…why you need a copy editor.
Your New Year’s resolution was to finally self-publish that book. You’re trying to keep your costs down–of course!
But this blog from the Alliance of Independent Authors makes very good points about how important it is to invest in a copy editor. Like me!
How to Choose and Use Editors for Your Self-Published Books by Karl Drinkwater
Having spent 12 weeks plus 12 days this calendar year away from home—mostly working abroad in China and the US–I decided it is time to pass along some of my wisdom:
Idris Elba—a sure bet
Anyone care to add any others?
In this business, you don’t always get to say that.
But here at K. Donnelly Communications’ world headquarters, we’ve just finished a terrific project with a terrific team.
Through mutual friends, Jim Kwaiser, founder and owner of western Pennsylvania-based consulting firm. C.H.A.L.L.E.N.G.E.S., Inc., contacted us for help with a book he was working on, Transforming Family Businesses: From Dysfunctional to Extraordinary.
Jim and his wife Ann have consulted with family businesses for over 60 years. Designed to provide guidelines for all types of families in business, Transforming Family Businesses, available on Amazon in print or e-versions, contains Jim’s valuable advice gained from years of experience. Real-life stories of families are used to illustrate the principles discussed in the book, and it is definitely a subject I am personally interested in, having grown up in a family business myself.
We base our philosophy on putting ‘family first,’” says Jim. “And that is the theme of the book. We have found this to be the key to move families and their businesses from dysfunctional to extraordinary. And it can be done.”
When Jim contacted us, he had already written ten or so chapters of the book; he needed help with editing, proofreading, and shaping the structure.
K. Donnelly Communications went to work!
Over a few months, thanks to email, internet, and Track Changes, drafts of the chapters went back and forth. And with each exchange we both felt that the final work was improved.
Jim found Lisa Thomson of BZ Studio near Atlanta, Georgia, who was invaluable in designing the look of the book, choosing the typefaces and adding photos. Jim completed the production process by publishing Transforming Family Businesses on Amazon through their CreateSpace service. It looks great!
Previously, K. Donnelly Communications had helped our friend Howard J. Manns, also from Pennsylvania and a great client, with his two self-published books, What the Doctor Orders, about his specialty, health care marketing, and Success and Lunacy, about his other specialty, his nutso life.
The moral of the story is that you can do it too! Have you always felt you had a book in you? Self-publishing services, like Lulu and CreateSpace, make it economical to publish yourself.
But anyone who has been through the process will give you the same advice: Hire professional help.
You may need someone to write the book initially, but you definitely will need someone to work on the copy and form it, visually, into a viable, professional, product in print and online. You can get some ideas of costs here.
Our motto at K. Donnelly Communications is: Yet another reason why you need a copy editor.
So if you’re thinking of becoming a publisher, get in touch. We could help you too.
Or maybe you have just published a book and want some advice on how to market it? Let’s do lunch…
Thanks, Jim!
As of 1st February, I am officially fully retired from my post as Senior Lecturer in the Business School and School of Media in Birmingham [UK] City University.
However, I prefer to define it as a return to my free-lancing life—now known as the ‘gig’ economy—with the US Social Security Administration as my most lucrative client. And a return to BCU as a Visiting Lecturer in March.
So, as my friend Maura often posts, What have you got for me Universe?! I’m available!
Need some marketing advice on your next project? [Buy me lunch.]
Need someone to sit in your house and wait for the delivery guy? [Do you have cable?]
Need some copyediting or proofreading? #yetanotherreason #whyyouneedacopyeditor
Need a speaker for your group about my fascinating writers, and the times and places in which they lived? www.suchfriends.wordpress.com.
Better yet, need a personal tour guide to the city homes and country homes where they ‘hung out’ together—Ireland, England, France, America?
Or do you need to trace your own Irish roots and then drive around with a local trying to meet them? Have I got a tour guide for you—right Tony Dixon?
Maybe you need someone to teach in exotic locales. Like…Pittsburgh!
Or recruit students from around the globe?
Or another creative activity that K. Donnelly Communications hasn’t even thought of yet?
I’m available!
And at reasonable rates.
We can provide samples and estimates up front, as well as glowing references. Email me at kdonnellycom@aol.com, or post a comment below.
…My new book, Manager as Muse: Maxwell Perkins’ Work with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is about legendary Scribner’s editor Max Perkins and how he motivated his writers to produce classic novels in the 1920s and 30s.
The dirty little secret is—he was a terrible copy editor. As bad a speller as Fitzgerald, his letters are riddled with mistakes. Unfortunately, this also happened with the first edition of the books he worked on with his writers. Sometimes he was in such a rush he would try to edit and proofread himself, keeping the galleys away from the Scribner staff. Bad idea.
The top Manhattan columnist of the day, FPA of the Algonquin Round Table, made the search for mistakes in Fitzgerald’s first novel, The Far Side of Paradise, into a parlour game among New Yorkers.
If you want to read more stories about Perkins and his writers, you can find information about the book on my blog, Such Friends [www.suchfriends.wordpress.com], and buy it at either Amazon.com in the US and Amazon.co.uk in the UK.
And if you want a copy editor, drop me an email at kdonnellycom@aol.com!
My fellow blogger Liz Broomfield, who publishes helpful books for small business owners and the self-employed, has been running a series on ‘Fiction, Non-fiction and Creativity.’ She did an informal survey of some writers, asking some really interesting questions, and now she’s posted my answers.
As you might guess, I am a big fan of the creative possibilities of non-fiction:
‘When you encounter a truly great copy editor, they are worth their weight in gold. They were, and are, a rarity.’
–Carmen Callil, author, founder of Virago and former publisher of Chatto & Windus.
And a truly great copy editor would have changed that quote to ‘he is worth his weight…’
Reading through some old copies of the Guardian [don’t ask], I came across an article, ‘The Corrections,’ by Alex Clark [http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/feb/11/lost-art-editing-books-publishing].
Clark takes as her starting point the scandalous version of Jonathan Franzen’s novel, Freedom, which was published with so many typos he insisted that it be pulled from the bookstores and fixed. And this came from a mainstream publisher, in both the US and the UK.
Of course, this is not the first case of a major publishing house being less than obsessive in the copy editing and proofreading department. When Scribner’s published F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, The Far Side of Paradise, in 1920, his editor Maxwell Perkins was in such a hurry to get the book out, the first edition was riddled with errors. Perkins was legendary as an editor who could find and nurture talent. But he was an even worse speller than Fitzgerald—who later recommended to Scribner’s a writer he heard about in Paris:
‘Hemmingway. He’s the real thing.’
Typos aside, Clark’s article makes some interesting points about the overall ‘decline in editing’ throughout the publishing industry. And she is talking about mainstream corporate publishers who should know better. Novelist Blake Morrison is quoted as saying,
‘There are still some brilliant editors in publishing today. But it’s harder for them to have the autonomy that, say, Maxwell Perkins enjoyed when taking on Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, let alone to spend the acres of time he did improving typescripts. The rise of marketing departments is often blamed for this…What has changed is that editors are no longer the people expected to identify and nurture a young talent. That role has passed to agents and, before them, to the creative writing tutors through whose MA programmes…the majority of today’s new writers emerge.’
NB: Wolfe studied playwrighting at Harvard, but neither Fitzgerald nor Hemingway ever took a writing class.
So what does this mean for those of you self-publishing? If the corporations with all the resources don’t have the budget to spend enough time on manuscripts to polish them, what chance do you have of turning out brilliant, error-free copy on your own?
A few years ago, someone in the publishing industry absolutely winced when I mentioned the self-publishing site Lulu to him.
‘Oh! Awful! I saw a book published there and it was filled with typos and looked terrible!’
I explained to him that any formatting or textual errors wouldn’t be Lulu’s fault. It’s up to you, the author, to create a perfect, error-free manuscript before publishing it on Lulu. And you do all the marketing yourself too!
All of this is designed to convince you that, whenever you are putting your work out there, it is worth the time and money to edit, proofread—twice–and have someone else look at it. Even if it’s just a blog post—run it by someone who knows his or her grammar. Choose somebody who went to Catholic school–Those kids really know how to spell…
And if you are going to invest in self-publishing, or putting up a website, or promoting your latest project, hire a professional.
If you would like to know more about Maxwell Perkins and his work with F. Scott Fitzgerald, here is a suggested reading list: http://suchfriends.wordpress.com/the-american-ex-patriates-in-paris/such-friends-reading-and-viewing-lists-f-scott-fitzgerald-his-scribner%E2%80%99s-editor-maxwell-perkins/ from my other blog, Such Friends [www.suchfriends.wordpress.com]
Honey—was that okay? [I always have my husband read through anything I’m going to post…]
It was only in the theatre that I have lived - Oscar Wilde
writer, explorer, cat herder
public relations and the rest
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Books on business for small business owners and the self-employed
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'...and say my glory was I had such friends.' --- WB Yeats
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