Dr Elizabeth Flann DE. Photo credit: Tracey Ambrose
My life in publishing began in London where I received thorough editing training when an agency sent me to the publishing wing of a large computer company. There, a former editor at Oxford University Press taught me the complete craft of copyediting, structural editing, layout (by hand at the time) and even last-minute rewriting when contributors let us down.
Back in Australia, I worked for Pitman Publishing as Senior Editor and in 1987 set up as a freelancer, working for educational publishers, government departments and corporate entities as a writer, editor and project manager. I also did voluntary work for a children’s non-sexist book cooperative, Sugar and Snails Press, as Editorial Adviser and Director.
I joined the Society of Editors (Victoria) in the late 1980s and was elected to the committee as joint Training Officer with Beryl Hill DE in 1991. During this time we organised speakers and short training seminars for editors at all levels, and for several years conducted a six-week course in the basics of copyediting for trainee editors, as there seemed to be a trend for companies to have no senior editors to provide this training.
For the same reason, the Society commissioned us to write a manual of Australian editing practice to be used in-house and in the growing number of tertiary editing courses. The first edition of The Australian Editing Handbook was published in 1994, with a second updated edition in 2009. For the third edition, published in 2014, we were joined by Lan Wang as third co-author.
I joined IPEd in its early years and was a member of the Accreditation Board and the Assessors Forum, which were responsible for setting up the first accreditation exams for Australian editors and for updating the Australian Standards for Editing Practice in 2006. I spoke at both IPEd and societies of editors conferences about aspects of editing and, with Beryl Hill, on the development of The Australian Editing Handbook.
After more than 20 years in the publishing industry, my career took a different turn. I was invited to teach an editing course at Victoria College, later Deakin University, and after a year was offered the position of Coordinator of the Graduate Diploma of Professional Writing, in which I taught editing and scriptwriting. I loved teaching highly motivated students, many of whom went on to great success, and during my time at Deakin completed a PhD in Australian film history, which was awarded in 2001.
Some years ago I decided to take early retirement and fulfil my childhood ambition to become a writer of fiction. I was very fortunate to win the HarperCollins Banjo Award for unpublished fiction in 2019 and my first novel, Beware of Dogs, was published in January 2021. It is a combination of female adventure story and thriller, and it was a highly interesting experience seeing publishing from the other side. Luckily for me it has been a wonderful experience.