I am a widely published historical novelist with over a million words in print with Random House, Bantam, Penguin and similar houses. As a former tenured university professor in the social sciences, I consider meticulous research as important as dialog and character development. If you need to know what living conditions were like for the Finnish before WWI, how chalk was manufactured before 1800, how the smallpox vaccine made its way from England to the U.S. in an age of no refrigeration, what materials (if any) the Japanese used to diaper infants two hundred years ago, these are the kinds of questions I can answer based on research. At the same time I can read a completed historical manuscript and catch out anachronisms -- a gun that wasn't yet invented, an idiom that would not have been known, characters speaking the wrong language or dialect, terms for servants, bishops, mayors in small Welsh villages or Victorian metropolises.
Most usually people hire me as a coach or beta reader, and I enjoy that work as well.