This is the home for my digital portfolio. You’ll find samples of copyediting, developmental editing, interior book design, and a few other goodies.
My areas of specialization within my Book Publishing master’s program at Portland State University are Editing and Design. I’m also including samples of outside freelance work.
Keep checking back, as many more will be added as I continue to take classes and work at Ooligan Press.
Samples from books that aren’t yet published by Ooligan Press (but are in the process) are password-protected.
Here is a Reader Report from my Literary Agents and Acquisitions class in the Portland State University Book Publishing master’s program.
A Reader Report is when someone reads a manuscript that’s been submitted to an agent or publisher and writes up an analysis. This report looks at the strengths and weakness of the story as well as how it fits in the market, then makes a recommendation for the publisher or agent to either accept or pass on the submission.
This report was on a manuscript titled Echoes of the Lost by Cindy Brown, the author of the Macdeath series. Echoes will be out on May 12, 2026, also known as the same day my graduate thesis and final portfolio are due.
I’m so excited for this book to come out. This will be the first of a handful of portfolio posts on the same book, because I took part in several stages of its editing process. It’s a great mystery, and I can’t wait to read it in book form.
Because a Reader Report is more internal to a publishing company or literary agency, rather than a pitching document from outside, and because the reader is evaluating the manuscript as a whole and passing on the most important information to the publisher or agent, they often contain spoilers, and this report does include some pretty serious spoilers. Read at your own risk, or just read the actual book!
Here’s the cover, designed by my Ooligan Press colleague who taught me everything I know about ebooks, Madelynn Sare. Again, I did NOT design this, but wanted to include it for the visual element of the cover, as well as to plug Madelynn’s work!
One of the foundational parts of my Literary Agents and Acquisitions class as part of the Book Publishing master’s program at Portland State University was learning to write Reader Reports.
A Reader Report is when someone reads a manuscript that’s been submitted to an agent or publisher and writes up an analysis. This report looks at the strengths and weakness of the story as well as how it fits in the market, then makes a recommendation for the publisher or agent to either accept or pass on the submission.
For this project, we were given the first 7000 words of a 63k-word original manuscript that was submitted to a literary agency. It was titled simply Untitled RomCom.
If you read my Reader Report and think, Hmm, this sounds oddly familiar, it’s because this was a draft from a real manuscript which was published as The Matzah Ball by Jean Meltzer. I figured that out while researching comparative titles for the market positioning portion of the Reader Report.
Instead of doing an intensive developmental editing process like the one in this portfolio piece, we were asked to focus on specific aspects of the manuscript, and write a letter in any form as long as it was under two pages. (Full length DE letters tend to be quite a bit longer.) My assigned focus was character development.
In addition to the letter, we were asked to mark up the full manuscript. I obviously can’t share the full marked up manuscript as that would be some serious copyright infringement and I really want everyone to go out and read this book when it comes out on May 12, 2026. So instead I’ll share some screenshots that are part of my Ooligan portfolio for the term.
Manuscript Markup Screenshots:
These images each highlight different aspects of the DE markup.
Well, the first one actually wasn’t technically on topic of character development, but I felt it was so me I couldn’t not include it. My memory is weirdly great for dates and days of the week, and I clocked the mismatch immediately. (And while you might think that I automatically knew that Dec 13th in 2017 was a Wednesday because that’s Taylor Swift’s birthday and I’m a crazy enough Swiftie to have an encyclopedic memory for what day her birthday fell on every year, and that wouldn’t be an unreasonable assumption, but in this case the date and day registered right away as not right because my med school interview at the Mayo Clinic was Dec 15th, 2017 and it was a Friday.) Of course, I checked a calendar first before making this comment. Another reason I wanted to share this one was that we’re taught that, when possible, we should give multiple options for how an author can address feedback, and this one lays out three options to get this date/day (and all subsequent ones in the manuscript) back on track.
You can always count on me to catch timing discrepancies big and small!
I included the second one because part of my style as a DE is to make sure I’m not just pointing out what could be better but also what is already great. The third and fourth photos demonstrate the typical feedback I give in DE manuscript markup.
Here’s the cover, designed by my Ooligan Press colleague who taught me everything I know about ebooks, Madelynn Sare. Again, I did NOT design this, but wanted to include it for the visual element of the cover, as well as to plug Madelynn’s work!
A galley is what is sent to people to blurb or review the book prior to publication. The design process for a galley is much more loose than it is for a final interior. Widows and orphans and runts are allowed, some front or back matter may not be included or finalized, and the fonts in the interior won’t have much at all to do with the eventual cover fonts, because a galley can be started and finished before a cover is finalized.
Here’s a representative sampling of my work on the Cekpa galley interior:
Here is the cover of Cekpa, in case you’re interested. It was designed by my Ooligan Press colleague Alex Devon, whose work you can see at mothinthemargins.wordpress.com! To be extra clear, this cover is NOT my work—I wish!—it’s here to add some visual flavor to the post, and as a chance to plug Alex’s work! Also, the book is really, really good and you should all read it!
The final project for WR 571 Typography, Layout, and Production was to re-design From Knowledge to Power (K2P), published by Ooligan Press in 2021. We worked with the first three chapters.
The biggest challenge with designing this book was that it contains several illustrations, color plates, images, and boxes. (There are also tables, but we didn’t have access to those.) Working on this project was good practice in working with an image-heavy, footnote-laden text, and using grids in InDesign.
Cover design isn’t my specialty—book interiors are!—but here’s my cover:
Fun fact. Some of you may know that I did my undergrad in Biochemistry at Portland State, and back in that life, not only did I take a handful of classes from K2P’s author, John Perona, I also did research in his lab for two years. While I was never good at bioinformatics research, I did then and always will have great respect for John, his teaching, and his passion for climate change education. I have fond memories of attending his climate talks at the Kennedy School back when I worked in his lab, and those talks eventually became this book. So, I feel an extra layer of connection to K2P.
With no further ado, here’s a sampling of the interior. I’m including the front matter as well as some representative pages of the interior that demonstrate my work with illustrations, boxed text, photographs, and footnotes.
For WR 571 Typography, Layout, and Production, we worked with a poetry collection called Echoes of Rainfall.
One of the biggest challenges with this project was to keep the poet’s intended structure. With a couple of longer lines for the trim size, there was a balance to strike between readable font sizes and not introducing new line breaks.
For WR 571 Typography, Layout, and Production, we worked with the Project Gutenberg version of Frankenstein.
For this project, I designed both a cover and an interior. I’m no cover designer, but I’ll share mine anyway:
As for the interior, we were only tasked with designing the first five chapters of Frankenstein, but I got a bit obsessive and did the whole book.
Since I can’t seem to post anything without mentioning music, I must say that every time my professor mentioned the first five chapters of Frankenstein, I thought of The National’s album The First Two Pages of Frankenstein. Listen on Apple Music while perusing this lengthy interior.
One of the biggest design challenges was that large portions of the book, both entire chapters and sections within chapters, are comprised of letters. I wanted them to stand out from the rest of the text, but also to be readable, especially considering their lengths.
This was my final project for WR 562 Book Design Software. We each had to design a chapbook. I decided to layout one of my personal essays. I chose this one, “Distant Lights,” because it had the most opportunities for design practice: sections that I could make into chapters in a chapbook, section breaks within the chapters, footnotes, and photos.
This essay features several mentions of the album Euphoria Morning by Chris Cornell (originally titled Euphoria Mourning), so feel free to listen to Euphoria Morning on Apple Music as you look through this portfolio project.
Because this is my original, unpublished writing that delves into deeply personal topics, I will share a photo of my cover design and selected photos of the interior, but won’t share the full text.
Because I intended to print some copies of my chapbook, using InDesign’s “Print Booklet” feature, I needed a page count divisible by 4 (or divisible by 4 minus 1 if I wanted a blank last verso page), I added this extra page advertising future chapbooks.
And here is an iPhone photo of the printed version:
Chrys Buckley 