Children's Book
Editing Services

With her eagle eye, Emma quickly identified the salient features in each of my stories, and the best way to highlight them. Plus she did it with professionalism, good humor, and respect. With Emma’s guidance I was able to join the submissions fray--confident I was putting my best foot forward. I finally signed with my dream agent, which allowed me to focus on my writing. And I’m proud to say she just negotiated my first picture book contract!

Emma is a gifted and stalwart muse who gave me a better understanding of what I have written and what, specifically, I need to do to improve my story. She did this with gracious goodwill, good-hearted objectivity and extensive professional and creative insight. Emma’s thoughtful, comprehensive, and utterly practical critique of my work guided me to a breadth of disciplined creativity that is very hard, perhaps impossible, to achieve by myself. My attachment to my central character has kept me too close to see the issues that block her full expression, and my own. Emma guided me to open-minded examination of my work. Her editorial skill is objective and fully explicated without being sanguine. She is acutely perceptive and utterly practical. Truly, Emma is an insightful editor who discerns the windows in the work that can be opened to invite greater light. I made a general call for help in improving my story and received much more than I expected: a road map to multi-dimensional understanding and practical next steps to bring my characters and story to brighter, clearer, life. Emma gave me this road map for the improvement of my book, but also for my personal development as an author. Her critique was at once decisive and affirming. I recommend her careful and perceptive reading and editing gifts to other authors who want to say all that they can say, to themselves, and to others.

There comes a point in a piece of writing where its author, after laboring over each and every word, is so intuitive with their script that the objectivity to evaluate it from the reader’s perspective is obscured. Emma is a wizard in providing the unbiased voice that allows the author to detach enough to see where writing gaps exist. Emma prompts an author to consider improvements in voice, plot and character development and does so in a timely, detailed and insightful way. Emma is an invaluable coach on the writing journey.

I am truly touched and awed by the time/thought put into your evaluations. I am currently digesting all, and my mind is swimming with new ideas and… pondering. Thank you for everything, my writing journey begins!

Thank you so very much for your lovely words about the book. I can’t say enough about your insights, questions, and edits. Your critique made me think more clearly about what I am trying to say and do with this book and the rest of the books in the series. I have rewritten all the stanzas to fix the “voice” and the show-and-tell problems. Because of you, I now have much more confidence to publish this book in the spring! Many, many thanks.

What a superb analysis! Best bang for my buck yet in my short career as an author. My only regret is that I didn’t find your services BEFORE submitting this book to publishers. Your services are just as advertised. This evaluation will make me a better writer. Thanks again!

I learned more in one hour from Emma Walton Hamilton than I ever did in any English or Creative writing course. Beyond her abilities to breathe life into the text, she is professional, and courteous. She is a best selling author and a class act.

Emma Walton Hamilton was my indispensible dramaturg during the writing of my play, MEN’S LIVES, an adaptation of Peter Mattheisen’s non fiction book of the same title. Her advice made that play something of which we can both be proud. Emma also produced MEN’S LIVES both years that it ran at the theatre she instituted with Sybil Christopher and Steven Hamilton, which has become one of the finest regional theatres in America. Emma possesses a gift for helping shape what E.M. Forster, calls, story, plot and character in literature of all kinds, not just plays. Her wide angle abilities to pull together, beginning, middle and end are a boon to a writer. Emma is correct in her literary assessments, clear spoken and precise in her advice, and an altogether beautiful person to work with, or indeed, just to have lunch.

I have worked with Emma Walton on three books and know what good fortune that has been. She has a sharp eye and a gracious manner, is respectful, occasionally firm, always supportive. Emma brings a bone-deep understanding of staging and theatrical presence to the editing process, allowing her to “see” the workings of a book–to applaud what is right, and to shape what isn’t until it sings. Her projects have the immediacy and vibrancy of a live performance in which she celebrates the subtlety and resonance of the author’s voice.

Emma is a talented developmental editor. She is adept at giving editorial feedback in a constructive way to authors; has a strong sense of plot, character development, and dialogue, and is particularly good at line-editing so that a story’s shape emerges more clearly (her suggestions for cutting and streamlining are particularly effective). Emma also has a strong marketing sense; unlike many editors, she has a talent for conceiving, writing, and executing marketing materials for both print and electronic mediums.