Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
4 Tips on Getting Your Title into Bookstores
• Why bookstores don't carry self-published books
• How to get your title into bookstores
• Ask for title in bookstore
• How to get into Barnes & Noble's online catalog
• BONUS: "Keep writing...Even in the moments when it's so hurtful to think about writing." – Heather Armstrong
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
Indie authors: Murky biz advice, gray legal issues
A variety of potential problems can create problems for indie authors starting their own business. Oftentimes, this arrives as murky business advice and gray legal areas. Here are some answers to commonly asked questions about those many issues:
• Should I copyright my book?
• Do I need trademark protection?
• Will I need a Standard Address Number?
• How can I avoid copyright infringement?
• Can I use the names of real companies and products in my books?
• What if my book is pirated?
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
A quick lesson: Suped up vs. souped up
Among the more interesting idioms in our language is souped up, which describes a car that has been modified to go fast. On its face, the idiom makes no sense – soup hardly is “fast,” after all.
Indeed, suped up seems to make more sense, as you can modify a car to go faster by using a supercharger, an air compressor that allows your engine to burn more fuel, hence giving it more power.
But that’s just the kind of mistake writers with little knowledge about cars would make.
Souped up is the correct spelling (and gets more search engine hits than suped up, at that). The term souped up predates the invention of superchargers and initially referred to any horse that had been injected with something to increase its speed. In fact, any concoction that packed a lot of power – including nitroglycerine – was called a “soup.”
While referring to a brew that increases power as a “soup” has fallen out of favor (pun intended), the variant souped up, meaning an object that has been modified for increased power, remains, at least with cars.
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
5 Sci Fi Writing Prompts – Novums
Science fiction stories typically arise from a novum, a scientifically plausible concept that is a “reality” in the tale. The novum might be an mechanical device like robot servants, artificial intelligence, or faster-than-light spacecraft; it also can be a hypothetical idea such as “The Earth is a scientific experiment run by aliens to determine the meaning of life” or “The government outlaws books.” The author then asks “What if?” exploring how the world with this novum is different than ours.
Among the problems of many novice science fiction writers is instead of introducing a new novum they rely on used furniture – that is, they borrow novums from popular SF series. After all, how many novels have you read that use starships exploring the galaxy for the Earth-based Federation? Barely changing names to appear as if you are not appropriating – a starcraft seeking M-class worlds for the Earth-centered Alliance – still doesn’t cut it as original or fully using the potential that science fiction offers to examine our culture or humanity.
To help SF writers, here are some novums of potential near-future inventions from which stories could be built:
Human pheromone trails
What if each morning when children washed up, the soap included synthetic pheromones that left a trail of where they’d gone, so in case of kidnapping, a child could be more easily found? What other applications are there for this technology, such as espionage or monitoring parolees?
Mach-powered interstellar spacecraft
What if mach effects – described by NASA as “the transient variations in the rest masses of objects that are accelerating and undergoing internal energy changes” – could power interstellar spacecraft? How would this propulsion system work?
Nanobot toothpaste
What if nanobots were placed in toothpaste to fight plaque and prevent cavities? What other toiletries might nanobots appear in to keep us healthy?
Smartflower
What if flower-shaped solar “petals” could follow the sun through the day, providing energy to homes and buildings. How does the widespread use of solar energy change our energy infrastructure?
Zillionics
What if a new science, called zillionics, was invented to deal with finding patterns flowing from the unrelenting torrents of data arising out of always-in sensors? Philosophies, theories and practical applications will be needed to distill, index, archive and find meaningful signals in data coming from zillions of sources.
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
How to Write a Bestselling Novel: In 7 Minutes a Day to Your Bestseller, writers receive expert advice on topics like motivating yourself to write, starting your story with exciting opening lines, creating intriguing characters, mastering the craft of writing to elevate your style, and pitching your story to potential publishers.
5 Great Quotations about Passion for Writing
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” - Maya Angelou
“A story trapped inside your head is like a disease. You won’t be healed until you get it out.” - Niq Mhlongo
“I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe.” - Jacques Derrida
“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.” - Franz Kafka
“If I do not write to empty my mind, I go mad.” - George Gordon Byron
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
Strive for web pages with high scanability
Few people read text on a web page like they do a book. While most approach a book by reading it word-for-word, most Internet readers scan. That is, they peruse, looking for the key points to get the gist of the text or to find specific information they are willing to read word-for-word. Because of this, you want to ensure any text you write for the web has high scanability.
This is true even for author’s websites. Although you’d think that avid readers and writers would prefer to look at every piece of writing in a word-by-word approach – especially when looking at an author’s website – the fact is that most don’t. There’s something about the medium of the Internet that makes scanning the natural way to read it; perhaps it’s the size, shape, brightness, or subtle underlying pixelation of the screen.
How to create a scannable page
Fortunately, scanability is easy to achieve through a number of techniques:
• Use clear navigation for the page – Include a headline and subheads, which often appear in a larger font size and are boldface, to help readers quickly identify the page’s main points. Headlines tell in a few words exactly what the web page is about. Subheads act as signposts that help visitors located particular points supporting or elaborating on the main idea given in the headline.
• Place main idea in first paragraph – The most important information – what the web page’s text is about – needs to appear in the first paragraph. This may seem redundant given that’s what your headline does, but the opening paragraph also shows why knowing this information is important and sets the page’s tone.
• Chunk your content – Limit each paragraph to one topic, specifically a point that supports or elaborates on the main idea given in the opening paragraph. You can include examples. A paragraph shouldn’t be more than 2-3 sentences long. Paragraphs can be grouped together by using a subhead.
• Use lists – Bulleted points are the ultimate way to quickly deliver information. They are very useful when you have a long paragraph of multiple points. Simply separate each point into a bulleted point and give it a two- to six-word leader.
• Utilize font style changes – Placing headlines, subheads and bulleted points in boldface help readers quickly locate the main points. Italics also can be used, especially for examples or for emphasis, to ensure they stand out. Just don’t overdo it, or the font style changes lose their effectiveness, as they can’t be easily picked out.
Need an example of each of these listed techniques? This article is written with each one used.
Standalone pages
You can help readers a lot by ensuring that each web page is independent of all others at your website. If this page had required visitors to first have read my web pages about readability and tone, then the text here probably won’t make much sense to them. Visitors can come to any page on your website through a variety of means – a search engine, a tweet, a Pinterest post, another website’s link – and that means they often bypass your home page and don’t read your web pages in sequence.
If you have web pages with related content, create a link on your page so that visitors can go to it. Including the related information in text rather than via a link only dilutes your web page’s hyperfocus on a single topic.
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
Learn More About Self-Publishing: Whether writing a novel or nonfiction, whether planning to print a paperback or an ebook, 7 Minutes a Day to a Self-Published Book guides you through the self-publishing process, from the title page to the index, from designing a cover to formatting your text.