Samples

I’m a copy and developmental editor for non-fiction books, most recently for the Pop Culture division of Chronicle Books.

Some of the books I’ve edited for Chronicle:

• Supermaker 


• The Vagina Book 


• Seeing Gender


• Seeing Science 


• Open Water

Samples of edited manuscripts available on request.

I was the written voice of TEN7, a full-service Drupal development agency in Minneapolis, MN. I wrote most of their blog content (those as the CEO), case studies (this client prefers a shorter, narrative style) and social media posts. Everything between 2/2018-7/2020 was me.

Some examples:

Case Studies

• St. Catherine University Website Overhaul


• Solhem Companies Website Updates


• Lutheran Social Service Minnesota


• Sage Glass

Blog Posts (Ghostwritten for CEO)

• Why We Left Tempo Time Tracking for Harvest


• A Crash Course in SSL Certificates


• Why We Left ADP for Guideline and Gusto (keep scrolling down, the images they put in here were way too big!)


• The Design and Evolution of the TEN7 Logo

Twitter Posts

I had been doing website content for TEN7 when I noticed their social media could use some sprucing up. They weren’t posting with any consistency, and the voice of social media didn’t have as much personality as I knew the company did. I asked if I could maybe take over social media and give it some personality and structure. They were just about ready to throw in the towel on social media, so they said okay.  I fleshed out an editorial calendar for them, including scheduled posts for their podcasts (including audio clips), case studies, blog posts, events, newsletters, etc.. I took over TEN7’s social media in April 2019. After about a year, TEN7 told me they were very happy that they didn’t give up on social media, as they feel the voice of social media now properly reflects the company!

I performed a content audit of a legacy power company website that had 1800 pages (seriously this thing was from the early 2000s). The site needed an overhaul and part of that involved me authoring a “friendly writing” guide to teach the company’s writers to update the copy to be friendlier (both to readers and to SEO).

• Sample from “friendly writing” guide


• Sample from the content audit “Findings” document as well, if you’re nosy.

The client for this example used RedRoverHQ’s social networking software for universities and corporations to connect and teach its 50,000 worldwide employees. They needed someone to rewrite their “academic” content to sound friendlier. Here are two samples of what I did:

Corporate Email introducing the “University”

The email that corporate had first written was long and looked like a wall of text to me. Since this was the first “meeting” the company’s employees were going to have with the “University” concept, I thought it was important that the language be friendly and inviting, and the letter should make them curious to learn more.

Website FAQ (Before and After)

The University website copy needed a similar “friendlying” treatment.

Software user guide sample

Datasheet for hardware products (wrote copy and did the graphic design for these

Way back when SEO was shiny and new, I live-blogged coverage of SEO conferences. While many live-bloggers simply write stream of consciousness (resulting in clipped, context-less phrases), I wrote my coverage as articles, including my own knowledge, perspective and industry context where helpful. My articles were regularly noted in search marketing blogs, and were given “best of the web” mentions on SEO community blogs.

These articles were written for AIMCLEAR, a Minnesota SEO firm during the great SEO/Social Media explosions of 2008 and 2009. The info in some articles is obviously dated (i.e. early iPhone apps), but surprisingly some of it still holds up rather well.

Once Upon A Time…There Were Five Kinds of Stories To Build Your Brand

Landing Page Optimization: Core Skills, Power Tips

Cookies, Milk & Kramer: Converting Visitors Into Buyers @ SES (mentioned in “Best of 2008 SEM Guides” by WebMarketCentral)

Expect Barking Cats? Customers Redefined‘Cool iPhone 3G Apps, Radical Mobile/Local Search

Critical Context in Analytic Data: Captain Kirk, Mortality Rates & Red Shirts

I wrote some fun articles for a travel blog. The company has since killed the blog portion of their site, but I found the links on the wayback machine (warning: formatting may be funky).

Wine and Hiking, the Perfect Pairing of Virtue and Vice

The “Slow” Travel Movement: Pretend To Be A Local

International Body Language, Gestures & Manners: Don’t Be “That Guy!”

Tipping & Gratuity Guidelines For International Travel

Chocolate Travel Tours Offer Sweet Adventure

Note: not responsible for bad formatting on these articles! 🙂

Is SEO Dead? No More Gaming Google guest writer for AdrianDayton.com

Good Post Titles Are The New Black guest writer for AdrianDayton.com

How Ayahuasca Helped Me Puke My Way to Better Mental Health,  selected to be part of the Trips Worth Telling series, put out in conjunction with Michael Pollan’s book, “How to Change Your Mind on his research into psychedelics

Sugarpusher Sweets, my sadly neglected sweets review blog

Sometimes snarky but always useful YELP restaurant and service reviews

The Twitter machine, if you call “tweets” writing!

Since I was building websites in the 2000s most of the sites I’ve built are long gone, but I have one legacy client I’m still supporting, and his site is my favorite of them all. Legend of the Mantamaji is a website built to market Eric Dean Seaton’s fantastic graphic novel series.