Literary Editor for Faroese Myths

I’m looking for a strong human editor for a finished manuscript of roughly 46,000 words: OF SEAL WOMEN AND GIANTS Myths & Legends of the Faroe Islands It’s a collection of 28 literary retellings of Faroese myths, legends, ballads, and a few stories that sit somewhere between history and folklore. This is not an academic folklore book and it’s not a children’s book. I’m aiming for something atmospheric, strange, readable, occasionally dark and occasionally funny — a book an English-speaking traveler might pick up in a bookstore or museum shop in the Faroe Islands and actually want to keep reading. The manuscript is substantially finished. The underlying stories have already been researched against Faroese sources, and it has had a Faroese cultural review. What I need now is another good human set of eyes before it goes into print. The editing This is primarily a line/stylistic edit, not a request to rebuild the plots. Because these are old legends, the basic story architecture is already there. I’m looking for someone with good literary judgment who can make the writing cleaner and more natural without sanding away its personality. Some AI tools were used during the research process, so one thing I specifically want help with is catching anything in the prose that feels repetitive, over-explained, too polished, overly rhetorical, or otherwise unnatural. I’m not interested in AI-detector scores. I’m interested in a smart human reader/editor who can tell when a sentence works and when it’s trying too hard. There is dialogue, humor, violence, supernatural material, saga material, folklore logic, and some intentionally strange storytelling. I want to preserve all of that. If you have experience with folklore, mythology, historical fiction, literary fiction, short stories, Nordic literature, or oral storytelling traditions, wonderful. If you don’t, that’s not necessarily a problem. Good editorial instincts matter more. Ideally, this could become an all-in-one project If I can find one person who is genuinely good at the editing and can take the book the rest of the way through self-publication, that would be ideal. That could include interior book design, typography, tasteful black-and-white chapter art or old woodcut/Gothic-style decorative elements, cover design, print-ready formatting, EPUB/Kindle formatting, and eventual setup/upload to Amazon KDP and IngramSpark. I already have an illustrated story map that will be part of the book. The visual direction I’m imagining is restrained, literary, old-world and North Atlantic — engraving/woodcut/early-print influence rather than glossy fantasy artwork. That said, please still apply if editing is the thing you do extremely well and the rest is not. I already have another publishing/design team I can use if necessary. I would much rather hire an excellent editor and separate production people than compromise the edit just to have everything under one roof. How I’d probably start I’d like to do a small paid sample edit with a promising editor before committing the whole manuscript. Nothing complicated — just enough for both of us to see whether our instincts about the prose line up. If you’re interested, send me whatever you think is useful: a little about yourself, relevant books or editing work, publishing/design examples if you do that too, and a rough sense of your availability and cost. You absolutely do not need to check every box above. If you’ve worked on something involving folklore, myths, legends, historical material, or literary storytelling, I’d especially like to see it. And if you’ve personally taken books through KDP/IngramSpark, mention that too. Mostly, I’m looking for somebody who reads this description and thinks, that sounds like a fun book to work on. A little background on the project: I spent some time living in the Faroe Islands and went looking for the kind of English-language legend collection I wanted to bring home. I couldn’t really find it. There are wonderful old stories everywhere there — attached to villages, cliffs, lakes, rocks and islands — but not quite the modern English collection I had imagined. So I figured I’d make one.