About Me

I grew up in and around Berkshire in the UK and have lived in London, Colchester and for the most part of my adult life, Norfolk. I am an experienced reader, editor and writer, having had seven books traditionally published and worked with nearly a hundred different authors as a developmental editor and mentor.

If you're looking for a copy editor or a line editor, that's not me.

As much as accuracy does matter to me, what really matters is the heart of the book. The character, the plot, the structure, the theme and how you feel when you get to the end. That's what I bring to my clients. I help them develop the book they wanted to write into an even more vivid and true version.

I’m not in the business of changing someone's book into what I would write. I am in the business of polishing and shaping and the Aha! moments when a character can be taken out or flipped, or changed in such a way that the rest of the book makes sense, a scene can be moved, or an ending can become the beginning. I love the thrill of seeing a book become clearer and the writers I work with surprising themselves with ideas they come up with in dialogue with me.

It is always a dialogue, never prescriptive. And notes are presented as questions as well as statements. And we talk in a Zoom meeting, which seems to make things clearer still.

I was an avid reader, from very young, learning to read before I started school and getting through hundreds of books a year. I love all genres of book if the story and the character captures me. I have worked with writers of commercial fiction, literary fiction, speculative fiction, science fiction, fantasy fiction, spy fiction, and crime fiction, as well as picture books, Middle Grade and Young Adults.

I read English and American Literature at the University of Essex and gained a First Class BA. I then worked n magazine editorial, and went on to do an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia where I gained a Distinction. In 2006 I won an Escalator Award from Writers’ Centre East and a Grant for the Arts to write my first novel, Jar Baby (Dexter Haven, 2012).

I have written for Grazia, The Observer and Mslexia magazines, and have been a mentor on the National Writing Centre’s Escalator programme for emerging authors in the East of England. My writing and my editing work hand in hand. I’ve worked with writers at all stages of their writing career, and for literary agents to help get writers' work ready for submission for publication. I love working with self-published writers, and developing series over time, as well as one-off novels.

I write fiction and non fiction for adults and young adults as Hayley Webster, and for younger readers as Hayley Scott.