Alison Kerr Miller – Editor

I got my start at a university press, where my duties as assistant to the managing editor provided an excellent editing education, and I moved on to trade publishing a few years later when I landed at Houghton Mifflin's Trade Division. The first novel I ever copyedited, Susan Straight's Highwire Moon, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and set the tone for the many works of literary fiction I have gone on to copyedit. In addition to select Adult titles like that one, at Houghton Mifflin I worked on all Children's books, copyediting all picture books and many middle grade, nonfiction, and YA titles myself as well. After seventeen years at Houghton (and its many iterations), I left to freelance exclusively and shifted my focus to Adult titles, but I still love a middle grade novel.

My favorite genre is the memoir, and I have edited those by some "names," such as Jenny Slate, Kathleen Turner, and Tori Amos, but I love helping all kinds of authors tell their own story of any scope. I've copyedited many nonfiction titles exploring historical events and people, and I excel at organizing notes and bibliographies into CMS compliance, the correct format for book publishing. (However, I won't say I ENJOY that, because I'm pretty sure only psychopaths enjoy editing back matter.)

Though I have experience proofreading all genres, I'd now be interested in working on PDFs of only heavily illustrated lifestyle, design, and cookbook titles. I love the puzzle of fitting text with photos on a spread by figuring out how best to tighten the text.

Even though I have had decades of experience and am now one of the "older" freelancers that I used to hire when I was in-house in my twenties, I like to stay current, whether it's related to language, technology, or pop culture. My editing style is centered around clarity and sense rather than arcane grammar rules (but I maintain that a lot of rules serve clarity and sense and will show you how if you're interested!). I follow the author's lead but operate as a stand-in for a very observant reader, and I always choose querying over rewriting.