Matthew Baylis – Editor

Hello, I work as an editor for Old Street Publishing, a small indie publisher based in the UK, although, obviously - since I'm here - I have flexible schedules and plenty of capacity to work on other projects. I'm also an author - I wrote a crime trilogy, a pair of comic novels and a non-fiction 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 new 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. As I mentioned above, 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 gave me a job as an editor, which I've been doing since 2015. I love it.

How do I work? Well, it depends on you, what you have written and what you want doing with it. A typical operation would be - I read your book (ideally a whole book, or at least half, if it's fiction; minimum 3 chaps + outline if non-fiction) and write you a detailed appraisal, telling you what I liked, what I felt needed improving on, and how you could 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 or Skype 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 just gives that vital extra burst of energy to nudge a writer over the hill and 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 is not the best word. I see redrafting (and redrafting some more) 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 and fantasy (this includes magic, ghosts, vampires, werewolves, superpowers and anything supernatural, sorry!) and sport.

What else can I tell you? I was once (in fact, repeatedly, during a period of several weeks) mistaken for the Duke of Edinburgh, I am the only British scriptwriter to have had a film shown in North Korea and the CIA once funded me to write soap opera scripts from a shed in Tottenham.