Professional Editorial Services Since 1997

Welcome! I’m Dania Sheldon, a freelance editor, writer, researcher, and indexer.

I have been helping people with their editorial needs for decades, and I love my career. I strive to provide clients with a wide range of exceptional services tailored to their specific needs. In 2017, I was honoured to receive the Tom Fairley Award for Editorial Excellence from Editors Canada.

Whether you’re looking for academic editing in the sciences or humanities, creative non-fiction writing, fiction editing, coaching, copyright and licensing negotiation, an index for your forthcoming book, or a manuscript assessment, I’m here to help. And if you’re not quite sure what you need, we can figure that out. Let’s work together to reach your publishing goal.

Learn More About Me

Skills I Offer

Editing for grammar, spelling, punctuation, and other mechanical aspects of style; checking for consistency of mechanics and internal consistency of facts. May include providing or changing the system of citations; writing or editing the bibliography; providing or editing preliminary materials, end materials, dust jacket blurbs.

Clarifying meaning, smoothing language and other non-mechanical line-by-line editing.

Also called substantive editing. Clarifying and/or reorganizing a manuscript for content and structure.

Reading and correcting page proofs of an edited manuscript. This is not to be confused with copy editing (see above), which takes place before the manuscript has been formatted into page proofs.

Creating a new manuscript or parts of a manuscript on the basis of content and research supplied by an author. May include some research and writing of original material.

Reading an entire manuscript, then providing the author with a detailed report assessing strengths and weaknesses, and making recommendations for how the author can improve the manuscript.

Researching permissions needed to reproduce previously published material; obtaining the permission of rights holders; negotiating licensing terms and fees; inserting permissions information into the manuscript.

Locating suitable photos and/or artwork; preparing descriptions for illustrations, maps and diagrams; negotiating licensing with picture sources and artists; preparing labels, captions, and source identification lists.

Checking the accuracy of facts and/or quotes by reference to original sources or verified secondary sources.

Coordinating and editing a project from proposal or rough manuscript to final manuscript, incorporating input from authors, consultants and reviewers. May include budgeting, hiring, design supervision, and project coordination.

Producing an alphabetical list of subjects, concepts, names, places, etc., that appear in a work. This is not done using the “index” function of a word processing program.

See My Credentials

Latest Projects

History, Literature

Modernist Literature: An Introduction

Mary Ann Gillies and Aurelea Denise Mahood

Edinburgh University Press, 2007

History, Literature

The Professional Literary Agent in Britain, 1880-1920

Mary Ann Gillies

University of Toronto Press, 2007

Classical & Near Eastern Studies, History, Literature, Philosophy

Influences on Peripatetic Rhetoric: Essays in Honor of William W. Fortenbaugh

David Mirhady, Editor

Brill, 2007

Autobiography & Memoir, History

The Quiet Tides of Bordeaux

J.L.F. Lambert, 2015

History, Political Science

Token Forces: How Tiny Troop Deployments Became Ubiquitous in UN Peacekeeping

Katharina P. Coleman and Xiaojun Li

Cambridge University Press, 2022

Gender & Women’s Studies, History, Literature

Edith Wharton’s Evolutionary Conception: Darwinian Allegory in the Major Novels

Paul J. Ohler

Routledge, 2006

See All Projects

My award-winning consulting editor, Dania Sheldon, was supremely thorough in covering all the necessary bases for this project.

Dr Edward Yardeni

Author of the acclaimed

Predicting the Markets: A Professional Autobiography

Dania Sheldon was permissions editor and a believer in where my book was going, helping with many images that were difficult to source and being a trusted sounding board on matters of content and approach.

Rick Antonson

Bestselling author of

Full Moon Over Noah’s Ark, Route 66 Still Kicks, and others

The amazing Dania Sheldon! The unique thing about Dania is her all-encompassing editing skills. Dania has help me with editing two of my books and many articles, and I have continually found her standard of work to be exceptional. Her excellent attention to detail in grammar, syntax, sentence structure, formatting, referencing, indexing, and proofreading, as well as her helpful suggestions and comments, have greatly advanced the flow and clarity of my writing.

Dania always understands what the work aims to achieve and edits it perfectly. She is also familiar with the academic publishing process, follows publishers’ requirements and expectations for manuscripts, has specialised knowledge of all the academic referencing styles (e.g., APA, Harvard, MLA, AGLC, Chicago, etc.), and goes above and beyond to turn the work in on time even under very tight — and sometimes impossible — deadlines.

Last but not least, Dania is accessible, supportive, and welcoming. It has been an honour to work with someone of her calibre.

Dr Daphna Arbel

Professor Emerita of Biblical/Early Jewish Literature

University of British Columbia

The project required a remarkable combination of insight, skill, creativity, organization, and professionalism. Dania earned the trust and confidence of the authors and designer with whom she worked. And the respect with which professionals in the field have received the final project helps to confirm our belief that this confidence was richly deserved.

Judging Panel

Tom Fairley Award for Editorial Excellence

Dania is a wonderful, professional, and caring editor. We were very fortunate to find her.

Dennis and Laila Radage

Authors of

Clockmaking Through the Golden Age

I have been happy to refer fellow writers to Dania for their editing needs, and now I am delighted to be able to recommend her to a wider audience. Working with a top-notch editor is not supposed to be fun, nice, or pleasant; it is supposed to be efficient, effective and at times uncomfortable. But I have never found working with Dania to be uncomfortable, and it has always been effective and efficient, and yes, I have to say, pleasant! That is why I have kept coming back to her, book after book (four at the latest count!)

Bernie Clark

Best-selling author and yoga instructor

I wholeheartedly recommend Dania Sheldon. In the many years of our collaboration, she has worked with unflagging dedication, professionalism, and importantly a keen eye for detail. I look forward to continued collaboration with Dania on future projects.

Dr Sarah Beaulieu

University of the Fraser Valley

Editorial Excellence Since 1997

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Professional Editorial Services Since 1997

Skills I Offer

Copy Editing

Stylistic Editing

Structural Editing

Proofreading

Rewriting & Ghost Writing

Manuscript Assessment

Copyright Research & Permissions Licensing

Picture/Image Research

Fact and Reference Checking

Project Management

Indexing