Editing - Story Tips - Publishing

Why You Should Edit Before You Send to An Editor Whether you’re publishing your book yourself, sending to an agent, or to a publisher follow these important tips. When you’re getting ready to send your manuscript off, always remember you are the writer. Editors do the editing. You wouldn’t send your car to the car...

Engage Your Reader with Active Voice in Your Writing While it has it’s uses – mostly in business writing – passive voice is considered weak and unappealing. Technically speaking, voice is determined by the property of a transitive verb which shows whether the subject of a sentence acts or is acted upon. Lets look at...

You’ve Written “The End” – But Is Your Book Ready? Okay, so you’ve finally reached the magic words, The End. But is it really? Are you done? Have you really finished your book? Chances are, you haven’t. If you’ve only written the words The End, once or twice – if you’ve spent very little time...

The First Fifty – Crucial – Pages of Your Book The first fifty pages of your book are crucial for setting the hook in your readers. Something has to happen. Something exciting, or intriguing, or you risk losing your reader’s interest. Limit Backstory – It’s always tempting in the beginning to fill the reader in...

How Many Manuscript Drafts Should You Go Through? When working on a book of any kind, if you haven’t gone through a minimum of three drafts, you probably don’t have a finished product. The first draft should be seen only as an opportunity to articulate and develop ideas in a rough form. This tells you...

What is an Adverb?  An adverb is a word that modifies a verb, an adjective, or another adverb. Here’s some examples: Adjective Form: happy clear close dear perfect Adverb Form: happily clearly closely dearly perfectly Of course, not all adverbs in in ly as the following list demonstrates: quite very much right too never  soon...

The Dreaded LYs When discussing adverbs in regards to writing fiction, the kind we’re usually talking about are the ly words – like clearly, dearly, and madly. Many high-brow critics complain that the use of adverbs like this is a lazy man’s (or woman’s) tool. I remember the first time I turned in some of...

Editing Your Final Draft Whether you’re self-publishing your book, sending to an editor, or to a publishing company — ideally you want to send your ultimate best work — even if you’re having someone else edit it for you prior to publishing. I have done a lot of editing. Editors are people too — just...