When I was in grade school, in the mid 1970s, I was a voracious reader. I probably read at least one or two books per week. Used to order several books a month from the Scholastic Book orders we used to get at school. That’s when the writing bug bit me for the first time.

I was in a phase where I was reading animal books. King of the Grizzlies, Kavik the Wolf Dog, Gentle Ben, Call of the Wild, and White Fang. Also Two Against the North (or Lost in the Barrens). I had always liked the big cats, so I wrote a story about a cougar. Even insisted my dad draw some illustrations for the beginning of each chapter.

By the time I got on to The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, that had been mostly forgotten in favor of reading more. Add Stephen King, Robert Ludlum, Dean Koontz, Peter Benchley, Diane Duane, Janet Kagan, Robert J. Sawyer, Michael Connelly, and Thomas Harris (among others) into the mix and all those books served as distactions from writing. And good distractions they were!

When I got my first desktop computer in the late 1980s and got in front of my first word processor, the writing bug bit again. Hard. The more I wrote, the more I learned. The more I learned, the better I got. Rinse and repeat.

My first involvement with professional publishing was in 1999 when my wife got two acceptance letters from two publishers about two of her books on the same day. By then, I had been writing in my spare time on-and-off for 10 or 12 years.

All told, between the two of us, we’ve published 226 titles (as of March 2024). The first 35 books were traditionally published, the rest indie published. I’m the editor of record for most of those indie published titles. I also took on a few freelance clients, editing their manuscripts for extra bits of income here and there.

Our goal had always been to earn enough from writing that we wouldn’t need our day jobs. My wife started writing full-time in 2015. When lockdown hit in early 2020, I lost my day job of nearly 13 years. With a rather large severance cheque, we just decided to go for it.

With a bit of luck, I found an indie publisher that was looking for an editor and they supplied me with around 5 or 6 books per month to copyedit and proofread. Often, there’d be developmental work in there, too. I also took on a bunch of individual clients that needed their books edited. We also published several anthologies, splitting the editing duties, along the way.

My wife and I incorporated Stories Rule Press in July 2020 and I’ve been writing and editing full-time ever since. We’ve earned a full-time income with our writing, editing, and publishing ever since. Altogether, I’ve edited somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 books.

If you find yourself in need of an editor to examine your book for any reason — developmental editing, copy editing, or even proofreading — I can help you make your book the best it can be.

Get a quote today. Email me at mark@srpeditor.com