Well, I'm All Better

 What a difference a year makes, in lots of ways.

Response to a Copyediting Query from a Previously Slowing-Down Client

Hi.

If the "better" refers to the cleanup of my iPhone-generated headshots, anything is an improvement over the basic material. They're great.

There's a lot going on in this m/s, which seems to be a diary from 1900, with a lot of formatting to clean up and recipes, which are always a pain in the patootie as far as consistency-making, even when trying to adhere to the original. The end also seems to have placeholders for art, which ideally you or I could strip out before or while editing, as they only get it the way. I could always insert "art goes here." The saving grace is that I'd assume the text should stay untouched as much as possible, although I'd query inconsistencies. 

Since we're moving into a new era with the press, I'd love it if we could use Word's Comments feature instead of in-text queries [QY: like this] as the comments are easily deleted if that's what you and the authors want to do and have very limited possibility of mangling the text, unlike going into the words and deleting that way. Comments are very easy to deal with -- and much faster -- once getting the hang of them, which should only take a few moments of practice. We can do a test run if needed, but I do think they'd make things easier for everyone, except for maybe Kerry, whose typist only creates more work for everyone. Those jobs would take half the time if she (I presume it's a she) didn't use auto lists for what ends up being half his copy.

Anyway, because of all the extenuating circumstances (formatting, recipes, dealing with copy not to be edited [which does create issues of its own]), $5/page * 290 pages = $1450.

And an FYI, if I've not mentioned: I'm dealing with upcoming major surgery, which could take place as early as March 14 in Charlotte (!), if all goes according to (my) plan. Anthem has different ideas, and only the deity knows what his or her plans are, so everything's up in the air and causing ridiculous stress on my end. My primary and valued clients need to know about this. I'm expecting three or four days hospitalized, and thankfully recovery would involve sitting around and not doing much except reading, which is how I spend my days anyway, and getting paid for it. I'd also be bringing a manuscript with me to the hospital, presuming they'd leave me alone long enough to read it. (Right now, it's scheduled to be a book about Joseph Smith and his golden plates, which should be a romp.)

Anyway, keep me posted. Seems like these beach books are usually a go, and early March might be a good time for me to fit this in.

Thanks, K—. The thought of the press cranking up is a great, great thing for me -- and for you too, I presume.

Excelsior,

Bob

Copyediting query boilerplate

For copyediting that type of volume, presuming no complicating factors, my rate is $4.75/page, with a page defined as 265 words. The project rate based on that word count, then, would be 128 pages (34000/265) @ $4.75/page = $608.

Complicating factors would be, for example, line editing to the point that many/most sentences need restructuring -- or extensive reworking of documentation such as notes or bibliography, which probably wouldn't apply here. But if I thought reassessing the rate was necessary for any reason, I'd let you know before I went too far down the road.

The process is pretty simple. I'd ask for one-month turnaround from date of receipt, and no payment is necessary until the job is complete. You send me a Word file, and I return to you three files:

1. The edited manuscript with all the changes indicated/tracked.

2. The same document with all the changes accepted. This would be the working document going forward.

3. A style sheet for the book, indicating editorial and spelling decisions, style and consistency notes, and so on. 

The manuscript will likely include some queries for you, and I prefer to handle those with Word's comments feature (the little balloons in the margins), if you'd be comfortable with that. If not, I can always present them as inline queries [QY: like this.]. Your call.

Occasionally I'll have need to contact an author at some point during the process with, for example, some repeating issue that I want to make sure I don't miscorrect. Doesn't happen that often -- and I know authors are always available for questions -- but typically it seems that once I receive a manuscript, unless I'm running late (ugh), the next time you should expect to hear from me is with the three files above, followed by an invoice. 

I think that's it. If you have any other questions, please let me know.

Thanks again.

After 35 Years at This, Maybe I Know What I'm Doing

An author with whom I've been working pretty closely just received a rejection letter from a writers' agency. Agent really liked the book but feels it's not sufficiently marketable.

The manuscript was in essentially OK shape when I first saw it, yet it needed a thorough albeit not difficult copyedit. Here's the agent's assessment after the Land on Demand touch:

I may as well get right to it: I’m going to pass on this. But believe me when I say I’m passing with many regrets, as I think that you’re an excellent writer with a superb grasp of both language and the type of style, tone, and pacing that makes for a good biography. I’m a big fan of biography and read a fair amount of it, and in terms of composition and content, this manuscript is on par with anything else that’s out there. 

Well, thanks. And, well, I guess I do know the person's name. But check out the lefty bass player and about three seconds of a seriously hammered Judy Garland at the beginning:

For All You Self-Publishers Out There: CreateSpace

Bob, I just sent book out last night and it's due to arrive on Tuesday (I couldn't bring myself to spend $45 for Monday!)  As a product of CreateSpace, it is all you said it would likely be; in short, stunningly disappointing and defective in just about every way. (In my own defense, I tried hard to get our team to go to another publisher; the numbers were just too good for CS.) If you would like to point out any defects, feel free, and we will try to fix the ones we can.

Their margin of error is a whopping 1/8 inch, so bindings almost all off center, the books are all wavy, the cover stays open after a single perusal and bends skyward, the bold of one author’s story bleeds too much (we are going to use a different typeface; if you have any recommendations of other ways, typefaces to set his story off, they are most welcome), and our designer said the back print job is worse than the local Kinko's would do. Other than that, pretty good inside, except the color is stark white, so we are going to try to change to a cream or beige.

Author Fights Back

I love this. One of my publishers has produced about a dozen of this particular author's works. Every six months he comes out with another little book of religious writings (about 80 m/s pages). If I had to classify the genre, and for as long as the Google lets this video sit here, please enjoy:

So his current manuscript comes in with this section in the Preface. Fight the power!

Special Note to My Publisher and Editor, as Well as to All Readers

            It may not be politically correct to adopt such a change in policy. But this is to serve notice that, from hence forth, I plan to capitalize not only nouns but all pronouns that refer to God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. By way of further example, since Jesus is the “light of the world,” I will capitalize the word Light when it refers to Jesus as being the Light. The same with the Lord as being Provider, Guide, and Companion—also the Light of His Presence.

            Enough said! Hopefully you get the idea. I may miss a word here and there, but at least you get the drift of my intentions. That’s one good thing about self-publishing: the author has the last word! 

Self-Publishing Made Simple

From The Network Is Your Customer (Rogers, Yale University Press, forthcoming [2010]):

An even greater impact on the book industry may come from the arrival of custom-printing kiosks, such as the Espresso. This “ATM for books” can print a hundred pages a minute and bind the pages into a finished book on a machine that will fit in the corner of a local bookstore. The first Espresso in Europe appeared in the famed Blackwell’s bookshop in central London, where it expanded the bookstore’s famously large selection with an additional half-million titles, ready to print from digital files. A customer coming in to find Charles Darwin’s out-of-print book on earthworms was able to print a copy in minutes for about twenty dollars (instead of paying a thousand dollars on the secondhand market for rare books). The first Espresso in the United States was in the homey Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vermont. The store found that many aspiring authors came in to print short runs of their own unpublished books once they found out they no longer needed an established publisher to accept their manuscript. As its digital library expands, the Espresso will allow small, local bookstores like Northshire to offer just as many niche books as an online powerhouse like Amazon.

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http://www.ondemandbooks.com/home.htm

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What great news for authors. And what's great news for authors should be great news for authors who want to put out quality books. Are you an author wanting to self-publish? Don't forget quality control. Have the book copyedited. Pay a professional to proofread it. Are you putting out a family history or a work of nonfiction? For your readers' benefit, the book needs an index. Whether you come to me or someone else, do your audience a favor and make the book the best it can be. Your future readership will grow as a result, and you'll be prouder of your past output when you look back at it.

A word to the wise.

Quality: editing and proofreading

Good books are good for a number of reasons. The writing is just one aspect of it.

If you go to a movie in which the acting is fine and the story is interesting, would you be able to ignore dialogue that two characters repeat 10 minutes apart, as if it had never happened before? What about the watch one of the charioteers is wearing in Ben-Hur? Maybe you can see the reflection of the camera in a store window. Does that not bother you?

My wife's a huge Al Green fan. He came out with an autobiography a few Christmases ago, and I bought her a copy, as did one of her friends. She could barely get through it because of all the typos. Might have been Random House that published that one . . . one of the big boys.

As a self-publishing author, you owe it to your potential audience to put out the best book you can. Editing and proofreading are essential elements of quality control. You, as an author, are hopefully a wonderful storyteller or a great researcher, or you can write about complex subject matter in a fashion that a layperson can enjoy and learn from it.

I'll be the first to say that I can do none of those things. I can't write stories at all, I have no subject I'm interested enough in to research, and I certainly have no command of any complex subject matter.

But what I can do is make your writing a lot better. You have your area of expertise, and I have mine.

One of my goals as an editor (and as a proofreader, for that matter) is to ensure that no speed bumps appear in the text. That is, the reader should never get hung up on a certain sentence, wondering what that meant or trying to determine how the sentence is supposed to read so that it makes sense. It's awfully hard to produce a page-turner if your reader is constantly saying, "Wait . . . what?" Or, as in the case of my wife, your reader is so distracted by the mistakes that enjoyment of the content is severely diminished, which is a shame.

If you are self-publishing and you want your readers to have a pleasant experience (and to buy your next book), hire an editor before the book is typeset. Hire a proofreader after the book is typeset. Employ a professional so that the book which will forever have your name on it is something you can look back at with pride.

Just a thought, and more to come.

Self-Publishing Editor. Self-Publishing Proofreader. Self-Publishing Indexer.

Do you need a professional editor if you are self-publishing?
Do you need a professional proofreader if you are self-publishing?
Do you need a professional indexer if you are self-publishing?

Yes.
Yes.
Yes.

And in the next post or two, I will give the reasons. In the meantime, you can take a look at my client list and get a feel for my background and why you should consider giving me a call.

spoke too soon; self-publishing 2: the platform

Looks like November's going to be another month of indexes. How long, o lord, how long?

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"Platform" is a hot word in publishing these days. If you're trying to go the traditional royalty publishing route -- that is, where someone actually pays you to publish your book, up front and then with mailbox money (royalties) -- the publisher will want to know what your platform is. This is code for "How many books are you going to sell just because of who you are?"

Tom Clancy
Shaquille O'Neal
Madonna
Pat Robertson
Sarah Palin
Tom Wolfe
Zig Ziglar
Alan Keyes

have platforms, of varying sizes.

Bob Land

has no platform whatsoever.

So who's going to get the book deal?

Royalty publishers are not going to spend a dime marketing your book if you're not bringing a crowd with you. It's like going for a loan. They'll give you one if you don't need it. Or that's how it used to be anyway.

And that's one of the hidden secrets of royalty publishing. It's the author's responsibility to sell the book. As it is with self-publishing.

I worked for years with an author on an essentially unpublishable volume. Why it was unpublishable is of no concern. But I told the author that if indeed some publisher picked it up, they would ask the author to do radio interviews, festivals, book signings, etc., to market the book. The author's response? "I wouldn't do any of that." Well, suit yourself, because that's what it takes, unless you have your own gift shop that tour buses bring people to on a daily basis. And even that's no guarantee.

Shameless promotion is the key to selling just about anything, especially in the times to come. If you want people to part with their money, you'd better give them a good reason for doing so. This blog is a form of shameless promotion, in case you hadn't noticed.

Great story I heard from a self-publishing author who is very persistent at being at festivals every weekend selling his books (and there are a lot of festivals in this part of the country). He said that people love meeting the author and leaving with a signed book. Love it. They'll buy the book even if they don't care what's inside of it or how good it may or may not be.

He was working a festival and a bus full of Japanese tourists let out right in front of the author signing table. They couldn't get enough of him. He said each person bought three or four books, and he happily signed them all. Most probably couldn't even read the language, but here was the author and the books. Local color and all that. So, he sold about 100 to 150 books at the full cover price of probably in the $15 range. Do the math. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon. Compare that with 2-8 percent of the wholesale price of the books you're going to sell in a bookstore if you can manage to publish with a royalty press, and presuming they can even place your book in a bookstore, the shelf space at which is very expensive real estate.

So, if you don't have a platform, you'd better have a yen, so to speak, for creating one, because writing the book might be the easy part of the equation. But once you've written and sold enough of that first one, you are building your platform. And if you build enough of one, and you want the prestige that comes with having a recognizable imprint on the spine of your book, you can go to a royalty publisher and say, "Lookee here. I've sold three thousand of these sitting in a folding chair watching the leaves change. You want a piece of that?"

And don't double-space after periods.

Self-Publishing: 1 of many to come

I'm not sure why I'm writing this now. I'm actually experiencing a burst of energy here a little after midnight and should be applying myself to getting books off my desk, but. . . .

I'm going to take up the subject of self-publishing in small chunks. So much to say.

It used to be that self-publishing was the last refuge of the unpublishable author. No more. My favorite story about self-publishing (formerly known as vanity publishing) is that Vantage Books, which runs a regular ad in the New Yorker and probably has for decades, was in the 1960s a CIA front operation. What better way to find out what crazies are thinking than to publish the books they are paying their own money to publish that no other publisher would touch?

These days, self-publishing has been made quite easy because of technological advances, such as print on demand. You don't have to have five thousand copies of your unsold book deteriorating in your garage anymore. Also, given that royalty houses expect authors to market their own books anyway, especially if you don't have a platform (note to self: future blog entry on platforms), why not publish the book yourself and get back some money -- like 40 percent or more of the cover price as opposed to a percentage of a percentage of the wholesale value minus returns, etc.? If any royalty publishers happen to be reading this blog, feel free to argue with me on this point.

There are so many ways to go with this, but let me step on my primary soapbox: If you are self-publishing, it doesn't mean that your book has to look like crap, and many self-published books do. The key is to find proper vendors, just like the big companies do, and put out a proper product that you won't be ashamed of in two years time. Ideally, your self-published product can look and feel as good as the best of the best. Like anything else, it's a matter of time, effort, and money.

Sure, you can put out a book quick and easy and dirty and cheap. And you'll get exactly that kind of product.

If you are self-publishing--and yes, this comment is as self-serving as it sounds--make sure that it is still professionally edited and proofread and indexed, if an index is necessary; the other two functions absolutely are. Make sure you have someone good design the inside pages in a proper book design program, and pay to have a good cover design created. Work with a printer (or have your book designer work with one) and use good paper and good cover stock.

Will all this drive up your costs? Yes. Will all this give you an infinitely better product? Yes.

I've seen so many locally self-published books that are obviously the output of someone who didn't know what to do or who to go to. Don't double-space after periods. Don't design your book while you're writing it. These types of books end up looking like fifth-grade class projects. Is that what you're hoping for?

Some people--I've worked with them--just want to die with "author" on their tombstone, and these days, it's easier and easier to accomplish just that. But once you're composting, what type of book are you leaving behind? People aren't going to be reading your tombstone.

Back to work.

return to a real world

Just returned from a week out of the bunker. Traveling with Tere, Mitchell, and Harry in Connecticut, New Hampshire, and New York -- a couple of nights on the island of my birth, some time in NYC, a little visiting with my brother (also a proofreader) and sister-in-law, and a long day coming back home today.

A few non-work-related observations: New England is lovely when you can pick and choose which seasons you spend there. Having no inclination toward winter sports, lost my enjoyment long ago of very cold weather, and an absence of desire to spend multiple thousands of dollars on heating oil each winter, SW Virginia suits me just fine. But spending time seeing lakes that are not the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority is a nice change.

If you are within 250 miles of New York City and have a free night, go to the Music Box Theater on 45th Street and see August: Osage County. Good Lord, there's hardly anything better than incredible live theatre. And this is as good as it gets.

Keeping up via email with the LandonDemand intergalactic empire, some issues are being raised about proofreading of manuscripts: my standard line is that manuscripts are copyedited and page proofs are proofread. Different functions, different tasks.



Some indexes are coming in that don't appear to be the kind that will have me dialing the suicide hotline.

Payments are picking up a little. Nice.

I've maintained for 20-plus years that a bad economy is good for freelancers. I think what will be important for me going forward is reminding companies of my availability. I exchanged some emails with a formerly very good client that I've not heard from so much lately; I used to do dozens of books for them each year, but this year have done only three. I wrote to make sure I'd done nothing to cause offense, and was told that work was being sent to those freelancers who told the publisher that they were available. Not that I've been lacking for work, but I like working for these folks very much and would rather have a lot of their work on my schedule than some of the other things through which I've been slogging. So, to the extent I need to market at all, it's more a matter of keeping good clients active than breaking new ground.

I'm working now with two or three self-publishing authors, and while sometimes there's a little more hand-holding than I like, my impression of self-publishing is a whole lot better than it used to be, and I should probably devote some blog entries to that topic.

Financial markets, election tensions, and so on . . . I used to be a newshound. These days, silence is a more and more attractive alternative. I'm tiring of hearing the same things day after day, and little is more tiresome than the sound of my own voice.