David Woods-Hale – Editor

I'm a multi-award winning editor, with extensive experience in editing and publishing for books, magazines and journals in both fiction and non-fiction, in the UK and US.

I've been fortunate to edit manuscripts on a variety of subjects including management and leadership, finance, marketing, strategy, advertising, story-telling, work/life balance, green business and sustainability, ethics, technology, creativity, innovation, and networking.

I'm a former marketing and communications director at the Association of MBAs and Business Graduates Association (AMBA & BGA), where I edited AMBA's monthly magazine Ambition, having been at the helm of more than 50 editions of the publication.

This has given me experience in editing features and papers exploring business from almost every angle you can imagine, but it also afforded me opportunity to work with hundreds of authors – and I am as comfortable editing the work of a business school dean, as I am editing that of a first year student. (This might just involve a degree of ghostwriting on my part, but the readers have never noticed).

More recently, I've been working on editing fiction, and have collaborated on several books over the past three years: including black comedies; tragic love stories; sci-fi satires; novellas exposing the 'underbelly' of our society; and an anthology of visceral, suburban horror stories.

In short, there are few topics from which I would shy away.

In terms of the services I can offer, my expertise lies in assessment and developmental editing for books. As Editorial Director at LID Publishing, I was responsible for commissioning the majority of business and management books on our lists for the UK and US so can sniff out a stellar manuscript a mile away.

For more developed manuscripts, I am adept at copywriting – reworking syntax, amending style, checking facts and stats, and making the key sentences and phrases 'pop', in a clear and concise way.

Finally, I believe proofreading and line editing is an art form and am skilled at making the final touches to typeset texts, that can make all the difference to the reader in terms of clarity. This work ranges from spotting spelling or grammar errors, suggesting final enhancements, correcting lengthy reference lists, or thoroughly interrogating those all-important contents pages, running heads and appendices. I'm comfortable creating style guides to support authors, as well as working from any style sheet of their choosing.

I love working with new and aspiring authors as well as more established and prolific writers, to craft stunning scripts, and I enjoy structurally reworking text, to make the copy sparkle. My mantra is that the topics of books should always be challenging and groundbreaking, while the finished product should never be a challenge to read.

I am collaborative, creative, confident, and curious, and I like to conduct myself like a critical friend, who will be an author's biggest cheerleader, but won't be frightened to give honest feedback.