Joanne E Sprott, Book Shepherd

I support your story's vision, one keystroke stroke at a time

Blog Archive

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Professional vs. Peer Editing

As a professional editor and proofreader, I am about 99% in favor of professional editing and proofreading. Not just because it’s my bread and butter, though. I’ve been a voracious reader since age seven, and I really want good copy to make my reading experience awesome.

Self-Publishing Cost Trade-Offs

I do understand that indie authors who are self-publishing may find it difficult to afford professional assistance in all areas of getting their books out into the world.

  • Do you put your money into cover art because you can only draw stick figures, or do you put it into interior book design?
  • Do you pay for upfront writing coaching or more mechanical copy editing and proofreading?
  • Do you get a manuscript evaluation or pay for professional marketing help?

It can be a hard call on some of these steps.

Pros and Cons of Peer vs. Pro Editing

Whatever your other choices, I do advise against counting on yourself and your friends for all your editing-related needs. We all get blind to our own material after many rewrites for one thing, and your friends may either not have very discerning eyes or may not want to criticize your work. Yes, because they are your friends. 🙂

If I were working a book project where I wanted to save money and still get some professional attention, I’d put it into copy editing and proofreading. Your friends have a better chance of giving you value in the overall reading department (manuscript evaluation). They will likely know if they like the story and if it moved along in a way that makes sense.

Another set of eyes and brain is really crucial to fine-tuning your prose, though. An English major may or may not be necessary, but you will “get what you pay for” on this point. Someone who’s been trained to read with an editor or proofreader’s eye will be more likely to see typos, missing words, and awkward phrasings. In my experience it’s mostly inconsistencies in capitalization and term formation (to hyphenate or not to hyphenate?) that amateur proofreaders miss.

Give the Reader an Experience

Remember that the idea is to create a story so smooth to read that the reader forgets they are reading and is pulled into your world to be transformed by it. If they have to stop and scratch their heads because they can’t follow what you’re saying, or because they keep seeing typos and whatnot (credibility will suffer), then you have lost much of the impact of your story.

Editing and proofreading do affect content and results. Your book is important enough to you to invest time writing it; make sure it creates a great experience for your readers by investing in at least one professional edit.

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Master Pages in InDesign

After several years of working interior book design, I still wonder why Adobe makes their InDesign software so complex. I know that the idea may be to provide a rich palette of tools and options, but it’s still a bit intimidating. I’ve worked with Photoshop before, so I know how much Adobe loves “tools” and “layers.” I think part of the difficulty is that we get so used to the flatter, simpler systems in Microsoft’s document management software. It’s really like going from amateur to pro with Adobe.

Microsoft Word and Book Layout

Word, though, is not a great document layout program. Because you write first and often add styles to paragraphs later (do you know how to use MS Word Styles?), it’s easy to add inconsistencies. And if you don’t use the primitive layout tools in Word at all, your chapter titles could all look different, etc.

What I’m getting used to in InDesign is the concept of design first, content later. With Word, I can write in whatever font and with whatever default layout exists, and then add styles later. With InDesign, I have to make sure I set up the look and feel of my book first. Then I can “Place,” as Adobe calls it, the content in after by pulling in the entire manuscript Word file.

Adobe’s Help System

Lightbulb moments come from my search for tutorials on questions I’ve had. Adobe has an excellent Help system on their site. I like following instructions (that’s always how I built LEGO sets—not into freestyle), so a checklist of steps appeals to me. Sometimes I go find a video lesson, but I do like the self-paced method of going through steps in text.

Master Pages

I discovered Master pages! This is where a lot of your formatting power is in InDesign. Your template is your Master page (or pages—you can have more than one type). Set that up the way you want, add pages, then fill them with imported or typed-in text. I just had to get over doing the bookmaking process “backward.” Do you know how hard it is to wait to design the Master pages and then put the content into see what it looks like?

By following the proper design process, I get to set up automatic things, like the size frame I want to put the content in on the page, page numbers, and running headers and/or footers. These elements are now set, and if I apply that Master to a page or pages in my book, all those things are taken care of. I can also have additional Master pages with different configurations for, say, the first page of a chapter (maybe the page number needs to go at the bottom and no running header).

They are good things, these Master pages. I can now get the basic text of my client’s book flowing properly through the text frames (yes, there are frames for different document parts such as text or image; it’s not already set up as a default text page like in Word).

It has been a long learning curve with InDesign, but the richness of the tools and the ultimate efficiency of the method are definitely worth it to create a professional book design.

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Capitalization: The Consistency Challenge

Dear Writers,

I’m your reader (as well as being an editor/proofreader), and what I’m looking for is a smooth and engaging experience with your words. Inconsistent capitalizing of words that normally aren’t makes me stop and wonder if this instance is different and how it relates to the rest of your story. Don’t make me stop and wonder unless you really want me to pause to absorb a new idea.

The Consistency Challenge

This may sound like I’m being too picky, but if you’re going to capitalize a term because it’s one of your x number of steps to success or the name of your channeled entity, etc., please do it all the time. You may think that you’ll remember, but trust me, you won’t. Most English-using humans don’t. Just isn’t intuitive. If you were German, you’d have internalized the capitalize-all-nouns thing from childhood, but English doesn’t work that way.

I think it’s a good idea to capitalize the important pieces in your new business advice book, but you will need to check (or better yet, have someone else check) to see that you’ve capitalized these terms throughout. Same for names of characters in a fantasy novel (Yarrow the Elf or Wolf the shapeshifter) or a spiritual self-help book (your Angel or Voice).

Please think carefully about how many terms you choose to capitalize. I’ve seen this practice overdone, particularly in spiritual inspiration books. If you capitalize too much, you will lose the impact for your most important concepts.

Just because you’re excited about a concept . . .

I get this sense of over-excitement from too much capitalizing of common nouns. It’s as if I’m being tugged at or yelled at (“This Concept is so Important; it will change your Life!”). It’s OK just to tell me your story or outline your process with bullet points to create space for your ideas. A smooth read of your words and a good layout of your material will go a much longer way toward allowing your ideas to be integrated into my life than simply capitalizing everything.

End of rant, then. 🙂 I’d love to hear about your experience as a reader with this phenomenon; maybe I’m just being too anal. And your experience as a writer in deciding how to use capitalization in your work. Why do you think it’s important?

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Getting Real About Self-Publishing Costs

Let’s get real. Publishing is not likely to be a major profit center in whatever business you are up to unless you plan on writing tens of genre (Westerns, science fiction, fantasy, romance) fiction novels a year. Except for a rare few, that’s how people make their living as writers. Publishing has never been a high profit margin business for either authors or traditional publishers, for that matter.

Nonfiction writing that’s successful is usually used as an accompaniment to something else, like your travel agency business, your spiritual workshops, your academic career, your charitable cause, or your business service. Books then become an investment and possibly additional small profit center for your core business.

So, if you want to publish that book, great, but here’s what I’ve gleaned in the cost area from providing some of the services  involved in getting published. Short-change these services and, yes, you’ll save money and get that book out the door, but you will be unlikely to develop even the hundreds of readers that may give you a tiny profit over time, as well as the sense that you have an audience for your work.

Writing

Remember that your labor is part of the cost equation. If you want to make a living as a writer, then your labor should be billable. If it’s not, then you aren’t making a profit on writing. I’m not saying you should sit down to write with the idea that it’s just to make money, but there is both tangible and intangible value in your time and talent. Make sure you are doing it for true love if you are not making any money at it.

Substantive Editing

Decent substantive editing or ghost writing/coaching (really helping you with the whole structure and storytelling from the beginning) is probably the most expensive investment you’ll make. Good editors and ghost writers will charge $60 to $80 (USD) an hour for their time and talent.

Line or Copy Editing

If you know writing already and are good at it, you may be able to skip step 2 and just get your grammar and consistency checked. You can send out your manuscript to friends and relations for a free look-over, but there will be no guarantee that they’ll know what to look for. Decent editing at this level runs from $35 to about $60 an hour, although I like to charge for the manuscript page (about 250 words per double-spaced 8.5X11 page), and I charge anywhere from $3.00 to $4.00 per page depending on how much work it looks like I’ll have to do. So, for a 250-page manuscript (which will be a fairly short trade (9X6)-sized book), you’re looking at $750 to $1,000.

Interior Design

This one is quite variable because it depends on how fancy you want to get. Just text and no variations like sidebars with images will be the cheapest, with lots of different-sized images to place being most expensive. Discount places offer interior design (not the cover—that’s separate) for $3 a page, but serious professionals doing design with lots of images run up around $6 a page or more. So, say that 250-page manuscript turns into a 200-page book with pictures, and you’re looking at $1200.

Cover Design

Again, this one depends a lot on how fancy you want to get with imagery and fonts (really good pro fonts cost the designer money), which will translate into more Photoshop or Illustrator work, etc. And you’ll want to decide how much to invest for talent as well. It’s not just about time or tools for any of these steps. Depending on complexity, you can end up investing anywhere from $350 to over $1000.

Proofreading

After the book is laid out, you’ll want a last proofread to catch both any leftover typos and any glitches in design (paragraphs not indented properly, headings gone awry, etc.). I’ll charge anywhere from $2.00 to $3.00 per page for proofreading depending on whether or not I was the editor to start with and how complex the design was. For your 200-page book, that’ll come to an average of $500.

Printing

This one all depends on what kind and how many. I went over to Ingram Spark just now and used their calculator for 100 copies of a 6X9, 200-page paperback with no color stuff, and got a quote of $332. But you can get much cheaper or more expensive depending on a lot of factors, including whether or not you need color, what weight of paper, trim size for the book, etc. Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP, an arm of Amazon.com) is really cheap, but if you have an art or photo book, you might want to investigate Ingram Spark or even Lulu.com.

Distribution and Marketing

Some of this may end up being your time again, setting up a website, etc. . Or you can invest in help with this as well (professional site design from $500 to $5000, depending). Keep in mind that the distribution cost will come out of your sales gross by making a deal with Amazon.com or another distributor. You’ll end up with a percentage of each sale (can be 15 percent or up to 70 percent depending on the distributor’s deal with you).

Totals

Here’s a rough average total for services rendered if you have some writing skills already: $4500. Not pocket change, but not totally out of the realm for a middle class person to invest (much less than a newish car, for example, but more than a good entertainment system). If your book is in support of a business consulting operation or a series of workshops or courses, etc., then you may very well find it profitable in the long run to have your writing be another access point to your message for your audience to take home with them. But before you decide to make a living as a writer, make sure that you are cool with the investment or your books will simply collect dust on your own shelf.

I know that we have a strong do-it-yourself theme going on these days in everything from plumbing (read Home Depot) to publishing, but if you really want to make sure your plumbing doesn’t leak and your book has the quality to find a good audience, you need to invest in professional services, and this expertise will incur a significant investment.

So, get real about the investment needed before you try to get published to make the most out of your story or message.

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Word vs. InDesign for Document Revisions

Word vs. InDesign

After I ran into a misunderstanding for a multi-authored book revision between making changes to content and dealing with formatting, I realized again how Microsoft Word-centric most writers and subject matter experts are, and that I need to take extra time to educate in order to avoid client anxiety and create the best input for me in doing a redesign.

Client Expectations

I’ve been tweaking the content, design, and index of the annual new edition of Ocular Anatomy and Physiology since 2015. Dr. Jan Bergmanson shepherds the project every year, and often asks his colleagues to add additional information from recent research. He also has one of his post-doctoral candidates coordinate any changes to the text and additions to the images (there are a lot of images in the book).

The trouble comes from the fact that I work with a new post-doc every year. My coordinators are really good at ocular anatomy and physiology, but they, like most folks, are used to writing documents in text programs like Microsoft Word. They often don’t realize that the designer will lay out the book in another program (InDesign, in my case). They get confused and anxious when they get a chapter by chapter export of the previous edition from the original PDF into Word and the images are floating around, the page breaks are out of sync, etc.

I know it’s fine because I’ll incorporating just the new changes into the already set InDesign layout, but the poor coordinators often think they have to “format” the Word files after the contributors change or add material, as if the Word file of all the chapters together will be the final product.

Microsoft Word’s Layout Issues

Word is definitely not a good book layout program since it tries to be “helpful” and automatically shifts image locations and keeps changing the page flow depending on what it thinks the printer settings are for a given computer. That’s death by a thousand shifts for the index update part of the project, not to mention the often random moves of images from one page to another. A true layout program like InDesign is the best way to control placement of text and images, for looks and for consistent page flow for indexing.

I’ve written a new introduction email from me for the post-docs and any authors that are working on revisions to a book I’ve designed; I can save the client a lot of time and anxiety by reassuring them that they can focus just on the content (but make changes visible to me) and not on trying to “format” the document.

We can all breathe easier with our roles clearly defined, and I can get on with helping create a great book with my client.

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The Virtue of Editorial Flexibility

When I first read this article on a conversation between novelist Donna Tartt and publisher/editor Michael Pietsch, I could definitely see Tartt’s frustration in dealing with editors in the past, which pretty much solidified her wish to stand out by rebelling against “the rules.” I’ll bet she does write readable, comprehensive prose, though, or she wouldn’t be as successful as she is. So, she’s playing by some “rules.” She just doesn’t want to feel that rules are rigidly imposed upon her by outsiders who are applying some semi-arbitrary style book to her creative work.

Pietsch brought up the “invisible hand” issue about editing (which is more influential in substantive/developmental editing than in copy editing or proofreading) and his tone itself stressed the importance of understanding that we editors are challenging, to a certain extent, the writer’s ownership of their creation. We are participating (although mostly anonymously) in the creative process, and therefore a diplomatic and flexible approach (particularly for fiction, I would imagine) is called for. We can’t retreat into some stereotypical Puritanical grammar-lady mode and be of any real assistance to the writer.

Even Tartt admitted that rules might be a good idea for, say, journalism and probably other nonfiction writing, where a standardized approach to communication will create a smooth read for folks who are reading to understand a structure or process. But a “smooth read” is also important for fiction, I think. When I read fiction, I want to get “sucked in” to the writer’s world, to get to a point where I don’t feel like I’m reading words on a page, but actually observing and emotionally participating in the story. I want to come away from the book feeling as if I am still haunted by my experience for a while. I read mostly science fiction and fantasy, so maybe reading more realistic fiction is different, but I doubt it. If the writer’s prose is filled with confusing sentences or even confusing plot process or characterizations that don’t make sense, then my reading experience will be frustrating.

There’s room for individual style, but stretching that grammatical fabric too far does a disservice to the reader (unless you are writing experimental prose for a niche academic audience—I’ve seen how that works). It becomes a balancing act for the editor(s) to be good helpers in supporting the author’s writing and also representatives of the reader and the principles of comprehension. I think it’s funny that editors and proofreaders are so often seen as rigid rule-appliers when, in my experience at least, we’ve had to make so many subjective, contextual calls on best practice based not on a set of rules, but on how the written structure best serves the story the writer is telling.

That’s me, then. Your ally in providing a great reading experience for your audience. First thing I do when I see a manuscript is to follow the writer’s style, figure out how it works, and then only step in to “interfere” when I, as just a reader, find myself stopped and confused, or if I see that the writer’s intent has been sabotaged by his or her own human tendency to forget to be consistent about character personality, the use of words or capitalization, or whatever.

I am here to be of service to you, not to take over ownership of your creative work. If I want ownership, then I’ll write my own books. The only thing I ask is to be given an open-minded consideration of my recommendations. The decision is still yours, dear writer, as is the ownership of your content. 🙂

© 2011 – 2024 Joanne E Sprott, Intuitive Coach