Services

Writing

I’m available to write pieces of any length—from short magazine features to entire ghostwritten books. My main area of interest in my own work is home cooking and how it intersects with broader cultures and histories.

Thanks for your expertise and willingness to share it with our readers—your passion for all of this really shows!

—Editor at the Charleston Gazette-Mail

Editing and project management

Whether a book needs a developmental edit, which deals with major issues of organization and theme; a line edit, which involves substantive editing and rewriting; or a simple copyedit to clean up grammar and ensure consistency and clarity, I love helping shape prose to make it a pleasure to read. I have experience in a variety of areas: fiction (adult and YA sci-fi/fantasy novels, thrillers, and literary fiction), trade nonfiction (food and lifestyle), and scholarly (primarily politics, social justice, and criminal justice).

As a project manager, I can work with authors, in-house editors, photographers, designers, and other freelancers to shepherd books from early manuscript to finished layouts ready for the printer. Busy acquiring editors can feel confident in passing along the nitty-gritty trafficking duties to me so they can concentrate on signing the next blockbuster title.

I’ve never worked with an editor before, but if this is what it’s like, it’s amazing!

—Yolanda Gampp, author of How to Cake It

My thanks to Liana for these exquisite edits—it’s so cool to see such attention to detail. In moments, I realize that despite possibly not being a speaker of some of these languages, she has familiarized herself with this material/the smallest details to such a degree that she’s totally in my head! What a gift!

—Massoud Hayoun, author of When We Were Arabs

Recipe testing and development

Thorough, careful recipe testing is essential to the word-of-mouth success of any cookbook. Recipes that have been independently vetted are of course much less likely to turn up in negative reader reviews online, and telegraph to home cooks that the publisher and author respect their time (and their grocery budget). Often a spot-check of ten to twenty representative recipes is enough to insure against major errors elsewhere in the book.

Recipe testing is not an insignificant expense, but because I’m also an experienced cookbook copyeditor I’m able to give each recipe a solid edit as I work. Having all the recipes consistent with the publisher’s house style, with all the metric conversions in place if required, makes the next steps in the process go much more smoothly, and in some cases a separate copyedit isn’t even necessary.

Recipe development—coming up with recipes from scratch based on author or publisher parameters and rough notes—is somewhat more involved than testing, but I do that, too.