Peter Ginna

peterginna.com | PG@doctorsyntax.net 

I’ve been an editor and publisher for over 30 years in publishing houses of all shapes and sizes, most recently at Bloomsbury Press, an imprint I founded at Bloomsbury USA specializing in serious nonfiction. As Editorial Director for trade books at Oxford University Press, my mission was to help authors of scholarly works reach a general audience; I have always taken special satisfaction in that kind of editing. Before that, I worked at two Big Five publishers, Crown and St. Martin’s Press, and a small independent firm, Persea Books. At those houses, I edited fiction, including both mysteries and literary novels, as well as nonfiction in categories ranging from history, biography, and science and medicine to how-to and personal finance.

As a freelance editor, I still often work with historians, biographers, journalists and others writing works that come out of deep research and thought. But I also edit memoirs, literary novels, and genre fiction. Whatever the category, my method as an editor is to ask, What is this book trying to be? and try to help the author attain the best possible version of that.

Authors I have worked with include, in nonfiction, David Hackett Fischer, Alice Kessler-Harris, Miriam Pawel, John Ferling, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Ha-Joon Chang, Brian Fagan, Suze Orman, Marty Makary, Craig Wilder, and Arthur Kleinman. In fiction, Alain De Botton, Colin Dexter, and Katharine Weber.

I’m the author/editor of What Editors Do: The Art, Craft, and Business of Book Editing (University of Chicago Press), and I teach in the Columbia Publishing Course at the Columbia School of Journalism.