Testimonials
Jem Bates is a consummate professional with deep editing expertise, commercial acumen and the highest integrity. I had the pleasure of working with Jem on my book Power Play and was continually impressed by his professionalism, extremely high standards and humour! Jem challenged me to lift my game, made everything I wrote shine and delivered a product I am so proud of. It was a privilege and a pleasure to work with Jem, and I cannot recommend him and his work highly enough.
Yamini Naidu, CSP, business storyteller and writer
Working with Jem on How to Speak Human completely dispelled our preconceived notions about the book editing process. We imagined it would be an angst-ridden affair, a systemised elimination of all the character from the writing. It was not. We assumed it would be a tedious exercise, limited to pedantic quibbles about punctuation marks. We were wrong. Jem made our book better in all the right ways, from saving us the embarrassment of ungainly punctuation and grammar to sweating the subtleties of language and even the nuances of the content. He also removed several thousand oxford commas without breaking stride and bore Jen’s pursuit of his cats around the garden with good humour. The whole experience was an unexpected delight. We’d heartily recommend Jem to anyone looking for a thoughtful editor with a wealth of technical knowledge but also the nous to ensure the content reads exactly as intended.
Dougal Jackson, award-winning writer, co-author of How to Speak Human