About
Following a successful period of publishing my own books, assisting my fellow authors with getting theirs into print, and undertaking professional training courses to enable me to do so, in 2021, I quit my print-industry IT day job to work full time as a freelance editor and proofreader. (I could definitely have made that sentence shorter, but I think it serves to illustrate the difficulty of editing your own work. 😊)
I work with both independent publishers and author service providers, as well as continuing to work with a variety of published authors. As a self-publishing author myself, I am committed to creating transparent pricing and budget-friendly options, as I understand how big and frightening an investment it can be. See my services page for my base per-thousand-word rates.
I regularly use the Chicago Manual of Style and New Hart’s Rules, along with many other style guides, to ensure texts are consistent with whichever style you feel is best for your book. I also keep updated with any changes in new editions of those guides.
I offer developmental edits, line and copy-editing, and proofreading of all types of document, and I am a graduate of the Publishing Training Centre’s proofreading course, the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading’s suite of copyediting courses, and Liminal Pages’ Developmental Editing courses. (I continue to undertake other courses with both the CIEP and other providers to keep in touch with current standards and ensure I don’t get too slack.)
I can provide old-school BSI proofreading (symbols written into your margins with a multi-coloured pen or PDF stamps) on actual paper if that’s your bag (and can be as lenient or strict as you require with the rules of grammar). I also work regularly with Word, Google Docs and other software programmes, utilising tracked changes and comments, and marking up PDFs with Adobe Acrobat. I’m a native English speaker and, as such, will happily iron out language bumps from the writings of those for whom it is not a first language. In particular, I’ve worked with a lot of Polish romance authors and can now almost instinctively fix the odd verb constructions that come from some (not all) translations.
As you can guess from my own published work, I specialise in fiction (particularly if you’ve written an epic fantasy, gnarly horror, fast-paced thriller, rom-com or knockabout comedy) but have worked on plenty of non-fiction texts, a lot of which focus on the music industry. As a musician myself, I’m very familiar with the subject matter and have corrected no less than seven incidents of authors attributing songs/albums/instruments to the wrong artists/record labels/musicians. I’m a keen advocate of LGBTQIA+ rights and issues, and I am very eager to help anyone from that background on their way to being published (as well as anybody from my native Devon).
If you’re writing either YA or Romantasy (or both) then I’d love to get in touch with you as I’m keen to expand my clients in these genres (because I devour them for fun in my spare time).
I’m a fully paid-up member of both the CIEP and the Alliance of Independent Authors, who carefully vet their members to ensure nobody is getting ripped off. I’ve heard enough horror stories from clients who previously hired the cheapest editors they could find on Fiverr and Upwork to believe in the guarantee of honesty that these two institutions stand for.
