Completing a book is a monumental achievement in a book journey. You successfully navigated the Draft Marshes, no simple task. Perhaps you’ve even braved the Range of Revision or hiked the Line Edit Foothills. But it’s possible to make that journey and choose not to continue to Publish Bay. Not every book is meant to be or needs to be published. [Read more…] about Try Something New
Fiction
The Querying Sands
After you’ve hiked the Line Edit Foothills, you come to a crossroads: Do you try to entice a traditional publisher to edit, design, produce, and market your book; do you do that work on your own to self-publish; or do you start a new writing project?
If you want a publisher to put out your book, you’re going to trek through the Querying Sands, a hostile-looking path. [Read more…] about The Querying Sands
Publish Bay
You’ve trained, toiled, and triple-checked all your gear. It’s time to launch your book into Publish Bay to explore the expansive waters of a broad audience here at the end—or an end—of your book journey. [Read more…] about Publish Bay
Proofreading Boulders
After your trek through the woods of design and copyediting, pause and catch your breath. Now is the time to proofread your work before you launch your voyage into the sea of publishing. Proofreading is a final check to make sure your gear (your words, design, etc.) is in order before publishing. [Read more…] about Proofreading Boulders
Reunite the Party: Typesetting & Ebook Formatting
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
The Red-Ink Woods
The Red-Ink Woods of copyediting are the last place your book goes as a manuscript in your book journey. After copyediting, it gets reskinned for page proofs/galleys, then on to publishing! [Read more…] about The Red-Ink Woods
Vary Your Character Descriptions (Guest Post)
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
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
