Claire Beveridge is a non-fiction developmental editor, copyeditor, content writer and coach. She has over 17 years' editing experience and specialises in biomedical science and health. She is an Advanced Professional Member of the CIEP, the author of the CIEP's guide on 'Developmental Editing for Non-Fiction', and she also wrote and delivers the CIEP’s Non-Fiction Developmental Editing webinar course.
Having identified as someone with no interest in business for many years, she realised that it might help to think of herself as a business owner a few years ago and now concedes that business and marketing are quite interesting. She has since completed a course on business strategy and (at the time of writing) is studying for the Professional Certificate in Executive Coaching.
Claire Beveridge: Articulating your value in the elevator Sunday @ 3:00 PM
Davina is a freelance authenticity (sensitivity) editor, copyeditor, proofreader and copywriter, and has had varied experience throughout her professional life.
She recently worked as a Marketing Specialist for a marketing consultancy specialising in scholarly communications within the research ecosystem and used her editorial skills to complete projects for scholarly organisations.
Prior to this, she had an enjoyable 17-year career in the NHS as an Advanced Practitioner Sonographer.
She won a place on a writing course for the HarperCollins UK Author and Design Academy in 2022 and is working on writing her own fiction and non-fiction book. She will be speaking at the London Festival of Writing in June 2025 for Jericho Writers, and will be running a workshop for writers on ‘Writing What You Don’t Know’.
She enjoys volunteering and has been a primary (and now currently a secondary school) governor since 2019. Davina lives in Yorkshire, Leeds, with her family and can be found running the Yorkshire hills, baking homemade treats or being a ‘mum taxi’ to her daughters.
You can contact her at [email protected]
Davina Bhanabhai: Authenticity in Publishing: A Crucial Service to Improve Content Saturday @ 2:15 PM
Sarah Calfee, Andrew Hodges, Sophie Playle, Aimee Walker: Developmental Fiction Editing Roundtable: Strategies in a Changing Landscape Sunday @ 3:00 PM
Lisa has been an editor and proofreader since 2017, after spending many years as a chartered accountant working in the retail and manufacturing sectors. She retrained as an editor and proofreader as her daughter started primary school. The CIEP’s vibrant community gave Lisa the light-bulb moment that encouraged her move to editorial services.
Lisa has been the CIEP local group coordinator for Manchester since 2018 when she was an intermediate member. She enjoys being part of the community and appreciates the generosity with which colleagues share ideas.
Lisa works with self-publishing authors, traditional publishers, and businesses. She specialises in business books and fiction. Lisa became an Advanced Professional Member of the CIEP in 2024.
Lisa is glad to embrace her degree in English Lit. She loves being part of an author's book team!
Lisa de Caux: Style sheet with editorial report Sunday @ 9:00 AM
Paula Clarke Bain is a Fellow of the Society of Indexers (SI) and has been a freelance book indexer and editor for two decades, most enjoying biography, comedy, film, literature and music books, plus indexes on indexes (see also Index, A History of the by Dennis Duncan, which has both a computer-generated index plus a human index by Paula). She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) and she was a freelance copyeditor and proofreader and member of the then Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP) before training in indexing with the Society of Indexers. She is also an Associate Member of the Society of Authors. She now mostly does indexing work, but still likes to take on the occasional copyedit or proofread for variety and to keep these skills active. Her qualifications include BA (Hons) English and American Literature (UEA) and BSc (Hons) Psychology, and she has an employment background as an in-house proofreader for publishers and printers. Currently, she is Chair and Conference Director of the Society of Indexers, and she has enjoyed being involved in many other SI matters, including writing for The Indexer journal and being co-creator with Ruth Ellis of the first National Indexing Day in 2017, commemorating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Society of Indexers by G. Norman Knight in March 1957. She is now part of the SI presentation team at the associated annual #IndexDay workshop events for publishing professionals, currently held at the Publishers Association in London.
Her website and indexing blog is baindex.org and she can be located on social media at LinkedIn and on Bluesky at @baindex.org.
Email: [email protected]
Paula Clarke Bain: An extra trick up your sleeve: adding book indexing to your editorial skills portfolio Monday @ 9:15 AM
Whitcombe lecture Saturday @ 1:15 PM
Louisa is a proofreader and copyeditor with a specialism in magazines. Louisa has proofread Freelancer Magazine since March 2023, adding a second title, The Independent Schools Magazine, in September 2024.
Working with words is a thread woven throughout most of Louisa’s career, which started with journalism training following an English degree. Public relations work for a home and garden company followed, where Louisa secured product mentions in titles including Ideal Home, House & Garden, and even The New York Times. As a bid writer, working on £multimillion contract catering proposals, she proofread and edited the bids she didn’t write and gained a reputation for attention to detail and a willingness to challenge any responses that didn’t meet the brief. Going freelance in summer 2020, she has balanced proofreading with grant writing, bid writing and a range of other projects. While attending her first CIEP conference in 2024, Louisa realised she could legitimately call herself a copyeditor as well as a proofreader.
Louisa is now in her fifth year as a CIEP member – having joined before securing her first freelance proofreading client. She’s now an Intermediate member and has been the coordinator of the Berkshire local group since January 2024. Louisa uses her network to organise interesting, useful and inspiring speakers to support the group members in running their businesses.
Louisa has been a volunteer opinion columnist at her local newspaper, the Maidenhead Advertiser, since 2021 and has now had the thrill of seeing her name (and photo) in print above 20+ pieces on everything from tourist tax to Disney villains. And for four years, she edited her church’s magazine (which included proofreading articles by the congregation).
Louisa Ellins: Why bother proofreading magazines? Sunday @ 11:30 AM
Debbie is an editor and proofreader, specialising in books set in France, mysteries and thrillers, historical fiction, memoirs and web content.
She has twenty years’ experience in the world of web, thanks to previous roles at the University of Oxford, the International Baccalaureate and Cardiff University, and is passionate about passing on her web knowledge to fellow editors. She also offers mentoring sessions to provide editors with one-to-one feedback and advice on how to improve their site.
Debbie is the author of Improve Your Editor Website, Improve Your Author Website and Tricky Quickies (easily confused words and phrases – concisely explained with examples). She has also written a mystery novel set in the South of France.
When not editing or writing, Debbie can be found admiring beautiful stationery, watching French series on Netflix and forgetting dance moves in her gym class.
Debbie Emmitt: I, Human. Using your website to showcase the value of a human editor Sunday @ 1:30 PM
Louise Harnby is a professional fiction editor with 35 years' publishing experience, and she specialises in working with independent crime, thriller and mystery writers.
She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), has curated The Editing Blog since 2011, and co-hosts The Editing Podcast with Denise Cowle.
Louise also offers a range of books and courses that teach editors:
• the craft of stylistic line editing in fiction (including guidance on suspense, psychic distance, crime fiction editing, dialogue, narrative viewpoint, showing versus telling, report writing and style-sheet building)
• how to make their businesses visible and compelling (including guidance on marketing, generating passive income, business planning, creating a visible website, blogging and branding).
Find out more about her courses, books and editorial services at harnby.co/fiction-editing.
Welcome from the CIEP chair Saturday @ 1:00 PM
Louise Harnby: 6 lyrical tools for fiction line editors Sunday @ 9:00 AM
CIEP chair’s closing words and raffle Monday @ 11:45 AM
Sarah Calfee, Andrew Hodges, Sophie Playle, Aimee Walker: Developmental Fiction Editing Roundtable: Strategies in a Changing Landscape Sunday @ 3:00 PM
Margaret works with organisations, businesses and independent authors to get their books, documents and online content published. As well as editing the words, she designs and prepares page layouts for print and digital and creates templates, ebooks and accessible PDFs. Before setting up Daisy Editorial in 2003 she spent over 14 years working in information and publications in an international legal firm, a local authority and several NGOs.
The session is based on Margaret’s experience of doing this sort of clean-up for over 20 years. Partly it’s about transferring the copyeditor’s task of defining the structure of a text from what we used to do on paper to the digital workflow. But because she works in content design and layout as well as copyediting, she knows what other issues editors can resolve to make the production stage easier. That's a valuable add-on for clients.
Margaret is an Advanced Professional Member of the CIEP. She was a Council director of the SfEP and then the CIEP from 2015 to 2021 and helped shape the brand and vision of the newly chartered institute. As information director she introduced new formats to the CIEP’s mix of resources, including fact sheets, focus papers and newsletters. Believing in the power of keeping on learning, she made all resources free to CIEP members.
Margaret Hunter: Cleaning up a messy Word document Sunday @ 11:30 AM
Brandt Johnson is the producer, director, cinematographer, and editor of the docu-comedy Rebel with a Clause—and he is married to the film’s subject, Ellen Jovin. Before this project, he wrote and produced several plays and a comedy web series.
Rebel with a Clause film screening and Q&A with Ellen Jovin and Brandt Johnson Saturday @ 3:45 PM
Ellen Jovin is the founder of a traveling pop-up grammar advice stand known as the Grammar Table. She is the author of the 2022 national bestseller Rebel with a Clause and has answered the grammar questions of total strangers on the streets of all 50 states.
Rebel with a Clause film screening and Q&A with Ellen Jovin and Brandt Johnson Saturday @ 3:45 PM
Dr Sara Kitaoji: Editing as a Vocation or Ikigai: Reclaiming Our Humanity in the Age of AI Saturday @ 2:15 PM
Marieke Krijnen is an academic copyeditor who started her own business after leaving academia in 2017. She helps scholars in the social sciences and humanities express their ideas in clear, consistent and precise terms and enjoys helping them get their reference lists in order.
She received extensive training in copyediting and is an Advanced Professional Member of the CIEP and a member of ACES: The Society for Editing. She obtained an MA in Middle East Studies from the American University of Beirut and a PhD in Political Science from Ghent University, Belgium. She has a background in Arabic and urban studies as well. After completing her first postdoc (again in Beirut), she decided to start her own editing business and never looked back. She has since undergone extensive training in copyediting and worked with over a hundred academic clients.
After leaving the Netherlands, where she was born, in 2007, she lived in Lebanon, Belgium, and Canada, and she currently resides in Poland. When she is not editing, she enjoys spending time with her husband and young son, playing the violin, and taking train trips. You can find out more about her at mariekekrijnen.com, and you can connect with her on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
Marieke Krijnen: Beyond grammar and spelling: Ten nonfiction copyediting interventions that improve clarity and readability Monday @ 9:15 AM
Sarah Calfee, Andrew Hodges, Sophie Playle, Aimee Walker: Developmental Fiction Editing Roundtable: Strategies in a Changing Landscape Sunday @ 3:00 PM
Rui Queirós de Faria: Developmental Editing and AI. Are we asking the right questions? Sunday @ 1:30 PM
Abi has been editing, proofreading and overseeing figures, tables and text for 25 years. Prior to setting up her own business in 2009, she worked in-house for a variety of organisations, managing print and digital projects, and quite often wrestling with business and economic data in Excel and content management systems.
Her current focus is editorial project management, working with UK university presses on their education and academic lists. She enjoys collaborating with and learning from in-house teams and freelance copyeditors, proofreaders and indexers.
Abi has written several publications for the CIEP, including the Editorial Project Management and Your House Style guides, and a fact sheet on getting started with macros. She is currently a vice-chair of the CIEP, and is leading the review of its upgrade model and processes.
Abi Saffrey: Figure it out: take charge of figures, tables and captions Sunday @ 11:30 AM
Since 1999, Sarah Sodhi has proofed, tagged, bound, corrected, edited, managed, commissioned, subbed, scheduled, estimated and produced a great deal of content – from interactive, multimedia resources to marketing leaflets, from monthly magazines to 900-page medical tomes.
Starting her career at a small medical publisher in Oxford, Sarah produced medical textbooks, journals and a bi-monthly magazine. She then moved into the public sector to work for an adult education charity, introducing formal scheduling procedures, progress-chasing systems and detailed budgets. After this, she immersed herself in the education sector, where she continues to edit and manage digital and print resources for primary, secondary and adult education publishers.
For the past 15 years, Sarah has also been a tutor with the Publishing Training Centre, providing high-level and hands-on support in editorial skills, project management and, most recently, PDF markup.
Sarah Sodhi: Setting new standards for PDF markup – but what should they be? Sunday @ 9:00 AM
Aimee Walker is a romance and women’s fiction editor from Northern Ireland. She is passionate about helping women self-publish and having romance respected as much as other genre fiction. Her background in education and therapeutic counselling resulted in a natural affinity to coaching authors, and she uses a very collaborative and coaching-based approach with the majority of her clients.
Aimee also enjoys mentoring other editors who want to add coaching to their repertoire and provides supervision to other writing coaches.
When she isn’t working Aimee can be found pottering in her garden with her menagerie of animals.
You can find her at www.awepress.com or on Instagram @aimeewalkereditorial.
Sarah Calfee, Andrew Hodges, Sophie Playle, Aimee Walker: Developmental Fiction Editing Roundtable: Strategies in a Changing Landscape Sunday @ 3:00 PM
Manda is a fiction editor living in a hamlet in the heart of Winnie-the-Pooh country (deepest, darkest Sussex, England). She's been connected with the publishing industry for her whole working life, having worked as an in-house Production Editor for Butterworths, LexisNexis, Martindale-Hubbell and Reed Elsevier.
In 2019, she set up her own freelance fiction editing business and now offers developmental editing, line-editing and proofreading to indie authors.
She specialises in Fantasy, Romance, Women’s Fiction, Young Adult and Middle Grade fiction.
When not editing, you’ll find her navigating the joys of parenting three daughters, vegetable gardening (badly) and looking after her two elderly (smelly) black Labradors and five rescue chickens. She also runs a company with her husband that specialises in traditional basketry, rustic fencing and teaching all things wood-related.
Her aim in life is to bring a bit of positivity and kindness to the world and she would be delighted to receive any LinkedIn connection requests from like-minded editors.
She is proud to be a Professional Member of the CIEP and you can find out more about her and what she does on her website: www.mandawaller.co.uk
Manda Waller: An introduction to marketing your editing services to indie fiction authors Monday @ 9:15 AM
Magda Wojcik: Human in the loop: The evolving role of editors in the age of AI Sunday @ 3:00 PM
