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The Best Book Editors

From the world’s major publishing houses

Professional publishing editors

Our editorial team are professionals with experience at the most famous publishers— Penguin Random House, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster— where they have overseen many bestselling and award-winning novels published to acclaim. Our editing services team are in-house and wholly dedicated to your publishing prospects.

When you select The Finished Novel Course or The Novel Development Course, you’ll enjoy the guidance of publishing professionals to oversee every aspect of your novel as we progress toward a finished draft. We’ll get you ready to submit to literary agents for a publishing contract, for self-publishing, or to take your creative writing further to new heights.

Their mission is simple: your success.
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Our editorial team

Professional publishing experience

The Novelry’s editorial team is made up of people with years of experience across every type of editing role. At The Novelry, their focus is on the developmental edit, with creative feedback to help make your manuscript the best it can be. They also bring experience of the ‘acquiring’ and ‘publishing’ processes to help with pitching your book.

Leading agents used to submit novels to our editors: now our book editors are submitting to those same agents. There’s an established relationship of trust which gives our writers a significant advantage—to skip the slush pile and beat rejections.

At The Novelry, we offer the same quality editing services as a major publishing house, bringing to your work of fiction the best book editors with proven experience editing bestselling and award-winning books.

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The Novelry team having a meeting
The Novelry team having a meeting

Your FREE writing course

See if The Novelry is for you with our free mini-course. 6 interactive online lessons. 

No payment card details required.

Our editorial team

The right editor for your book

Meet the professionals from the Big Five major publishing houses including Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins and Macmillan.

Lizzy Goudsmit Kay

Before joining The Novelry, Lizzy Goudsmit Kay was a Senior Commissioning Editor at Transworld Publishers, a division of Penguin Random House, home to general fiction authors including Kate Atkinson, Dan Brown, Bill Bryson, Lee Child, Richard Dawkins, Paula Hawkins, Rachel Joyce and Sophie Kinsella.

More info

Tash Barsby

Before joining The Novelry, Tash Barsby was a Commissioning Editor at Transworld Publishers, a division of Penguin Random House. Tash has worked as an editor on many bestselling titles including the #1 Sunday Times bestseller The Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse.

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Emily Kitchin

Before joining The Novelry, Emily Kitchin was an Editorial Director at HQ, a division of HarperCollins and home to authors including Adele Parks, Linwood Barclay, Sarah Morgan, Carrie Hope Fletcher and Erica James.

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Josie Humber

Before joining The Novelry, Josie Humber was a Senior Commissioning Editor at Hodder & Stoughton, a division of Hachette, home to authors including Jodi Picoult, Stephen King, David Nicholls and Erin Kelly.

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Gillian Holmes

Before joining The Novelry, Gillian Holmes worked as an acquiring editor and a copy editor at Penguin Random House for the Arrow Books imprint, where she acquired authors such as Katie Flynn who was the bestselling saga writer in the country.

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Craig Leyenaar

Before joining The Novelry, Craig Leyenaar was a Commissioning Editor at the famous Titan Books, a publisher specialising in science fiction, fantasy, horror, crime and thrillers, and home to authors including Stephen King, V.E. Schwab, James Lovegrove and Mikey Spillane.

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Francine Toon

Before joining The Novelry, Francine Toon was a Commissioning Editor at Hachette, publishing distinctive prize-winning literary fiction. Francine has worked with internationally renowned authors such as John le Carré, Stephen King and Fredrik Backman.

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Nic Caws

Before joining The Novelry, Nic was Senior Commissioning Editor at Headline, part of Hachette, with a particular focus on their boutique romance imprint Headline Eternal, the publishing home of bestselling authors such as Sarah Adams, Erin Sterling and Mariana Zapata.

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Krystle Appiah

Before joining The Novelry, Krystle Appiah was an Editor at Macmillan Children’s Books, home to authors including Marcus Rashford, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Tomi Adeyemi and Julia Donaldson.

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Simran Sandhu

Simran Sandhu was an Editor at Macmillan Children’s Books where she worked on groundbreaking and award-winning children’s and YA titles including Pooja Puri’s A Dinosaur Ate My Sister, the first title selected for the Marcus Rashford Book Club and the How to be a Hero series by Cat Weldon.

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Georgia Summers

Before joining The Novelry, Georgia Summers was an Editor at Tor, an imprint of Macmillan, home to authors including Cassandra Clare, Olivie Blake, Adrian Tchaikovsky, TJ Klune, Arkady Martine and Travis Baldree.

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Sorcha Rose

Before joining The Novelry, Sorcha Rose was an Assistant Editor at Hodder & Stoughton, a division of Hachette, home to authors including John Grisham, Stephen King, Sophie Hannah, Erin Kelly, Will Dean, B.A. Paris, Vaseem Khan and Lucy Score.

More info
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Formerly HarperCollins
Formerly Simon & Schuster
Formerly Titan Books & Orion
Formerly Hachette
Formerly Penguin Random House
Formerly Hodder & Stoughton
Formerly Macmillan
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Expertise to finish your novel.

‘My story whisperer book editor took my submission package to the next level. She gave me the perfect premise line, went over my first three chapters with her brilliant editorial eye, and gave masterful advice on how to reorganize my book’s timeline to jack up suspense. She then. I couldn’t recommend The Novelry more highly.’

—Helena Echlin, now represented by Janklow & Nesbit after submission by The Novelry. Clever Little Thing has been sold to Pamela Dorman Books/ Penguin Random House and Penguin Canada, Grijalbo (Spain) and Nord (Italy).

Enjoy finishing your novel with The Novelry

Choose your course

Reach the end of your first draft or finish a publishing-ready novel. Our courses offer various combinations of The Novelry’s three-step writing journey, and provide ultimate value.

Beginners

The Novel Kickstarter Course

Come up with the idea and write a first draft

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$
1950
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198
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OR
£
1599
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189
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OR
£
149
/mo
Pay monthly
Novel writing course online with The Novelry.
Intermediate

The Novel Development Course

Take a novel in progress to publishing standard

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$
2250
Save $
138
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OR
£
1849
Save £
179
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OR
£
169
/mo
Pay monthly
Novel writing classes at The Novelry.
All writers

The Finished Novel Course

The 3-step program + manuscript assessment

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$
4250
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178
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OR
£
3499
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89
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OR
£
299
/mo
Pay monthly
Submission
Idea
Edit
Write
Appraisal
Assessment

Published books from our alumni

We’ve taken complete beginners all the way through to secure world-class literary agency representation.

Beautiful tales, boldly told
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The joy of editing

Raise your editing game with our team

We offer a simple three-stage program at The Novelry, and the third stage is The Big Edit, the class to edit your novel with our professional book editors. This class is included in the Novel Development Course or The Finished Novel Course. To access our editorial services, you need to sign up for one of those plans.

In The Big Edit, we will guide you through all the aspects of the book editing process, developing and polishing your technical writing skills on a sentence by sentence basis and teaching you how to self-edit.

The class helps independent authors learn to master these aspects of fiction editing in multiple genres whether literary fiction, historical fiction, contemporary fiction, women’s fiction, fantasy, science fiction, children’s and young adult fiction and even some forms of non fiction like memoir. Editing skills learned now will set you in good stead for your creative writing career.

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From pitch to a polished performance

From the developmental edit to a final review

We’ll guide you step-by-step with killer logic through the wonderful process of drilling down from structural development through to line-by-line style so that you become your own best editor for a lifetime of happy writing.

You want a straightforward guide to formatting? It’s here! You want contemporary examples of structure, sentences, openers, and brilliant editing techniques? We’ve packed these lessons with the most famous books in the English language: from the Harry Potter books and the Game of Thrones series to The Couple Next Door and Girl, Woman, Other.

Check out our advanced technique for stand-out prose to open your book with a bang—Lucid Compression®. You want a stand-out synopsis? We’ll make it simple to write. You want a brilliant pitch letter? We will help you with the precise word choice to put it in the bag.

You want tips and tricks from inside the editing network? Find out more about what literary agents and most editors really, really want and top up your course learning with our regular program of live classes and guests from within the industry.

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We grow careers

Toward publishing

Get access to our professional editing service when you need it to fast-track your writing skills. Once you join us for a course, you can purchase extra Paid Feedback Sessions with a professional editor as and when you need them. The Paid Feedback Sessions allow you to book in with one of our developmental editors for a review with line editing and report on a word count of 5000 words a time. You’ll enjoy a 45-minute video debrief where you can ask any questions. We recommend you reserve these sessions for the second half of the year, when you’re more certain of the story and can apply the feedback to written work you know you’re keeping. Use them during the third phase of the year —The Big Edit—to really sharpen and hone your chapters as you move from the structural edit to sentence style and word choice.

Writers enjoy writing, but editing is the core skill that differentiates published authors from new writers. Invest wisely and learn from the best editors.

The Novelry team having a meeting
The Novelry team having a meeting
The Novelry team having a meeting

What makes a good mentor?

An aspiring writer will want to consider a potential writing mentor carefully to choose an experienced writer who has navigated the publishing industry successfully, with a proven track record, who has standing and recognition in the literary world and the publishing industry.

A good mentor is someone who loves learning and who understands that they too, as a writer, are always learning; that way the one-on-one mentoring relationship becomes a mutually fulfilling and exciting experience, open to new ideas and feedback that flows naturally both ways.

To choose your potential coach, consider the writing coach’s work. Have they been published recently? Do they write in a similar genre? Do they understand the book publishing process? Have they got teaching experience? Do they belong to professional organisations? That they belong to a writing community and are willing and able to work generously with other writers is an important test.

The Novelry team

Find the best book editor for you

Sign up to our individual writing classes should you want to take things one step at a time. Or check out our courses (which offer various combinations of the classes below) for a mapped-out journey to writing success.

What can a good editor can do for you?

A good editor will shine a light on what’s working and what’s not working on the big picture of your manuscript allowing for the most exciting story to surface from the structure and sentence style of your material. A good book editor will ensure your book hits the sweet spot where commercial sales meet positive reviews, acclaim and awards. They will help you write a bold story, beautifully told.

At The Novelry, our team of book editors are all experienced publishing editors who have worked with bestselling and award-winning authors at the Big Five publishing houses like Penguin Random House.

If you mean business, make sure you work with a renowned and experienced book editor.

What’s better than one editor?

A team of professionals. Book editors tend to have niche genre specialisms. Be careful when working with just one editor that they truly have experience working in your genre or niche. Publishers will only acquire books that perform well for the genre. Freelance solo editors will bring their experience to your work, but also their own personal taste and judgement. Working with just one book editor can destabilise a writer as they are only getting one person’s perspective when a broader view may be better.

At The Novelry, we meet as a team every week to talk about our writers’ work in progress to ensure we are giving you the best of our combined advice and experience. You will have access to our many editors allowing you to find the right book editor for you. You will be able work with your editor directly over multiple rounds allowing for back and forth and your editor will be familiar with your intentions and aspirations for your book. It’s not all about sentence structure! The best editors like to respect an author’s style.

A team of professional book editors with combined experience across a range of fiction for considered writing advice.

Can an editor fix my book?

A book editor is typically able to spot the problems but not fix them!

With our team of editors and currently published authors at The Novelry we are uniquely placed and motivated to find brilliant creative solutions to any story problem.

Our editing approach mirrors the book publishing process, beginning with developmental editing, proceeding to copy editing the entire manuscript, and onto matters concerned with book marketing. Our editing approach mirrors the book publishing process, beginning with the developmental editing process, you will meet your professional book editor to review the storyline for a new draft likely to please publishers.

Our writers progress through the stages of the book editing process from developmental editing to line editing, before they submit their revised manuscript to our editorial services team for review. Our editors will be there to review and catch your work before you move forward toward submission.

If you’re not there yet, our editors will help you fix it to get it right.

What should I expect to pay?

Editorial services can be very expensive and you are placing a great deal of trust in your book editor. What seems cheap can prove expensive and downright destructive in the long run. Don’t economize on your dreams. Aim to invest in the best.

Most literary consultancies and editorial services farm out the editing work to a freelance editor, often paid at very low rates, who is paid by the manuscript and will tick off yours to move onto the next. Some well-known publishing companies follow this practice. With this cheaper type of editing service, you neither get to meet editors, nor have them answer questions.

Professional editing services often require a 10 or 15% commission on your publishing royalties. Buyer beware! Check the small print first! (We would not dream of it.)

We are able to offer the expertise of in-house professional editors at a more affordable price thanks to our combination of course-based training and editorial services.

Our team are in-house editors motivated by our success stories.

Can a book editor get me published?

Typically a consultancy or freelance book editor’s work ends when they hand you back your manuscript with lots of red lines through it. It’s when you get their report the hard work really begins. They take no further steps to help you get published. Not so at The Novelry!

Your book editor will not only give you detailed line-by-line feedback, honestly and clearly assessing its potential to meet the standards of a traditional publisher before advising changes and when your book is good to go, your book editor will work with you on a query letter review and prepare the submission package for our bespoke submission service.

We review each and every writer’s submission as a team to ensure we meet the highest standards for your success. We submit our writers one-by-one to trusted literary agencies to secure representation. This is the fast track to getting published and typically over 60% of our submissions are successful within two weeks.

Take a look at our roster of over 25 trusted literary agencies like WME, The Book Group, United Agents and more who look forward to receiving our writers’ brilliant novels.

The Novelry is trusted and recommended by world-class literary agencies.