Writer, Editor, Helper

For Writers: When Nobody Loves Your Baby

 

Photo: Moacir P. de Sá Pereira

Publishing a book is sometimes compared to having a baby. The similarities are undeniable: the seminal idea, the gestation, the labor. But at “birth,” the metaphor hits a wall, because in real life nobody—nobody—has an ugly baby. When the pix go up on Facebook, scroll through the comments:

Beautiful baby—congratulations!
What an adorable dolly!
Sooooooooo precious!
Cutie pie!

In 118 comments you won’t find one thumbs-down. Not a single “OMG—I am so sorry” or “Dang—better luck next time.” What’s more, even if a comment or two betray a little honesty in their hedging (“Love the pix!” “Thanks for sharing!”), a parent is not for one second going to have doubts about that baby as a result.

How different it is for a book: if that baby’s ugly, you’re gonna hear it. Maybe your Facebook friends won’t tell you, but you’ll hear it one way or another, either in negative reviews or in the sad, empty silence that comes when a book is ignored. And then how can you not have doubts?

I have at least one friend who doesn’t read reviews—at least the bad ones. Instead, she puts her friends on alert to send her good ones only. I see her reasoning: why should she let a lousy review by a single stranger have the power to depress and anger her?

You may have guessed why this is on my mind: my new children’s book, on the cusp of publication, is now in the hands of reviewers. Every day I tell myself that I should be reveling in this phase before anyone’s disdain (or discovery of typos) can dim my joy. But instead I bite my nails and check my Google alerts.

Maybe I’ll learn something from the criticism. Or take heart from evidence that even negative reviews can increase a book’s sales.

But sales will be cold comfort if someone calls my baby names.

I’ll let you know the minute the little bundle arrives. And maybe you’ll let me know if you see a good review?

 

Hobbled?

 

Photo by Upyernoz

Do you have any deficiencies that you find dispiriting?

Me too.

I cannot play card games, for instance—I can never keep track of which cards have been played. To my mind, a given card could appear at any time, even if I played it myself in the last hand. I also despair of trivia contests, because even when I know the answer, my brain seems to lock up until someone else says it first. And speaking French—forget it. In my neighborhood, if you aren’t fluent, you just look like an idiot. Pah. Stupide comme le fromage.

It’s not that I have no talents. Once I was the only person who passed a driving test that involved backing around a line of orange cones. I’m also an expert at pretending not to be ticklish. Probably to this day my children think I’m not, because years ago, with superhuman determination, I was able to hide my pain and hysteria so the sadistic toddlers would go away.

Okay, to the point. (Clue: it’s one I’ve hammered on before.) Why, oh why, would a person whose job involves sitting all day at a computer working in MS Word, why would that person choose not to learn how to do it well? Why would that person ever, ever, choose to drift from the keyboard over to the mouse, mosey the cursor up to the top menu, click on View, and meander down to Footnotes—six hundred times a day? Multiply this by all the common functions a person accesses via those menus, and by my math, this amounts to way more time than we have before we die. And to spend it all in mindless repetition? How could that person not hate her job?

Skill is a relative concept, and there are plenty of word-processing tasks I haven’t mastered. But I feel it’s fair to say that any copyeditor who works for money and doesn’t use shortcuts for the most basic typing functions is not only making life difficult for himself—he’s cheating his employer by wasting time.

To find, replace, copy, cut, paste, toggle tracked changes on and off, single-space or double-space, make italic or roman, switch from normal to print view—you know which chores you do most often. Yes, they’re called “work,” but work doesn’t have to be that hard.

It is much more fun and rewarding and ethical to be good at your work. It’s easy to search online for “MS Word shortcuts.” Don’t be overwhelmed by the lists—most of the items won’t apply to your work at all. Learn just one or two tricks at a time.

I promise you’ll be tickled with the results.

Trigger-Happy

 

Photo by Let Ideas Compete

Long ago and far away, I worked for a copy chief who introduced me to the editorial concept of gratuitous meddling. I would like to be able to say that she was a wise and patient master imparting wisdom to the neophyte. But in fact she was a gratuitous meddler herself and was loathed by the copyediting pool. “Gratuitous meddling” was a favorite phrase of my workmates, who used it frequently in their ridicule.

I latched onto the phrase then, and decades later it still springs to mind when I read complaints from writer victims.  A copyeditor will change “in no wise” to “in no way.” Or “most important” to “most importantly.” Or “stanched” to “staunched.” She’ll break an endnote of three citations into three separate notes and change two hundred instances of Sophokles to Sophocles in a text written by a distinguished professor of Greek literature.

Can the mere possession of a red pencil make someone so trigger-happy she loses all restraint?

H. G. Wells famously quipped that “no passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft,” and there’s something in that. Once the tracking is turned on, you’re itching to leave some tracks. Competent prose can be downright irritating when you’re young and energetic and on a mission to whip the literary world into shape. Come on, come on, you think—surely I know something this writer doesn’t! Sure you do. But it isn’t that. Or that. Or that.

You sit with a dictionary and search engine close at hand. Then why oh why aren’t they your weapons of choice? If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a hundred times:

First, do no harm.

Look it up.

And when in doubt, keep your hands in the air.

 

Who Has Time to Read? It’s Book Fair Season

 

Over the weekend Chicago’s annual Printers Row Lit Fest happened, and this time I was free to make the most of it.

I was allegedly there to sign books, browse books, and read books, but that was not my goal. Rather, the goal was to bump into and schmooze with all the most interesting readers, writers, and publishers in the Midwest and suck the latest trends and information out of their brains before strolling on to the next encounter.

Although I enjoyed talking to writers about the books they were selling, the most spirited conversations I had were with people trying to figure out how to work the endless permutations of publishing options these days.

For instance, a successful local independent publisher told me that his next experiment is to sell long essays, nonfiction articles, and novelettes in digital form for a dollar or two. His gimmick? He’s going to call them . . . books. “They are books,” he said. “Short books.” He thinks readers are smart enough to look at the price and the word count and judge the value for themselves.

Self-publishers are honing game plans as well. One, a writer of middle-grade humor for boys, assured me that “most stuff” is self-published now. I suppose he’s right—if he’s talking about “stuff” that appears on the Internet and doesn’t sell to anyone but friends and relatives. Next to one of his books a sign read “Amazon Top Ten Best Seller.” I was momentarily impressed—until I realized that he was taking advantage of the attenuated category rankings that allow Amazon to give almost any book some kind of standing: in this case something like #10 Amazon Best Seller in Books > Children’s Books > Middle-Grade > People & Places > Boys & Men > Humor > Body > Farts > Mildly Funnier Than #11.

Another entrepreneur was seeking publication the old-fashioned way, strolling from booth to booth with his fliers and chatting up anyone trapped behind a stack of books to sell. That I wasn’t a publisher did not deter him from pitching his “Calendar of the Strange: Featuring 12 Months of True Life Weirdness.” It didn’t deter him when he approached me in booth C at 11:30 a.m., and it didn’t deter him when he approached me in booth DD at 12:30.

In different ways, all three of these conversations inspired me: to be open to new media and not overly influenced by buzzwords and labels; to write what I love, try new forms of publishing, and not worry how it will be pigeonholed at Amazon; and, well, to accept that some forms of promotion are not for me.

Although I did sell a few advance copies of my new book,* the most fun part was giving one away to a ten-year-old girl who drew a winning ticket from the hat and got her choice of the donated books on display. To my astonishment she chose mine. I said, “Wow—did you know that that’s my book?” and her mom said, “This lady wrote that book!” and the little girl’s face lit up with surprise and happiness. I wrote in her book, “To Marie, with thanks for being the first child in the world to choose my book,” and I asked if she would e-mail me after she finished reading it, and she promised she would. I can’t stop thinking about how happy it made us all. I really hope she likes it.

I hope you get to a book fair this summer, too, but if you don’t, I hope you at least read a good book.

______

*For children, and technically not out yet, but I’ll let you know the minute it is.

Dear Carol: E-book Indexes, Elusive Endnotes, and Wildcard Searches

Dear Carol,

Everything has changed with the advent of e-books. As a new e-book creator, I’m confused about indexes. It would seem that the traditional format (item name, page number) wouldn’t work in an e-book, simply because of the lack of page numbers. However, I’m a huge fan of indexes. What’s the scoop, Copy Editor?

Anonymous

Dear Anon.,

Although I too love a good index, I usually find what I need in my e-books by searching. I like the way the search results on my Kindle show a snippet of text with each result, so it’s easy to see which of the locations is the one I want.

Unfortunately, this type of searching doesn’t give you the kind of useful organizational information you can get from a well-built index, which gives you a glimpse of the bones of a book and lures you from one search to another. An e-search doesn’t allow you to browse.

Some e-books do have indexes, but they are useful only if the locators are active links. Then it doesn’t matter whether the locators are page numbers or some other kind of marker, as long as they take you where you want to go. Let’s hope that in future more and more e-books will feature linked indexes.

Dear Carol,

Can you explain why a book would have endnotes, but nothing in the text to denote the note? No superscripted 1 or * or whatever? I’m reading a Penguin Classic and, because I’m a denizen of the twenty-first century and only a periodic visitor to the nineteenth, I had need of endnotes. But, as I said above, the book didn’t seem to have them; or, at any rate, the text didn’t give any clue that I could find endnotes at the end. When I flipped to the back of the book, it was with a bit of magic in mind; maybe, I thought, I could will endnotes to appear. And there they were. Now, I didn’t will them to appear—I’m not a wizard. But I’m left frustrated because how was I to know? And furthermore—how are endnotes like that even helpful? Do I just wait until I run across something confusing and hope for the best about my worst? (My worst being a lack of knowledge about historic episodes in and around St. Louis.) Bewilderingly yours,

Mike

Dear Mike,

Granted, Penguin might have listed “Notes” in the table of contents to tip you off. They might even have splurged on a footnote early on in the book—something like “Notes keyed to the text begin on p. 325.” But this type of documentation is not uncommon, and as a reader of Penguin Classics, you thought to flip to the back, as will other readers hoping to find notes. So . . . as problems go, this seems pretty low on the angst-o-meter. (Maybe I’ll try to will readers to send more urgent queries next time.)

Dear Carol,

Say you’re editing a document in MS Word that is divided into many chapters. But now you’re told that the author wants all those “chapters” to be called “sections,” pronto. If you do a simple search and replace for the word “chapter,” it would be chaos, since the document does refer to chapters in other books and uses cross-references inside the text. The fact that the chapter titles are written in boldface can help you search, because you can tell Word to search for Chapter ^# (Match case; in bold). However, the problem is that Word doesn’t let you use expressions like ^# in the Replace field, so you can’t tell it to replace Chapter ^# with Section ^#. So how do you replace something while keeping the wildcard in your search field intact? It’s a long-winded description, but I hope it’s clear enough. Thanks for your help.

F.

Dear F,

With slightly more advanced searching and replacing techniques, you can get Word to do exactly what you want. The Editorium “Freebies” page has a link to its “Advanced Find and Replace for Microsoft Word,” a detailed (and amusing) instructions manual for just that.

In the case of your chapters-to-sections change, open the Find and Replace box, and checkmark the Use Wildcards box. In the Find box, hit Ctrl+B (to search for bold type), and type the following string:

Chapter ([0-9]@)

This tells Word to find the capped word “Chapter” followed by a space, followed by a number between 0 and 9, followed by any other number (since you have many more than nine chapters). Next, in the Replace With box, type this:

Section \1

This tells Word to replace the first expression in the Find box (“Chapter” followed by a space) with the word “Section” followed by a space. The \1 tells Word to replace the second expression in the Find box (the numbers) with themselves. Thus, Chapter 1 will be replaced by Section 1, and so forth. (If you read Editorium’s short section called “Wildcard Grouping,” that explanation will begin to look a little friendlier.)

A caveat: You were wise to anticipate the chaos that can come from wildcard searching. Whenever you do a replacement like this, it’s safest to make the changes one at a time so you can check them as you go.
______
Readers: Write to me at my Questions and Suggestions page!