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I’ll be speaking at the annual conference held by Northern California Publishers & Authors on Saturday, April 25, 3:00-4:15 p.m.

Editing: The Invisible Art that Takes Your Book from “Self-Published” to “Professionally Published”

When asked recently how they felt about self-published books, nearly one in five of the news media who responded specifically mentioned the poor quality of editing. General readers are no more forgiving, as demonstrated by reviews at Amazon.com.

What is editing? Can anyone do it? What skills and tools are needed? You will learn:

• The different kinds of editing
• How to know which kind of editing your manuscript needs
• How to find the right editor for your manuscript
• Your role as author or publisher in the editing process

More information about the conference, including details about other speakers (John Kremer, Marion Gropen, Nora Profit, Robert Brekke) and how to register, are at the NCPA Web site.

1) Log in to your WordPress blog. Write a new post ( Posts | Add New ).

Continue reading “Attaching a file to a WordPress 2.7 post”

Just want to make sure everyone understands that a professional editor or copyeditor is not going to mock you or make fun of your work.

By the time we see your manuscript, you’ve spent months and often years on it. Our job is to help ensure your words are clear to the reader and to make you look as good as possible. It’s a collaborative relationship that works best when there is mutual respect. In all cases, the book belongs to the author, and the author has final say.

Of course there will be infelicities, unless you are one of those rare* people who is perfect. A typical manuscript comprises 100,000 words. That’s 100,000 opportunities for error at minimum, compounded by words’ pesky habit of working in tandem and our brains’ tendency to spit out commonly heard terms while our eyes overlook them.

Copyeditor’s note: “Our brain’s tendency” or “our brains’ tendency”? A judgment** call. Although there’s only one brain per person, using the singular brings up the image of a collective mind. These constant judgment calls make copyediting the hardest job I do, except for writing.

* Thank goodness!

** Although “judgement” is an acceptable variant spelling, according to Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary, the dictionary recommended by The Chicago Manual of Style, “judgment” is the preferred spelling. Major and minor publishers use Chicago for their house style.

Someone asked me how to get started blogging. My first reaction: Do you really want to blog?

If you don’t like to write, if you don’t know what you would write about, if your days are already so full you can barely find time to catch your breath, blogging might not be for you. Then again, you might love the opportunity to write whatever pleases you and to engage with others. Continue reading “A sketchy intro to blogging”

An overview of Web site statistics for the new proprietor of a Web site or blog. If anything is unclear or confusing, please leave a comment so I can fix the problem. Thanks!

• Page tags
• Site logs
• How to access your site logs through your Web host
• Example site log entry

There are two ways to track your site visiters: site logs and page tags (counters and trackers). Both provide information about

• the number of visitors,
• the countries of your visitors,
• the links on other sites that led to yours,
• the words that brought up your site in online searches,
• which search engine was used,
• the Web browsers and operating systems used by your visitors, and
• other data.

Continue reading “Tracking your Web site or blog visitors”