About Jennifer Lawler
About Me
The lead instructor and administrator of Club Ed® LLC is Jennifer Lawler, who moved to Southern California from the prairie a few years ago. Most days she can be found at the beach, laptop in hand, surrounded by palm trees and bougainvillea.
Jennifer became a freelancer more than twenty years ago, when her daughter was born with a serious, debilitating neurological disorder and she needed a way to pay the rent that didn’t require going to someone else’s office for forty hours a week.
Over the years, she’s met hundreds of other people in similar situations, and freelancing has helped many of them pay the bills while also dealing with other responsibilities and demands. Her goal is for Club Ed to help anyone turn a way with words into a realistic source of income.
She has worked for many years as a freelance book development editor on a wide range of editorial projects for traditional book publishers as well as independent authors, specializing in genre fiction.
She launched Crimson Romance for Adams Media (which became an imprint of Simon & Schuster), overseeing all aspects of acquisitions, editorial, and production. She has also worked as a magazine editor for MSP Custom Publishing. Previously she worked as a literary agent.
She teaches aspiring and established story development editors the craft of developmental editing as well as the business of freelancing, primarily through Club Ed. She also develops and offers expert instruction in more advanced theories of editing, such as her classes in POV problems and conflict.
She is the author or coauthor of more than thirty nonfiction books and nearly twenty novels, including her popular and award-winning Dojo Wisdom series (Penguin). Her work has been published by Simon & Schuster, Thomas & Mercer, Montlake Romance, and others.
Her personal essays have appeared in publications such as Family Circle, Neurology Now, Minnesota Monthly, and the Chicken Soup book series. Her blog post, “For Jessica,” went viral and is still a source of comfort and inspiration for parents of children with special needs.
She has taught in the biomedical writing program at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, the copyediting program at the University of California – San Diego, and in professional development programs at the Editorial Freelancers Association and Loft Literary (among others) as well as at other writing programs in colleges and universities.
She earned her PhD in medieval English literature from the University of Kansas and a black belt in Taekwondo at approximately the same time. She hasn’t quite decided which has been more helpful in her career.
She can be reached at
Info@ClubEdFreelancers.com
Club Ed LLC is a California company.
