Looseleaf Editorial & Production

Book Editing & Design

Kristy S. Gilbert

Editor of the Year 2021!

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Thank you, Utah Freelance Editors and the Leauge of Utah Writers! Kristy S. Gilbert, Editor of the Year 2021I (Kristy S. Gilbert) am the first-ever Editor of the Year for the League of Utah Writers/Utah Freelance Editors. It means a lot to be honored like this by fellow editors, especially within a community as friendly and supportive as UFE. It means so much to me that I decided to put on my fanciest dress and take a picture so I could pretend I accepted a physical award during this time of virtual conferences!

This new award—initiated by UFE’s dauntless president, Talysa Sainz—is a wonderful opportunity to recognize publishing professionals who rarely approach the spotlight. I look forward to highlighting the excellent work from other UFE folks in the years to come. If you’d like to meet some other UFE pros, check out the Utah Freelance Editors database at UtahFreelanceEditors.com/find-editor.

Reunite the Party: Typesetting & Ebook Formatting

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Code Ebook & Typeset: Apply the designs & check for readability hiccups. For ebooks, check compatibility across platforms.It’s time to get the gang back together! Earlier in your book journey, you split the party to tackle initial design work and copyediting at the same time. Now you need to bring your polished text and your design tools together to create print-ready files and distribution-ready ebooks. This is where the Design Pines and the Red-Ink Woods meet. [Read more…] about Reunite the Party: Typesetting & Ebook Formatting

Vary Your Character Descriptions (Guest Post)

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Kristy wrote an article about adding variety, personality, and emotion to character descriptions for Utah Freelance Editors. Below is an excerpt.
You can read the whole thing here.

Describing characters can be difficult work, but some authors unintentionally make the task more difficult by sticking to a driver’s-license-style checklist of traits about their characters—gender, hair and eye color, height, etc. This focus normally comes from an impulse to describe characters so readers will have clear images in their minds.

But using the same traits or describing characters solely in informational terms can make it harder for readers to remember things about individual characters and can hamper reader reactions and connections.

Instead, try out a few of these strategies to more efficiently create emotional situations and characters that delight and connect with your readers.

Interested? Read the full article on the Utah Freelance Editors website.

The Design Pines

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Map of the Design Pines, which contain cover design (which you use to attract the right readers for your book) and interior layout (which you use to convey the story's tone & make it readable for the right audience).The Design Pines are a leg of the self-publishing book journey after line edits. This forest is where you gather materials and build tools to create the visual magic of your story. Unless you’re a skilled visual artist and graphic designer yourself, it’s wise to enlist one or more book designers. (If you’re publishing traditionally after a trip through the Querying Sands, your publisher will hire them.)

Because visual magic is usually less familiar to writers than wordy wonder is, this post is more detailed than the previous Book Journey Map explanations—and there are more free resources for more info at the end. [Read more…] about The Design Pines

What You Need to Know Before Hiring an Editor

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Before you hire an editor, it’s important to have some foundational knowledge about the process. Here are five key bits of intel to get you started.

1. There Are Different Types of Editing

Many writers get to a stage where someone tells them to hire an editor (or comes to that decision on their own). But it’s important to know there is more than one type of editing, and those types usually need to happen in separate passes (and sometimes with different editors). Editing for character and pacing is difficult to do if you’re also correcting commas and hyphenation. [Read more…] about What You Need to Know Before Hiring an Editor