With Jesse Steele

If you're a surgeon and planning to write something, Betsy White should be your best friend.  Thankfully for the rest of us who lack a degree from medical school and have fingers better suited for a keyboard than precision surgery, Betsy also works in a wide variety of non-medical genres.  Betsy worked with McGraw Hill, East Carolina University School of Medicine and Recovery Communications (among others), but we're proud to have her as part of the Editorial Department staff.

JS: You've done a lot of work with medical texts. How did that happen? Do you have a background in medicine, or is it something you just came across?

BW: My husband is a physician, and when we got married he began an internship at Stanford University Hospital, and I went along. I took a temp job typing, then applied for an opening as a secretary in the Radiation Therapy department. I may have gotten the job on my Southern accent and youthful looks, although I had a good liberal-arts degree. When we moved to Virginia McGraw Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology hired me as a copyeditor, and from there I became a freelance editor for various clients including some university presses.

With Jesse Steele

First of all, Peter Gelfan is not a magician.  You might believe so after reading some of the testimonials written about his editing work, but his abilities to pull a rabbit out of a hat or make the Statue of Liberty disappear are still unproven.  While that might make Peter a poor candidate to entertain at a child's birthday party, at the Editorial Department we are ecstatic to put the nearly two decades he has dedicated to editing, ghostwriting, and generally making good writing great to quality use on our client's manuscripts.

JS: What do you do when you’re not writing or editing?

PG: Not much. (Laughs) Photography. I’ve often thought I’ve learned more about writing from photography than I have from books about how to write. It’s the same idea. You’re taking a picture of a particular thing for a specific reason, not just snapping away. You include the elements around it that support the image and the idea. You frame and selectively focus to eliminate all the things that don’t support the picture or might distract from it.

It's somewhat difficult to write an introduction for someone with the accomplishments of Renni Browne without resorting to cliche.  "She wrote the book on editing":  she certainly did, but that barely scratches the surface of her accomplishments over nearly fifty years of editing.  To call Renni an expert in this era of instant internet expertise seems trite, so you'll have to read her bio yourself and find out for yourself why we're so proud to be part of The Editorial Department, which she founded in 1980.

JS: This is a huge question, but how has the experience of founding and running this company been for you?RDB: I'd have to say exciting and fulfilling. I've never been bored, not for one minute. Every book is different, every author is different, every page is different. When I left mainstream publishing there was such a need for what we do. Books needed editing just as much as ever, but that wasn't happening at anything like the extent when I entered publishing in the 60's. It was so exciting to see the TED idea slowly catch on.