Here's the picture: You’ve revised your manuscript more times than you can count. You’ve polished your query letter, researched literary agents or publishers, and finally started sending your manuscript out into the world. Then comes the rejection. Or, even worse, nothing comes at all. Rejection is an unavoidable part of traditional publishing, but it can also be an incredibly confusing one. A form rejection rarely tells you why an agent passed on your manuscript, and many pu

In the expansive realm of publishing, there exists a sobering reality: the presence of scams that can exploit the hopes and dreams of...

Proofreaders aren't just eagle-eyed typo hunters. For many indie authors, proofreaders can often be a valuable resource for navigating the next steps in the self-publishing process. If you've never thought to ask your proofreader about what to do with your polished manuscript, here's a step-by-step guide that will take your manuscript from final polished draft to published book. This checklist assumes that you have standardized the formatting of your manuscript document and a

Book publishing has undergone significant transformations in recent years, offering authors a plethora of choices in how they bring their...

The saying “you don’t know what you don’t know” is so true when it comes to publishing, whether it’s self-publishing or traditional publishing. Authors are writers first and foremost. They know the craft of writing, but it’s all the other steps—revising and editing, publishing, and marketing—that can be daunting, even to the most seasoned among them. I’m always gathering vetted resource links that I can recommend to authors. So this post is just that! I’ve categorized the lin

Style sheets are a mainstay of the traditional editing and publishing process. Yet many writers and authors don't know what they are or how they can be put to use. In this blog, I'll break down what types of information the style sheet records and ways that authors can use this information to support their writing endeavors. What a style sheet is An editorial style sheet is a record of all editorial decisions made in the editing and proofreading process. It ensures that an ed

If you think no one is judging books by their covers, then you’d be wrong about this oft-underutilized aspect of book marketing. The book cover and spine or the book cover thumbnail will be the first aspects of your book that catch a potential reader’s attention. It’s pivotal that your book cover is professional and that the cover image file is sized appropriately. The last thing you want, before you even consider all of the other implications for book cover design, is a grai

In the past, I’ve talked about how freelance editors might charge for their services. There are many ways professionals might do this, but one way I discussed was using the sample edit to determine how many hours a project is estimated to take, applying an hourly rate, and then charging a full project fee. Time is, therefore, money, as the saying goes. Logically, it makes sense then that saving time will also save you money. Now, before anyone objects, let me explain what I m