Elizabeth Thorlton – Editor

I’m a professional proofreader with nine years’ experience in the business. My goal when pursuing my English degree was to find a way to read for a living, and that’s exactly what I’ve done. While I’ve worked on everything from cookbooks to memoirs to children’s episodic stories, my favorite projects are fiction . . . and cookbooks.I follow the guidelines of Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition. Merriam-Webster is my dictionary of choice. I do my utmost to make sure that every project adheres to these guidelines without disrupting the author’s core style. By the time a project reaches me, it’s typically in its final stages. My job isn’t to question your plot; my job is to make sure that no mistakes in grammar or layout derail the reader and ruin an otherwise spectacular reading experience.That’s right; I firmly believe that tight lines or a poorly placed em dash can spoil a book as easily as a character name that nobody knows how to pronounce. That final polish a proofreader brings is critical. I’m looking not only for grammatical mishaps but also for widows, orphans, stacks, awkward spacing, consistency with headers and footers, and any other tomfoolery trying to sneak into your work.Check out the books in my portfolio below. While I was copyeditor for a few of these, I typically was the proofreader. There are memoirs (Apocalypse Child), quirky coffee table books (Goat Yoga), young adult fiction (Scripted Unscripted), thrillers (Task Lyst), horror (Diabhal), and so much more. I crave variety in my reading but consistency in my work, so while I don’t have a specific genre I prefer to work in, I provide the same level of attention to detail to each and every project, no matter the topic.Another project I love: cleaning up OCR recognition files. These would be things that were scanned into a PDF format and then converted to a Word document, oftentimes previously published books with no digital file. I’ll read through and format to prepare for editing or typesetting, correcting any errors that were introduced in the scanning process or left over from the initial printing. Is it tedious? Yes. Is it boring? I mean, I can definitely think of more exciting things. Is it perfect for someone who stays at home with three small children and therefore craves the satisfaction of restoring order to chaos? A resounding yes. This was done for Jane Butel’s cookbooks, the Eugenia Price collections, and the Max Byrd thrillers.