Here’s an opportunity to get a glimpse of a pro editor at work. This blog post from The New Yorker, in 2007, shows the development of Raymond Carver’s classic story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” in the hands of his editor, Gordon Lish. The following document compares the original draft of [...]

Recently in this space, I came down pretty hard with the advice that you should make sure your writing is as smooth and error free as possible before you publish it. Now that I’ve made that point, I want to add the corollary: Don’t obsess. Well, maybe obsess a little, but not too much. The [...]

So when will we start to see REAL ebooks appear on the market? You know the ebooks that take advantage of their digital environment. Ebooks that have been rendered to improve the reader’s ebook experience. As the number of ebook devices explodes into the book reader’s world, the readers are going to expect more. This [...]

Self-publishing and ebooks have carried a stigma from day one by naysayers and the traditional publishing world. They forecast the book publishing pipe filled with poor and unreadable digital content because of the self-publishing ebook author. There has been an increase in errors and poor formatting introduced by the new digital books compared to their [...]

People are impressed with anyone who has completed the task of writing a whole book. There are thousands, if not millions, of people who have sat down to a keyboard to start writing a book but never finished it. Those who do go the distance make a commitment that goes beyond the first writing session.

One of the things I love best about DVDs are the special features. I love learning how and why a movie was made as much as (and maybe more than) the the movie itself. The same goes for books. I love learning about the process that went on from conception to publication and all the steps and changes that happened along. So in that spirit, I thought I’d share my own writing process for those who are curious about where my stories come from.

So many self-publishing houses; so many empty promises… In the past year since my own self-published book, The Victor, was released, I have met many authors who have gone the self-publishing route and have learned many important things that they should have given thought to but didn’t even know to ask and are now kind [...]

We’ve all been there. One minute you’re smoothly cruising down Your Vision Blvd. in your 1966 Ford Mustang convertible—sunshine, blue skies, 70-degree wind blowing through your hair. All of your ideas are beautifully coordinated into coherent and meaningful sentences. Writer heaven. Then, out of nowhere, gridlock. You’ve stopped moving. It’s bumper-to-bumper traffic and you find [...]

The main difficulty in proofreading your own text is simple: you have trouble recognizing your own typos, grammar mistakes, and inaccuracies. You know what you want to say; it’s just not always communicated in your writing. When you act as your own proofreader, you may often overlook mistakes because your eye doesn’t recognize them as mistakes.

Publishing my first novel has been a very interesting experience. Now that it is being read by many and reviews are pouring in, I’m learning something new regarding editing – you need many eyes. I did pay to have my text professionally proofread and edited, however, even then things have squeezed through the cracks. After [...]