5-book series from The Editing Podcast hosts!

New 5-book series from The Editing Podcast hosts!

8/7/2025

Learn about editorial foundations, growth, sustainability, legacy and marketing with this 5-book series.

Fancy reading some of the core takeaways from The Editing Podcast? Notes from the Podcast is a brand-new book series that focuses on five core areas of editorial business development.

What’s in the series?

Currently there are five books in the Notes from the Podcast series, all focusing on what Denise and I like gassing about the most – running, growing, sustaining and marketing an editing and proofreading business.

Editorial Foundations – helps editors and proofreaders who are setting up their new businesses. It captures the conversations we’ve had about building a freelance business from the ground up.

Editorial Growth – helps early- to mid-career editors and proofreaders who want to grow, focus and professionalize. The Notes capture our discussions about refining, marketing and elevating a freelance editing practice.

Editorial Sustainability – helps more experienced editors and proofreaders who want to invest in longevity. The focus here is on strategy and business evolution.

Editorial Legacy – focuses on how we as editors can make quiet contributions that shape and support the editorial profession.

Editorial Marketing – speaks to every editorial freelancer who’s ever felt nervous about business promotion, and who wants ideas about how to go about being globally visible.

Is the content identical to The Editing Podcast?

The content in the podcast is scripted with the spoken word in mind. Publishing those conversations verbatim would not have made for engaging books.

What we’ve done instead is extracted that content and presented it so that the written word takes centre stage.

So, yes, it’s still our podcast content, but it’s been repurposed and reworked so that it’s book-fit.

How long did it take to create the books?

The answer to how long it took depends on your starting point.

We didn’t write the books from scratch – creating them required having the podcast scripts in the first place. And since we broadcast our first episode in 2019, so you could say the journey started then.

However, it was 2022 when Denise and I got together for a strategic-planning weekend in Tynemouth so we could review where we were with The Editing Podcast and discuss our longer-term goals.

During the discussion – with breaks for fish and chips, and ice cream … not always in that order – the idea for a book series was born.

We’ve spent the past three years doing the following to bring these books to life:

scoping the themes of the series
exploring different series names
developing the cover designs to reflect the podcast branding
organizing, revising and checking the content
discovering what we need to do, and what we need help with
preparing the books for print-on-demand publication.

Did you use AI?

The biggest challenge we faced in making this project viable was untangling well over 100,000 scripted words spread across 145 separate episodes broadcast in no particular order.

Some of that scripted content was irrelevant because it:

took the form of speaker-identification tags
included jokes or anecdotes that went off at a tangent
focused on issues that weren’t relevant to the five core book themes
included information about how to subscribe to the podcast.

Even the content that was relevant wasn’t located only in episodes whose titles made it obvious. It was all over the place! Plus, it was scripted in a way that suited voices rather than books.

Initially we embarked on doing that untangling work ourselves. However, it was backbreaking – eye-wateringly inefficient, not to mention mundane.

We realized it would take us years, not months, and the project looked like it might have to be shelved …

Unless we got help.

We talked over the options and wondered if AI might come to the rescue. We decided to give it the task of:

hunting down where the theme-relevant content was located within all 145 episodes
extracting the relevant snippets
and then returning them to us.

That was a learning curve because it took a while to work out how give it the right prompts to ensure it gave us exactly what we wanted. However, it was time well spent because we got there in the end!

So, yes, we did use AI – to analyse our own content and extract the chunks of it that we wanted. From then on, it was up to us to do what we do best …

What Louise and Denise did

Once the AI had delivered our booty, we spent several months doing the following:

organizing the content logically within each of the volumes
stylistically line editing each book to make it book-fit rather than spoken-fit
writing new information to provide clarity

With that done, we turned to:

creating the prelims, introductions and conclusions
designing the covers and promotional images
formatting the interiors so they’re KDP-ready
copyediting the five manuscripts
proofreading the page proofs
sending advance PDF copies to multiple reviewers who generously agreed to cast their eye over the series and provide testimonials (thank you, each and every one of you!)
preparing our marketing plan.

And finally, we published!

Why bother publishing when people can listen?

Denise and I have always been massive advocates for repurposing valuable content because it respects the fact that people like to get their information in different ways.

Some like to listen. Some like to watch. And some like to read.

Plus, some of our listeners have specifically asked for books, saying that they love listening to The Editing Podcast, but sometimes they want to revisit a particular nugget but can’t remember which episode it was in.

By reorganizing our conversations into themed narratives, we’ve given people choice.

How to buy the books

All five books are available in print via Amazon.

ORDER YOUR BOOKS NOW

Still want to listen? Head over to The Editing Podcast!

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

About Louise

Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.