Today’s topic is: What is the one thing you would change about the publishing industry? I have been asked this question before. I’d like for people to read more books, or perhaps I mean pay for more books. It’s no secret that publishers are suffering from drastically reduced sales, attributable not only to the economy but also to developments of our modern world, including amazon, self-publishing and illegal sharing.
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Here’s the thing. I did not expect to get published. I had enough to think about in even finishing a book, let alone sending it off to an agent. Still, in my far-off dreams on the subject I had considered that any form of my name(s) would not work well on the cover of a book because, just as Courtney Schafer complained about her own, nobody spells them correctly. Ever. So when people were suddenly using words like “contract” and “payment” and then I also heard “pseudonym,” decades of correcting credit card representatives and RMV workers had me primed to agree.
There is a strategy to pseudonyms. You want to appear on the right place on the shelf; send a message about your identity (‘Raven’ sends one message, ‘Suzy’ another); show some musicality or rhythm your real name doesn’t have; and leave certain bits of information out of the picture, in many cases gender. (more…)
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The first thing I must say about editing is that I have worked as an editor and copyeditor myself. I am accustomed to cutting out flab, reorganizing information into coherent strings , switching out “which” and “that,” and moving commas. When it comes to commas, every company I have ever worked for used the Chicago Manual of Style. The guidelines therein have soaked through me and into my bones, so that when my victims argue against corrections I can respond with, “Chicago Manual 5.30 . . . Chicago Manual 5.33 . . .” holding up that icon of perfect consistency as proof of my goodwill.But that is not to say I enforce my preferences on everyone. I recommend the Chicago Manual to those who are struggling with punctuation and cannot get a grip on how to use it effectively. But it is the Manual of Style. It is not a rule book. Nothing is more tiresome than people on the internet telling each other what the “rules” are. One does not have to put a comma when a sentence has two different subjects , for example – but once one has chosen to do so, one should do so always. That is the only rule.
And so it happened that when I turned The Emperor’s Knife over to Jo Fletcher Books I knew that a different style may be applied, and it was. I had taken great pride in my perfect punctuation, but it was all wrong, terribly wrong – completely at odds with all acceptable forms of human communication. (more…)
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