Jane Dorner has been mentoring people through life-writing and memoir for the last 10 years and before that worked as a publisher’s editor for 30 years. She has authored more than 20 conventionally published books, including for Oxford University Press, the Bloomsbury and Hachette Groups and the British Library. These are all on her website at www.editor.net together with her journalism for The Guardian, the Financial Times, New Scientist and many others. She was a fiction reader for Penguin for 8 years.
More recently she has self-published three works and has been ‘hand-holding’ roughly a dozen other writers through projects of their own. Some are already published, or going through the press, and range in subject material from architectural artifice, cello teaching and the ginger plant to post-war experiences and silversmithing. All have an autobiographical element to them, while also dealing with an area of expertise. Jane is interested in how peoples’ stories reveal themselves through the subjects they write about. She is also upbeat about self-publishing, and can help with the whole process of turning a manuscript into a finished book.
Jane is happy to work with those who want one-off advice or encouragement as well as those who need rolling deadlines to goad them into finishing a project when self-doubt stays their hands. She has a great deal of experience of looking at the structural shape of a work and at the sentence level of semicolons and the mot juste.
3 covers of books Jane has seen through from concept to finished book
Cover of her own self-published memoir
Testimonials
Jane gave me the encouragement to get started on my book, something I had thought of doing for several years. She suggested I write a short passage each week, whatever came to mind, in no particular chronological order, which broke the ice. She was gently persuasive, encouraging and patient throughout. Vicki Ambery-Smith, Jeweller
Jane has a gift with words and a technique of kindly encouragement that propels one forward. I could not have done my book without her. Sandy Ross Sykes, Botanical Artist
Jane guided every aspect of my work. I couldn’t have written my book without her help and critical advice. Wendy Max, Cello Teacher
Alison Belsham