Assisting book authors, small press, university press, and corporations with line editing (grammar, punctuation, spelling), structure and critique on book-length projects: novels; short story collections; memoirs; nonfiction (history, biography, travel); technical; and corporate image.

Jim Woods brings to your printed product an editing expertise acquired through his more than forty years in commercial publishing as a magazine staff editor and freelance writer; and industrial publishing as a technical and engineer writer/editor.

While employed as a technical editor in the aerospace industry in California and at the same time attending a local college and working toward a journalism degree, he started writing articles for the firearms magazine markets, on speculation. After selling three such pieces to Petersen Publishing Company's Guns & Ammo magazine, a staff post opened with that organization, which he applied for and won.

His position was that of Editorial Director and he was charged with creative responsibility for the division's one-shot and annual newsstand-distributed book titles.

Within the Petersen organization, he later changed job functions to become Managing Editor for the Petersen's Hunting magazine title, and at various times on other assignments was masthead-listed as Senior Editor or Editor as the project required.

Separating from Petersen Publishing Company because of a personal move to Arizona, he contracted with then Publishers Development Corporation (PDC) of San Diego, now the Firearms Publications Marketing Group, as a Field Editor for Guns magazine and contributor to the company's additional titles, Shooting Industry and Handgunner. In that capacity, he worked at home on a self-regulated schedule, on self-generated assignments. He supplied one feature and one specialty column per issue to Guns magazine for six years; and occasional articles to the other two magazines.

In addition to the staff editorial assignments noted, Jim Woods has had more than 400 freelance articles published in:

He contributed to hardbound anthologies including the Collector's Limited Edition, Hunting in Zimbabwe, Safari Press, 1992; Guns of The Gunfighters, Bonanza Books, 1982; and A Guide to Handmade Knives, Janus Press, 1977.

His writing tutorial Two Dozen Lessons From An Editor, has been revised and reissued under new title, So You Want To be An Author? by Gypsy Shadow Publishing (2011). He is the author or co-author of sixteen books that include both fiction and nonfiction.

Education: