You have a manuscript. I have read several hundred like it, which is the only credential that counts here: I know what a book looks like before anybody has decided what it is for.
I edit drafts — memoir and literary fiction, mostly writers in eastern Canada who found me by asking someone else. The work is structural: what the book is actually doing, and the page where it quietly stops doing it. But structure is half of what gets a book bought. The other half is a conversation in a room you are not in, where somebody says a number out loud and somebody else asks who exactly is going to read this.
That room is the subject of this site. Positioning, comps, rights, the route a book takes to reach anyone at all, and the arithmetic sitting under a print run. Not because the numbers are the point. Because you cannot argue with a P&L you have never been shown, and you will be asked to live inside the consequences of one for two books at least.
I am also a community nurse, and the two jobs make the same demand. What a person tells you about their situation is rarely the whole situation, and the practical details are where anything gets done. A deal is a practical detail. So is the second book.