One, Two, Three

It has been most enjoyable to finish the next editing stage (2) on the wonderful flash fiction collection I’m working on with the author. All when shielding in Covid-19 lockdown! Things are an extension of weekly lockdowns for me due to disability and medication. It makes it very weird and I miss socialising so much.

So, count to three and keep on editing!

The Joy of the Edit 2

I've recently completed Edit 2 on a second book I'm editing for Bridge House and it has been most encouraging.

The author has put so much hard work into the book. What is nice at this stage is (a) seeing that and (b) as a result almost feeling how much the book has been strengthened as a result.

Beware, editor at work!  Pixabay

This is probably my favourite part of the editing process. The book is so nearly there and that's a great feeling for author, publisher, and editor alike.

One for the spelling fans maybe! Or there again....  Pixabay

 

 

 

 

 

I'm also pleased to see the first book I edited is now out. I must admit, while I cannot be as pleased and thrilled with that as the author undoubtedly is, I do feel almost maternal, wanting the book to do well out there in the big, bad world!

A story well told and with the right amount of editing to make the maximum impact on a reader. Now that IS important. Pixabay.

Now I am looking forward to being on the other side of the fence again when I have my own Edit 2 back to work through in due course!

Publishing The Power of Love

 

 How we came to publish this one

We’re now only considering short story collections or children’s books by authors we already know. This was an exception as it came to us before we imposed that restriction. However, Phyllis has become one of our more regular writers as she is now on CaféLit.      

The title

Yes, this is a collection of love stories. There is romantic love, familial love, even the love of pets for their owners.   

The cover

That old clock at Waterloo station features a few times in the stories so it seemed a good idea to feature it on the cover. In any case, using a station implies going on a journey and entering new relationships or confirming the depth of them is always a type of journey.

Some notes about style

There is a lot of inner monologue in these stories. For the main part we’ve used that sort of indirect form, e.g. “Would he turn up? What if she didn’t recognise him? Was this a sensible thing to have done?” It’s always important at this point to do this in the voice of the character whose point of view we’re reading. We’ve mixed this with some quoted words and even characters talking out loud – both just to stop the style; becoming too monotonous.  

Who we think the reader is

These stories are ideal for a holiday read. They are for the most part heart-warming and life-affirming.   

Lockdown Projects

As I stay at home during lockdown on shielding I am completing Edit 2 on Allison’s collection. In between editing there are various projects underway such as cross stitch, knitting, artwork and painting the fence. All things are staggered around lots of rest for me.

Stay safe and stay home everyone.

Proof-reading issues

 

A surprising average number of mistakes

Did you know that the average number of grammatical mistakes and typos that elude the proof-reader in an average-sized novel is fifteen? I’ll give it the Big Five – they have very few and produce some books that have none at all. They’re less good at formatting for Kindle and other e-books but that’s for another post another day. And of course the average number becomes fifteen because some, but only some, self-published books haven’t been properly proof read.

The importance of proof-reading and how we do it

We certainly shouldn’t take short cuts with proof-reading. Employing an independent proof-reader is money well spent. In our imprints we’re old-fashioned enough to go through three stages of editing and the third is almost a proof-read. Thereafter we get two people in-house to proof-read. One will be the original editor and the other one of three of us who are used to proof-reading.

This final proof-read is of the camera-ready PDF that will form the inside of the book. We ask the author to look at this too, not so much to look for typos, spelling mistakes or grammatical errors but to check that the formatting is correct. Sometimes they’ve embedded some code in that will make the text format in special way. We’re sometimes not sure whether the author wants the text to look the way they presented it or the way that the coding suggests. But if they happen to find anything else, good. They’re helping us to get the book to be the best it can be.

Yes, we still miss the odd thing but we come out well below the average of fifteen. And we’re careful. Very careful.

Reviewer’s delight

Unfortunately there are a few reviewers who seem to delight in taking a type of moral high ground about this but some of them fall badly.

I recently read and reviewed a book I’d enjoyed and put my four star review on Amazon and Good reads. I was appalled to find another review there that said this:

“I would ask why this book is so badly edited? It contains spelling error, grammatical errors, and missing words.”

Really? I need to make several points here. First of all, I didn’t spot a single thing wrong with the text. And believe me, as soon as I spot one of those fifteen errors I jump out of my absorption in a text. There are two possible explanations here: either there were no mistakes and the reviewer doesn’t understand grammar, or the book was so absorbing that even I failed to spot the mistakes. However, I doubt the latter is true as I gave the book four stars, not five, as it didn’t absorb me completely.

But let’s look at that review. The writer “would” ask. Why a conditional? In which circumstances would they ask? Why not just say they don’t know or even better just state that there are spelling and grammatical errors. Yes, errors, not error. Of course  one can say “spelling error” is grammatically correct but stylistically this doesn’t work so well. I’m pretty sure anyway that it’s a typo. The writer probably meant “spelling errors and grammatical errors” which would have been better as “spelling and grammatical errors” anyway. Why the question mark at the end of a statement? And there really is no need at all for an Oxford comma.

For one of the books we published a review said “does suffer from occassional misspellings and one or two grammatical errors”. Oh yes. Sic. It didn’t actually anyway. Deliberate choices had been made by the author for the sake of the voice in the text. The editor had agreed. Yes we should know the grammatical rules and only break them when we really know what we’re doing. Grammar is there after all to help us make our meaning clear. But we also would do well to remember there is no ultimate authority on English. The only thing that really matter is whether we communicate effectively..

Point-scoring? Kettles, pots and black?

Or should I be more lenient and admit that those two reviews work so it doesn’t matter about the mistakes within them? However, if both reviewers went on the way they’re going they’d score more than the fifteen in 46,000 words. And I can’t quite take them seriously which brings us right back to just how important proof-reading is.                                       

The All Important Call to Action

Sign up for news of our books and receive this free e-book.  

Web site review

When we publish a new author we go through a series of certain marketing routines. One action is the offer of a web site or blog review. One glaring era we see on many authors’ sites is a lack of call to action.

What is a call to action?

This is the means by which you make it easy for your readers to act on what you’re telling them about, so it might be:

A link to your book on Amazon or similar

A link to where people can download a free sample of your work

A link to an event you’re holding

How does this square with avoiding ‘buy my book, buy my book, buy my book’?

First of all, I personally have no objection at all to people putting direct links on social media or their sites to their book on Amazon or somewhere else where you can buy it. If it’s a book that sounds interesting I’ll buy it. If it’s not the type of thing I’m into I’ll just not click through. I can still appreciate that the author wants to let us know about their work. If I’m not sure, I’ll click through anyway and read a bit more about it and perhaps look at a few reviews.

But here’s the thing - if I’ve got to go and look it up myself, well I can’t be bothered.  Life is too short.

I actually find many of the books I end up buying by reading about them on Twitter or Facebook.  

I post links to my own books and other books we’ve published on social media too  but keep strictly to the 20/80 rule. Only 20% of what I post on social media should be direct calls to action. In fact it’s probably only about 10% though I do ads for our books that haven’t cleared their set-up costs and stories on CafeLit that haven’t had at least twenty hits.

Bios on CafeLit

I’m always a little puzzled when authors on CafeLit don’t provide a bio. Is it shyness? Do they expect me to dig out an old one?

Well they shouldn’t be shy. If you’re a writer, you’re running a business. We don’t offer payment for stories that appear on the daily postings though some will get into the Bet of book and receive royalties. We do offer authors the right to shout out about themselves and their achievements. Why shouldn’t they? People don’t have to follow the links if they don’t want to but it can be frustrating if they would like to know more and there’s nothing there.

No, I’m not going to dig an old one. I don’t have that sort of time. Besides we all move on. Pretty well as soon as you’ve written a bio it’s out of date. Bios anyway can be post specific. If you’ve written a story based on potholing something about your experience of potholing might be interesting. But not if you’ve written as story based on skiing. Our submissions guidelines specify that writers should provide a bio and whilst we don’t preclude people from being published by us if they haven’t followed the guidelines to the letter and their submission is the best on the day but if we have two equally good ones and one has all the components we’ll go for the more complete one.  

Our magnet book

This is a major call to action. We’re giving away a splendid selection of many of our authors in exchange for folk joining a mailing list – a mailing list that is GDPR compliant and which they can opt out of at any time. We’ll mail out to people on that list news of our new books and of offers on our backlist.

And guess what: within the pages of the book are other calls to action which take reader to more works by an author they’ve enjoyed.

If you’re in the book, or even if you’re just published by us, because you will still benefit form that mailing list, do feel free to use the image and the link to create a call to action on your own site. Or just copy the concept to make your own call to action.     

              

Book Covers

Image by DarkWorkX from Pixabay

Naturally the cover needs to give a good indication of what the book is about without giving anything away that will spoil the reader’s enjoyment. There is a whole debate the be had there. But in this post I’m talking more about the shape and colour of the illustration selected.

Often we’re asked to use a photograph or an illustration that authors themselves provide. And sometimes they just don’t work. Then there is the colour blue which can be very difficult to get right. It’s almost impossible to get a computer to show this accurately.

Occasionally a writer will find a picture they would like to use but we than have to check that the picture is not copyright AND that it is the right shape and colour.    

Sometimes an author will suggest a concept and that is something we can work with. We use pixabay. Not only are all of the pictures copyright free but they are also free to download. We actually pay a voluntary small fee each month and we always acknowledge the illustrator.

A neat little trick is to put our concept into pixabay’s research facility. So for example when we put Snowflakes together we put in the search term “snowflakes”. Here a few that we came up with today. 

Technically, this woks well. We would have to reverse the image so that the Christmas tree, star and globe are on the right, representing the front cover. The left, back cover, is plain enough  to include a blurb. The title and subtitle would go beneath the tree. However, maybe this is  a little too Christmassy for our theme. 

In many ways fine but it would be hard to make the title, author and blurb show up. 

Okay, snow flakes all right but a little insipid.


Our actual cover:

Note: the original picture had a brown background.

Nativity was difficult. The search brought up too many traditional nativity scenes. Instead we went for quite an abstract landscape and the abstract DNA in the first letter:

Challenge: our next anthology is Mulling it Over. What might fit there?