Eve had been writing this book for 12 long years, but was yet to find the right kind of editor. Working under Power of Words, Jennifer helped in numerous ways, from line editing, to getting just the right blurb, to web designer advice.

All 5-star reviews on Amazon. A solid turn-out for in-person launch.

Working on Self-Help Books: Why Ignite Your Power Stayed With Me

There are books you edit, and books that change you as they are edited. Ignite Your Power fell firmly into the second category.

I came to this project normally, with a copyeditor’s instinct to improve the work. But somewhere between the first read-through and the final proof, I found myself lingering over passages in a way that had nothing to do with comma placement. As a woman who has, more than once, swallowed a perfectly valid argument rather than bite back, this book spoke directly to something I recognise in myself. Anger has five types: who knew?

What sets Ignite Your Power apart is not simply the volume of insight it contains — though that is genuinely staggering — but the way that insight is grounded and made human through case stories. These are composite case stories: a technique drawn from psychology and counselling practice in which a single narrative character is constructed from the real, recurring experiences of many different people. No one individual is exposed; instead, the author distils a pattern of behaviour or an emotional truth that readers will recognise immediately, because it reflects something universal. Done well, a composite case story achieves what raw data never can — it makes the reader feel seen. And Ignite Your Power does it very well indeed.

Psychology and social psychology have long been a private passion of mine, which makes projects like this one a particular pleasure to edit. Understanding how people think, what drives their decisions, and why they respond the way they do under pressure is endlessly fascinating territory — and it requires an editor who engages with the material rather than simply processing it.

That engagement recently extended to a fact-checking project on a specialist reference work — one I cannot name, but which I can say proved remarkably useful for understanding behavioural biases and social dynamics across the full spectrum of human experience.

Works like this one quietly expand the toolkit for anyone wanting to navigate relationships, negotiations, or simply the everyday business of being understood. The overlap with Ignite Your Power was striking: both books, in quite different registers, are fundamentally about knowing people better — starting with yourself.

That is the kind of editing work I find genuinely rewarding — and it is available to self-help authors either as a standalone service, individually quoted to your manuscript’s scope, or as part of my Self-Publish and Own It package, which takes your book from polished prose through to a print-ready file you own outright.