The Role:We're building the best romance catalogue in the world, and we're assembling a small team of creative people to do it. As an Associate Editor, you'll take books that readers almost love and reimagine them: the characters, the stakes, the pacing, the plot, the emotional payoff. You'll study how readers respond, work out what's holding a story back, and rebuild it into something that hits far harder. Then you'll put your version in front of real readers and see if you were right.
What You'll Do:- Read deeply and diagnose. Find where and why a story loses readers, using the manuscript, reader feedback and engagement data.
- Write clear, bold editorial plans for major rewrites: new hooks, reworked arcs, sharper character motivation, payoffs readers can't stop talking about.
- Bring your vision to life. Execute those rewrites in collaboration with authors and agentic AI tools.
- Test your instincts. Run reader tests on your revisions, interpret the results, and carry what you learn into the next book.
- Build relationships with authors, freelance editors, marketing and the wider content team, who will be your collaborators in making each book better.
What You'll Bring:- You love romance and read widely in it. You know the tropes, heat levels and subgenres, and you have strong opinions on why readers keep coming back.
- You have sharp editorial instincts. You can say exactly why a story isn't working and what would fix it.
- You're a creative thinker with big story ideas, and you get excited by the chance to reinvent a book, not just repair it.
- You're comfortable with developing creative theories from quantitative data. You can look at reader data, form a hypothesis and explain it clearly.
- You're excited to use AI as a creative tool, with the taste to judge what it produces and make it better.
- You're smart, curious and hungry. You learn fast, take ownership, and want real responsibility early.
- You have 1-3 years in editorial or publishing, an MFA, or similar. Your judgment and ideas matter more than your résumé.
- You can work on-site in San Francisco 5 days a week.
Nice To Have:- Experience with serialized or web fiction (Wattpad, Galatea, Kindle Vella, webtoons)
- Experience giving developmental feedback to writers
- Your own fiction, playwriting, or screenwriting experience. We love people who make things.
$80,000 - $100,000 a year
