And every once in a while, a perfect client will give the editor a recommendation, or write some nice things about the editor in a blog post.

I am very fortunate to have a wonderful list of clients right now.  Thank you for your business; it makes work fun.

My client, Rob Mahan Books

When is exposition your best choice for revealing information? What are other options and how do you choose? This is a subject relevant to both fiction and nonfiction writers seeking to make their work come alive for readers. Explore ways to make your writing pop with our panelists in a discussion and Q&A.

Panelists will also discuss ways to make the most of your research by repurposing it for other projects and markets.

Saturday, March 17th, 2012 11:00 AM-1:00 PM, Tokyo Buffet, 7217 Greenback Ln, Citrus Heights, CA.

You never get so good that you can’t learn more. And if you can get some opportunities for professional growth in the company of fine people like Judith Horstman, JT Long, Kate Asche, Margie Yee Webb, Amy Rogers, and some asian buffet, even better!

Here’s some advice to aspiring authors: Scour the events in your area for writing club meetings and take advantage of what they have to offer. Even if you know most of what there is to be said on the topic, you might pick up something from an angle you’d never thought about before.

“Bigger is always better in the American imagination. But I am here to tell you–six books and nearly a decade later– that this mind-set is parochial and self-defeating. It’s also complete nonsense.” 

If you aren’t yet familiar with small presses, it’s time.  Here’s Poets &Writers Database of Small Presses. 

On the one hand, editors from traditional publishing houses and the agents who are the gatekeepers for them are still treated like movie stars, and getting them to read and acquire your manuscript is still presented as the capstone of the writing process.  Talk of their demise still, too often, largely sounds like sour grapes. Yes, the trad model is being forced to change by digital options. Technology has always forced change. That’s the way it goes.

And, yes, on the other hand, this change is allowing for the democratization of publishing, and it is allowing more great stories to be made available to the public. All the financial benefits, if there are any, fall to the writer. It doesn’t take close to three years for a book to get to an audience. And. And. And.

Here’s one side of what I came away from SFWC with:  Self publishing is still the less-favored stepchild, despite all the popular rhetoric to the contrary. Self-publishers (and the editors who assist them) are still seen as less trustworthy, even by the most outspoken advocates of self-publishing.*

Part of the reason for this is the same reason that so many writers flock to self-publishing.  Anyone can do it. And with no gatekeepers, lots of shit gets through. Agents and editors at publishing houses continue to serve a valuable function when it comes to debut fiction–they filter a lot of stuff that is not ready to be read. They filter first drafts and keep them off of the bookshelves.

If you are a writer intent on publishing on Amazon, the onus is on you to help change the bad reputation of self-published books. I heard a lot of talk about this at the conference, and I loved to hear it, both as an editor (duh) and also as a voracious reader.

If I buy a book I want it to be better than the first drafts I am being paid to edit. I will only buy so many bad self-published books before I decide I won’t waste any more money. I have heard this a lot. Many people still don’t trust self-published authors.

If every wanna-be writer keeps publishing the books they write without the benefit of writing classes or critique groups or editorial services, the quality of the books….  An old rant.

The reason I’m excited to be a part of publishing now is that I believe this is changing.  At SFWC I heard a lot about writers taking responsibility for the publisher role, and this means if you’re going to be a publisher you have to think like a business person.

Publishing is in a state of flux. Traditional publishing has to modify itself and knows it. Self-publishing really has nowhere to go but up. Ride with me on the front of the wave.

*I am basing this on the answer I received to a question I asked Alan Rinzler at the conference.

The Nor Cal EFA hosted speaker Judith Horstman in January, and she provided the participants with insider information about writing for magazines and talked a bit about her new book.

I attended the California Writers Club and met Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, who confirmed for me the importance of digital publishing and presented a convincing argument regarding the obsolescence of the old publishing model and its gatekeepers. While there, I ran into an author whose debut novel I had just downloaded to my Kindle, at the suggestion of a mutual friend, but had not yet started reading.

Uploading a correctly formatted document into Smashwords was actually more difficult than the founder purported it to be, but getting it to work was a technological learning experience that didn’t kill me and therefore made me stronger.

Completing a substantive edit on a statistics textbook for a non-native English speaker contracted to Wiley allowed me to breathe a sigh of relief, and confidently say that my comprehension of statistics increased tremendously!  It also allowed me to use my APA knowledge, neglected in the fiction world.

San Francisco Writers Conference orientation was held in January and the event is next weekend, February 17-19.  I’ll be there. Will you? Come visit me at the Cafe Ferlinghetti, where I’ll be hanging out early Saturday morning and throughout the afternoon on Friday.

I’ve got fiction manuscripts lined up all quarter; working with a 630 page suspense novel currently, and this will be followed right away by a suspenseful love story, then a contemporary fiction/social justice novel, then Brad’s sequel comes in to me, then a mystery.  Phew!  Gotta love it. Thanks to Mark Coker and others like him, there are a lot of people out there taking the bull by the horns and going for it.  Thankfully, they are embracing the need for an editor before they put it out to the world.

Two recent articles talk about the importance of an editor in the self-publishing process.  This one, in Huff Post, and this, in the San Francisco Book Review.

You keep on writing and I’ll keep on reading. And writing.

Can we every really understand why our fathers behave the way they do? Can we comprehend what exactly it is that they pass on to us?

And why is it that sometimes we can’t keep ourselves from steering straight into disaster?

Steve Almond is in these pages, helping us to see the trouble with easy listening, as he explains how the move away from vinyl has affected his relationship with music and, for all of us, the very act of listening.

Contemplate why a woman would have herself wrapped in red crepe paper in the desert.

And more. In this gorgeous book, available in digital and print editions here.

Subscribe here.

Over the last couple of holiday weeks, it was my pleasure to read This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey, hot off the Harvard Book Store’s EBM, by Steve Almond (who I am so excited to announce is a featured author in the next issue of Under the Gum Tree, due out in Jan. 2012), A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan, No One Here Gets Out Alive by Daniel Sugarman, everything under the Music category at The Rumpus, Stephen Elliott’s Daily Rumpus- daily, and because of that, “Adrian Brody” (still thinking about that one).  And because I’m a girl, I’m listening to a book on CD– Life, by Keith Richards (unabridged, on 20 CDs)– read by Johnny Depp.  I still might buy the hardcopy.

I bought 2011 American Short Fiction, and am eagerly awaiting its arrival in my mailbox. I bought Anne R. Allen’s latest release for my Kindle (okay, maybe this is research, as was Amanda Hocking’s book Hollowland).  I just know I’m forgetting something, and leaving out what I’m reading with my kid.

What are you reading? Are you on Goodreads? Friend me there, if you are!

You probably didn’t notice that my site was down again last week.  I don’t understand why anyone would want to hack little old me, but whatever. (Hey, while I’m under, you might as well…) Now I have a little facelift!  This is one aspect of freelancing that I really enjoy– no, not the hacking part– but the fact that I get to hire other creative freelancers and work with them.  Thanks again, Glenn Weatherson, freelance web designer, for being my web-guy and dealing with all the rigamarole at Word Press.

At the recent Self Publishing Boot Camp, I spoke about the need for an editor before self-publishing. I focused particularly on a novel or memoir, because the whole purpose of a book like this is that it engages the reader. If it doesn’t engage the reader, your book will not be successful, or worse, it will attract negative reviews and make you sad.

Someone who has a background as an acquisitions editor at a literary agency or publishing house or who selects and acquires fiction for literary magazines that you like to read might be a good fit for you. I talked about professional readers in my last post. I also talked a bit about Brad. I want to come back to him.

Brad DeHaven hired me to read what he had tentatively titled, “Beyond the Picket Fence.” It was a 65 page memoir of his life. He was 50.  The manuscript began before his conception, at the conception of his brother, took the reader through his dysfunctional family situation, his mother’s re-marriage to a Greek mobster who beat him, his drug use and violent teenage years, his brother’s incarceration, meeting the woman he would marry, the upbringing of his children, and culminated in the tale, essentially, of how he went undercover to bust his son’s drug dealer.  All this incredible story in 65 pages. Like a freight train headed from point a to point b, it barreled through telling the reader this happened then this happened then this happened. It was a great story, and he has a fantastic voice. The book, the way it was put together, was ineffective.

We had to find the real story in all of that. What did he want the story’s takeaway to be? Where was the hook? The real story was how despite the experiences from his own youth, he was unprepared to deal with his son’s addiction to a powerful prescription painkiller.  We worked together on a developmental edit.  It became Defining Moments: A Suburban Father’s Journey Into his Son’s Oxy Addiction.

A developmental edit is what you hope your book doesn’t need, frankly.  It takes the most time and costs the most money.  It doesn’t know what kind of story it wants to be yet. A professional can help a writer uncover this. If it has no focus, it probably needs a developmental edit. If the reader can’t tell who the story is about, it probably needs a developmental edit.

A substantive edit is more common.  Sometimes this is called a heavy line edit. The writer understands what the story is and has a decent story arc, cast of characters, resolution. The writer may not have well-rounded characters, there may be inconsistencies with narrative voice or point of view, there may be needless layers of filtering or instances of telling where it really needed to be revealed in a scene.  Most manuscripts have these problems, which interfere with the emotional connection the reader makes with the story.

The ability to eliminate these problems is what separates the writer whose self published book languishes on even the shelf of his best friend and the writer whose book is read and recommended and passed around and receives favorable review.

Common problems that necessitate a substantive edit (via pptx nee jpg):