Therealwriter

I finished my first manuscript, and with my first completed work, I had no idea where to start with finding a reasonably priced editor. So I found Thumbtack.com. I hired a woman by the name of Christine Stewart based out of Baltimore Maryland, who calls herself "The Real Writer". Well now I understand why she has to call herself that instead of people just assuming she was an actual writer, or an actual editor for that matter. She does an amazing job at selling herself as one, which was why I trusted in her to edit my manuscript. She had 3 reviews of 5 stars, and after doing some research, I took a chance with her. I paid her $800 for developmental editing of my full manuscript. This would include subjective editing for consistency, and flow, and structural improvement, as well as grammatical corrections, spelling and punctuation. After paying half of the fee up front, upon the last half of payment I should have received the manuscript with the editing marks, and the manuscript with all of the corrections made. A clean copy. What I got back was far from that. The clean copy was FULL of typos. She did not know how to format my document, which I had to correct myself. She did not finish making all of the changes throughout the document, handing it back to me and saying that I should make the corrections "for practice." She handed the manuscript back to me sooner than the deadline, but did not complete the job at an acceptable level at all. When I communicated this to her, she complained about having to leave a party early to finish the work. On another occasion she had the excuse of being sick. Overall the service was very unprofessional, and her attitude was very negative. She did not seem interested in the manuscript at all, which is fine if she didn't enjoy the story, but she should have shown interest in the work itself. As an editor, you will not always enjoy other people's work, but she is being paid to make corrections. When I gave Christine a negative review, she in turn got very nasty and made several responses in reply, using a personal email I sent to her, editing it to say things that I did not say. If you go to her page on Thumbtack, it clearly says that she has completed only 5 jobs with Thumbtack, yet she has 12 reviews in total, all except for mine giving her 5 stars with glowing reviews, which leads me to believe that she is posing as an editor, misleading amateur writers and duping them out of money.

Thumbtack.com contacted me about one of the reviews I wrote, asking if I actually dealt with Christine, and because I did not reply fast enough, they told me that they had to remove my review because Thumbtack had a policy of honesty. Well I replied telling them my story, pointing out that Christine was misleading and in fact not being honest when she has 5 completed jobs with Thumbtack and 12,5 star reviews. No answer from Thumbtack, and her lies that she put up on her page about me are still there.
If you are a new writer, desperate to find professional editing services, DO NOT trust your hard work with CHRISTINE STEWART, or with THUMBTACK.com They are both a con and could care less about providing professional and honest services to anyone. Like the worse of them, they only care about making a buck.