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Episode 80: Benjamin Dreyer

As Told To

Release Date: 01/14/2025

Episode 92: Carla Sosenko show art Episode 92: Carla Sosenko

As Told To

Veteran journalist Carla Sosenko has written for The New York Times, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, People, Self, Newsweek, and numerous other publications. Her work has also appeared in Time Out New York (where she was editor-in-chief), Entertainment Weekly (where she was executive editor), In Touch (where she was managing editor) and Us Weely (where she is currently executive editor at large). She is also the co-author of , written with TikTok star Melissa Dilkes Pateras. In her just-published collection of essays entitled , Carla writes with candor and great good cheer about growing up with a...

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How much does ego play a role in the art and craft of a book collaborator? That’s a question at the heart of this conversation with #1 New York Times best-selling ghostwriter Rachel Holtzman, co-author of more than 60 books on topics ranging from wellness and spirituality, to cooking and entertaining, including collaborations with such celebrated personalities as , , , and . Prior to her work as a self-described “book doula,” Rachel was an editor at Penguin Books and ELLE magazine, before a detour to culinary school and a short stint in the kitchen at New York’s Gramercy Tavern helped...

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“Sometimes our own stories get snatched from us, hidden in darkness for years,” writes podcast guest Salwa Emerson, “until it’s time to reclaim them.” Salwa is well-known to publishers as an author, editor and ghostwriter, specializing in memoirs, thought-leadership books, and book proposals. To hear her clients tell it, she has a way of bringing those stories out of hiding and into the light. She has collaborated with world-renowned chefs, professional athletes, reality television personalities, Oscar-winning actors, and Pulitzer Prize winners. Before turning to ghostwriting, she...

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“We all have to figure out our own ways to carve out our own creativity,” says New York Times best-selling ghostwriter Cynthia DiTiberio about finding time to do her own writing alongside her collaborative work. “Not that our creativity doesn’t go into our ghostwritten books, but you can’t claim it in the same way.” Cynthia knows what it takes to create a successful book. She started her publishing career as a senior editor at HarperCollins, where she worked with a number of authors, including NIH director Francis Collins and Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Jeffrey...

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“You’d be amazed at how far you can get in life having no idea what the subjunctive mood is,” writes Benjamin Dreyer, retired managing editor and copy chief of the Random House division of Penguin Random House. “As if it’s not bad enough that English has rules, it also has moods.”

Yes, it does. Happily, the mood of the room for writers in Benjamin’s good hands as a copyeditor was cheerful and patient and winning… and, for the most part, grammatically correct. Over the course of his 30+ years in publishing, he helped to shepherd the work of writers such as Michael Chabon, Edmund Morris, Suzan-Lori Parks, E.L. Doctorow, Elizabeth Strout, and Shirley Jackson into print.

Somewhere in there, he also found time to write a book of his own: The New York Times best-selling stylebook Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style—a “brilliant, pithy, incandescently intelligent book [that] is to contemporary writing what Geoffrey Chaucer’s poetry was to medieval English,” according to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham, another Random House author who benefited from our guest’s unseen hand.  

Join us as Benjamin reflects on the collaborative role of the copyeditor in the publishing process, on the joys of creative footnoting, on the particularly lovely frustration of working with Isabella Rossellini, on a writer’s lifetime allotment of exclamation points, and the excesses to be pruned from phrases like “assless chaps,” “slightly ajar,” and “passing fad.”  

(Note the ever-popular serial comma in the previous sentence, and the expenditure of one of those allotted exclamation points in this parenthetical aside!)  

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