What if you skipped paying for a professional editor and crowdsourced your editing instead? Or what about your neighbor who’s a retired English teacher? She says she’d only charge $200 to edit the entire book, and you know how sharp she is based on painful experience. Couldn’t you save big money with crowdsourced editing? You Read more about Should you use volunteers to proofread your book?[…]
When your whole story lies ahead of you, it’s easy to naively assume you’ll name your manuscript file TheGirlWiththeFuzzyManuscript_Orig, then go to FuzzyGirl_Revised, and maybe finish with TGWTFM_BetaFeedback. What you may not have counted on generating are the two dozen variations of your book now enthusiastically mating inside the directory folder for your novel. You’ve Read more about File names that show your manuscript revision status[…]
Every writer wants to become that noteworthy debut author who’s the darling of the bestseller charts and book blogs. With that kind of pressure, it’s no wonder so many authors fall prey to perfectionism and procrastination. Editing and publishing feel like a mile-high wall that’s impossible to scale. Maybe you’ve effectively taken yourself out of Read more about The writer’s solution to beating perfectionism and procrastination[…]
Some of the most common edits I make at the sentence and paragraph levels have to do with overusing character names in a story. These edits arise from a single issue: the tendency to approach things a little too formally, from a little too far outside the framework of how characters would naturally think of Read more about Are you overusing character names in your novel?[…]
What if everything in the world went right for your book, and now you may actually have a writing career? The thing that many emerging authors neglect to plan for is what happens after they’ve typed “The End.” That’s where the process of writing a novel ends and the process of being a novelist begins. Read more about Kick-start your own career development program for new novelists[…]
Modeling and imitation are time-tested techniques used by athletes, artists, and skill-builders of all stripes. One of the best ways to stretch your writing skills is to draw inspiration from those who are writing the kind of novels you want to write. What do the authors you admire do best? Can you emulate that? The Read more about Develop your writing muscle through imitation[…]
Are you still struggling with where to put the comma in a dialogue tag (or was that a period)? Forget mixing up peek/peak/pique; are you still struggling with it’s/its or they’re/their/there? Do beta readers make more remarks about your grammar than your story? These are signs that you need more practice and development learning to Read more about Affordable ways to study the craft of writing[…]
You can quit holding your nose now—this whole synopsis thing is going to take longer than a single breath of air. Writing your synopsis is a must-have writing skill for every successful novelist. Your book synopsis is no one-trick pony. Consider how many times and how many ways you’re going to have to summarize your Read more about 12 reasons to learn how to write a brilliant synopsis[…]
Nothing makes an editor sadder than slogging through a manuscript that isn’t ready for editing yet. Let’s not embark upon a journey your manuscript isn’t ready to take. Really. As exciting as it feels to move one step closer to publication, typing “The End” is only the close of the very first step. The majority Read more about Is your book ready for editing?[…]
Writing a series is standard operating procedure for self-published authors seeking to grow their catalogs. The formula is simple: stretch a story concept across two, three, four books or more, and voilà—you’re a multi-title author with a respectable little catalog to your name. (Here’s more about how that works.) But tackling a series is a serious Read more about Why your first book should not be part of a series[…]
An editor can give you a hand out of all sorts of tight spots in your book’s development, not just writing and editing. A seasoned outside eye can help you smooth out story issues before you start writing or help you sell your novel effectively once you’ve finished. Not sure you’re on the right track? Read more about 10 ways a book editor can help besides editing[…]
Bad news: You just got your manuscript back from the editor, and your computer has collapsed in a fit of pique. Every time you open the document, Microsoft Word stalls out. The only thing still moving is your cursor, chasing its tail like an eternal puppy. How can you process your revisions if you can’t Read more about Help! My edit is choking my computer![…]
Your daily Starbucks fix: it’s today’s point of comparison for all things reasonably considered “small change.” But did you realize that the bill for a daily cup of joe in the United States—that’s something like $4 a day—adds up to almost $1,500 a year? Somehow, that doesn’t sound like small change anymore. Coffee on this Read more about The cost and value of developing as a writer[…]
Nobody wants to scale the stony gray wall of revision. Nobody. Not even those crazy Spartan racers. (You go, Spartans.) A novel revision stares you down with the same inscrutable gaze of a blinking cursor on a blank page. How on earth should you begin? You start rereading your manuscript. Something’s misfiring; you can hear Read more about How to revise the early drafts of your novel[…]
Do you want to be someone who’s published, or do you want to be an author? Self-publishing makes it easy for nearly anyone to publish a book. Hundreds of people publish books every single day. (That’s probably a lowball figure—the publishing industry really is that active.) But if you want to be a novelist with Read more about The parts of being an author that aren’t writing[…]
Quick, what’s the fastest way to sabotage your efforts to get an agent for your book? Answer: query your novel before it’s ready. If you’re a novelist, you’re not ready to query until your manuscript is completely written, fully revised, and ready for its close-up. Don’t be misled by advice intended for nonfiction authors, who Read more about Should you query an incomplete novel?[…]
Whoa, just look at that flowchart! That’s way too many steps! Why, yes. Yes, it very likely is. Few self-published authors can afford all of these editorial production steps. Few would want to even if they could. But the truth is that this does mirror the traditional editorial and revision process. If a publishing company Read more about The editing and revision flowchart for self-publishers[…]
Are you guilty of trying to put lipstick on a pig? As my colleague Jami Gold confided via email, “I’ve seen far too many authors consider themselves ‘edited’ just because someone did a comma check, but my reviews and impressions of a story are almost always about the story itself. We can’t emphasize that enough, Read more about How to develop your story revision skills[…]
Writers have this thing about rejection. It seems edgy or romantic somehow to count rejection notices, to clutch them to your breast like the beads of a diabolical rosary with the power to damn or redeem your creative power for eternity. That’s an awful lot of malign intent to ascribe to an agent who might Read more about How to cope when your manuscript query is rejected[…]
If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.—Stephen King Did you hear the one about the songwriter who doesn’t listen to music? She doesn’t want her creativity to be tainted by another musician’s sound. On the rare occasions when she makes an Read more about How to read like a novelist[…]
The very first decision a series author has to make is what type of series to create. Are you telling a single story across many books, or are you writing many books based on common elements? The big-daddy benchmark of series writing is the trilogy. Trilogies have come to be expected in genres like speculative Read more about Series Writing 101: Resources for planning and writing a series[…]
If you’ve never used Microsoft Word’s Track Changes feature before, the idea of getting your manuscript back from an editor filled with all sorts of lines and squiggles you have to do something to in order to keep your novel from plummeting precipitously through a fiery ring of digital destruction and disappearing into the black Read more about Updated: Author’s survival guide to Track Changes[…]
Do you know your business? It’s all very romantic to claim that as a novelist, you’re a creative spirit with no head for the mundanities of business and marketing. The truth is that no agent or publisher wants to work with a clueless aspirant, and no self-published title will make it without an understanding of Read more about The problem with being a novelist who doesn’t read[…]
Why does your editor keep changing grey to gray in your book? You like the way grey looks. It’s listed in Merriam-Webster as a “variant spelling of GRAY”—that makes it legit, right? Unfortunately, mixing American vs. British English doesn’t work that way. For an everyday Joe, mixing English usage from all parts of the world Read more about Why you shouldn’t mix British and American English in your novel[…]
If only it were practical to hire an editor to “give everything a quick once-over—and let me know if you spot any plot holes along the way.” The problem is that different types of editing zero in on entirely different areas of your book. Asking an editor to combine edits and multitask their way through Read more about Can you combine types of editing to save money?[…]