About Working Edits
Working Edits wants to give everyone who edits books for a living the skills, language and confidence to do so. We do this in two ways: through our training workshops and through our editing practice.
Working Edits was set up by senior editor Ana Fletcher as a response to a baffling omission in the way the publishing industry works: editors and agents aren’t taught how to edit books.
Like most of her peers, early in her career Ana was given excellent training in the essential editorial skills needed for copy-editing and proofreading. But the type of editing she found herself doing day-to-day looked very different. It involved talking about the ideas at the heart of a project, grappling with a book’s shape and structure, and helping authors find their voice on the page.
Working with colleagues, Ana developed training workshops that give everyone who takes part a framework for editing that will serve them for their whole careers. After successfully piloting the workshops with Penguin Random house, in 2023 Ana launched Working Edits to offer the training to the wider industry.
As Working Edits, Ana continues to edit fiction and non-fiction titles for publishers and literary agencies, and works with her clients to use those edits as training tools for junior members of staff.
About Ana
Ana has edited close to 100 works of fiction and non-fiction by prize-winning and bestselling authors, including Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Jacqueline Crooks, Jarvis Cocker, Tessa Hadley, Jo Hamya, Anthony Horowitz, Howard Jacobson, Daisy Johnson, Ian McEwan, Jeanette Winterson and Evie Wyld.
She spent five years as a desk editor and senior editor at Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Penguin Random House, and two years before that at the independent press And Other Stories.
In her life before publishing, Ana worked as a writer, editor and trainer for the brand language consultancy The Writer, and was part of the International Programmes team at the human rights and literature organisation PEN International.
Ana speaks, reads and occasionally translates from Spanish and Portuguese. She has a BA in English from the University of York, and an MA in Comparative Literature from UCL.