The Essential Publishing Question All First-Time Authors Ask — Ask not what your editor can do for you. Well, actually, that’s the question you do want to ask when you’re writing your book, feeling overwhelmed or stark naked actually about the whole writing and publishing process. But wait, you say, I need to find an editor. I’m a first-time…

Fine-Tune Your Writing with Advice Your Critique Group Won’t Give You — If you’ve been following my two previous posts on stuff writers write that makes editors cringe, and more annoying stuff writers write, you know I’ve tackled Simon Sinek’s tiresome why, Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (when we all just need caffeine), variations on the starfish story (throw them all back)…

Or worse, you’re already live on Amazon with mistakes? — Twice just this year, book designers I know have contacted me and said, “Sandy, I am doing this cover and interior, and I think this book really needs an edit. I know [the author] had an edit done, but I’m seeing issues. Can you help?” What issues are they seeing…

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? …