Book designer and typesetter with 20 years of experience. Clients include John Wiley & Sons, Addison Wesley Longman, and McGraw Hill, and many books for Smithsonian Institution. Andrea is offers free book design services for books that she typesets. Book Designer and Typesetter Andrea Reed is a book designer and typesetter with 20 years of …
by Rachel Stone Did you ever wonder how or why publishers publish what they do? As an industry insider—executive, manager, and editor for over 35 years—I can give you the lowdown. Actually, it’s what you think it is, and the answer is pretty simple: MONEY. These are some of the questions publishers ask themselves when …
By David A. Cathcart You’ve just completed your first novel. You’re convinced it’s the next great American classic, your Catcher in the Rye, the book that is so big and important you’ll never have to write another, content to spend the rest of your days as an eccentric recluse instead. Better yet, you’re certain that …
by Floyd Largent Content Editor | Books | Short Stories If you’ve recently completed a book-length manuscript, it’s best to run it past another pair of eyes before you send it out into the world. As the author, you may be too close to the project to see its potential flaws, from minor continuity errors …
by Amy Bennet, editor Recently I’ve seen a number of manuscripts by talented new writers who are falling into a trap. Writers are overcomplicating their novels, often by choosing unnecessarily experimental narrative techniques, or by deliberately leaving out important plot information. The choices range from switching, seemingly randomly, between past and present tense or first …
by Alice Day, editor One of the delightful attributes of books and publishing is that they’re anachronistic. Where emails and texts speed up our life, reading and writing slow it down. As you’re well aware, writing takes a long time, revising takes even longer, and having your work published can often feel like the word “slow” …
There are many online book retailers today, including CreateSpace and Amazon Kindle, Apple iBookstore, Google, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, and Lulu. Publishing has changed in just about every way in my lifetime, but one thing remains the same: the basic rules of good book design and typesetting (also known as page layout and composition). Main …
by Floyd Largent, Professional Editor Book Editing Associates Twenty years ago, the answer to the question I’ve posed in the title would be “Yes, definitely”—but only if you were writing a book. With the exception of established literary lions like Joyce Carol Oates or John Updike, agents don’t handle short stories or non-fiction articles. There’s …
Handling Profanity as a Christian Novelist By Editor John David Kudrick “I’m a Christian who typically doesn’t use profanity, but that doesn’t stop me from allowing my fictional characters to cuss if they want to.” If you’re a novelist whose first love is Jesus, then the preceding quotation may have your eyes popping wide open, …
by Caroline T Let’s imagine you are a savvy writing newbie and you want to take advantage of book publishing resources early on. You Google; you read books, you buy subscriptions and you figure out what path works for you. Let’s say you have a story in your head that won’t leave you alone; you …
By Beth Bruno, freelance book editor Rita Rosenkranz, literary agent in New York City, represents almost exclusively adult non-fiction titles, including health, history, parenting, music, how-to, popular science, business, biography, memoir, popular reference, cooking, spirituality, sports and general interest titles. Rita works with major publishing houses, as well as regional publishers that handle niche markets. …
Recently, I’ve had the pleasure of editing quite a bit of short fiction. I’ve noticed a number of trends based on the manuscripts I receive and the questions that come along with them. Since I have long experience in submitting short story manuscripts for myself and others, I thought I’d take a look at a …
Unless you have a “name” or have been previously published and sold lots of books, or have won impressive literary awards for your writing, or have written an amazingly original book that taps into current trends, you will have a hard time getting an agent to even glance at your novel. Most likely, it will …
by Marie Valentine, Book Editor and Proofreader What is a Novella? Novellas are in the medium range of works of fiction that, although brief, often include as much variety and scope as full-length novels. Length can be anywhere from 17,500 to 60,000 words, but as David H. Richter notes in Forms of the Novella, numerical boundaries …
by Marie Valentine, editor In one of the best books I’ve had the pleasure of editing, Ryan Parmenter had me grinning and grimacing while reading Hyperbole, laughing through the bleakness of the comedy. In a dystopian “post-7/11” world, people swallow black boxes that reveal their deepest secrets when they die. The book reveals and revels …