Ian Smith – Editor

I started out writing travel stories that appeared semi-regularly in the weekend edition of The Australian newspaper. My work tended be leftfield and anecdotal, focused less on giving readers travel advice than on portraying the people I met on the road and all the crazy stuff that happened. When my career wound down, swallowed up by the Internet, an editor friend schooled me in the dark art of copy editing and employed me on numerous projects, including three titles in the Travellers series for Bradt Guides. Around the same time I took up developmental editing, employing the lessons I’d learned as a travel writer to help other people achieve their goals and bring their visions to life.

I specialise in travel and memoir, but I also enjoy reading and working with fiction. Gritty real-life stories, whose protagonists have their backs well and truly against the wall, invariably strike a chord with me. I’m also partial to stories that make me laugh. As an editor, I aspire to foster those qualities that make the books I love special: clear and precise language, punchy dialogue, strong characters, humour, taut, lean structuring and a narrative that hums along at a lively pace and contains enough twists and turns to keep readers involved from start to finish.

Good stories tend to tell themselves, I find, but usually they require a great deal of love and care to bring them to their full potential. It’s always a thrill when I can help facilitate this.