An exciting new partnership with VenX will connect IPEd professional editors with aspiring authors, facilitating a range of paid opportunities.
VenX is a membership-based digital community for aspiring writers with an inbuilt self-publishing platform. Founder Jane Curry describes it as a one-stop shop for writers to learn, belong and, if they choose, also publish their work.
The partnership with IPEd ensures self-published authors have access to expert and experienced editing – the often hidden, yet essential part of the publishing process.
IPEd CEO Karen Lee sees the partnership as a wonderful opportunity for IPEd’s professional members.
“We welcome the opportunity to partner with VenX to connect their writers with our professional editors.
“IPEd members have a wealth of experience and a wide range of skills and knowledge in a variety of genres and this partnership will provide innumerable opportunities for them to showcase those skills.
Curry, also the founder of successful Australian independent book publisher Ventura Press, said VenX was born from her decades of experience in the publishing industry.
“Because I’m a career publisher, I’ve observed self publishing from a distance, and seen the flaws in it. With Venx, I wanted to make sure that people who are excluded from the mainstream, which is 99% of writers, have the same access to editing, design and marketing – all the things that a trade publishing house would do to your manuscript to turn it into the book, I wanted to give people the power to do that themselves.”
Janes says the key difference between traditional self-publishing and VenX is that with VenX authors are not on their own.
“In the true self-publishing world you’re completely on your own. With VenX, we really like to emphasise that community part so that people can get help, or they can ask us questions.”
With the self-publishing market growing, Karen said it was an opportune time to partner with VenX.
“Editors are always at the forefront of change in the industry and at IPEd we are always looking at how to best position the profession and provide benefits to our members.”
So how does it all work?
Along the pathway to publication with VenX, Jane said authors must necessarily make “certain pitstops” and that “the first pitstop is very much to get that high level editing.”
VenX offers their community two avenues to editing.
The first links writers to the IPEd Editors Directory where they can search for and connect directly with an IPEd professional editor.
The second is a more bespoke service where VenX does the searching on behalf of the writer and pairs them with an IPEd professional editor.
Regardless of the avenue chosen by the writer, Jane says that the goal is to ensure writers “can get the best editing possible”.
“Editing is what changes a book into something people want to read. It’s probably the most essential step of the publishing journey.”
More about VenX
VenX is a membership-based digital community for aspiring writers with an inbuilt self-publishing platform. A one-stop shop for writers to learn, belong and if they choose, also publish their work.
It was developed by leading business woman Jane Curry, founder of successful Australian independent book publisher Ventura Press. Jane has spent over 30 years in book publishing, starting out in London with Time Life Books before coming to Australia in 1985. Over her career she has been Managing Director of Weldon (later Lansdowne) Publishing and dictionary publisher Macquarie, she acquired and successfully on-sold National Book Distributors and she was ANZ Managing Director for UK listed Quarto Publishing PLC.
Jane published her own list at Pan Macmillan Australia prior to establishing her own trade publishing house, Ventura Press, in 2002 publishing literary fiction, memoir and narrative non-fiction.
Jane has been an elected director of the Copyright Agency since 2015 and is a member of the Steering Committee for leading arts and culture think tank A New Approach since its inception. She is a former Director of the Australian Publishers Association where she was convenor of the Independent Publishers Committee and led the inaugural publisher delegation to the Beijing Book Fair in 2017.