Hello everyone! I’m rolling out a new function on this website that I’m pretty excited about. I think it’s a great opportunity to get quality, yet discounted, services to the authors who really need it.
It’s a Half Price Gift Certificate campaign. I went to multiple authorly service providers and asked them to provide gift certificates for their services. I’m offering them here for sale at half price.
Among the services are:
Book Editing
Book and eBook cover design
Book coaching
Book critique
Book advertising
Manuscript formatting
Online courses
If you are an author with a budget, this might be just what you need.
So you have written your short story and cannot wait to release it into the world. But before doing that, it is important to take some extra time to make sure your story is properly edited, despite the fact that editing is nowhere near as fun as writing.
Developmental editing may be an unfamiliar term to some writers and authors. This is, in the most basic of definitions, is editing that enhances your story.
Have you ever read a book and felt the plot was all over the place, or the characters were inconsistent? Maybe the climax wasn’t strong enough or the story was missing that obvious inciting incident. Hell, have you ever started a book and just didn’t like it?
For those who are planning to self-publish a book, you may have heard by now that self-publishing is a business. It’s your business, and treating your business with professionalism and enlisting in the required help will help your business (books) succeed.
For those seeking agent representation, this idea also holds true, however a publisher is in charge of many of the business decisions instead of you.
So you’ve had your book professionally edited, and you are faced with the task of turning the feedback into something that lifts your book to the next level. This article will help you do that.
When we share our work with others, we are usually looking for one thing: feedback.
Constructive criticism is an important part of the writing process. Without it, we might still be able to improve, but we’d do so at a much slower and less specific rate. Having someone hand us back our work with specific notes on things we can fix and improve on isn’t always easy, but over time we get used to it. If we can find a good feedback source. And that’s a big IF.
Writing is tricky. Trying to express your meaning clearly can be hard enough, but also making it engaging can be quite the balancing act. As a writer, I’m still working on it, but as an editor, ill-considered or lazy writing jumps off the page at me like a facehugger from Aliens. While much of any writer’s voice is a product of their individual choices, there are a few words everyone needs to be wary of.
As an editor, I’ve edited hundreds of books. One thing that you quickly notice is that there are certain mistakes that you see repeated time and again. This article contains the five most common grammar and punctuation mistakes I come across on a daily basis. My hope is that by sharing some of these with you, you’ll be in a better position to avoid stepping on these literary mines.
Yesterday marked my deadline for completing the pre-edits for Marred. “Pre-edits” seems like it would be an easy task. It wasn’t. Once the track edits begin in two weeks, I’m not allowed to change anything other than what the editor points out. So I wanted to go through the manuscript…one…more…time…and improve it to the best of my ability.
Notice the title of this post is not Does your novel need editing? The answer to that question is YES. Always. I don’t care if you wrote The Great Gatsby of the modern day; your novel needs to be edited.