Judith Markham
Managing Editor
Discovery House Publishers
Karen Ball
Executive Editor, Fiction
B&H Publishing Group
Judith Markham
Managing Editor
Discovery House Publishers
Karen Ball
Executive Editor, Fiction
B&H Publishing Group
Recommended for:
Any editorial persons, from executive and acquisitions editors to copyeditors and proofreaders
Space is Limited
Session 4
Editors and the Changing Face of Publishing
Oh, The Places You Will Go!
In this wrap-up session, veteran editors Judith Markham and Karen Ball will draw on their years of experience to address issues specific to editors in the Christian publishing industry. Come ready to take part as we work together to address such topics as:
- The Age-Old Question: What makes a Book “Christian”?
- When Worlds Collide: dealing with conflicts between author and editor
- The Editor’s Paradigm: Evaluating your specific situation to understand how to best serve your authors and publisher
- Now What?: Putting the info from the workshops to use in your publishing house
Presented by:
Judith Markham has four decades of book publishing experience. During her years at Zondervan she acquired and edited fiction and general non-fiction and had her own imprint, Judith Markham Books. In 1987 she and two partners founded the book packaging company Blue Water Ink, and since 2001 she has been Managing Editor at Discovery House Publishers. During her years in religious publishing, Judith has edited twenty Gold Medallion (now Christian Book Award) winners. She is a founding member of the Academy of Christian Editors and has been a faculty member of the Writers' Publishing Workshop at the Ockenga Institute at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. Judith and her husband, Robert, live in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Karen Ball loves being an editor. She started in ’81 as the assistant editor for Christian Bookseller magazine (now Christian Retailing). Within 3 months she was promoted to editor. She joined Tyndale as a book editor for fiction and nonfiction, where she discovered her calling: fiction. She’s built and led successful fiction lines for Tyndale, Multnomah, Zondervan, and now B&H, where she’s the executive editor for fiction. She’s acquired/edited some of the best novelists in the market, including Francine Rivers, Karen Kingsbury, Robin Jones Gunn, Terri Blackstock, and many others. A writer in her own right, Karen’s most recent novel, What Lies Within, was a 2008 finalist for the Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice award and the Christy Award. She lives in Oregon with her husband and several four-legged, furry “kids,” including a year-old, perpetual-motion, constantly chewing Siberian husky and an Aussie-Terrier mix whose shrill bark has been known to drive people insane. Good thing they’re cute.
