Karen Robinson – Editor

I'm an experienced copy editor specializing in working with indie authors, especially within the genres of fantasy, dystopian, paranormal, and speculative fiction.

Eliminate distractions

You don’t want your readers to get distracted by errors in your book. So don’t let your readers find any errors—let me find them instead.

Understand genre conventions

You want an editor who understands the conventions of your genre. I specialize in fantasy, dystopian, paranormal, and speculative fiction.

Keep your voice intact

You want an editor who doesn’t try to rewrite the book in her own voice. My goal is always to retain the author’s voice—just to make it a cleaner version of that voice.

Understand the flexibility of fiction

I have a solid background in grammar. I know the rules. I understand the rules. I also know how and when to break them. I’m not going to be pedantic and insist on a change just for the sake of correctness if it is going to cause a problem with readability. Fiction is flexible—sometimes sentence fragments are useful, for example.

What copy editing is

As a copy editor, I am focused on the details of the story—the sentence-level concerns. Although I do check for consistency (making sure Sally doesn’t suddenly change eye color, for example), I don’t make global comments about your book. I’m not going to give you a list of plot problems or places where characters/scenes should be more developed. That’s the job of a developmental editor (and something that should be done before sending the manuscript to me). If there’s something that really jumps out at me, I sometimes make a comment about it, but I’m not reading your book at that level. If that’s the kind of feedback you are looking for, please work with a developmental editor first. Then come back and let me clean things up at the sentence level.

Note on developmental editing and editorial assessment

I provide line editing, copy editing, and proofreading. If you are looking for a developmental edit or editorial assessment, that comes before the copy editing stage and is not a service I provide. Check out Reedsy's description of the different types of editors: https://blog.reedsy.com/types-of-editing/.