This is a great question and a super important one to ask about any editor you’re thinking of working with. Currently in the UK there is no official accreditation for editors (like you’d find for accountants or engineers, for example) which means anybody can call themselves a professional editor regardless of experience or qualifications, so it can be difficult to judge whether somebody is right for your project. Proven experience and pass marks with CIEP The CIEP recently gained chartership…

You’ve heard of reading like a writer (because I talk about it all the time). Now it’s time to book club like a writer! In the mid-nineties, ‘Book Club’ to me meant the Scholastic catalogue handed out after lunch and a pile of paperbacks waiting on my desk when I got back from assembly. In my early twenties, ‘Book Club’ meant white wine and themed cupcakes at a friend’s kitchen table, discussing the novel *some* of us had read that…

Wondering how to tell if a book is YA or middle grade just from a quick glance? When you pick up a book, say at the library or in a book shop, how do you know which audience it’s been written for? Sometimes the way books are shelved doesn’t make it obvious: my local library labels its middle grade section ’11 to 14′  which combines upper middle grade and lower YA, while the chapter book shelves are labelled ‘6-10’ which…

This is part of Start me up: Mark-up on successful novel openings, a blog series designed to help you read like an editor. I’ll analyse the first pages of some of the middle grade and YA novels on my bookshelf and dig deep into the mechanics and craft. Why did the author make those choices? What clues does this opening give us about the rest of the story? How well does it grab the reader’s attention from the off? You…

By now you all KNOW I’m really passionate about the importance of not just reading for authors (although yes, do read! Read lots!) but also reading analytically and with purpose: something I’ve started calling ‘rabbit hole reading’.  It’s brilliant to simply let yourself get totally immersed and enjoy a novel – that’s a really important experience for writers – but you’ll get so much more value from a story if you let yourself go down a rabbit hole when you read. Analyse the plot, the structure, the characters. Ask yourself why the author made the choices they did. Make notes. Annotate. Discuss it with other people. Even mine the acknowledgements page for the names of agents, editors and publishers involved and learn about that author’s writing and publishing process.

I just got back from a long bank holiday weekend in Devon and it was totally lovely. Not relaxing, obviously, since I have a five year old but it was super fun and just nice to be somewhere different – especially after having Covid earlier this month and not being able to leave the house. We stayed in a little cottage near the sea and spent lots of time walking, making sandcastles, doing treasure hunts, going on rollercoasters (Caeden and Steve, not me) and eating scones in the scorching sun. 

The short answer: not exactly! Sample edits are a great way for editors, particularly copyeditors, to show you their approach and way of working before you make a decision to hire them. They might offer to work on a few pages or a chapter and send it back to you to read through, and then it’s up to you to decide if this is the right editor for you or to ask clarifying questions. It’s also a useful way for…