I’m Deborah Bean, editor, author, and new owner of DNB Publishing, Ltd. When I was forced to retire back in 2018, I had no idea what I was going to do. I’d been told by my doctor that I could no longer work in the IT industry. Now, I had done coding and database development over the past thirty years, but most of my career was writing and editing user guides such as software manuals (some over 400 pages long), training materials, white papers, and memos. Because I was the expert, there was no editor to approve my work. I had to do the editing myself.

In 1997, I became a leading expert in the Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex on two pieces of software. One was Act! Contact Management (which morphed, eventually, into Salesforce) and the other was Peachtree Accounting (now owned by Sage). I co-authored three Act! books and wrote the Peachtree book (over 450 pages) on my own. Our publisher, WordWare Publishing, said the writing was so clean, it only needed a simple proofing. Great praise from a company that spent thousands editing books.

In fact, Learn Peachtree Accounting was so good that all I had to do to win a writing job was walk in and plop that book on the manager’s table and say, “This is what I can do for your company.” So, I know that I can write, and I can edit.

In addition to professional writing, I’ve always had stories in my head. My husband got tired of me relating all these stories to him because one day, about 25 years ago, he said I should write them down. Sure, I was a professional writer, this should be easy. Well, it wasn’t. For years, I just went to the story I felt like and wrote a scene, or rewrote, or rewrote it again. I had no idea what I was doing.

Then my husband found ArmadilloCon. We both got into the Writers’ Workshop, which had Julie Czerneda as the special Guest of Honor. I was fortunate enough to be in her round table group. Of my submitted manuscript, she said I had a “great voice”, and the story was “confident, rich work.” High praise from an award-winning author of real science fiction with real biology. Of course, I was also told my ending was “trite” and Chris Roberson said it was “hoary cliché.”

I started attending more writers’ workshops and bought lots of books on writing. Then I applied to Arizona State University, Piper Center for Creative Writing’s program, Your Novel Year. And I was accepted! I spent the next eighteen months learning from real writers how to write, plot, dialogue, pace, set a scene, create believable characters, and editing. It was a very intensive time which is why only eleven of our class’ fifteen students finished the program.

Then, I started trying to find an agent or traditional publisher to print my book. Meanwhile eBooks have exploded and so many beta readers told me to self-publish. But I wasn’t satisfied with my book. I knew it could be better. And now that I’m better, I’m splitting that first book into two different novels. I’ve also got a third partially finished and know what the fourth and fifth will be about. 

Which brings us back to DNB Publishing, Ltd. About a year ago, I was approached by a friend who had seen some of my fiction writing and was looking for an editor. He asked me to do some part-time editing and was willing to pay. I know the English language pretty well, so I said yes. Then I went out and bought a lot of editing and grammar books. I’ve also attended some editing seminars and completed a ten-week Copyediting certificate course from Writer’s Digest University.

On top of all of this learning, I formed a corporation called DNB Publishing, Ltd. For that part, I went out and, you guessed it, bought a lot of books on starting a publishing company as well as a business.

So, DNB Publishing, Ltd. is ready to take on your editing projects to begin with. See the Editing and Writing pages for services we currently offer. We are willing to edit almost anything, be it a short story, a magazine article, or a novel as long as it doesn’t violate our ethics or the rights of another person.

DNB prefers that story and book projects be sci-fi or fantasy, but we’ll also do memoirs and horror. We also like boardgame projects (see DNBGaming.com). But if you have something else, contact us to discuss what you need.

But why become a publishing company? Because I also want to publish books, both my own and for others. In order to get books into the trade catalogs you need an imprint, not your name. The advantage of doing this is that Iam no different from Tor^©, Ace Fantasy^©, Del Ray^©, or Roc Science Fiction^©—except I’m much smaller. And I’m not limited to Amazon.com, but can hit other markets, such as Barnes and Noble, Rakuten Kobo, Smashwords, Apple Books, and others. And we can get you paperback copies, in a wide variety of sizes and quality. In the meantime, subscribe to this blog follow my newest career as full-time writer and part-time publisher. I’ll post at least one blog a month. And, if you have a project you want DNB to work on, go to the Contact Us page and send us a message.