April 11, 2012 in General Topics
We expect feedback and criticism from readers, even though the vast majority aren’t experienced writers. In a similar vein, while I’m new to Twitter (February of this year, I kid you not), I know enough from a professional background to question if certain kinds of tweets are really the best use of an author’s time. Read the rest of this entry →
March 30, 2012 in General Topics
I have always loved Star Trek: First Contact, and it’s on my personal list of all-time favorite science fiction films. When one examines it alongside its sister films, it’s easy to see why it worked so well. And in comparison with the other three films, it lays open a host of lessons for an author. What does Picard and company’s second outing teach us that the other three movies don’t?
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March 7, 2012 in General Topics
One thing drilled like an oil derrick into the head of an author — particularly someone ePublishing some or all of their work, like I will soon be — is the need to keep their blog updated on a regular basis. Of course this is part of attracting and retaining a following of regular readers, and associates in this business respect a blog providing meaningful content.
But beware the temptation to slip into a routine. Here’s how I drove away regular readers, at least until recently.
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July 19, 2009 in General Topics
Word is still the defacto office application, and I use it in my writing. However, the application can make life harder than it needs to be when prepping a sub.
I’ve learned how to prep a sub better over time, and figured it might help sharing these tips here. I’m going to follow each hypothetical editor’s submission guideline with how to format said text:
“We need a blank line between paragraphs.”
In Word, do a find and replace. You want to replace all instances of ^p with ^p^p. Make sure to only have the story’s text selected.
“We only want documents in rich text format.”
I imagine most of you will know how to do this, but for the non-tech-savvy out there, use the “save as” function in Word to save the document as “rich text format”. For each tales submissions folder, I like to have a separate sub-folder called “alternate versions”. This is where I park all those versions I’ve created before to match an editor’s specific style request, like 12-point font, anything other than courier–and hot pink wingdings center-justified.
“We want submissions pasted in the body of an e-mail.”
I’ll make no secret of the fact that this is a royal pain to the writer, but if it makes the customer happy, so be it. They have their editorial system down and we must adhere to it.
To do this, first make sure your e-mail client is sent to plain text. I use gmail for everything I do now (no local items to restore in the case of a disk loss), and if you are as well you can find the option when you’re composing a new message. To the right of the formatting bar, simply click “Plain Text”.
Next, you’ll need to manually indent your cover letter with spaces instead of tabs (at least for gmail). Then you get into pasting the story, which is where the fun really starts.
Open your document up and select the story’s text. Use the find and replace for blank lines between paragraphs, as stated above, if the market requires it.
Note, however, that if you paste the text in like this, you’ll see some tabs carry over, but many won’t, leaving ugly text. To solve this, replace all tabs in the source text of the story with five spaces. You can do this by doing a find and replace on the selected text with ^t getting replaced by five manual spaces.
I’ve yet to find a way to easily replace underlining for emphasis, which is lost when the text is pasted over, so I usually have to do a manual compare between the source text and the e-mailed story text. When that’s done, you’re finally ready. Even then, things might not come out perfect, but I’ve never seen an editor that doesn’t respect the effort involved.
Don’t forget to avoid saving changes to your text.
Some might point out that you could create macros to do all this functionality. I’d be worth a shot, but I can’t help but wonder if you and the other editors that eventually get your regular attachments would be dogged by macro warnings.
Hope this helps anyone out there struggling with this.
Stay tuned.
April 26, 2009 in General Topics
One of the biggest pains in my writing life is submitting fiction. For those of you that might be new to writing, I highly recommend the use of a spreadsheet to track your submissions. A simple excel sheet makes like much easier in this regard.
In my case, the sheet has all the necessary fields I’ve come to rely on when submitting work:
That’s really all there is to it. I’ve other useful worksheets in the spreadsheet, such as “Retired Stories” and “Sales Records” (which helps me track rights sold), but this is all basic, simple, and a must if you’re tracking say, fifteen active tales like I am at the moment.
Of course, as an editor you could always make my workload easier. I’ve many decent pieces of fiction. Won’t you consider buying some?
😉
Stay tuned.
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