Jess Zimmerman – Editor

I'm an award-winning, bestselling editor with four years in traditional publishing, specializing in genre fiction and gift and lifestyle nonfiction. Before that, I edited personal essays and cultural criticism for digital magazines, and before that I was a news editor at a site about science and climate, so I have a wide range of subject matter experience and interests, including pop culture, food and drink, popular science, writing craft, and spooky stuff (fiction and nonfiction alike). I love book concepts that are weird, funny, offbeat, or slightly at an angle to most stuff on the market, and I'm not scared to look at a pile of notes and answer the question "is this anything?"

Editing is something I do WITH and FOR you, not TO you—I want it to feel collaborative and maybe even therapeutic. I'll work with you to develop your concept to its full potential, including understanding its place in the market, while also remaining true to your voice, your priorities, and your goals. When I've asked my authors for quotes about our work together, they often emphasize that I'm able to draw out their ideas and help shape them into their most fully-realized, cohesive, convincing, and marketable forms. (Some examples: "Jess is that rare editor who keeps you sounding like you, only better." "She knows how to take a mess of pages and ideas and shape it into an argument or story." "Her capacity to know what you actually mean before you do is genuinely uncanny.") For query letters and assessments, we'll answer questions like: does this hang together as a book, and if not, what needs to change? Is there something that makes this book especially urgent, timely, or trendy? For nonfiction, how can you best sell yourself as the ideal, inevitable author for this book? For developmental editing, we'll look at all that and more: pacing; scope; voice; rhetorical effectiveness (how convincing you are) for nonfiction; plot and character challenges for fiction. Let's work together to bring your work to its highest level!