Editing & teaching

Editing

As well as larking around with stories, these days I have an official title which I could probably even capitalise if I wanted. I’m co-director of editorial services for publishers at the agency Prepare to Publish Ltd. It’s my buddy Andrew’s company and I just joined in.

We provide a top-to-tail editorial service for book publishers, which includes structural edit, copy edit and proofreading. Because we’re writers ourselves we offer writers and publishers the sort of service we would want to receive.

Publishers hand us a manuscript and an author, and an agreed number of weeks later we hand back an engaged author and an edited book. Have a look at some of the things we do and the people we work with at the Prepare to Publish website

Teaching

I am a Senior Lecturer at the Oxford International Centre for Publishing.

I teach widely, bringing the storytelling wisdom of screenwriting into the practice of prose fiction, as well as relating new developments in narrative art. My teaching philosophy is that having written and edited widely, I’ve made pretty much every mistake going, and I want to save you the bother of all those hours I spent weeping and gnashing at the desk.

Also, I have done a very stupid thing. Which is to make myself redundant. Because if you carefully follow The Novel Creator writing course I’ve designed with Amanda Saint over at Retreat West, you’ll never have any use for my editorial services again. Doh.

For the launch, I wrote a piece for Retreat West about learning how to write and teaching how to write.

Past events

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