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Getting Real About Self-Publishing Costs

Joanne Sprott · March 5, 2019 ·

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, …

Word vs. InDesign for Document Revisions

Joanne Sprott · January 8, 2019 ·

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 …

In Search of a Smooth Read

Joanne Sprott · December 4, 2018 ·

Taking a philosophical turn on the editing and proofreading thing today. There are all kinds of tools that editors use to find inconsistencies in word usage or capitalization, punctuation, etc. that make a proofreading pass, for example, go faster. Since most of these tools are not available for the Mac operating system (the one I use), I've found that I rely on keeping an old-fashioned style sheet (recording how a term was spelled or capitalized or hyphenated, etc., and then doing search). But …

The Virtue of Editorial Flexibility

Joanne Sprott · November 6, 2018 ·

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 …

What is Book Shepherding?

Joanne Sprott · October 9, 2018 ·

As I've been expanding my skill set in the publishing process, I've been thinking about what to call what I do, and last year, the idea of shepherding came to mind. I'd been informally advising some self-publishing authors about that particular process and the basic aspects of editing that they'd have to go through, along with the book design process. So, I thought, hey, this guiding stuff is just like being a shepherd, a publishing process shepherd. Of course, once I went to Google and …

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