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Celebrate National Dog Day with a Good Book (No Promises that the Dog Lives!)
Monday, August 26 is National Dog Day. The holiday was first established 20 years ago by animal advocates with the goal of advocating for the adoption of the numerous dogs found in animal rescues all over the country. According to a 2024 study, 65.1 million households...
Book Review: The Chicago Guide to Copyediting Fiction by Amy J. Schneider
A quality and detailed manual to help in technically revising and formatting works of fiction. Writers and editors, certainly ones new to the trade, are inclined to focus on the importance of official style when it comes to nonfiction writing. The more “serious” the...
7 Tips to Overcome Writer’s Anxiety
After four years of political, social, and medical upheaval, stress is just a part of everyday life. If you aren’t feeling at least a little stressed, congratulations you’re probably a chatbot. The publishing industry is no stranger to stress. We’ve talked about...
Feeling the Burn: How to Avoid Burnout While Writing a Book
For most authors, writing is far more than just a career—it’s a passion. The thought of starting a new book project is, at first, one that sparks rigorous motivation and enthusiasm. But all too often, that initial “get up and go” mentally quickly melts away into...
LGBTQ Books are the Most Challenged in America: Here are Some that Top the List
LGBTQ representation in publishing has grown exponentially over the last decade in a good way. We noted in a previous post that LGBTQ books have gone from being a niche subject in the back of bookstores to bestsellers that are helping to keep publishing alive and...
Celebrating and Honoring Freedom Day: Juneteenth
Juneteenth has been celebrated by Black Americans since 1866, but has been largely overlooked, marginalized, and unknown to many Americans until recently. Juneteenth would not become recognized as a federal holiday until June 18th, 2021, after a proclamation by...
Pride Month Book Recommendations Across Genres
This June, we have a few book recommendations to celebrate Pride: skip the corporate rainbow-washing and instead curl up with a good book by a queer* author featuring queer themes, characters, and insights. The following books, encompassing just some of the diversity...
7 Key Tips for Tackling a New Client’s Style Guide
Diving into work for a new copy editing client is always an exciting time for any editor—but it can also be an intimidating one. And it doesn’t help when you’re trying to wrap your mind around a 10-page style guide you’ve never seen before! But here’s the good news:...
LGBTQ Representation in Publishing is on the Rise, but the Band Plays On
June is designated as Pride Month in honor of the 1969 Stonewall riot, which was seen as the unofficial start of the gay rights movement here in the United States. The movement has seen gains over the years in just about every aspect of American culture, including the...
Should the Onus be on Research Institutes or Publishers to Catch Scholarly Misconduct?
Scholarly misconduct unfortunately seems to be on the rise in recent years. Paper mills are becoming more and more prevalent by the day. More than 8,000 papers were retracted by publisher Hindawi. Wiley’s newest AI paper detection software found that 10-13% of papers...
Getting Graphic: A New Take on the Classic Gothic Novel
World Goth Day is celebrated annually in May. This day can be described, according to World Goth Day’s website, as, "a day where the goth scene gets to celebrate its own being, and an opportunity to make its presence known to the rest of the world." This day was...
What Does ChatGPT Bring to the Editorial World?
On March 16, 2023, ACES, The Society for Editing, hosted a webinar on ChatGPT, calling on the expertise of Samantha Enslen (former ACES board member and writer) and Corinne Jorgenson, COO of Redpoint AI Engineering and Consulting. Enslen and Jorgenson gave a general, succinct overview of ChatGPT (and language networks in general) and explained its benefits...
Getting the Word Out: Social Media Tips and Tricks for Authors
Whether you love it or hate it, there’s no denying that in today’s world, social media is an integral part of how information is spread across society—and that very much includes authors who are looking to share their work with an audience. This opens the door for a flood of questions authors should be asking themselves about how to most effectively...
Hardbacks or Paperbacks: What’s the Right Choice for You?
While the common consensus is that publishing is moving further and further into the ebook market, physical media is still alive. Sales of physical books saw increases in 2020 and 2021 thanks to the pandemic lockdown, and while sales were overall down 6.5 percent in 2022, 788.7 million hardback and paperback books were sold in 2022. This represents a very...
How Long Should My Novel Be?
When you set out to write anything for publication, one of the key things you should ask yourself is “how long should this be?” There are several things that factor into answering this question, from age demographic to genre to narrative form. No matter what you’re writing, or for whom, knowing the average word count for publications and adhering to them...
How to Procure a Cover Designer for Your Book
You should never judge a book by its cover, but that won’t prevent potential readers from passing over your book if they don’t like its cover artwork and design. So how can you commission a book cover that both attracts readers’ attention and accurately communicates what your book is about? Read on for your road map to success. Researching your target...
Before You Start Writing Your Book: Twenty Things to Consider About Your Story
Are you considering writing a book? Maybe you have a vague idea of a story you’d like to tell, but you aren’t quite sure, or maybe you have a solid idea of what you want to write, but … What might you be missing? When I started writing my (still unfinished) book a few years ago, I had no understanding of the journey I was about to take. I later learned...
Technically Speaking – Part 2
Part I of this two-part post focused on the five major steps to successfully approaching a technical writing project without a technical background. Now, in this second installment, we’ll focus on the list of 10 tips and tricks to successfully making that project happen! Tip #1: Focus on what you DO know. While you might not have a huge amount of knowledge...
Word Count in Novels: Is It Important?
Word count — it’s a simple enough thing — write the words and count them. But do word counts really matter when you are writing your novel, and is book length an important thing to consider before publishing? Although there’s no absolute answer, and there’s always an example of that one book in that one genre that was super-short (or super-long) but still...
How to Be a Good Beta Reader: Reading in Exchange for Critique
What Is a Beta Reader? A Beta Reader is asked to read an author’s work when they’ve finished their original edits, but before the professional editing has begun. They help the author handle big-picture questions regarding story, pacing, plot, character, etc. While they’re not typically looking for typos and grammatical mistakes, an author may ask them to...
What’s in a Name? How to Make Sure Your Book Title Looks and Smells as Sweet as a Rose
Maybe I’m showing my age here, but when I was a young adult, I loved going to Barnes & Noble to peruse the new book titles to see what spoke to me. We’re told not to judge a book by its cover, but a cool title on said cover is always helpful in catching the watchful eyes of readers. While some authors with a built-in audience can have an untitled book...