Sue Copsey

Hello! Welcome to my website.

I’m a professional book editor and author, with more than 20 years’ experience in the UK and NZ publishing industries.

I should probably have two websites – one for my editing services, and one for my books, fun stuff and blog. But really, life is complicated enough don’t you think? So if you don’t want to wade through this home page, go straight to the tabs at the top of this page and select away!

Editor

I have extensive experience as both an in-house and freelance editor. I trained at Dorling Kindersley in London, and was a project editor then senior editor at DK for four years. After moving to New Zealand, I became a freelance editor specialising in non-fiction titles (adult/children’s), educational material, children’s/YA fiction, and genre fiction. I have edited more than 150 UK, US,  and NZ titles.

To find out about my editing services, including my publishing background, client list and portfolio, click here.

Author

My writing career began at London Zoo, where I worked as a  press officer and was deputy editor of Zoo News. I also wrote a weekly column for the UK national children’s newspaper The Early Times.

During my time at Dorling Kindersley, I wrote Children Just Like Me, which became an international bestseller and won several major awards (hooray!).

In New Zealand, my non-fiction title Our Children Aotearoa (Pearson) was published in 2011, followed by my first children’s novel – a spooky adventure called The Ghosts of Young Nick’s Head. Its publisher closed down, but this hasn’t been all bad for me, as it gave me the opportunity to explore the DIY route. It’s useful to be able to share this knowledge with other authors thinking of self-publishing. No awards for this one (boo!), but it’s received good ratings and reviews. Plus it has given me the chance to visit schools and chat with kids about writing and ghosts. Very cool.

My adult fiction Wife After Wife, a modern retelling of the story of King Henry VIII and his six wives, will be published by Little, Brown UK in late 2019 (read all about it here on thebookseller.com) and its sequel, Sister After Sister, in 2020. They are written under my pen name Olivia Hayfield. Olivia will have her own website soon. It will be much fancier than this one.

The sequel, The Ghosts of Tarawera, received a Storylines Children’s Literature Trust Notable Book Award - yay!  The third in the series, The Ghosts of Moonlight Creek was unleashed on unsuspecting children in 2016, and was a finalist in the Sir Julius Vogel awards in the Best Youth Novel category.

“An action-packed adventure with a good dose of spookiness.”

– Zac McCallum, Children and Young Adult Outreach Librarian, Christchurch Libraries 

“A fabulous spooky adventure tale with its New Zealand setting offering something unique in a genre dominated by non-specific locations …”

– SQ Magazine