July/August 2026 Update

Sunflowers growing wild in Colorado.

‍Hello, and I hope you’ve had a good summer (or winter if you’re in the Southern Hemisphere). Here in London, we’ve had the hottest summer I can recall in all the twenty-two years that I’ve lived here. I grew up in Southern California and, honestly, London felt just as hot for a lot of the summer this year, with the added discomfort of high humidity and no air-conditioning in most places, including my flat. Luckily, though, my husband, cats, and I live on the ground floor, so our apartment doesn’t get anywhere near as hot as those of our upstairs neighbours. And we’re very privileged to have some large trees in our communal yard/garden almost right outside our living room, which helps to keep the temperature down.

Cleo lying down on a blanket in the yard, trying to beat the heat.

In late July, however, I decided to “escape” the London heat by going to a place with even more extreme heat—Texas, where my mom and my sister and her family live (though, lucky for them—and me—almost everywhere has air-conditioning there). I’m at that stage in life where my parents and in-laws are getting older and sometimes needing more help, so I needed to go and spend some time with my mom after we lost her long-time partner and carer. It was good to spend time with family and I’m grateful that I was able to help my mom some.

Of course, the visit wasn’t all about helping my mom. While there, my incredibly smart and talented nine-year-old nephew also taught me how to ice-skate (to be completely honest, I had ice-skated before, but not since I was about fourteen—almost 32 years ago!—and I was pretty tentative on the ice even then). He graciously allowed me to use some colourful stacked buckets to help me balance, and eventually I was told that I had passed my test and could now proceed to get rid of the buckets, albeit a little before I was ready to. But I couldn’t exactly disagree, as I only get to see him once, maybe twice, a year, so in the end I got rid of the buckets, and I only almost-fell five times, which is pretty good, considering. 😊  

After I visited my family in Texas, I proceeded onto Colorado, where my dad, stepmom, youngest brother and an aunt and uncle live, and had a great visit with them as well. My youngest brother has autism and is nonverbal, so it’s hard to stay in touch with him from a distance, which made it especially good to be able to spend time with him and give him a big hug.

Either side of my trip, I worked on re-issues of novels that needed different levels of editorial intervention—one required a comprehensive line edit, while the other was just a quick proofread, with some attention paid to line editing, as the author hadn’t had a line editor at the time they’d originally published the novel. As an editor, I had never really considered helping authors with re-issues of their novels, but they were interesting experiences! As the novels had already been published, even with the comprehensive line edit, it was even more important to proceed cautiously and to ensure that any line edits matched the author’s tone and style and were absolutely necessary. It was a good reminder that editing is not always a one-size-fits-all approach. So if you’re an author whose manuscript needs something that falls outside of a traditional straight proofread or copyedit, let your editor know exactly what it is you need. And in terms of my editing services, I’m happy to be flexible in my approach and to tailor it to whatever you/your manuscript might need.

Otherwise, I also managed to watch a CIEP (Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading) webinar on Trends in the (UK) Publishing industry, which was given by Phoebe Morgan, Executive Publisher of Commercial Fiction at Simon & Schuster UK, which was very informative. One thing that was very interesting was that she said publishers are not seeing as many sales, most likely due to the cost-of-living crisis. This makes it much harder to sell a book now, at least in the traditional publishing space. She mentioned that the self-publishing landscape has changed a lot, too, in the last five years, and that many self-publishing authors are doing well, and some traditional publishers are trying to pick up successful self-publishing authors (good news for indie authors who seek traditional representation). Publishing companies are also focusing more on special editions of novels—ones with unique covers, for example—as this has become big with readers (so if you’re a fantasy author with the budget for it, this might be something worth exploring). Finally, she mentioned that crime fiction has been overtaken in popularity by romance and fantasy, but there’s still a demand for it. She also talked about the impact that recent changes in the industry will have on freelance editors and proofreaders, but I won’t bore you with that. 😊

Lastly, I just wanted to let readers know that I have some autumn availability for proofreading, copyediting, and manuscript critiques. So if you’re looking for some help with your manuscript, why not send me a message and we can explore whether we’d work well together. You can reach me at: kendraroseolson@gmail,com, or by using my contact form, available here.

Until next time,

Kendra