I am a freelance editor, proofreader and copy writer with extensive experience in the publishing industry and academia. I have worked with many wonderful clients, including publishers in Aotearoa New Zealand and overseas, government departments and non-governmental organisations, self-published authors, academics (editing and preparation of book manuscripts for academic publishers and articles for academic journals), and Masters and PhD candidates (thesis editing).
I can shape and reorganise text to ensure the narrative remains fluid and readable, and, most of all, makes sense to tell the best possible story and retain the author’s unique voice – whether fiction or non-fiction and across a wide range of genres.
Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” in his celebration of human individuality. Consistency in writing is another matter entirely – it invisibly adds to the reading experience by avoiding distractions. I can smooth out all style inconsistencies and errors with my well-honed copy editing skills.
I have formidably broad general knowledge and excellent research skills to support my editing. I can ensure the writing has a logical flow and help writers to communicate their ideas in the clearest possible way. I work with publishers or liaise directly with authors to ensure the manuscript is ready for production.
Editing projects include:
Call me Hawkeye. I may not be Alan Alda in M*A*S*H, but I’m the sharpest-eyed proof reader you’ll ever encounter. I can spot all errors and adapt to any house style. Got a problem with your em and en dashes? Your author switches between APA and Chicago A? An embarrassing missing ‘l’ in public? I can fix that.
My years working in publishing, on academic writing and as a freelancer have trained that eye, and I have experience in proofreading in a huge variety of styles and formats, from books for publication to PhDs. Accuracy is crucial if you want your writing to be taken seriously. I’m just the proofreader to ensure that happens.
Proofreading projects include:
Do you need cover copy (a blurb) for a book? I can write copy that will make your book sound intriguing and illuminating. I can write copy for a press release, catalogue or marketing materials. I can also provide advice on how to ensure your existing copy is the best ever to help sell that book.
I have years of experience writing cover blurbs and other publishing copy for a huge range of genres. I write freelance blurbs, teach copywriting to publishing students and publishers, and (let’s be honest) I spend quite a bit of time in bookshops looking at cover copy. I love thinking about how words can be sharpened to appeal to its audience and use exactly the right language to inspire people to read the book.
Whether you need some copy for a book cover – in any genre – or other publishing materials, I can write in a voice that speaks to your audience.
Copy writing projects include:
Email me at editor@madeleinecollinge.co.nz
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I’m a freelance editor, proofreader and copy writer. I’m happy working in many genres and text types, from short reports to long books and PhDs, adult speculative fiction to children’s picture books, history, politics and current affairs to memoirs, novels and self-help.
I’ve worked with words since I graduated with an Honours degree in English literature from Victoria University of Wellington and with a diploma in publishing from Whitireia Publishing. I got my start in publishing at Auckland University Press and Bridget Williams Books, working on some of New Zealand’s best books. I then moved to London where I was lucky enough to land a job at Penguin Books, where, among other roles, I wrote copy for a wide and wonderful range of international fiction and non-fiction, including hundreds of Penguin Classics. After I returned to New Zealand I worked at Victoria University as a tutor and learning adviser, helping students at all levels from first-year to PhD to improve their writing. I have continued teaching as an annual guest tutor for Whitireia Publishing, running workshops on creative copywriting, and have been a guest speaker at the Publisher’s Association Conference in 2020 and 2024.
I launched my freelance editing, proofreading and copy writing business in 2016 and have been lucky to work with many wonderful publishers, organisations and writers in both Aotearoa New Zealand and around the world.
I can help with all your editing, proofreading and writing needs.
Want me to come and talk to your publishing firm about Writing Creative and Convincing Cover Copy (blurbs)? I have many years’ experience in running sessions on this subject, to help publishing staff gain confidence in their own copy writing and learn some important dos and don'ts of writing high-quality cover copy. Please contact me at editor@madeleinecollinge.co.nz if you would like to book a session.
I am an annual guest tutor for the Graduate Diploma in Publishing (Applied) at Whitireia New Zealand, and have been a guest presenter (2020 and 2024) at the Publisher’s Association of New Zealand, running sessions on Writing Creative and Convincing Cover Copy.
I have also been an interviewer for a lunchtime session at Unity Books, Wellington, interviewing author L. J. Ritchie about his novel Monsters of Virtue published by Escalator Press for Whitireia Publishing (for which I also did the final edit and assessed the editing process completed by students on the course).
I was excited to be interviewed for the NZ Listener in an article about blurb writing: ‘Back Cover Story: The not-so-subtle art of selling books’ in 2024.
In an unusual twist of copy-writing fate, one of my blurbs was featured as a window display featuring Irmgard Keun’s A Child of all Nations (Penguin Modern Classics) at Waterstone’s Covent Garden in London.
Bonsai: Best Small Stories from Aotearoa New Zealand
Canterbury University Press
Bonsai brings together a pioneering collection of flash fiction and associated forms (prose poetry and haibun) from 165 writers in Aotearoa New Zealand, along with intriguing essays on this increasingly popular genre. In 200 small stories of no more than 300 words, where the translucent boundaries between prose and poetry are often transgressed, we discover a vast array of human experience.
Here, children race snails, shoot tin cans, learn to fly, and look for Antarctica in a drain pipe, while Schrödinger’s cat dreams of life and death, a dog licks away a woman’s tears, and a peacock guards its human family. Family tensions spill over during trips to the beach, couples get together and fall apart, babies are born – or not born – and parents die. You might find yourself dancing like the cool kids, listening to a neighbour sing in the dark, or watching a tractor catch fire. There are perfect moments in miniature as dew falls on a spider’s web and strangers make eye contact.
Composed with precision in a form where every word counts, these carefully chiselled works are provocative, tender and endlessly surprising.
The City Limits
Robert Metcalf
Ferndale Press
“You know what gets me about Wellington? … You keep getting to the edges of it.”
The stories of The City Limits depict people at a point of change and reflection in Wellington, a city bounded by hills and sea.
Some imagine a world beyond the hills, as a teenage girl catches a glimpse of another life at a carnival, and a school-leaver dreams of a future in New York. Other stories ask if ‘you can’t go home again’ – from a visitor stirring up memories of Wellington for a woman in London, to a man struggling with a return to his home town. Children see the adults around them in a different light, others contend with the daily demands of the city and older people watch as the place they remember transforms into something they no longer recognise.
Single & Single
John le Carré
Penguin Classics
Why was an English lawyer shot dead in Turkey by his firm’s top client? How can a down-at-heel magician in Devon explain the vast fortune that has mysteriously appeared in his daughter’s trust fund? With customs officer Nat Brock on the trail, the answers point to the House of Single – once a respectable finance company, now entangled with a Russian crime syndicate.
West is pitted against East, and the British establishment against a labyrinthine criminal superpower, in le Carré’s searing novel of lives built upon lies.
Child of All Nations
Irmgard Keun
Penguin Modern Classics
Kully knows some things you don’t learn at school. She knows the right way to roll a cigarette and pack a suitcase. She knows that cars are more dangerous than lions. She knows you can’t enter a country without a passport or visa. And she knows that she and her parents can’t go back to Germany again – her father’s books are banned there. But there are also things she doesn’t understand, like why there might be a war in Europe – just that there are men named Hitler, Mussolini and Chamberlain involved. Little Kully is far more interested where their next meal will come from and the ladies who seem to buzz around her father. Meanwhile she and her parents roam through Europe. Her mother would just like to settle down, but as her restless father struggles to find a new publisher, the three must escape from country to country as their visas expire, money runs out and hotel bills mount up.
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
Penguin Classics
David Copperfield is the story of a young man’s adventures on his journey from an unhappy and impoverished childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist. Among the gloriously vivid cast of characters he encounters are his tyrannical stepfather, Mr Murdstone; his brilliant, but ultimately unworthy school-friend James Steerforth; his formidable aunt, Betsey Trotwood; the eternally humble, yet treacherous Uriah Heep; frivolous, enchanting Dora Spenlow; and the magnificently impecunious Wilkins Micawber, one of literature’s great comic creations. In David Copperfield – the novel he described as his ‘favourite child’ – Dickens drew revealingly on his own experiences to create one of the most exuberant and enduringly popular works, filled with tragedy and comedy in equal measure.
The King’s English
Kingsley Amis
Penguin Modern Classics
The King’s English is Kingsley Amis’s authoritative and witty guide to the use and abuse of the English language. A scourge of illiteracy and a thorn in the side of pretension, Amis provides indispensable advice about the linguistic blunders that lie in wait for us, from danglers and four-letter words to jargon and even Welsh rarebit. If you have ever wondered whether it’s acceptable to start a sentence with ‘and’, to boldly split an infinitive, or to cross your sevens in the French style, Amis has the answer – or a trenchant opinion. By turns reflective, acerbic and provocative, The King’s English is for anyone who cares about how the English language is used.
The Koran
Penguin Classics
The Koran is universally accepted by Muslims to be the infallible Word of God as first revealed to the Prophet Muhammad by the Angel Gabriel nearly fourteen hundred years ago. Its 114 chapters, or surahs, recount the narratives central to Muslim belief, and together they form one of the world’s most influential prophetic works and a literary masterpiece in its own right. But, above all, the Koran provides the rules of conduct that remain fundamental to the Muslim faith today: prayer, fasting, almsgiving, pilgrimage to Mecca and absolute faith in God and His apostle.
The Bible
Penguin Classics
The King James Bible or Authorized Version (1611) comprises the Old Testament, the Apocrypha and the New Testament, from God’s creation of the heaven and earth and the fall of man in Genesis, through the life Jesus Christ, to St John the Divine’s foretelling of the end of the world and God’s final judgment in Revelation. Among the most influential texts of all time and the cornerstone of the Christian faith, the King James Bible is the work of the great scholars and theologians of the early seventeenth century and reflects their desire for greater stability in the Christian religion. They revised and retranslated existing versions, including that of William Tyndale, to create a standardized Bible that would be accessible to all speakers and readers of English. Definitive and highly readable, this superb edition brings new vigour to one of the finest pieces of English prose.
Clinging to the Wreckage
John Mortimer
Penguin
Here John Mortimer recounts his solitary childhood in the English countryside, with affectionate portraits of his remote parents – an increasingly unconventional barrister father, whose blindness must never be mentioned, battling earwigs in the mutinous garden, and a vague and endlessly patient mother. As a boy dreaming of a tap-dancing career on the stage and forming a one-boy communist cell at boarding school, his father pushes him to pursue the law, where Mortimer embarks on the career that was to inspire his hilarious and immortal literary creations. Told with great humour and touching honesty, this is a magnificent achievement by one of Britain’s best-loved writers.
Iron Kingdom
Christopher Clark
Penguin
Winner of the Wolfson History Prize, Christopher Clark’s Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600–1947 is a compelling account of a country that played a pivotal role in Europe’s fortunes and fundamentally shaped our world. Prussia began as a medieval backwater, but transformed itself into a major European power and the force behind the creation of the German empire, until it was finally abolished by the Allies after the Second World War. With great flair and authority, Christopher Clark describes Prussia’s great battles, dynastic marriages and astonishing reversals of fortune, its brilliant and charismatic leaders from the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg to Bismarck and Frederick the Great, the military machine and the progressive, enlightened values on which it was built.
