Jane lives near Winchester, Hampshire, with her husband and family. She helps people to sell their real-life stories to magazines and newspapers. Since she started working as a freelance journalist in 1997, Jane has had more than 1000 articles published in in the Daily Mail (Health and Femail), Glamour, the Daily Express, the Daily Mirror, Woman’s Own, Prima, Reveal, Take-a-break and Best, among others. She specialises in real-life women's interest, health stories, and is an experienced learning disability journalist. A portfolio of her work is displayed on this website.
How do you sell my story to a newspaper or magazine?
As well as working as a freelance journalist, Jane has trained and advised aspiring young journalists at a further education college and been an external verifier for magazine journalism courses at colleges and universities. She is also a mum of three and part-time carer. Her experiences caring for her eldest child, who has severe learning disabilities, led to Jane writing the self-help book ‘Bringing Up a Challenging Child at Home: When Love Is Not Enough,’ published by Jessica Kingsley, London (2000) and a chapter for a book published by the New England Journal of Medicine, entitled the ‘Genetics of Mental Retardation,’ (Karger) (2010).
Jane decided to train as a journalist because, as a mum and carer, she needed to work from home. She initially wrote about issues surrounding her own experiences for publications such as Disability Now and Community Care. Then, because she believes that everyone has a story to tell, Jane branched out into writing real-life human interest stories about people like you. As someone who has told her own very personal and sensitive story in the press and in her book, Jane understands what concerns you may have about sharing your story. (
see what people whose stories she’s already sold say about her). She still has a huge interest in writing about learning disability issues and regularly includes this topic in her
Sharing Stories blog posts. She also gives talks and presentations about her experiences as a carer and has given training sessions to health professionals and carers on communication and challenging behaviour in people with learning disabilities.This year Jane came second out of 28 entries for Epilepsy Scotland's Journalist of the Year Award. My entry was described by the judges as 'gripping,' and 'an incredibly arresting first hand account of epilepsy with lots of information for readers.'
