“I probably wouldn’t have been published without Alice Peck. Goodbye, Beautiful went through a number of drafts and versions, and I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t happy with any of them. So I hired Alice to edit the book for me and she suggested changing the story’s narrator. That’s HUGE, right? But it was, hands down, the best advice I’ve ever received. Honestly, when I thought about her approach, I felt the story’s heartbeat.
“You can (and should) have friends and other writers read your work, but I tell everyone I know to hire a freelance editor (unless you already have an editor through your publisher). You’ll get good feedback from your peer reviewers, but you need someone who understands the elements of sentence structure, when you should use an em dash, what an em dash is, someone who can see both the small and big picture for your book. It’s even better if you get someone who understands New York publishing circles, how the industry is changing, and what approaches new and established writers should take. Alice gets all of that. I really don’t want to make this introduction into more of an advertisement for her (although you can find her services here), so I’ll end it by saying that she’s always going to edit every novel I write until she’s dead.”
