Writer, Editor, Helper

Your Word Processor Wants to Please You

In my line of work, I hear a lot about the annoyances of typing on a computer. People hate it when MS Word* springs a pop-up in the middle of certain tasks, or vetoes perfectly good grammar, or automatically uses the Calibri font, or capitalizes words meant to be lowercased, or highlights a whole word when they want to highlight only part of it.

What many writers and editors don’t seem to understand is that computers do as they’re told but would be happy (so to speak) to do otherwise. We can tell them what to do!

Finding and Citing Sources? Librarians Are Ready and Waiting to Help

Bartle Library, Binghamton University. Photo courtesy Flickr.

Chatting with a group of college and university librarians recently, I was struck by both their enthusiasm and their frustration: enthusiasm over the increasing power of technology to aid in scholarly research, and frustration that educating students and teachers is proving to be such a challenge.

The group unanimously perceived a lack of skills among its clientele: Students are routinely flummoxed as to how to search for or evaluate the sources they need in their work. But even as librarians are poised to teach information technology through classes, online tutorials, and one-on-one sessions, actually laying hold of student time and attention depends on faculty support—and that is not always easy to find.

Self-Publishing: It’s Not Just for Books

                                                                                    Photo: Okinawa Sobi

[The other day fellow copyeditor Mark Allen asked me to write about my recent experiences in self-publishing. I said I was afraid of sounding like an ad for CreateSpace or for my own book; he said he didn’t think I should worry. I’m a little worried, but here goes anyway. If you don’t like it, please complain to Mark.—Carol]

For some time now I’ve been curious about services like Lulu and CreateSpace that allow an individual to upload materials and publish them as print-on-demand books at no cost. How could this be? What’s the catch?

I watched the overview video at CreateSpace and was impressed. Not by the examples of writers who had made it big—anyone who expects that to happen is a dreamer—but by the explanation of how the program works.

And it does work. With no intention of actually publishing anything, I worked through the process using the first year of my blog posts as content. There were remarkably few glitches; consultants were available to advise when I needed help; and I didn’t spend one red cent that wasn’t optional before I finished.*

Mind you, there was plenty of temptation to spend money on the services that Amazon offers at every step of the way. No doubt that’s where they make the real money from self-publishers: developmental editing, copyediting, cover design, marketing. Although I have some skills and resources that allowed me to decline their services,** the fact remains that anyone with a computer can make a book. I made mine using only the applications that came installed on my laptop. If you have PageMaker or InDesign, you’ll have fewer hurdles than I did.

Print-on-demand publishing is a small economic miracle. It allows the printing and binding of documents in very small quantities without incurring the overhead costs of publishers who must store and market large print runs. Much ink has been spilled over what this means for conventional book publishers. But here is what struck me: not enough has been said about the benefits to the individual of having a way to self-publish materials other than the next great American novel.

Books require marketing, and very few writers are in a position to market their work effectively. How many people have published a book at iUniverse or Lulu that actually sold in any quantity to someone other than themselves? My guess is that the percentage is very small.

But say you have a project that does not need marketing, something you would like to make available to friends or family or simply have bound into a volume for yourself—a memoir or photo history or collection of old letters or poems or recipes. Or maybe you have a diary or journal that currently resides only in electronic form. Or you run a business and would like to print a hefty documents archive for investors. Any such trove of documents that you would like to be printed and bound into a book, but are reluctant to spend money on because—not to mince words—you’re cheap, could be uploaded and printed for a small price. What’s more, your creation would remain available online indefinitely to anyone who was interested in it.

By the time I finished my project [self-promotion alert!], I was so enchanted by my own back cover copy, I decided to publish the book. I even indexed it. The result is Moonlight Blogger, a collection of all the posts from this site from May 2010 to July 2011. If no one buys it, I’m out only my labor, which was more fun and educational than laborious.

Quite honestly, I think I’m hooked. I’m considering having my son’s fantasy novel printed into a volume for him for Christmas. He’s been writing it for years, and it could be years before he’s done. . . . I’ll just label it volume 1.

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*I did opt to buy proof copies at various stages, even when I didn’t need them. I wanted them for show-and-tell when I speak to groups about publishing. They were cheap—between $3 and $5 each, plus shipping. CreateSpace is experimenting with offering electronic review of proofs—an excellent idea—but I think most writers will wish to see their work printed out at least once during the process, especially if they want to check the quality of illustrations.

**I even designed my own cover without using a free cover-design template, although a book designer friend I showed it to couldn’t resist tweaking it a bit over a glass of wine. The templates are better than my homemade effort—next time I would use one.

Live on your radio today . . .

(Ahem.) That will be me at Dellani’s Tea Time at Blog Talk Radio. I’ll be talking about my new children’s novel Eddie’s War in conversation with host Dellani Oakes and writer Daniel Ferry. Please join us!

4 PM Eastern Time. To listen in, follow this link.

Before You Submit: Some Tips for Self-Editing

My colleague Geoffrey Pullum’s musings on our tendency to see motes in the writing of others while ignoring logs in our own raises the question of how writers are supposed to edit themselves in the first place.

All Lawyers Are Not Liars: True or False?

All lawyers are not liars: true or false?

If you answered “True,” would you also say that all pizzas are not edible, or that all editors are not sticklers, or that all peeves are not justified?