Renni Browne is an American book editor and the co-author with Dave King of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to Edit Yourself Into Print (HarperCollins, 1993; second edition 2004), one of the most influential and consistently in-print writing books of the past three decades. She founded The Editorial Department in 1980, the first major independent book-editing company in the United States, and retired in December 2023 after fifty-seven years editing fiction and nonfiction.
Her publishing career began at Time-Life Books as a copy editor, and she became a book editor at Charles Scribner's Sons in 1966. She moved to Stein and Day in 1968 as senior editor under Sol Stein and stayed seven years, during which she acquired and edited multiple New York Times bestsellers. She then served as senior editor at William Morrow before leaving mainstream publishing in 1978 because, as she has often said, in-house editors had stopped doing the deep, line-by-line work on manuscripts that had defined the craft. She founded The Editorial Department in 1980 to bring that working standard back, offering authors the kind of attention publishers used to routinely provide.
Self-Editing for Fiction Writers teaches working manuscript-level technique by example: show and tell, the working mechanics of dialogue mechanics, interior monologue and free indirect style, point of view, proportion, voice, sophistication, and the kinds of repetitive tics and weak habits that stop a promising draft from getting published. Each chapter pairs principles with rewritten passages drawn from the hundreds of manuscripts she and King edited at The Editorial Department, with over half of those manuscripts eventually published, and over half of those being first novels. Sol Stein called the book required annual reading for every working novelist; it has been in continuous print across multiple editions for more than thirty years.
She co-founded the Lost State Writers Conference, gave workshops and seminars around the country on self-editing, dialogue, and getting published, appeared as a writing commentator on NPR, and reviewed books for Kirkus, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly. Although no longer actively editing, her standards and approach remain the foundation of The Editorial Department's work. She lives in Greeneville, Tennessee.
