Matthew Baylis – Editor

Hello, I worked as an editor for Old Street Publishing, a small indie publisher based in the UK, and also work for the Met Police in London - but with flexible schedules and plenty of capacity to work on other projects. I'm also an author - I wrote a crime trilogy and a travelogue/history/anthropology book about my time in the South Pacific.

I started out 25 years ago as assistant in a literary agency, where I first began working with authors on their books. After a couple of years I left that world - temporarily - to pursue my other great love - working as a storyliner on the BBC tv drama 'EastEnders', then training writers and developing drama series in Kenya and Cambodia.

I continued as an editor-for-hire, though, working on a series of tv-tie-in science titles and a prison memoir, leading writing workshops for various groups and delivering online creative writing tutoring. I kept on writing my own books, too, and I hit it off with the publisher of Books Three, Four and Five to the point that he hired me as an editor.

How do I work? That depends on you, what you have written and what you want doing with it. A typical operation would be - I read your book and write you a detailed appraisal, telling you what I liked, what I felt needed improving on, and how to go about doing it. I can then do the same thing for a further draft, if you choose, or if it's now just in need of a trim or a polish, undertake a line edit and proofread.

I'm also happy to do Zoom consultations - once I've read your book. It's often easier to get my points across in a live conversation, and it often means we arrive at the answers together, rather than me just sending you a long list of questions. Writing doesn't have to be a solitary pursuit and sometimes collaboration gives that vital extra burst of energy to nudge a writer onto the homeward stretch.

I used to describe myself as an 'editorial fixer' (because I'll do everything, from helping you think of an ending that eludes you to sorting out the punctuation and making sure it really was possible to travel by train from Vienna to Naples in 1953 without a stop-over in Rome...) but fixing isn't the best word. I see redrafting as part of the process, not as trying to mend something that's gone wrong. Books take time.

I don't want to give you a list of all the things I don't/won't do. But the subjects and genres about which I know the least, and have the least experience of editing are children's/YA, sci-fi, fantasy (this includes magic, ghosts, vampires, werewolves, superpowers and anything supernatural, sorry!) and sport. Also, I only work on complete novels of 50,000 words +; if you haven't got to the end yet, do get in touch when you have!