editor

BEA Synopsis Special!

With Book Expo America coming up May  29-31, you’ll want to have your synopsis ready to hand out to literary agents during your pitch.

Proof Positive is offering a $1 per page synopsis proofreading special from April 16 through May 29. Proofreading includes checking for grammatical errors, spelling errors, and word choice.

Send your synopsis to ProofPositivePro [at] gmail.com with the subject line Synopsis Special, and you’ll receive a confirmation within one business day. Fast return guaranteed.

 

Proof Positive’s One-Year Anniversary!

THANK YOU to all the authors who made Proof Positive a huge success in its fledgling year! You will be seeing some great changes in 2014 when the business expands and upgrades to add more services, including editing articles, resumes, video game scripts, social media posts, and more.

I am thrilled to have worked with the following authors in just one year, and I’m excited to add more to the list.

Joseph Murphy, author of the Activation series and the Sword of Kassandra series
Hanna Peach, author of the Dark Angel series and the Bound series
Patricia Childress, author of Jessie the Invisible (upcoming)
Jenna Lehne, author of Beautiful Malevolence (upcoming)
Kevin Zdrill, author of Crazy, Mixed Up World (upcoming)
MM Jaye, author of Fate Accomplis (upcoming)
Tory Gates, author of Parasite Girlslove-of-books graphic
Judy Teel, author of the Cinderella Heiresses series and the Shifty Magic series
Dahlia Savage, author of Indiscretion and Graduation Day
Dawn Brazil, author of Finding Me (publication in April 2014)
Quanie Miller, author of It Ain’t Easy Being Jazzy and The New Mrs. Collins (upcoming)
Christine Warren, author of Honky Tonk Debutante
Milena Veen, author of Just Like a Musical
Charlie Moore, author of Against the Clock
Amy Wilde, author of White Bees
J.T. Twerell, author of Forever Yours (upcoming)
Lilian Roberts, author of the Immortal Rapture series
Sarka-Jonae Miller, author of the Between Boyfriends series
Tarra Gordon, author of Confessions of the Crow

I’ve enjoyed working with every single one of you and look forward to working on your next projects!

How (Not) to Write a Novel

I always sing author Quanie Miller‘s praises because she’s such an outstanding writer. In fact, I did a fun and interesting interview with her in 2013 about her premier book It Ain’t Easy Being Jazzy. As the owner of Proof Positive, I am proud to be featured on her blog with my guest post, “How (Not) to Write a Novel”. I’d love it if you comment and ask questions – I will answer every single one. Take advantage of some free advice from an expert editor!

eBook Plague – Errors Aplenty

“Annoying.” “Very irritating.” These are just a couple of the most common descriptives readers are using when talking about their frustrations with the numerous errors in e-books.

These readers are asking Amazon and other e-book distributors for refunds without finishing the books….and they’re getting them. This should be Chapter 1 in the “Don’t Let This Happen To You” handbook for indie writers.

It’s such a prevalent problem that there are entire forum threads in which readers are complaining about this problem. To give you some idea of their feelings, one of those readers said, “I really believe that writers need to make an effort and deliver a product worthy of what we are paying for it.”

Another contributor voiced a similar feeling, which sums up the sentiments of most, “When I pay for a book, I want it to be done correctly.”

Yet another reader had great advice for writers, “Stand out in the crowd – make that effort, and give readers the best experience possible. They’ll thank you with repeat business and recommendations.”

Information like this is extremely valuable to indie authors because it gives us important insights into what readers want, don’t want, and won’t tolerate. And let’s face it – once you turn a reader off with so many errors that they can’t read on, they’re not likely to give your upcoming books a chance.

So how can an author produce the cleanest copy and best possible experience for his/her readers? Some rely on proofreading software, but that doesn’t always do the trick. Here’s why:A Girl and Her Fir Coat

1. Much like spell checking tools, many times it will allow incorrect words to remain unquestioned because they’re spelled correctly.

2. It won’t always pick up repetitions of words or phrases and so many other things that require a trained human proofreading eye.

3. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) scans are notorious for misreading certain letter combinations, especially in certain fonts: “th” can be misread as “til”, “1” instead of “i” or “l”, and “rn” is misread as “m”.

Rampant misspellings, punctuation errors, characterization problems (among the top three complaints), and spacing issues should all be corrected before you publish your book, especially if you introduce it through a limited time free offer – lots of readers take advantage of those offers, and word will quickly spread if they are annoyed by errors. As the saying goes, “you never get a second chance to make a first impression”.

Don’t take chances – nothing beats the accuracy of a sharp, trained, professional proofreader’s eye.

Tuxedoed Writing

Will Rogers, Jr. once advised a fellow actor, “Don’t ever take a dramatic lesson. They will try to put your voice in a dinner jacket, and people like their hominy and grits in everyday clothes.” The actor – Dale Robertson – followed Rogers’s advice and became a highly successful television star.

This golden advice is similar for writers: don’t let writing classes, editors, or well-meaning critique groups dress your writing up so much that it’s no longer yours. Separate good advice that will benefit your story from advice that would change your voice, tone, or direction.

Without a doubt, writing classes and seminars can be beneficial, as can the opinions of friends and fellow writers. But opinions are just that – opinions. They’re not black and white formulas for writing success, they’re someone else’s personal ideas and preferences, and those may not necessarily be right for the story you had in mind.pen tux

Sometimes we writers tend to forget that helpful, well-meaning suggestions aren’t solid answers for writing a best seller, and we take them as hard facts rather than suggestions. I have a friend who belongs to an informal writing group that critiques each other’s works. She finds going to the monthly meetings helpful in keeping her on track with her writing commitment, which is great. But because there are a couple of published authors in the group, she takes their critiques as etched-in-stone fixes for her work, which they’re not. In fact, even though some of their suggestions are excellent, others were derailing her plot and changing her main character so much that she didn’t even recognize him anymore. She kept hitting walls and found that she couldn’t write about this new “stranger” in her novel. Had she tried to force her story out, it would have suffered and lost its authenticity. All those well-meant critiques would have turned her novel into everyone else’s novel. She finally realized that she had to back away from certain suggestions in order to move the story forward and keep it hers.

So weigh those well-intended suggestions and critiques objectively and see if they actually improve your story or if they’re just putting a dinner jacket on your words. Readers want authenticity – they can see right through the fake bow tie and tux; what they want is your style of everyday clothes.

Falling In Love Can Be Dangerous

As writers, we love what we do. Let’s face it – if we weren’t passionate about it, would we pour our hearts and souls onto page after page, into book after book, not knowing if anyone else will share our passion? Of course not.heart (2)

We also tend to fall in love with our prose. Our phrasing, word choice, settings, and characters mean something to us and can weave their way into our hearts. While that’s a good thing in one way (after all, if we don’t love our work, who will?), it can be a drawback if an agent or editor recommends necessary modifications that our hearts aren’t willing to make.

I witnessed this first-hand a couple of years ago.

A fellow writer friend submitted her manuscript to an editor who had good connections to some promising agents. This editor had her finger firmly on the pulse of the publishing industry, so her input was extremely valuable, especially to a previously unpublished author. Her expertise and ability to connect writers with agents were reflected in her rates – she didn’t come cheap.

This writer decided that if she seriously wanted to get published “the old fashioned way” instead of indie publishing, it would be worth the editor’s fee. She submitted her manuscript and waited anxiously for its return so she could make her revisions and get her work between a couple of hard covers.

When the manuscript came back, she found more corrections, modifications, and recommendations for changes than she expected. Way more. She flew into a rage as she read through her edited work, accusing the editor of being “too nitpicky” and of trying to change her voice.

It wasn’t true. The editor was just doing her job, and she was doing it well. Those changes, suggestions, and recommendations were critical to the improvement of her book, but the writer didn’t want to hear it. She had fallen in love with her words to the point where she just couldn’t break up with them – she kept reading passages aloud and arguing that they couldn’t be changed without destroying the tone of her story.

In the end, her book never got published. She submitted it over and over to various agents and then directly to publishing houses with no success. While most sent generic rejection letters, a few agents took the time to give her basic reasons why the book wasn’t salable, and all of those reasons coincided with the editor’s edits.

Sometimes we writers have to face the emotionally difficult task of doing some tough surgical edits to improve our manuscripts. That writer’s beloved novel now sits in a bottom drawer collecting dust, whereas if she’d accepted a little “tough love”, she could already have been a household name.

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