfully to enhance

therapeutic goals in my clinical sessions with both children and adults.

I had even taught an upper division course at the American University

in Cairo, in Writing Bibliographic Books For Young Children,

after which I wrote several picture and story bibliotherapy books

published in Arabic and English.

Bijal Shah graciously agreed to read and assess a compilation of short stories,

poems and personal essays for teens in the Middle East where

my goal was to help youth understand themselves and the world around

them better. I have chosen to write to help all ages because many people

are afraid to seek therapy or there simply aren’t enough therapists around.

There is no way I can adequately thank Bijal Shah for the enormous

help she gaveme in focusing my work in in such a way that I was able use

her suggestions to make the changes necessary to have the work accepted for publication.

Throughout she was encouraging and even when criticizing something,

she did it in a way that was helpful.

The assessment done by Bijal Shah was beyond anything I could have

possibly imagined! Reading through the nineteen pages she sent me was

like we were two friends having a cup of coffee and discussing the work together.

Her assessment was organized into a Table of Contents with sections like:

Overview, Writing Style and Voice, Readability, Bibliotherapy

and Review of Individual Story and Poems.

Each section caused me to think, reflect and consider what I had written

and how I’d presented the material. I spent a tremendous amount of time

and thought dealing with each story, essay and poem

because of the careful way Bijal Shah had approached each piece.

The comments concerned use of language, whether or not the piece worked or not,

typos and need for a copy editor, suitability for teens, and so forth.

When I finished working on each individually, I felt ready to tackle her major

concern was that the book was too broad in scope and needed to be broken into components.

Bijal suggested ways this could be done, and eventually I chose to follow her suggestion to have one

book of short stories for teens and another book of essays and poems for adults. It was through

Bijal’s eyes and practically line-by-line critique that I saw I really was addressing two audiences.

Again, there is no way I can thank Bijal enough for the lengthy, useful and

educational assessment. I met recently with a group of international writers in

Indonesia where several were interested in writing bibliotherapy books because of personal situations they have faced and

I gave them all information about Bijal’s website, and I urged them to sign up for her introductory course.

In fact, I plan to take this courses through Book Therapy in the near future because I am sure this young woman has a lot to teach me.

- M Brauer

A big hello and thank you for reading! Passionate about literature, psychology, and life I launched Book Therapy as an alternative form of therapy using the power of literature. I train mental health professionals, librarians, teachers as well as readers on using bibliotherapy in their own work through our online Bibliotherapy, Literature and Mental Health course. We also curate reading lists/personalised book prescriptions for clients based on their individual needs. This is our signature personalised reading service.

You can also check out Book Therapy’s other free reading lists and A- Z of book prescriptions (covering both fiction and non-fiction). These suggest books based on your existing life situation (e.g. anxiety, job change, relationship heartache) as well as interests (e.g memoir, historical fiction, non-fiction, crime etc). There’s also a Children’s A — Z of Book Prescriptions. Feel free to check out the blog for more literary gems. There’s also a post on my personal story of how I entered the world of bibliotherapy and book curation.

In this role, I have had the opportunity to publish two books called Bibliotherapy: The Healing Power of Reading and The Happiness Mindset, and write various literary essays and pieces for newspapers and magazines. I have undertaken bibliotherapy workshops for The United Nations, various libraries in New York and corporate organisations in the UK and US. My book recommendations have featured in the Guardian, Marie Claire, NBC News, Asian Voice, New York Observer, Sydney Telegraph and various other publications. If you are a parent you might enjoy a podcast I’ve recorded with speech and language therapist Sunita Shah on Raising A Reader & Storyteller. And if you’d like to connect, email me at bijal@booktherapy.io or www.booktherapy.io.

Book Therapy is a participant in the Amazon EU, US and Canada Associates Programme, an affiliate advertising programme designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and Amazon.ca