Sessions
Inside the Big Five: Tales from a Trade Book Production Editor
5:00 PM - 5:45 PM Fri
Susannah Noel has been a freelance copyeditor and proofreader of trade books since the mid-1990s. She's worked on a variety of bestselling fiction and nonfiction titles for Big Five publishers, small presses, and indie authors. In 2018, she cofounded Editorial Arts Academy with a mission to provide training and support for book lovers who dream of becoming freelance editors of trade books. In 2022, she accepted an in-house position as a production editor at St. Martin's Publishing Group / Macmillan Publishers. In this role, she shepherds books from manuscript to print, hiring freelance copyeditors, proofreaders, and cold readers and supervising their work. As soon as she was on the inside of a Big Five publisher, she began gathering intel into the book publishing industry for her students. Susannah lives in Barre, Vermont, with her husband, two young adult sons, cats, and dog.