How to Tell a Book by Its Cover — or Why Cover Design Is Essential for Sales — Ever pick up a book and anticipate a juicy mystery thriller only to discover it’s a memoir of abuse? Or grabbed an enticing romance novel (or what looked like one because of the six-pack-ab boyfriend on the front cover), but it turned out to be poetry? Yah, extreme examples, but…

A Definitive Guide for Authors and Editors — Editors disagree about many of the finer points of their work such as whether to capitalize the word president (no, generally, but yes with President Lincoln), whether to spell out numbers (some styles say yes to every number lower than 10 or lower than 100), or whether to use the…

I’ve seen it all. A manuscript of 60,000 words and just one paragraph. A hodgepodge of dialogue smooshed together with no quotation marks. …

Intrinsic versus extrinsic motivators — When I ask students in my writing classes why they are writing a book, I offer this PowerPoint slide with bulleted options:

And what to do instead — Copyright is federal protection for work you create. Let’s say you write a book (copyright applies to other creations such as music, but I know the world of books). You are instantly protected because you created the book in a fixed format, such as a computer file or a printout…

Words make the difference — I’ve never used the word bugbear in my writing, until now. It just shows how distracted you can get when trying to find synonyms for peeves. My pet peeve words are things, great, good, pretty, very, and really. Think about the word great. What exactly does it mean? …

So you can finally stop staring at a blank page — Imagine the first writer’s block. I recall a cartoon showing a caveman with a rudimentary stick staring at a large, blank rock. Today’s equivalent of the blank rock may be a computer screen, and your process may seem like this: When you sit down to write (and there’s a problem…

6 Additional Writing Traps to Avoid Looking Like an Amateur — In an earlier, popular post, I discussed how first-time and even veteran writers go down rabbit holes with their writing, and sometimes it’s the editor (like me) who helps dig them out of those traps. I have more examples. Unmask the Oxygen Mask Story As if we didn’t have enough on our minds when we…

Why you can’t find errors in your own work and need an editor — Let’s talk about those typos. The internet is filled with examples, but you only need to look, well, anywhere. Everywhere. Please post some of your favorites in the comments so we can all enjoy them. Although no one wants to die of a typo, imagine a sloppy physician writing the…