The Proofreader's Parlour
A blog for editors, proofreaders and writers
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This week’s reader question is from Pritti, who’s already secured publishing work but wants to move out of her science commissioning role. Lack of practical experience and relevant qualifications are holding her back.
Pritti says:
Thanks so much for allowing this to be a open forum/platform for beginners like me to ask questions! I am a 23-year-old law graduate who currently works as a commissioning editor for a online science publishing company. However, even though this has been a 'foot in the door' type of position, my heart is really set on going into trade publishing and becoming a freelance editor. Not only that, my position here as a commissioning editor isn't what it actually says on the tin – it's more on the commissioning side of things rather than editing. In fact, I do no editing whatsoever, in my opinion! So I feel like I'm not gaining the necessary skills I need for the industry. I was thinking that obtaining a well-recognized qualification would help get me noticed, as my ultimate goal is to become a freelance editor – but without gaining the necessary experience in my current role, and without the qualifications, I do feel like I'm at loss here. I've also applied for a number of roles but been unsuccessful owing to my lack of experience. Freelance agencies have also rejected my application for the same reasons – not having enough experience. Furthermore, there's also no way of acquiring clients where I work. Please help! Thanks so much for your question, Pritti! I accept that your current role won’t give you the practical experience you require because you’re in a commissioning rather than production role. However, I don’t think that needs to stand in your way of embarking on training that will prepare you for developmental editing, line editing, copyediting or proofreading in a freelance capacity. No training provider will turn you away because you don’t already have the experience! The UK’s Society for Editors and Proofreaders, for example, offers a suite of online training courses designed for novices and experienced professionals alike. I wonder whether because you’re working in-house you’ve got yourself into a mindset of thinking like an employee. If want to work as an independent editor, you need to start thinking like an employer (of yourself). That means sorting out everything for your business from your training to marketing to administration. Getting qualifications My first piece of advice is therefore to sort out the qualifications issue. I’ve covered this in several previous Q&As, so take a look at the articles and the list of national editorial societies below. You haven’t told me where you live but there are several distance-learning options available (in Canada, the US and the UK, for example).
Getting work Freelance agencies are certainly one option, but that’s a narrow approach to take given the many others worthy of exploration. Here are some additional ideas:
Your subject specialism You told me that you’d like to work in the trade publishing sector. The term ‘trade’ refers to the publishing of materials for a general audience. If you want to be found by, for example, independent thriller writers, you’re going to need to be visible, and that may take time while you build your portfolio and your SEO. If you want to do freelance work for trade publishers (for example, Pan Macmillan or Little, Brown) you’ll might well struggle until you have more experience under your belt (unless you get lucky). I think this is something you should set your sights on further down the road. In the meantime, focus your efforts on building your freelance business – marketing yourself and practising your post-qualification craft. I always recommend that new entrants to the field focus attention on the market where they’re most likely to stand out. Specialize in what you know first; diversify later. You have a law degree. I don’t. That’s why I’d never copyedit for a law student or an academic submitting an article to a legal journal. And while I have proofread law books for academic publishers, those clients never asked me to copyedit. Your law degree means you speak a language and have a knowledge base that I don’t (and many other experienced editors don’t). You can use that to differentiate yourself. When I began my editorial business journey, I had professional training, a politics degree and experience of working in-house for a social science publisher. I didn’t spend valuable time trying to get my business off the ground by asking Gollancz if I could proofread their SF Masterworks series (much as I would have loved to do that!). Instead, I went and knocked on the door of social science publishers and spent several years honing my craft with politics, sociology, philosophy, economics and media studies books. Over time, new opportunities arose as I became more visible and my marketing efforts began to bear fruit. But it did take time, and while that happened I concentrated on where my strengths lay so that I could gain experience. I believe that you need to do the same. I think you should focus on the following client groups to begin with:
Some academic publishers also have trade divisions/imprints and so the academic work can deliver trade opportunities to the independent editor. Summing up I hope that helps you get your thoughts in order, Pritti. If you take things one step at a time, I’m confident you can get to a point where you’re immersed in the trade sector. But I’d recommend building up to it by playing to your market strengths. Good luck! You ask. I'll answer
I'm more than happy to tackle questions, especially from beginners. If there's something you want advice about, drop me a line and I'll post a solution to your problem here. The more focused your question, the more in-depth my answer will be! And if you want me to mask your identity, no problem.
Check the Q&A archive to see whether your question's already been answered.
Louise Harnby is a fiction copyeditor and proofreader. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.
Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader & Copyeditor, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn. If you're an author, you might like to join Louise’s Writing Library. Members receive monthly updates featuring self-publishing news and resources.
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Should you edit or proofread pornography? What if it’s erotica? Is there even a difference?
Does sexually explicit written material deserve to be edited? What is it exactly, and what is it not? And if you want to edit it, how do you make yourself visible to its authors? Perhaps you have strict criteria for the types or subgenres of pornography or erotica that you’ll edit. In that case, how can you communicate these to potential clients? Here’s my take. And it is only my take. Some of my colleagues won’t touch the stuff with a bargepole. And those of us who will? Well, we all have our individual boundaries. What is pornography? And what is it not? If only there were a universally accepted definition of pornography. There isn’t, alas. What you consider porn may not be what I consider porn. Or one of us might think a written work is more erotic than pornographic. Others might not even bother making a distinction. And that’s the first thing any editor needs to recognize. The term ‘pornography’ is loaded with subjectivism and preconceptions, many of them heteronormative, so what you’re expecting and what actually ends up in your editing studio could be two very different things. ‘Pornography is notoriously difficult to define, and overburdened with assumptions concerning – at the very least – gender, sexuality, power, globalization, desire, affect, and labour,’ say Rebecca Sullivan and Alan McKee. Oxford offers the following broad definition: ‘Printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate sexual excitement.’ And broad it is. Too broad, in my opinion, because it doesn’t exclude materials with descriptions or displays of non-consenting performers and minors, which are illegal. What we can say is that definitions are contested – in society, in the courts, and in academic literature. That makes it difficult for the editor who’s asked, ‘Do you copyedit pornography?’ because even if you think you don’t, others might think you do because they have different opinions on what constitutes porn. So what do we do? I think custom guidelines are the answer, particularly if you decide to publicize the fact that you’re happy to edit sexually explicit material. Before we discuss these, let’s consider erotica. 
Is there a difference between pornography and erotica?
If there is a difference, it’s unlikely that the lines of distinction so clearly drawn in your own head will be shared by everyone else you consult on the matter. Echoing Sullivan and McKee, Leon F Seltzer notes the degree to which ‘the criteria used for distinguishing between the erotic and pornographic [are] … steeped in personal moral, aesthetic, and religious values’. And he goes on to say that the erotic ‘doesn’t appeal exclusively to our senses or carnal appetites. It also engages our aesthetic sense.’ Tracy Cooper-Posey’s distinction draws specifically on novel-craft: erotica isn’t ‘only about sex, unlike its gutter-cousin, pornography. At its purest, the new erotic novel is a brilliantly-written story with super-nova sex that compliments the caliber of the writing, and is fundamental to the plot and characters. In other words, if you remove the sex, the story can’t be told.’ And so it may be that if you, the editor, decide a manuscript’s sexually explicit content contains enough celebration of the human form and is written to a high enough standard, or has a good enough plot, then it’s erotica. If not, it’s porn. It seems to me that getting bogged down in the definitions will get us nowhere fast. The terminology is as tangled as that used to describe editorial services (well, maybe not that bad!). If the author’s struggling to write well, but is trying to create erotica, who am I to say it’s porn? And if it’s just sex that aims for nothing but titillation, but it’s written beautifully, artfully, does that mean it’s no longer porn? If your decision is down to the art-versus-smut argument, one thing’s for sure: you’re going to need to see a sample. And if you want to work on only certain types of material, you’ll do well to create some guidelines. 
Creating guidelines to keep you comfortable
Guidelines don’t just help you and the writer decide whether you’re a good fit. They’re also a great way of demonstrating your engagement with the subject and your willingness to have a conversation with a nervous or embarrassed author. What should you include? There’s no one way of going about this; include whatever’s important to you and what you want the author to know. Here are just a few ideas:
Are pornography and erotica worth editing?
‘Even filth needs editing,’ said my colleague Louise Bolotin when she wrote about the issue on my blog back in 2012, and I agree. The porn and erotica writers for whom I’ve worked are as committed to their writing as any crime fiction, thriller or literary fiction author. A client recently told me, ‘I love my writing and with your help I hope it can lead to something else. If we don’t dream, then we don’t create. I’m proud of my stories but this is a whole new world for me, and like anybody who writes, there’s insecurity.’ What was I dealing with? Not plot, no. Seltzer’s and Cooper-Posey’s definitions chimed here. But my client needed a lot of help with punctuation to make the narrative readable. He’d omitted all speech marks, so the dialogue was invisible. There were repetition and syntax problems. But the writing was strong – imaginative, funny, clever, sexy – and in this book at least, I think he had a great turn of phrase (almost poetic at times). The pace was good, the language potent, and the sex appropriately disgraceful. All in all, I think he did an excellent job! Even so, prior to editing, the book wasn’t publishable because it didn’t conform to recognizable standards of spelling, punctuation and grammar. The reader would have struggled to enjoy the story because they’d have been pulled out of it with every missing full point and speech mark. And that’s my job (and yours) – to help the author help the reader. So, yes, I think pornography and erotica are absolutely worthy of being edited. 
A word on the market
We know there’s a market for pornography and erotica. There are readers with an appetite for these genres, and writers ready to feed it. Those writers need editors to make those stories as good as they can be. If you’re comfortable working on adult material, then you’d do well to make this clear because there seems to be a dearth of professional editors advertising the fact. Here are some numbers generated by searching the UK’s Society for Editors and Proofreaders’ Directory of Editorial Services and the Editors Canada Online Directory of Editors using the following key words: 
In both countries, you’ll have the least competition in these directories if you’re prepared to edit porn and erotica (unless your author hyphenates science-fiction!).
Being visible – getting work
If pornography and erotica are genres you want to edit or proofread, approach the issue as you would any other subject specialism. The political science professor will be drawn to editors and proofreaders who make it explicit that they welcome this type of work, have experience of editing the subject matter, and provide resources and guidance that demonstrates that expertise. Pornography and erotica authors are no different. And so:
Anxiety – yours and the author’s
Some editors are keen to take on the work but anxious that it might reflect badly on them. Does being public about your willingness to edit pornography and erotica damage your reputation? I don’t believe so. Pornography and erotica are recognized genres. As long as we present our willingness to edit them with the same professionalism as we’d approach politics or philosophy, science fiction or romance, I see no problem. I and several of my editor friends are open about the fact that we work on adult material and none of us has suffered problems acquiring work. I think that’s down to the fact that we’re all committed to marketing our editorial businesses, and focusing on the value we can bring to the table. That’s what clients concentrate on, not the things that are of no interest to them. The thriller writer cares that I work on thrillers, not that I also copyedit erotica and historical fiction. Editors aren’t the only Nervous Nellies. Some of the writers who’ve contacted me about editing porn and erotica are anxious too. The emails usually start with something on the lines of ‘I feel a little embarrassed about this but …’ or ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking but …’ Again, guidelines and resources can help to reassure an author before they send the email. Summing up If you’re happy to edit porn and erotica, go for it. If you aren't, that's fine too. As independent business owners we can choose what material we want to work on and what we don’t. Wanting to edit a particular genre isn’t enough. Make sure your willingness to edit porn and erotica is visible – on your website and in the editorial directories you advertise in. If you don’t say it, you won’t be heard. Further reading
Louise Harnby is a fiction copyeditor and proofreader. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.
Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader & Copyeditor, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn. If you're an author, you might like to join Louise’s Writing Library. Members receive monthly updates featuring self-publishing news and resources. How to use social media with intention If you're an editor, proofreader, translator or indexer, you're probably already using social media. If that's the case, but you feel like you're struggling to keep it under control, this training course could be just what you need. Social media is great for chattering – updates about our kid’s first day at school, little notes about how badly we need coffee, pics of our cats sitting on our keyboards. It’s all great fun and long may it continue. But when it comes to using social media for business, we need to think about intention. Otherwise the dreaded rabbit hole will beckon. Laura Poole and Erin Brenner of Copyeditng kindly invited me to present an online masterclass for editors and proofreaders on social media marketing and engagement. I'll be your instructor for Social Media with Purpose on Tuesday, December 19, 2017, 11 am–12:30 pm Eastern Time. Key learning points In this 90-minute masterclass, we'll cover the following:
Registrants will also receive a free 53-page, 10,700-word ebook that addresses all the learning points, plus a list of links to recommended resources to help make your social media engagement persuasive, emotive and productive. 
I do hope you'll join me for the class. Details of registration fees and how to sign up are available on the Copyediting training page.
Louise Harnby is a fiction copyeditor and proofreader. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.
Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader & Copyeditor, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn. If you're an author, you might like to join Louise’s Writing Library. Members receive monthly updates featuring self-publishing news and resources.
Lisa got in touch to ask for help with getting her proofreading career off the ground. She’s feels as if she’s between a rock and a hard place because of a lack of academic qualifications, career experience and time.
Lisa asks:
Hello, Louise! It seems that a lot of future editors have great educational experience. They can build on that to start with as a marketing tool. What can I do if I have spent 25 years raising children, and I don't have more than an associate's degree in General Studies, no experience, and not a lot of time to spend on learning marketing? I am a dog-walker and pet-sitter during the day, and I want to start marketing myself as a proofreader. Help! Hi, Lisa! Thanks so much for your question. I can appreciate that you probably feel like you’re banging your head against a brick wall at the moment. I do have two books that take you through the steps of editorial marketing, and one free booklet. I’ve posted links to those at the bottom of the article. They’ll give you the detail; here on the blog, I’m going to focus on the basics and try to get you in the right mindset. Time constraints Time management is a tough one, but it’s something that everyone who’s set up their own freelancing business has experienced. The challenges don’t go away once we’re established either. Take me for example. I have to find time to work on my business, too – time for marketing, time for administration, time for advanced training, time to train others! I, too, have a family and a business to run (my fiction editing work) during the day. Time for the business of running my business has to be found, and it’s tough. That’s why I’m writing a blog post now, at 9.30 p.m. on a Monday evening on my laptop in front of the TV. The dog’s to my left, the girl’s in her room, the hubbie’s on the other sofa! My life is all about multitasking and there’s no way around it. I know a lot of people who do their marketing out of hours, or chunks of it at least. We all have the same 24 hours in a day and we all juggle our backsides off to make it work. It’s just the way it goes. There’s no way of cheating it, no shortcut for any of us!
So, MINDSET TIP #1: Instead of thinking about how much time you don’t have, think instead of where you might borrow time from.
Here are some ideas:
Do you work 7 days a week, 365 days a year? For some people in the world, that’s a reality not a horror story, and if that’s you, you have my genuine sympathy. But if you do take weekends off (or one or two other days during the week), and if you do take some annual leave, might you consider using it as a busman’s holiday – devoting it to your business (marketing, training, etc.)? This isn’t most people’s idea of fun; it’s certainly a sacrifice. But if it gave you that 50 hours of professional training that you need to get off the starting blocks, it would be a sacrifice worth making, an investment for your future. Training Once you’ve borrowed some time, you need to decide what to do with it. I mentioned training briefly above but let’s dig a little deeper. You didn’t tell me what pro training you’ve completed, so for safety’s sake I’m going to assume it’s limited. Professional training is, I think, a requirement for anyone wanting to be taken seriously in today’s editorial freelancing market. It gives you confidence, ensures you’re fit for purpose and puts you on a par with the thousands of trained colleagues with whom you’ll be competing. Having pro training is no longer stand-out, it’s stand-ard. You might be worried that you don’t have time to do in-depth professional classes – you’re at work all day so can’t attend on-site training.
So, MINDSET TIP #2: Think online. This is the way to go because you can train at your convenience in your own borrowed time.
Above, I talked about Laura Poole and Erin Brenner’s online classes via Copyediting. The Society for Editors and Proofreaders and the Publishing Training Centre in the UK both offer outstanding distance-learning courses for copyediting and proofreading, too. Those are just a few examples, but nailing the classes means you can demonstrate on your website that you’re a professional – with pro training, a pro attitude and pro commitment. I believe that our marketing messages should focus on our clients’ problems first and foremost, but backing that up with training is a no-brainer. So let’s talk about marketing. Marketing The thing about marketing is that you can get right on it – start doing it while you’re learning it. Perhaps there are some editorial freelancers who have client lists as long as their arms and can rely completely on word of mouth. Or they have lots of publisher clients who offer repeat work (I’ll talk about that below). But the new starter in today’s market has to think bigger.
So, MINDSET TIP #3: Be visible. The invisible proofreader (or editor) is an unemployed proofreader (or editor). Even pro proofreaders and editors need to market themselves consistently.
Some types of marketing are slow burn; some can have a much quicker impact. Here are some ideas that fit into both categories:
And that final point leads us onto something else worth considering … Client focus When it comes to marketing, every editorial business owner needs to think about which clients they’re going to target. For you, this may feel trickier because you don’t have a career background that lends itself to a particular subject specialism.
So, MINDSET TIP #4: Instead of thinking about what you don’t have in terms of education and career experience, think about what clients want and what their problems are.
Here are just a few examples that will help you develop your marketing message:
Focusing your message on solutions to your clients’ problems means they see you concentrating on them rather than on you. Imagine this … you walk into two shops, intent on buying a new pair of shoes from one or other. In store A, the assistant spends half an hour telling you about her feet. In store B, the assistant asks you about your own. Where do you want to buy your Jimmy Choos – A or B? All of us need to make our clients want to buy editorial services from us, so we need to focus our message on their problems and their needs, not how brilliant we are. And in fact, though, we can demonstrate our brilliance precisely by being focused on them. It comes down to good old-fashioned customer service. Hope that helps. I wish you well on your editorial business-building journey, Lisa! Resources
You ask. I'll answer
I'm more than happy to tackle questions, especially from beginners. If there's something you want advice about, drop me a line and I'll post a solution to your problem here. The more focused your question, the more in-depth my answer will be! And if you want me to mask your identity, no problem.
Check the Q&A archive to see whether your question's already been answered.
Louise Harnby is a fiction copyeditor and proofreader. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.
Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader & Copyeditor, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn. If you're an author, you might like to join Louise’s Writing Library. Members receive monthly updates featuring self-publishing news and resources.
One of the main reasons why blogs (and vlogs or podcasts) die is because the creator finds it difficult to maintain the momentum. ‘What am I going to write about?’ ‘What if it’s already been covered elsewhere?’
Invite questions … Inviting people to email me with questions is my top tip for generating blog ideas that are right on target. Questions are how your readers frame their problems. And when you solve those problems, you help people – make life easier for them. And that’s one of the most powerful ways of engaging with someone … just like in real life. All you need for one blog post is one question from one person. That’s because even though only one person has asked, there’s a good chance that many more people have wondered the same thing. Solve that one person’s problem and you’ve probably solved a hundred people’s problems. 
Customize and personalize
My Q&A series is built on precisely this premise. When someone emails me with a question, I tell them that I’ll write a detailed answer for them on the blog. The answer won’t be generic, but specifically for them. My articles are often quite broad-based – they aim to talk to lots of people at once: how to create a resource hub, which proofreading courses I recommend, grammar rules and preferences, online writing courses, how to price proofreading and copyediting projects, and so on. But there’s nothing generic about how I handled Rachel’s question: ‘I have multiple sclerosis and severely reduced manual dexterity – can I become a professional proofreader?’ The blog post I created in response to that was written just for her. And, yet, two people emailed me after I published that post to thank me for it because they, too, had conditions that affected their fine motor skills and wanted some guidance on how that might impact on their ability to build a freelance editorial business. So that’s one question, and three people’s problems solved that I know of. I reckon there are plenty of other people out there who didn’t contact me, and never will, but who might have the exact same question. I make sure I stamp each Q&A blog post with a banner that identifies it clearly as part of this series. And at the end, I always include an invitation to get in touch. 
Respect privacy
I think it’s a good idea to offer to mask a person’s identity. Some readers feel uncomfortable about asking questions in public. The reasons are varied but include worries about being judged or appearing to lack knowledge and experience. The reality is that none of us knows everything. We’re all learning … and always learning. I have plenty of answers up my sleeve, but I have a ton of questions, too. Sometimes I’m happy to ask them in public; other times I choose a more intimate space. At all times, trust is essential, so if you offer a Q&A-style service on your blog, take care to ensure that all parties are on the same page about what personal information will be included before you go live. I now have a dedicated form that Q&A participants fill in. This includes a section where the questioner can tell me whether they’re happy for me to use their first name, or if they want this and other identification markers masked. The gifts from all the beginners Don’t be afraid to tackle issues that you think are ‘easy’ or ‘simple’ or ‘basic’. Anything’s easy when you know the answer; when you don’t, the solution seems unreachable. Here’s a story from my own backyard ... I’ve been adding video into my marketing mix – shorties that introduce blog posts and resources I’ve created for self-publishing authors. I posted one of those videos into a marketing forum to get some feedback. My pal Mark Orr, an expert in smartphone video creation (Pocket Video School), told me that the resolution and head-positioning were off. There are, it turns out, fixes to both these problems, but they’re only straightforward when you know them. I didn’t, and it wasn’t until Mark and I had a proper chat on Skype that we worked out where I’d been going wrong. Something we discovered during that conversation is that there were about 20 more questions that I didn’t know the answer to but which were a doddle for him. He helped with all of them, but he told me I’d helped him, too, because I’d given him a few ideas of what to vlog about. He made me feel that my lack of knowledge was both welcome and an opportunity. And because he helped me, I now trust him. More on that later … Here’s an example of when the beginner question isn’t welcomed. In May 2017, Steven Pressfield posted about ‘Clueless Asks’, in which he states that when beginners ask ‘clueless’ questions, ‘they have not done their due diligence. Don’t ask a writer how to get an agent. Find out yourself. There are ten thousand sources online and a hundred books in the Writing section of a book store.’ Now, Pressfield has a point. There are no doubt thousands of online resources that will answer the question, and if you’re not interested in building an online platform that gets heard over the cacophony that is the internet, then you’ll sympathize with him. But – and it’s a huge but – if your blog is foundational to your visibility and you see it as a valuable tool for communicating and sharing with your colleagues and clients, then a ‘clueless ask’ is NOT a frustration. It’s a gift – and a precious one at that. It’s precious because it helps me publish articles that I know at least one person wants to read, articles that will help someone, and make their life easier. 
The privilege of being asked and trusted
Every time someone asks me something that I think is easy, or obvious, or simple, or has already been answered elsewhere, I am reminded that my questioner asked me. Which means they came to my website, took the time to engage with me, chose to trust me (just like I came to trust Mark). That’s amazing, especially since we’re usually strangers to each other. And since they’ve privileged me with a visit, I’d like them to stay rather than nipping off somewhere else … and talking to someone whom they deem more helpful than me. A good blog is a helpful blog. And even if the content I post has been answered by someone else, somewhere else, the questioner couldn’t find it or didn’t go looking for it. They asked me. That means it’s worth having on my blog. And if they ask you, it’s worth having on your platform, too. Plus, each of us will answer in our own unique ways – with our own voices and experiences. Each of our approaches might differ a little or a lot. Either way, the internet is big enough for a multitude of voices and approaches. All of us can be part of the conversation, so my advice is to see the question (however basic) as a giant opportunity. Being audience-focused In ‘How to build a web presence that outsmarts, outperforms and outlasts the search engines’, Stoney deGeyter discusses how back in 1998 it was relatively easy to get the attention of the search engines. Good Google rankings could be found with the right keywords and links. These days, that’s not enough. Now, it’s about ‘creating a web presence that people love’. That means gearing it towards the audience, not the search engines. What better way to gear a blog towards an audience than answering the questions your audience has? Other ways to find the questions Inviting questions is one way of working out what problems need solving. But there are others, too. The key is to be clear about whom your intended audience is and where they’re hanging out. Once you know that, lurk and listen. Who’s asking what? Some options to consider include:
I hope this has given you some ideas about how to generate blog content that’s of genuine use to your readers. Inviting questions isn’t the only way, but it’s one I love because it personalizes my blog space and puts me in direct conversation with my readers. And in the spirit of the subject, don’t forget … You ask. I'll answer
I'm more than happy to tackle questions, especially from beginners. If there's something you want advice about, drop me a line and I'll post a solution to your problem here. The more focused your question, the more in-depth my answer will be! And if you want me to mask your identity, no problem.
Louise Harnby is a fiction copyeditor and proofreader. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.
Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader & Copyeditor, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn. If you're an author, you might like to join Louise’s Writing Library. Members receive monthly updates featuring self-publishing news and resources.
This is the second in a series of guest posts by my colleague Steve Allen, a soldier-turned-editor who specializes in firearms and military-particulars editing. Here are four more tips to consider when writing about firearms in fiction.
1. Is it just a gun?
Is is ever just a gun? Yes and no. Any gun is not substitutable at will for another gun. Not all guns share the same features, nor can one gun do everything. Just as mechanics need more than one wrench, some tasks require different guns. All firearms share common basic features but are quite varied, similar to tools. Choose the correct tool for your characters based on the story and situation. Do not give the hero a 9mm pistol nailing bad guys at 900 yards (823 metres). Use a scoped high-power rifle for shots greater than 600 yards (549 metres). A shotgun, even when loaded with rifled slugs, cannot shoot accurately across a valley. Shotguns and pistols are designed for up close and personal. 
2. Terminology tangles
I don’t fault writers for simple and common terminology and vernacular mistakes, unless their target readers would. I ignore basic firearms terminology mistakes as long as the author is clear on intent and meaning. Most people use cartridges, shells, rounds and bullets interchangeably. Referring to a magazine as a clip is usually not a story-killer – unless you’re writing very gun-centric fiction where the character would not make that mistake. Firearms terminology and acronyms are writer-trapping quagmires – avoid them if you can. Establish gun terms early in the manuscript. If your writing feels like you’re trying too hard, your readers will know. Be consistent with your terminology and keep things simple. If you refer to a magazine as a clip, do so throughout the story. Flipping back and forth between terms confuses readers. Use the term assault rifle with care. Know if you will offend your readers by the use of 'assault rifle' or if they will even care. There is no precise lawful definition of what is an assault rifle. Adolf Hitler is credited with creating the term as a propaganda piece during WWII. In the US, assault rifle is generally used by politicians demonizing a particular weapon, hoping to ban by legislation its ownership and sale. 
3. Clip-fed revolvers … and reloading
The revolver reloaded by a magazine is a less frequent mistake, but one I notice occasionally. Revolvers are loaded by stripper clips, speed loaders or loose rounds, not magazines. Know at least the basics of how and with what the guns are reloaded in your story. Reloading a weapon is best kept general, with as few words as possible, before returning to the action quickly. Explaining that your character popped open his revolver, dumped the empty cartridges, then refilled it with loose rounds from his pocket, snapping it closed when full, is sufficient. Better yet, just mention that the character reloaded and let the readers form their own mental images. You don’t need to describe every single step of reloading a gun, because it detracts from the action. 
4. Your hero put what on a what?
Improper use of firearm accessories or impossible accessory attachment is a fairly common mistake. For example – rogue Chinese general assassinates the Chinese president with a suppressed revolver. Frequent mistakes that I see include:
With attachments and accessories, follow the KISS principle. For a writer unfamiliar with guns, KISS means Keep It Simple, Stupid. More is not always better. Complicating firearms in combat can be disastrous for your hero. Next time, we'll be looking at thumb safeties and silencers among other things. Until then, if you have any questions for Steve about firearms in fiction, drop them in the comments and he'll help you out.
Steve Allen is a retired soldier living north of Seattle, WA, with his lovely wife and daughters, and a neurotic terrier and a goofy black Labrador.
When not editing, Steve wanders the Pacific Northwest on roads less travelled, searching for good books and very cold beer. Email: stevenwordsmith67@gmail.com
Louise Harnby is a fiction copyeditor and proofreader. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.
Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader & Copyeditor, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn. If you're an author, you might like to join Louise’s Writing Library. Members receive monthly updates featuring self-publishing news and resources.
Can you proofread and copyedit professionally without being mouse-dependent? And what if you don't have a degree? Does it matter? A reader asked me. Here's my take.
Andrew says:
I am considering taking introductory courses in proofreading and copyediting; firstly, please could I ask you about the software used. Usually I prefer to use the keyboard to move around the menus, because I find repeatedly using a mouse tiring on my hands and arms. Does (at least some of) the software used in your industry allow keyboard use as an alternative to mouse work? Secondly, would my lack of a degree hold me back? I have many years' experience in IT system development and programming; would this experience be attractive to publishers? However, I was hoping to not just to work on IT-related material! Thanks for your question, Andrew. Let’s deal with the software issue first. Software Text editing When editing raw text, most editors use Microsoft Word. There are several excellent complementary add-on programs. These increase the editor’s productivity because they allow us to do complex tasks more quickly. One example is PerfectIt, an outstanding consistency checker that can be customized to find and fix problems including hyphenation, capitalization, spelling variance, number style, italics, super/subscript, bullet punctuation, and wildcard searches. In addition, there are hundreds of free macros available to editors, all of which are designed to complement the editor’s eye. Examples include spell-checkers, proper-noun analysis tools, homonym and homophone identifiers, Then there are onboard tools in Word such as wildcard search and find/replace to name but two. And let’s not forget Word’s ribbon, which provides quick access to a range of tools, including the Styles palette. To work efficiently, you’ll need to access these tools. As long as you know (or can learn) how to access the relevant menus via your keyboard, and assign keyboard shortcuts, I see no reason why you should be dependent on a mouse. Page-proof annotation If you’re hired to proofread designed page proofs, you’ll likely be working on PDF in Acrobat Pro, PDF-XChange, Adobe Reader or similar. You’ll need to be able to use the onboard comment-and-markup tools and possibly the stamps palette. Again, providing you can learn the keyboard shortcuts, you can minimize your mouse usage. There’s a helpful list of Acrobat shortcuts on the Adobe website: A note of caution: my concern is the impact on your speed. One of the keys to being a successful independent editor is efficiency. If you’re already a seasoned mouse-independent Word and Acrobat user, and are introducing new keyboard shortcuts into your existing knowledge base, I suspect the transition will be comfortable and the impact on your speed minimal. If you’re not familiar with these programs, the tools within them, and the access keys, you’ll need practice to build your speed. In general, though, given your extensive experience in systems development and programming, I can’t see these issues being obstacles for you, Andrew. You’ve probably forgotten more about how to navigate a computer screen than I’ve ever known! Is a degree necessary? If you want to copyedit for specialist scientific editing agencies, you’ll likely need at least a Master’s in a related discipline, even a doctorate. If you plan to work for publishers or packagers (project-management agencies) with book lists in the social sciences, arts, humanities and technology, they’ll be more interested in your professional editorial training, and your ability to perform successfully in an editorial assessment. If you wish to copyedit and proofread reports, books, journal articles, theses and dissertations for self-publishers, businesses, academics and students, focus on what you can do to solve their problems. These days, I work exclusively for self-publishing fiction writers. They’re preparing their novels for a crowded market full of discerning readers with the ability to leave critical reviews on Amazon. My job is to help them overcome some of the problems they’ll encounter on that journey, and my website focuses on that rather than on my politics degree. Did my politics degree help me when I worked exclusively for social science publishers? Perhaps. But I think my years of in-house publishing experience, marketing social science journals, helped more. When some years later I was proofreading a book for a well-known university press and Loïc Wacquant came up in the references but the diacritic in his first name had been omitted, I spotted it. It was my career experience that showed me the way, not my degree. You, too, can use your IT background to demonstrate your knowledge and experience to clients. But it will only be part of the story. Ultimately, your message will need to be about them – their problems, their concerns, their challenges … and how you are part of the solution. If you tell that story in a compelling way, you’ll build a brand identity that inspires trust and engagement, one that makes you stand out against your competitors, regardless what subject you didn’t read at university. And though you don’t want to work exclusively on IT-related material, don’t shy away from using that as your springboard. It’s what you know, what makes you special. No one’s going to hire me to edit an IT book. Why would they when they can hire someone who speaks the language and knows the subject like the back of his hand – someone like you? Specialize in what you know first. Diversify as the opportunities arise, and develop your brand identity as required. That way you’re playing to your strengths in the start-up phase. I hope that helps you on your journey. Good luck! You ask. I'll answer
I'm more than happy to tackle questions, especially from beginners. If there's something you want advice about, drop me a line and I'll post a solution to your problem here. The more focused your question, the more in-depth my answer will be! And if you want me to mask your identity, no problem.
Louise Harnby is a fiction copyeditor and proofreader. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.
Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader & Copyeditor, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn. If you're an author, you might like to join Louise’s Writing Library. Members receive monthly updates featuring self-publishing news and resources.
Writing about pain is hard, but there’s no shame in that struggle; it’s difficult to articulate even when we’re experiencing it.
‘Pain is […] the kind of subjective and poorly delineated experience that is difficult to express satisfactorily in language […] Indeed, pain shares some of the characteristics of target domains that have received considerable attention in the cognitive linguistic literature. Like LOVE, for example, it is private, subjective [...] cannot be directly observed,’ says linguist Elena Semino. When researching this article, I was surprised by how little has been written about the art of depicting physical pain in fiction. And, yet, the act of hurting is prevalent in most genres; it deserves as much attention as emotional distress. I've come across a few examples in my sentence-level editing work this year where great writers came a little unstuck, tending towards repetition and overwriting the pain. That was my prompt to delve deeper. I thought it would be interesting to look at depictions of physical pain from within the bubble of novel craft ... and beyond, in medicine and poetry. Here are 5 tips to help you write about physical suffering. 1. Don’t always say it hurts – less is more ‘Pain is something we all go through to a lesser or greater extent. It’s something we all know intimately. Yet it’s so hard to describe and write about. It’s hard to push beyond “it hurts” and not wallow in it and also hold your reader,’ writes Justine Larbalestier. She’s spot on. It’s why some beginner writers’ pain scenes end up either repetitive, overwritten or clichéd. Trust your reader. If a character’s elbow is smashed with a hammer, do we really need to be told that it hurt, that he ‘writhed in agony’, that he was ‘wracked with pain’? Sometimes less is more. Readers are very good at filling in the gaps. Just as we imagine (without being directed to) a character rolling her eyes when she’s frustrated, raking her hands through her hair when she’s downcast, or biting her lip when she’s anxious, so we know that she feels pain when she’s kicked or punched, when she stubs her toe, when she’s stabbed, whipped or bitten. Mick Herron is a master of keeping it lean. It’s not that he avoids mentioning pain, but he weaves experience into its telling that makes the reader think, Yes, I get that. Here’s an extract from Slow Horses: Arms pulled River upright and his body screamed, but felt good at the same time – aching its way out of a cramp. A bottle was pressed to his lips, and water poured into his mouth. River coughed and bent forward; spat; threw up almost. Then blindly reached for the bottle, grabbed it, and greedily gulped down the rest of its contents. ‘Shit, man,’ Griff Yates said. ‘You really are a fucking mess.’ 
2. Consider the type of pain
Commonly understood descriptors can be useful when thinking about pain writing. Semino references the 1971 McGill Pain Questionnaire and summarizes author Ronald Melzack’s categorization as follows:
The first way in which you might use this table is to apply the descriptors to your writing of a character’s pain. These can help you with the shape and movement of it.
Here's a fine example cited by Susannah Mintz. It's a scene from Sharon Cameron's Beautiful Work, where the narrator, Anna, says of her pain: [It is a] beating between my breasts, and a reverberation of beating upward to my collarbone – a low steady hum, close to my body, not touching it. But agitating it. Below the beating, a thick, spikelike pressure was driving down to my belly …. The roof of my mouth was dry. I couldn’t swallow. A harsher beating arose near the surface of the skin in my left breast below the nipple. (84) The descriptors are evident, but Cameron uses them artfully to bring the pain to life; it has intention. It does things to Anna ... it's 'near' her, 'close to' her, rather than within her. In this detached state, the pain becomes a supporting character in the scene. 
3. Focus on pain's consequences
Think about how you might show physical and emotional reactions rather than telling the pain. You could use the descriptors from the table above as nudges as to what those reactions might be. For example, if your character’s pain is crushing, you might express this by showing him struggling for breath; if it’s gnawing, you might have him bent and holding his belly. Back to the hammer and the elbow … what if instead of being told that the character is in agony, we learn that he doubles over, falls to his knees, vomits, or blanches? Perhaps he experiences a white-out, or loses control of his bowels. What about the sounds he makes … or those he doesn’t because he’s rendered voiceless? How does the pain move and what does it look like? Some of these reactions might be brutal, but the injury and consequent pain are themselves brutal and needn’t be shied away from. Similarly, emotional reactions can help with the writing of physical pain. How does your character feel when that hammer hits his elbow? Depressed, frightened, vulnerable, hopeless, despairing, humiliated, angry? In The Poppy Factory, William Fairchild focuses sharply on the sounds and movements his character makes, and shows the hurting through them. Then suddenly you're down and all movement stops like a jammed cine film. You're still screaming but now it's different. It's because of the pain and when you try to get up, your legs won't move. You don't know where you are. All you know is that you're alone and probably going to die. When you stop screaming and look up, the sky is dark and you can't hear the guns any more, only the sound of someone moaning softly. It takes a few moments before you realise it's yourself. In the PDF below, I've included some additional ideas for possible reactions to pain, (based on the nudges from the descriptor table above). There's space for you to add your own. 
4. Acknowledge the limitations of agony
When I’m told that a character is in (physical) agony, my expectations of what she is capable of are changed. I’ve only been in agony a couple of times in my life, and I was good for nothing, rendered almost immobile. Reason left me. So did language. And so just because our protagonist is an MI5 agent with advanced armed-combat skills and interrogation-resistance techniques, there’s probably only so much she can take if she’s in agony. Some genres of writing lend themselves better than others to acute pain tolerance – fantasy and sci-fi, obviously, when world-building rules allow for it; and action/adventure with Jason Bourne-like characters who refuse to go down no matter what they’re subjected to. Somewhere there’s always a line, though – a point where Invulnerable Uberguy becomes unbelievable, laughable. If we’re told he’s in agony but he’s still throwing cool punches, turning roundhouse kicks, evaluating his escape route and planning this evening’s dinner date all at the same time, parody’s not far away. There’s nothing wrong with escapist writing that allows for agony tolerance and superhero-like brilliance as long as that’s your intention and your reader’s expectation. If you’re aiming for authenticity and grit, though, be mindful of pain thresholds, especially what’s possible when your character’s in agony. Agony, drawn realistically, can make us doubt the protagonist’s ability to make it. Why is that interesting? Says K.M. Weiland: ‘A good story should have the power to engage [readers] in a character’s suffering even when they know it’s all going to turn out right in the end. Every time an obstacle shows up between your protagonist and his goal, ask yourself: Is this just something that happens to him? Does he just brush it off and move on? Or does it hit him where it hurts? Does it make him (and readers) doubt his ability to make to the end of his journey?’ 
5. Look at how the poets do it
Milton. Who better? In this excerpt, we’re left in no doubt as to Satan’s physical suffering, and yet there’s no mention of his feeling it. Instead, we see it in our mind’s eye through the effort of his movements (‘uneasy steps’) and the detail in the environment (‘burning marle’, ‘torrid clime’, ‘inflamed sea’) that ‘he so endured’. His Spear, to equal which the tallest pine Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast Of some great admiral, were but a wand, He walked with to support uneasy steps Over the burning marle, not like those steps On Heaven’s azure, and the torrid clime Smote on him sore besides, vaulted with fire; Nathless he so endured, till on the beach Of that inflamed sea, he stood and called His Legions, angel forms [...] Which is best? Whether you choose to leave your character's hurt to the reader's imagination, tell it through using commonly understood descriptors, or show it through reaction and environment will depend on your style, genre and intention. If you're in the middle of a fast-paced action scene, Cameron's approach in Beautiful Work might be a distraction for your reader. If you're writing a more introspective scene, Herron's lean approach in Slow Horses could leave the reader wanting. There's no best way of writing about physical suffering. The most important thing is that it shouldn't be boring. Unless your reader has congenital analgesia, they will have experienced pain and know it is anything but tedious. Further reading
Here's your Pain: Type, Shape and Reaction Nudges PDF. Click on the image to download your free copy. 
Louise Harnby is a fiction copyeditor and proofreader. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.
Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader & Copyeditor, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn. If you're an author, you might like to join Louise’s Writing Library. Members receive monthly updates featuring self-publishing news and resources.
Content marketing gives a lot of editors and proofreaders the willies. Too little time, too much work, don’t have enough ideas, can’t work out what to blog about, don’t even know what it is … those are statements I’ve heard aplenty.
So when John Espirian and I agreed to lead a 2-hour workshop on content marketing at the 2017 Society for Editors and Proofreaders annual conference in Wyboston Lakes, we assumed we’d have our work cut out for us.
How were we going to convince a room full of wordsmiths that content marketing is valuable, doable and enjoyable? To cut a long story short, we asked them to throw their split infinitives, comma splices, dangling modifiers and restrictive clauses out of the window for 120 minutes and have a bit of fun with us. Did they rise to the challenge? You bet! 
The problem with marketing
Every business owner needs to do marketing. And if you love it (like I do, like John does) that’s great. But what if you find it a bore? What if you’re someone who prefers the work you do to the work you do to get the work you do? Still with me? Editors and proofreaders are just as time-poor as anyone else. Marketing takes time and effort. And content marketing requires commitment because you won't see the impact overnight. One of the best things about content marketing, though, is that it’s ripe for playfulness. And that’s the case whether you’re doing it or learning to do it. That playfulness must be on-brand, of course, but creating useful, helpful, valuable content that solves clients’ problems needn’t be a dull process if you keep an open mind. John and I asked our colleagues to open their minds and go a little bonkers. And if you think you can’t do content marketing, perhaps you can try this exercise too. 
The Whacky-business Workshop (or how to develop a content marketing mindset)
We spent the first hour on the why and what of content marketing so that our friends understood the principles that underpin the approach. And just in case you don’t know, content marketing is basically about creating and delivering useful stuff that inspires people to trust you, engage with you, even buy from you. Next, we asked them to get into groups of two or three. Then we handed them a list of businesses and asked them to choose one. And so began the Whacky-business Workshop. There were no businesses related to editing and proofreading, mind you. None of the jobs in that list is something any of us has ever done; some of them aren’t even real, though not many. Instead, we gave them a list of whacky businesses – that way, our delegates would be forced away from their existing editorial business focus, and free to embrace a content marketing mindset. Here’s what they had to play with:
20 minutes to think, 1 minute to present We asked them to think about what problems those companies’ potential customers or colleagues would have – what they might ask before they decided to engage with or buy from one of those businesses – then generate as many content ideas as they could in 20 minutes. There were 2 rules:
Those who made our bellies ache the most would receive a chunk of content marketing goodies – well, books; we are editors, after all – written by industry experts. 
Why does being silly help?
If you can take everything you’ve learned in an hour, apply it in 20 minutes, and generate a framework of solutions in 60 seconds – and with a company and customers you know nothing about – what might you do if:
Believe me, if you can generate 10 questions that a client might ask before hiring a human scarecrow, 3 videos about the benefit of fart-reduction underpants, or 6 reasons to hire a professional mermaid – in the time it takes to bake a cake – coming up with ideas for a year’s worth of content for your editorial blog, vlog or podcast will be a walk in the park. And our session proved it. Our colleagues were amazing. Some were content marketing novices when they walked into the room, others were looking to hone their skills, but all of these perfect punctuators, grand grammarians and artful amenders slipped easily into the shoes of their new businesses … and their audience. Of course, there can only be one winner … well, two in this case: our friends and fellow pro editors Kate Haigh and Kia Thomas. If you’re seriously thinking about setting up as a human scarecrow and you need help with your marketing strategy, just call them. 
Some might think it’s difficult to make straw interesting, but Kate and Kia know different. Here's the content marketing magic they came up with in only 20 minutes:
Company name Outstanding in the Field – Human Scarecrows! Content aim To make our website a valuable resource for other human-scarecrow professionals Content ideas – solving potential clients' and colleagues' problems
Editors are born content marketers
It's true. Editors and proofreaders are problem solvers by nature. We spend our working days finding problems and working out how to fix them … not with blunt force but with elegance, with respect, with our writers in mind. We query kindly, we tweak tenderly, and we never forget that if our clients don’t have problems, we don’t have jobs. And that’s pretty much what content marketing is all about – identifying problems, offering solutions, and doing so in a way that makes the potential client trust you. So if you think you can’t do it, that it will be too hard, will take too much time, that you won’t have enough ideas, that you’re an editor not a marketer, then try being silly. Pick one of those whacky companies and ask yourself what you’d want to know before buying from them. Turn those queries into a list of ideas for blog posts, videos, PDFs, infographics, booklets or podcasts. There are no rules – you’re just having fun. When you’re done, think about your editorial business and your clients. What are their problems? And how might you create and deliver the solutions? No problem is too small, and no question too basic. If you’ve thought of it, chances are there’s a potential client who’s thought of it too. Why not be the one to fix it and have that solution on your website? If you have a question about content marketing for an editorial business, drop me a line or leave a comment. I’ll do my best to help … unless it’s about human scarecrows. In which case, you know who to call.
Louise Harnby is a fiction copyeditor and proofreader. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.
Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader & Copyeditor, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn. If you're an author, you might like to join Louise’s Writing Library. Members receive monthly updates featuring self-publishing news and resources.
Here's more from my audio-book creation series. This time, professional voice artist Ray Greenley talks about doing it yourself, how long it will take and what kit you'll need. Over to Ray ...
In previous posts I talked about platforms (ACX), pricing, and sourcing and evaluating a professional voice artist for your audio book.
I know what you're thinking – 'There’s another option you’re not telling me about on purpose … I could avoid all these issues and just record my book myself!’ Yes, that’s true. You could. Okay … are you sure? I mean, REALLY sure? Because producing an audio book does take quite a bit of work. As a rule of thumb, a producer who knows what they’re doing will generally spend about six hours working to produce a single hour of finished audio. So if your audio book ends up being about 10 hours long, that means you could expect to spend about 60 hours working to produce it once you’ve invested the time in learning how, and the money in the equipment you’ll need. You'll need the following equipment (I'll go into more detail below):
There are some decent microphones that plug directly into your computer via USB, but generally you’ll get a better sound with an XLR microphone and a preamp. 
Also, vitally, you’ll need a good space to record in. It should be quiet with plenty of sound-absorbing material in it to make the space sound as ‘dead’ as possible.
A walk-in closet can do the trick in a pinch, although chances are you’ll need some additional sound treatment to really get it acceptable. By the way, if you live in a busy area with a lot of traffic or other outside noises that you can hear from your space, then your space is no good unless you can somehow insulate against all those outside noises or are willing to record in the middle of the night when (hopefully) things are quiet. More on preamps and recording software Okay, well if you’re really on a budget, you can record using Audacity, which is free recording software. It has some solid tools and can do what you need. If you’re willing to invest some money, you can get some reasonably priced software that can do a bit more. I use Studio One Artist from Presonus, and I know some other narrators work well with Reaper. Both of those programs can be had for less than $100. There are many others as well. 
For the preamp, there are some good options at a reasonable price. I currently use a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2, but I’m looking forward to upgrading to a Presonus Studio 2|6 soon.
Another reasonable option would be the Presonus AudioBox USB. One of the nice perks to getting one of the Presonus preamps is that it includes the recording software I mentioned earlier, Studio One Artist. Once again, there are lots of other options, many of which would probably be sufficient for your needs. The big question, the microphone So I can tell you that I use a Shure KSM32 and it works well for me. I’m pretty fortunate that I can sound good on such a relatively inexpensive microphone (US$499+). 
Unfortunately, there’s absolutely no way to know if YOU will sound good on it, too.
Microphones really are very personal tools. One that works great for me might be terrible for you, and vice versa. Your best bet is to try several out and see what works well. The easiest way to do that is to find a specialty store that sells them; the store will often let you try some out before you buy because they’re aware of the difficulty in matching the microphone to the voice. ‘Okay, so once I’ve that all set up I’m good to go, right?’ So … no, not nearly. You still need to learn how to USE all that stuff, which takes a lot of time and effort. 
I know this isn’t a surprise coming from me, but I think you’ll REALLY want to consider carefully when it comes to narrating your own book.
If you think you might really want to get into narration and put in the time and energy to learn how to do it right, then have at it. It’s very challenging work, but also very rewarding. There are very few people who have the right talents to be both a writer and a narrator, let alone have the time to train and use both sets of skills. My hat’s off to you! However, if you’re thinking you want to record your own book because you just want to try to save some money over paying a narrator to do it, or hoping to avoid the work of finding a good narrator who’ll take your book on as a Royalty Share project … please don’t. I promise it’ll take time you’d probably rather spend writing, and the chances of it really being a high-quality production are not great (no offence). In the long run, I’d bet it will cost you more than you’ll save, one way or another.
Next time we'll be looking at distribution, briefing the artist, and evaluating the first 15 minutes. Until then, thanks for reading!
Resources
Contact Ray Greenley Website | Facebook | Twitter
Louise Harnby is a fiction copyeditor and proofreader. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.
Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader & Copyeditor, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn.
The Begin Self-Publishing Podcast is dedicated to sharing tools, tips, advice and ideas about self-publishing from industry specialists.
The BSP host, Tim Lewis, kindly invited me onto the show to talk about fiction editing. Tim and I discuss the following:
You can listen to the full episode here: Fiction Editing with Louise Harnby Previous episodes have addressed non-fiction editing (with my friend and colleague Denise Cowle), business tips, marketing advice, social media promotion, cover design, interior formatting and publishing services. For more information, or to subscribe, go to the Begin Self-Publishing Podcast.
Louise Harnby is a fiction copyeditor and proofreader. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour (subscribe here) and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.
Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader & Copyeditor, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn. If you're an author, you might like to join Louise’s Writing Library. Members receive monthly updates featuring self-publishing news and resources.
My friend and colleague Denise Cowle is a specialist non-fiction editor who works with a wide range of businesses, so she understands the pressure to publish better than most. Here's her expert advice on when good enough is acceptable ... and when it's not.
Perfection and the pressure to publish
When you write for your business, is it perfect? Should it be? Small businesses without the benefit of a dedicated marketing department are increasingly recognizing the power that quality content has to raise their profile, connect with their potential clients and ultimately drive sales. However, the focus on publishing content regularly can pile on the pressure to get something – anything – out there, to keep up with the publishing schedule for your blog, or to update your web copy and marketing materials to reflect the latest developments in your field. Does this writing have to be perfect? Should we expect everything that people produce to be error-free? If you pay too much attention to the Grammar Police, you’ll be paralysed with fear that a misplaced apostrophe or misused word will bring your carefully constructed business crashing down around your ears. There’s no excuse for poor grammar, they’ll bellow, caps lock on, from behind the anonymity of their screens. Ignorance of correct spelling is the scourge of society, they’ll mutter, labelling you as feckless, careless and lazy, without knowing anything about you or your business, other than the fact you typed except instead of accept. But as an editor, and advocate of content marketing, I beg to differ. I think there are occasions when it’s OK to put out content with errors. Shock! I know! Am I doing myself out of a job here? Not exactly. 
This is not permission to abandon all standards
Before you go rushing off to dispense with the services of your freelance editor and disable spellchecker, let me explain. I’m not for a minute suggesting that you should take this as permission to abandon all efforts to produce great, error-free copy. I’m working on the assumption here that you’ve taken time to make your copy the best it can possibly be within your time and budgetary constraints. I’m assuming you’ve used the tools and techniques available to you; you’ve run the inbuilt spellchecker or other software, read through your text carefully, and used a dictionary when you’ve been unsure. But sometimes, despite all your efforts, errors remain, either because you’ve missed them or because you don’t actually recognize them as errors in the first place. You go ahead and hit the publish button, and your mistakes are out there for all the world to see. We’ve all done it, but it’s rarely the end of the world. When is it OK to publish content with errors? In my view, it’s forgivable to have the odd mistake in content that:
It comes down to the purpose of the content, the medium you’re using, and the value your audience places on it. Your reputation will survive a typo in a tweet signposting your latest blog (I’ve done it myself and lived to tell the tale). Unless, of course, the typo is so unintentionally funny or rude that it goes viral! And even then, is there such a thing as bad publicity? It depends on your business, and what the error is. If you’ve created a free email course as lead generation I’d expect it to be error-free. However, the odd missing apostrophe or spelling mistake may not be a deal-breaker for your audience if the content is amazing and provides lots of value. 
When is it not OK to publish content with errors?
It’s not OK to publish content with any errors if:
If you’re an editor or proofreader, to my mind this is a no-brainer. Your clients are looking for perfection, or as near as dammit. There is no margin for error here. And don’t think you can get away with proofreading your own writing because, let me say this clearly: You. Will. Miss. Things. Who wants to hire an editor with spelling or grammatical errors in their copy? The answer should be: no one. 
Banish procrastination and publish!
No one wants to see any writing, however fabulous the content, strewn with spelling mistakes and grammatical blunders. But I’d much rather see you sharing your content with the world than keeping it in a draft folder because you’re worried that it might contain errors. Don’t allow fear to prevent you from publishing. Do your due diligence – run spellchecker, follow my tips on how to proofread your own writing – and get it out there! The world doesn’t stop turning because of a couple of typos, and you owe it to yourself and your business to write that copy, making it as good as you can. Should you hire someone to edit/proofread blog posts or other content? Rather than slogging over copy like it’s your overdue English homework, you might recognize that your time is better spent elsewhere and free yourself from the burden. If writing isn’t an enjoyable part of your work, wouldn’t it be better to outsource all or part of the process? Giving yourself permission to do this acknowledges that your time is a commodity in your business, and you have a responsibility to spend it wisely. You should consider this option when:
Is good enough, enough? Not everyone is blessed with the ability to write well and consistently, but I believe that everyone can improve with practice. Learning from mistakes is a crucial part of the process, and that can only happen when you write your web copy or publish your blog and allow other people to read it. Good enough can be enough when it’s on the road to even better.
Denise Cowle is a copy-editor and proofreader for non-fiction. She works with educational materials, reports, marketing copy and blogs. Her blog focuses on helping you to be a better non-fiction writer. Denise is an Advanced Professional Member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders.
Further reading from Denise
Louise Harnby is a fiction copyeditor and proofreader. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.
Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader & Copyeditor, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn. If you're an author, you might like to join Louise’s Writing Library. Members receive monthly updates featuring self-publishing news and resources.
Are you fed up with your 404 page? Worried that your clients are too? Broken links are broken conversations. Here’s a wee idea I came up with to fix the disappointment and get you and your visitors talking again … using a chatbot.
What is a 404 page? A 404 page is where your visitor ends up if they’ve clicked on a link to your website and one of the following has occurred:
Google’s recommendations for a high-quality 404 page
404 frustrations
When you hit a 404 page on a website, you feel frustrated. You’ve gone to that site for a reason – you’re trying to solve a problem, or learn something new, perhaps even buy a service or product. And if the page you’re searching for has been moved, or if the link you’ve clicked is incorrect, you end up in a place you don’t want to be. It’s a dead end. If the website’s owner has been thoughtful, there’ll be a search box or menu to help you, perhaps a list of links that might be useful. Still, you’re the one who has to do the work to get back on the right path because, usually, there isn’t is a way of talking to the owner, a way of saying, ‘I wanted X but I’m stuck. Can you help?’ And since you’re already in a grumpy mood, you’re more likely to disengage and leave the site. After all, someone else is probably solving your problem, and maybe if you head back to Google Search, you’ll find a fix rather than a 404. 
A beautiful bot! Introducing Lulu …
I’m a fiction copyeditor and proofreader and I love marketing my business! I regularly publish free booklets, PDFs, checklists and templates for fellow editors and proofreaders, and self-publishing authors. I share news about that content via social media and on my blog. A few weeks ago, I set up a free account with ManyChat. I created Lulu, my Messenger bot. She’s my digital assistant and she’s great – most of the time! We’ve had a few glitches … some digital napping on the job … but in the main she’s successfully helped me deliver my resources to my Facebook network. Instantly. I learned how to build Lulu from my two favourite pro content marketers Andrew and Pete. August was their ‘Build Your Bot Month’ and four in-depth tutorials taught me everything I needed to know to get going. If you want a taster, hop over to YouTube and watch ‘Get Started Using Messenger Bots in Your Marketing with Andrew and Pete’. All well and good. But was there other ways I could use Lulu to help me engage with my community of editors and authors meaningfully? Recently, I was looking for something online. It took a while to find what I wanted, but find it I did. Or nearly. The link looked good but landing was a disappointment – a 404. The site was busy and I had no clue where to start. So I did what a lot of people do online. I gave up and went somewhere more interesting instead. That’s not what I want people doing on my site. I want my authors and colleagues to feel that I’m there for them, ready to help, ready to engage. Could Lulu help? 
The ManyChat webpage widget
I decided to get Lulu on the case of my 404 page. I have a lot of content on my website, and even more external links to that content. I’ve been blogging regularly since 2011, and I’ve changed things around on my site more times than I care to mention. And while I do my best to set up 301 redirects when I make changes, there’s no doubt that there are external broken links about which I can do little. ManyChat has a bunch of growth tools including two embeddable widgets. One is an opt-in box that can be placed anywhere on a website. I’ve used this widget to provide a more interactive experience for my 404 arrivals, one that enables them to make choices with the click of a button, but ultimately to say, ‘Louise, I wanted X but I’m stuck. Can you help?’ Because they’re contacting me via Messenger, they can get in touch instantly. Which means I can help them quickly. And the quicker I help, the less likely they are to get the hump and go somewhere more interesting instead. What’s great about this widget is the customization element. You can choose colours, images and messages that reflect your clients’ needs and your solutions. It matters not whether you're an editor like me, or an author, or another type of business owner ... the widget will work for anyone with a website. 
Case study: the visitor journey on my 404 page
Now that I’ve set up Lulu, the visitor who lands on my 404 page can take a journey, one that involves the ability to interact directly with me quickly. Here’s what it looks like ... This is what the visitor sees when they land: 
Clicking on the button takes them to a new page:
Now the conversation beings in Messenger. First, Lulu introduces herself and asks the visitor to provide some information that will determine how the interaction proceeds:
In this example, the visitor has selected ‘Author’. This generates a new set of choices, including the option to have a conversation with me:
If the visitor chooses to ask for a quote or get some free resources, they’re taken directly to the relevant pages on my website. If they wish to talk to me, Lulu acknowledges the request with a message:
In the Messages section of my Facebook page I receive a notification that someone wishes to chat. Lulu steps aside and the real conversation with me can begin:
Summing up
The ManyChat widget allows us to work with Google’s recommendations: apologetic, friendly language that acknowledges the problem; colours, language and images that are on-brand; clickable links to key pages and core content; and the ability to report the problem directly via an instant conversation. Landing on a 404 page is a negative experience for the visitor. A chatbot turns that negative experience into an opportunity, one that offers a series of calls to action. By including a discussion in the mix, we can offer one-to-one engagement. And it’s fun! We’re putting a smile back on a frustrated client’s face, and that can only be a good thing! Have you used a chatbot for your own 404 page, or as a way of engaging with your clients and colleagues? Let me know in the comments!
Louise Harnby is a fiction copyeditor and proofreader. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.
Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader & Copyeditor, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn. If you're an author, you might like to join Louise’s Writing Library. Members receive monthly updates featuring self-publishing news and resources. Slipping into character – understanding the impact of narrative point of view (Sophie Playle)7/9/2017
Point of view can be difficult to master if you've not studied novel craft. My friend and colleague Sophie Playle has. She's an outstanding developmental editor who knows how to help writers get the big-picture stuff right. Today, she takes you through the fundamentals of narrative point of view so you (and your reader) know who's telling your story.
Over to Sophie ... 
As an author, you have a lot of decisions to make when it comes to putting the ideas you have for your novel down on paper. Where should you start the story? Which characters should you focus on? Should you write in past or present tense? Third or first person? The possibilities are overwhelming.
It seems counterintuitive, but narrowing your options can be quite freeing. Once you’ve eliminated the paralysis of infinite choice, you can focus your creativity. Choosing the viewpoint from which you tell your story is one decision you should certainly consider. It doesn’t matter whether you think about this before you start writing or during the redrafting stage. Either way, by deliberately and purposefully aligning your narration with a particular character, you’ll be able to:
When a novelist hasn’t considered the point of view from which they’re telling their story, it makes things a lot harder for the reader. The story might lack focus, the characters might feel at arm’s length, and the writing style could fall flat. If you struggle with any of these issues, considering point of view could be the answer. 
What is ‘point of view’ in fiction?
Let’s start with the basics. When we talk about point of view in fiction, we’re talking about the position from which the events of the novel are being observed or experienced. It’s essentially where you’ve decided to place the lens through which a reader accesses your story. [My writing] students talk about 'point of view' […] as if it were mechanical, when in fact it refers to the hardest and most thrilling thing we do—becoming someone else, becoming that person so thoroughly that if we’ve decided the person is nearsighted, we’ll imagine the room in a blur as soon as she takes off her glasses; if we’ve made him so jealous he can kill, we’ll feel mad rage down to our tingling fingertips when his girlfriend looks at another man.
Alice Mattison, The Kite and the String
But before we get into the details of slipping into character, we should back up a little. There are many narrative layers to a novel, and it’s useful to understand them.
Narrators, not authors, tell stories.** The difference is subtle, but important. If the author tells a story, the reader knows it’s made up. But if the narrator tells the story, it’s much easier for the reader to willingly suspend their disbelief and immerse themselves in what the narrator is saying. When you write, you – as the author – should disappear. Instead, you channel the narrator. The narrator can either be a character in the story or a disembodied observer. Either way, you see what they see, hear what they hear, and smell what they smell as they experience the events of your story. And depending on the type of narrator you’ve chosen to use, the narrator can also slip in and out of the perspective of your viewpoint character (or characters), experiencing the world through their body and mind, expressing those experiences using their language and style. I admit, it’s a little confusing to wrap your head around. So let’s take a quick look at the most common types of narration and the implications each can have on your writing, and hopefully all will become clear. 
The different types of narration
FIRST PERSON First-person narration is when a character is telling the story from their own perspective and uses the pronoun ‘I’. Unless the character is telepathic, they will only be able to express the events of the novel from their own point of view and have knowledge of things only they have experienced. If they learn things from other characters, this knowledge will be filtered through (and potentially distorted by) their interpretation. Pros
Cons
EXAMPLE: If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them.
J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
THIRD PERSON OBJECTIVE
Third-person narration refers to characters as ‘he/she/it’. Third person objective is used when the point of view from which the story is told is like a floating camera following the characters around. The narrator is almost invisible as it won’t express any thoughts and emotions and can only report on sensory experience – what could be seen, heard or smelt by any onlooker. There is no direct access to the thoughts and emotions of the characters, other than what can be interpreted by their dialogue and actions. This viewpoint isn’t normally used over the course of a whole novel, and it can be blended with third-person subjective (see below). Sometimes new writers will inadvertently use this viewpoint if they’ve taken the advice ‘show, don’t tell’ to an ill-considered extreme! Pros
Cons
EXAMPLE: Spade rose bowing and indicating with a thick-fingered hand the oaken armchair beside his desk. He was quite six feet tall. The steep rounded slope of his shoulders made his body seem almost conical—no broader than it was thick—and kept his freshly pressed grey coat from fitting very well. Miss Wonderly murmured, “Thank you,” softly as before and sat down on the edge of the chair’s wooden seat.
Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon
THIRD PERSON SUBJECTIVE (OR LIMITED)
Unlike with third person objective, the reader has access to the thoughts and emotions of the viewpoint character. The story is told only through one viewpoint character’s perspective at a time. We see, hear, smell, taste, feel and think what they do; the narrative is written in the character’s voice; and the reader can know only what the character knows. Third person subjective narration can be blended with third person objective narration to varying degrees. If the narrative is slightly more objective, the character’s direct thoughts might be made visually distinct from the main narrative by either being presented in italics or quote marks; if the narrative is very much subjective, separating direct thoughts isn’t necessary because the whole narrative is written from the direct perspective of the character. Jumping from one viewpoint character to another in close succession is known as head hopping and can be very confusing for the reader. It’s advisable to stick to one viewpoint character at a time. Pros
Cons
EXAMPLE: It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened. No. Wrong word, Jonas thought. Frightened meant that deep, sickening feeling of something about to happen. Frightened was the way he had felt a year ago when an unidentified aircraft had overflown the community twice.
-- Lois Lowry, The Giver
OMNISCIENT
With omniscient narration, the narrator knows everything and isn’t limited to the viewpoint of any single character. An omniscient narration could be written in present or past tense, and use first or third person; they could be a character in the story (like a god or an enlightened person), or they could be an observing nonentity. Completely omniscient viewpoints are difficult to pull off well and have fallen out of fashion. Pros
Cons
EXAMPLE: Margaret, the eldest of the four, was sixteen, and very pretty, being plump and fair, with large eyes, plenty of soft brown hair, a sweet mouth, and white hands, of which she was rather vain. Fifteen-year-old Jo was very tall, thin, and brown, and reminded one of a colt ... Elizabeth – or Beth, as everyone called her – was a rosy, smooth-haired, bright-eyed girl of thirteen, with a shy manner, a timid voice, and a peaceful expression, which was seldom disturbed ...
— Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
Omniscient narration is quite complex, so let’s go into a little more detail. Omniscient narration can never truly be all-knowing because of the limitations of the nature of writing and reading: words must be read in order, so experiences must be felt in a linear way, which is not the same as having all knowledge in your head simultaneously.
Because of this, as with all writing, the issue is that of choice: what information does the omniscient narrator choose to divulge at any given time and, more importantly, why? Jumping from one viewpoint character to another (head hopping) should still be kept to a minimum to avoid confusion, and using an omniscient narrator is not an excuse for using this device in an uncontrolled way! 
How to choose the right viewpoint for your novel
Choosing which type of narration to use will depend on the kind of effect you want to create, and the kind of knowledge-handling your plot requires. When deciding which point of view to choose, ask yourself the following:
These might not be simple questions to answer, but if you can figure out which answers are most important to you, you should be able to decide which narrative form and which character’s or characters’ viewpoints will allow you to tell the type of story you want to tell. How to control the POV in your story Once you’re aware of the issues of point of view, it’s surprisingly easy to control it and avoid confusion and inconsistency. All it takes is a little logical thinking, depending on your answers to the following questions:
Once you’ve answered these questions, it should be simple to use your chosen viewpoint in a consistent and focused way. How to handle multiple viewpoints Should you have multiple viewpoints in your novel? It’s really up to you – and will depend on the type of story you want to tell and the effects you want to create. The main advantage of sticking to one viewpoint is that it allows you to explore it in greater depth; the main advantage of using multiple viewpoints is that it allows you to explore the events of the novel in greater breadth. Switching the POV often makes it harder for the reader to really get to know a character. It’s the equivalent of going to a party and talking to a different person every twenty minutes. My advice is to keep your number of viewpoints to a minimum. Use only what the story needs – not what you feel like writing. If you have two narrators or characters telling the same story, you need a very good reason for it. When using multiple viewpoints, it’s imperative to make the switch between them seamless and clear. It’s best to start a new chapter or scene when switching viewpoints; at the very least, start a new paragraph. Whichever method you choose, keep the pattern consistent. Don’t just have one chapter in which there are multiple switches when all your other chapters stick exclusively to one viewpoint. Summing up The way you chose to narrate your story will have an impact on how your story is read. Different narrative styles allow you to create different effects. Choosing viewpoint characters brings focus, tension and originality to your writing. Controlling the point-of-view elements in your novel and learning to slip into character is one impactful way to become a better writer and write better books.
Further reading from Sophie
* One crucial thing you probably didn't realize about point of view ** Whose story is it anyway? How to choose your narrator
Sophie Playle runs Liminal Pages, where she offers editorial services to authors and training to fiction editors. Want a freebie with absolutely no strings attached? Sure thing. Click here to download ‘Self-Editing Your Novel’.
Louise Harnby is a fiction copyeditor and proofreader. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.
Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader & Copyeditor, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn. If you're an author, you might like to join Louise’s Writing Library. Members receive monthly updates featuring self-publishing news and resources.
If you're proofreading final designed page proofs, there's more to look out for than the odd typo or double space. Professional proofreaders identify and find solutions to a range of layout problems too.
This post featured in Joel Friedlander's Carnival of the Indies #84
Who's this checklist for? This is for anyone checking final designed page proofs, For example:
I've proofread over 500 books for the mainstream publishing industry. The checklist below is based on the house guidelines provided by the publishers I've worked for. The titles I've proofread include social science textbooks, handbooks and monographs, and works of fiction and narrative non-fiction. And while the subject matter has varied, the requirements for checking final page proofs hasn't. Note my use of the term 'final designed page proofs'. This checklist is not for those doing a final quality-control check in a Word document. Rather, we're dealing with a typeset PDF or hardcopy of the book as it will appear when printed or published online. For that reason, the proofreader is tasked with ensuring that the appearance of the book is consistent and correct according to client preference. This PDF provides a summary of the required checks. Click on the image to download your free copy. 
Louise Harnby is a fiction copyeditor and proofreader. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.
Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader & Copyeditor, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn. If you're an author, you might like to join Louise’s Writing Library. Members receive monthly updates featuring self-publishing news and resources.
Should you invest several hundred pounds in professional proofreading and editing training when there are free online courses available? A reader asked me whether the freebies are worth their salt …
Malika asked:
Hello Louise. Your blog has helped me with a lot of things. However, I am currently doing a BA. I want to learn editing and proofreading side by side. I wanted to ask whether the websites providing free online courses on editing and proofreading are reliable. Thanks for your question, Malika! Foundational English-language skills First, I always recommend that those considering a career in this field focus on their language skills before they embark on professional editorial training. Professional proofreading and editing courses teach the practice of how and when to amend or annotate. They assume an existing above-average knowledge of spelling, punctuation and grammar that accords with English-language convention. Proofreading and copyediting – what do those terms mean? Before I get into the nuts and bolts of your question, I’d like to talk about what’s meant by the terms ‘proofreading’ and ‘editing’. The terminology is often tangled. I define the various stages of editing as follows:
The training we do (whether it’s free or charged for) needs to reflect the skills needed to carry out these levels of editing. At the end of this post I've provided a PDF that offers more detail about the problems proofreaders and editors aim to solve at each stage. Reliability, promises and intention Now to your query. I think that an evaluation of a course’s reliability needs to ask two questions:
EXAMPLE The course:
Your intentions:
The course has been designed to help Purdue students with the thesis-writing process not train proofreaders to professional standards. The course is reliable in the context of its intention. It’s just not a good match for you or anyone else seeking to set up an editorial business. Client perceptions and expectations There’s a marketing issue at stake, too. However ‘reliable’ the free course is, it’s worth asking yourself whether it has the potential to enhance or damage your trustworthiness. Here’s the problem – there are thousands and thousands of editors and proofreaders online. The market is global, too, thanks to the internet. If a client finds you and five others, how will they decide who’s worth getting a quote from? Imagine your home needs rewiring. You’ve already had one small electrical fire and want to avoid a future catastrophe. Who do you hire? The professionally accredited electrician or the spark who did a free tutorial on YouTube? People searching for editorial services are just as discerning. They’re handing over hundreds, even thousands of pounds to a stranger. They want a professional who’s passionate about their business, takes it seriously enough to invest in high-quality training, and knows how to fix what’s wrong to industry-recognized standards. If you can’t demonstrate that you’re that person, you won’t be able to compete effectively. Some client types, publishers for example, expect an editorial pro to have completed courses from specific training providers. Others will focus on your successful completion of a test. To pass the test, you’ll need to know your stuff. If your free course doesn’t provide you with the required knowledge, you’ll come unstuck. Ask colleagues, clients and professional organizations Some years ago, I asked a group of UK publishers about professional training. You can read what they said in ‘Does training matter?’ (see ‘Further reading’ below). If you’re based outside the UK, call a few publishers and find out what professional training they recommend. Your national editorial society will also have guidance. There’s a list of worldwide national editorial societies in the ‘Further reading’ section, too. Practising editors and proofreaders will also have opinions. Ask in online forums about any free course you’re considering, and how it stacks up against paid-for options. Here’s one editor’s opinion: I recommend the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP) and the Publishing Training Centre (PTC) for UK editorial training. That recommendation is based on my experience (I’ve not done any free editorial training) but it’s an opinion, not the law! My colleagues will have their own preferences, some of which will be based on where they live. Pro training courses – what’s on offer Compare any free course’s syllabus with that of an industry-recognized course. Let’s take a look at the SfEP’s proofreading training: Proofreading 1: Introduction (online £103) Time: 10 hours ‘This course is suitable for beginners contemplating a career as a proofreader and for those who need to proofread as part of their job but have had little formal training. [It] teaches the very basics of proofreading; on its own it does not provide the thorough grounding needed to work as a professional proofreader. Apart from introducing the basics of proofreading, the course is designed as a taster to answer the question “Is proofreading for me?”’ You can see the full syllabus here: Proofreading 1: Introduction; it includes:
Proofreading 2: Headway (online £156) Time: 20–25 hours ‘This course is for people who have some knowledge and experience of proofreading and would like to learn more. It […] builds on the basic skills you already have to improve your concentration, focus and judgement.’ You can see the full syllabus here: Proofreading 2: Headway; it includes:
Proofreading 3: Progress (online £156) Time: 20–25 hours ‘This course guides you through more complex general and specialised material, including texts with illustrations, tables, notes and references.’ You can see the full syllabus here: Proofreading 3: Progress; it includes:
This is staged professional industry-recognized training that aims to make you fit for purpose and ready for market. It’s not cheap, nor should it be given that it’ll take a minimum of 50 hours to complete. No one gives away 50 hours of anything for free! If you find a free online proofreading course and it doesn’t include the content covered by the full staged SfEP syllabus outlined above (or an equivalent professional association’s course in your own country), ask yourself whether the material is sufficient for your learning requirements. When free is great – the springboard That’s not to say that freebies aren’t valuable. However, we need to recognize that, usually, what’s on offer is a glimpse, a taster. That taster might well offer insights, knowledge, tips and tools to start us on our journey. Freebies are a springboard. I use them to my gauge my fit with what’s on offer. I chose to invest in professional marketing coaching earlier this year. But first I signed up for some free stuff to see whether I liked the hosts and their training methods. I provide my own freebies – my website is packed with them … PDFs, ideas, advice, booklets. These are snippets; people have to pay for my substantive books. Many editors offer free sample edits to give clients a taster; the full editorial service costs. And so it is with editorial training. The PTC offers a free taster programme for its flagship distance-learning proofreading course. The SfEP offers a free proofreading test. Will either make your ready to offer proofreading services to clients in the open market? No. Will they act as signposts for what kinds of issues you need to look out for and whether a proofreading career is for you? Definitely. But you get what you pay for! Being a professional Editorial work is no different to accountancy, social work, teaching, graphic design, building, or electrical engineering … you can do it well and to professional standards, or you can do it badly. If you do it well, you’ll be able to give your clients excellent customer service. They’ll use you repeatedly and refer others to you. They’ll give you testimonials that will build your social proof. If you do it badly, you’ll let your clients down. If you’re lucky they’ll only complain and ask for their money back. If you’re not, they’ll tell others how awful your work is – a PR disaster. Any courses that promise miracles for very little to no money and time need to be viewed with caution. Use them to evaluate whether a professional editorial career is right for you. Beyond that, financial investment will be necessary. I hope that helps you, Malika! Further reading
You ask. I'll answer
I'm more than happy to tackle questions, especially from beginners. If there's something you want advice about, drop me a line and I'll post a solution to your problem here. The more focused your question, the more in-depth my answer will be! And if you want me to mask your identity, no problem.
Louise Harnby is a fiction copyeditor and proofreader. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.
Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader & Copyeditor, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn. If you're an author, you might like to join Louise’s Writing Library. Members receive monthly updates featuring self-publishing news and resources.
Knowing when to intervene and when to leave well enough alone is something most of us struggle with at the start of our editing and proofreading careers. This reader question highlights another dimension, that of concern with damaging authorial style in fiction. Here's my take ...
John says:
I am struggling with repetition versus an author’s style. Is there a section in New Hart’s Rules about this? Is there a golden rule that should always be followed? Is it necessary to point out repetitions if there are only two or three in a text of four pages, or if they’re in different paragraphs or in the same sentence? Thanks for your question, John. Broadly speaking, I think that as soon as something has a negative impact on the reader’s ability to navigate the story, we’re into the territory of finding solutions rather than respecting style. But more on that below. First, a caveat … The difference between voice and style You didn't ask about this, but it's something that beginner fiction writers and editors often struggle with so I decided to provide an overview here. Voice and style are often presented as the same thing in discussions about writing and editing. Actually, it's more complicated because there might be multiple voices in a novel, but one authorial style. Consider the example of a crime novel: Thinking about voice(s) In this example, the story is told through multiple points of view, though only one POV is presented per chapter – so we might follow the action through the eyes of Simon Smith in Chapter 1, and Nicole Jenson in Chapter 2, then back to Simon in Chapter 3. The narrative is written in the third person, so the voice is that of the narrator, though we will also hear Simon's and Nicole's voices through their dialogue. Still, the narrative voice should be consistent in both chapters. Overall, though, there are multiple voices in the novel – the characters’ and the narrator’s. Thinking about style Let's imagine that the author prefers short, choppy sentences to convey drama, tension and fear. Omits pronouns to keep things lean. Sometimes. He often uses contractions (I’m, we’d, you’re) to aid flow and mimic informal, natural speech patterns. And to convey emotion, he leans on dialogue rather than detailed description. All of this is his authorial style. It's present throughout the 10-book series and pulls it together. Readers can identify the books as having been written by the author in part because of the consistency of style. Now that we've made a note of that, let's return to the problem in hand ... Style versus poor writing The fiction editor needs to be aware of the difference between a style choice and a readability problem. Consider the following: 1A: She always named her cats after favourite aunts; this one was called Molly. 1B: She always named her cats after favourite aunts. This one was called Molly. 2A: He looked over his shoulder and almost felt the arrow as it whistled past. 2B: He looked over his shoulder. Almost felt the arrow as it whistled past. 3A: They walked to the end of the long hallway. At the end of the hall there was an open door beyond which lay three more hallways. They chose the left one and continued towards the interrogation room, no one said a thing as they walked. 3B: They walked the length of the hallway in silence. They reached an open door, and took a left towards the interrogation room. In 1A there’s a style choice regarding semi-colon use, and I’d respect this unless the author had specifically asked me to omit semi-colons (in which case I’d amend to 1B). In 2A there’s a style choice regarding sentence length. I’d use my judgement here. I might suggest 2B, explaining in a comment that I felt it conveyed a sense of tension more in keeping with the scene the author’s usual style. Or I might offer two options: 2B and an alternative: He looked over his shoulder, almost felt the arrow as it whistled past. In 3A, there are multiple problems – chiefly repetition, poor flow and a comma-splice. I don’t want to rewrite the book for the author – that’s not my job – but I can’t leave this as it is. I need a sensitive recast but I need to work with what I have. I might suggest something on the lines of 3B. And that’s the difference. In 1A and 2A the readability isn’t impaired. In 3A it is. If an author’s style is to write poorly, the editor must intervene. Readability trumps poor style. Our job when line editing and copyediting is to smooth and correct when things are rough and wrong. To leave as is because ‘it’s the author’s style’ cannot be justified. To do so would render the role of the editor obsolete. We’re hired to sort out problems, and attend to them we must. Golden rules, or lack of them When it comes to line editing fiction, there’s no rule book (New Hart’s or otherwise) that will tell you what you must fix and how you must fix it. Each project's different, each brief’s different, and the style and voice(s) in the text will be different. Above all, it’s intuitive. It takes into account the tension, pace and mood of a scene, and whether the repetition is obvious and makes the writing look amateurish, or whether it’s necessary and key to the novel’s trajectory. You need to feel your way into the story, get under the skin of the writing, and make sure the reader can move forward without stumbling. And how you, John, approach it might not be how I approach it because we're two different people and our impressions are subjective. Furthermore, whether and how you deal with repetition problems will depend on frequency, proximity, what you’ve agreed with the author, and whether the amendments are essential, preferred, or, rather, gentle improvements. Different line editors would handle 3A in different ways. Some would flag the problem; some would flag and explain it; yet others would flag, explain and suggest a solution. My preference is for the latter (unless I'm proofreading). Assuming we need a recast to avoid repetition in 3A, we could do one of the following:
The approach you choose should be based on what you’ve agreed with the author beforehand. I work with some authors whose novels require heavy line editing. To keep costs down, we agree that I’ll amend the text directly rather than commenting excessively. In such cases, the authors have decided they trust me to intervene in a way that’s sensitive to their style and the voice(s) in the book. I have other clients who prefer deeper recasts to be offered in the comments. If you’re not sure how to solve a problem, or you think there are multiple solutions to dealing with repetition, the query trumps the amendment every time. I do have some 'rules'! These are not about the what but the how. Perhaps they’ll help you communicate with your author about the repetition problems in a productive way. The mindful rules of fiction editing
What’s the brief? One thing you didn’t’ mention in your query was what level of editing you’d been commissioned for. It takes time to sort out sentence-level problems such as 3A. Correcting the comma splice is a quick fix and takes a second. Creating a recast that’s emotionally responsive to the author’s style and the voice(s) in the narrative and dialogue is a different kettle of fish. Correcting the comma splice falls within my definition of proofreading – the final quality-control or verification process. The recast absolutely does not; it’s deeper sentence-level editing and has to be priced as such because it takes longer to fix. Frequent repetition problems are usually evident in a sample chapter, so the editor should be able to see whether the level of edit requested is appropriate. If you’ve been commissioned to proofread and you find yourself dealing with a few issues of repetition here and there, it’s unlikely to impact on your hourly rate; just make a gentle note in your handover report. If the file is littered with repetition that renders the work unpublishable, and this wasn’t evident in the sample you were sent, you’ll need an emergency discussion with your author to explain the problem and come to an agreement as to how to proceed. Summing up I hope this has helped. The key is first to focus on the reader’s experience. That will be your best guide as to whether the repetition needs attending to. Then focus on your relationship with the author and let that guide you as to how best to communicate the problem via direct amendment, commenting or a mixture of the two. And don’t forget the mindful rules! Further reading You ask. I'll answer
I'm more than happy to tackle questions, especially from beginners. If there's something you want advice about, drop me a line and I'll post a solution to your problem here. The more focused your question, the more in-depth my answer will be! And if you want me to mask your identity, no problem.
Louise Harnby is a fiction copyeditor and proofreader. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.
Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn. If you're an author, you might like to join Louise’s Writing Library. Members receive monthly updates featuring self-publishing news and resources. Today I'm exploring the differences between fiction and non-fiction editing, and why fiction work isn't for everyone. To keep things tidy, I'm talking in the main about line editing and copyediting because I specialize in sentence-level work, but some of the key principles will apply to developmental fiction editing too. Why fiction editing is a different kind of artistry Have you ever tried something for the first time and found it difficult? Did someone review your initial effort? Did they outline problems before celebrating your achievement? If so, how did you feel? I suspect most of us have encountered this scenario at some time or other. I have, and it feels just awful. A review of anything that focuses only on the negatives – however kindly those negatives are offered – is a poor review. It matters not whether you’re an editor, a business executive, a marketer, or a parent; if you can’t find a single good thing to celebrate in the work in front of your nose, then you’ve not done the job properly. When editing fiction, the ability to celebrate first is critical – more so, I think, than with non-fiction. Note that by non-fiction I’m referring to academic, technical and journalistic works, not narrative non-fiction (sometimes called creative or literary non-fiction) such as memoir or biography, where I think the editing challenges are similar to the fiction specialist’s. In a nutshell, editing criminology requires a different touch to editing crime fiction. 
It’s personal
Every writer’s book is their baby, and most writers will infuse their tomes with their own experiences. But when those experiences concern matters of love, grief, sex or despair, the process of writing – and of being edited – takes on a whole new level of intimacy. I’ve lost count of the number of authors who’ve told me they felt physically sick at the thought of contacting an editor, never mind emailing me the file. Many feel vulnerable, exposed, embarrassed. And why wouldn’t they? Imagine handing over hundreds, even thousands of pounds to a stranger to look at an image of you and suggest how to make it better – not just any image, mind. You’re naked in this one. For many, that’s what it feels like to be edited. And so the fiction editor is charged with a responsibility. And it’s huge. 
Best versus best fit
Put 10 fiction editors in a room and ask them to work on the same 2,000 words. You’ll likely come back with 10 very different samples. That’s because fiction editing is subjective. It’s not that the rules of grammar, spelling and punctuation don’t apply. It’s not even that they apply less rigidly. It’s rather that they apply differently. Just a single change to a punctuation mark can affect tension, pace, mood. One of my regular authors has a mantra: ‘Louise, as always, keep it lean and mean.’ He’s a crime writer. It’s high-octane stuff. Low on adverbs. Low on conjunctions. Short, choppy sentences. The protagonist looks over his shoulder a lot. And if the punctuation is sympathetic, the reader looks with him. Compare this with another recent project. It’s essentially a love story – a woman’s search for her exiled family. The tale is one of heartbreak, abandonment, reconciliation and redemption. The author’s style is more fluid, prosaic. The protagonist isn’t looking over her shoulder but searching her soul. Every change needs to reflect this. How I go about reflecting these authors’ intentions will not necessarily be the same as one of my colleagues. It’s not that one of us is better at editing than the other. Rather, it’s how we interpret those intentions – and seek to mimic them – that’s different. We’re not talking about who’s the best, but who’s the best fit. That’s something the author must decide. And it’s tricky. How does a writer search for best fit on Google, or in an editorial directory, or on social media? How do they find that elusive emotional responsiveness to their writing?
Gauging emotional responsiveness – the sample edit
Fiction editors don’t have a monopoly on sample edits, but there is, I believe, an added dimension here in which samples really come into their own. Physically working on a piece of text helps every editor get a sense of the writing style, where the problems are and whether they’re capable of solving them, how long the job will take and how it should be priced. For the fiction editor, there’s something else, though – the feel of it. It’s our first opportunity to find out whether we can get under the skin of the author. And if we can’t, it might mean walking away. If we can’t respond emotionally to the author’s intentions – feel our way through the words and into the characters and the world they inhabit – the edit could be impaired. You can’t mimic an author seamlessly if you’re unmoved by what you’re reading. There’s a lot of talk about authorial voice in the editing world. In fiction editing, the concept can be a tad limiting.
A sample edit has its limitations, of course, by virtue of size. But it gives the author and the editor a glimpse of whether that emotional responsiveness is present and how it’ll be managed on the page such that the fit feels right. Ultimately, fiction editing is as much about the heart as the head. 
The mindful rules of fiction editing
Once the author and editor have found each other, the mindful rules of fiction editing will come into play ... during the edit, and in the post-edit summary or report. Here are mine:
Fiction is a specialism
Fiction editing isn’t for everyone. If you’re keen to specialize in this kind of work, ask yourself where you lie on the empathy scale. Many specialist fiction editors I know describe themselves as being a little on the oversensitive side. Terms such as introspective or contemplative are never far away. I cry at some adverts, so it’s no surprise to me that I ended up in this line of work! This emotionality can serve the fiction editor well, but it’s not something that can be learned on a training course. That’s not to say that specialist fiction editorial training isn’t worth doing – far from it. But mindfulness is your friend, too – don’t be afraid to embrace it in your editorial practice!
Louise Harnby is a fiction copyeditor and proofreader. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.
Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn. If you're an author, you might like to join Louise’s Writing Library. Members receive monthly updates featuring self-publishing news and resources.
This is the first in a series of guest posts by my colleague Steve Allen, a soldier-turned-editor who specializes in firearms and military-particulars editing.
Today we're looking at applying caution when loading up your hero with high-tech kit. Is he or she tactical, tacti-fool or tacti-cool? Over to Steve ...
I’m a specialist freelance editor of firearm and military-related particulars. I see gun-related writer mistakes all too frequently. Many simple firearm mistakes can be avoided without problems.
Unfortunately, many of the firearm mistakes I see are not simple, nor are they so easily fixed. Insignificant firearms mistakes inflame the nitpickers and have them shitting on your reviews. Savvy readers catch even the smallest of mistakes. After a mistake, readers question your writing, wondering what other mistakes you’ve made. Make too many and your story falls apart. Basic firearm mistakes cause you to lose credibility. Even in fiction, you must maintain credibility. What follows in this series are the frequent firearm mistakes that I see in fiction manuscripts and some advice on how to avoid them. Tactical, tacti-cool and tacti-fool Give your characters a good weapons load-out and good gear. Know the difference between tactical, tacti-cool and tacti-fool. Arming your characters reasonably takes some practice and restraint.
Unless writing satire, parody, comedy, etc., avoid giving your characters tacti-cool gear. Loading a character with tacti-cool gear, and having him learn the hard way the value of quality gear is a good use of tacti-cool stuff – just don’t overdo it. This is what tacti-cool looks like:
Oooh, shiny! I cringe every time an author tells me, ‘But it looks cool.’ Don’t give your characters ridiculous and worthless gear based on looks. Movies are incredibly influential, which is why I mention them so often in this series. Looking cool is great in the movies; it can get you killed in the field. Avoid gear such as:
Low-cost, mass-produced tactical gear is designed to empty the tacti-fool’s wallet, not actually to be used in combat. A simple rule of thumb to follow is: if the elite troops don’t carry it, avoid arming your character with it. A caveat is: if the weapon fits the character’s back story, then it might be okay. For example, if your character studied Silat (Indonesian martial art) and carries a kerambit it fits the story. If your character learned Eskrima (also known as Doce Pares; Filipino martial art) while living in Cebu, then arming her with fighting sticks fits the story.
If you enjoyed this, there's a PDF summary of the key points here. Just click on the image to download.
You can access the full 45-page ebook now by joining Louise's Writing Library. If you'd prefer not to sign up, that's fine. Instead, watch out for forthcoming posts in The Art of Firearms in Fiction series here on The Proofreader's Parlour.
Steve Allen is a retired soldier living north of Seattle, WA, with his lovely wife and daughters, a neurotic terrier and a goofy black Labrador.
When not editing, Steve wanders the Pacific Northwest on roads less travelled, searching for good books and very cold beer. Email: stevenwordsmith67@gmail.com
Louise Harnby is a fiction copyeditor and proofreader. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.
Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn. If you're an author, you might like to join Louise’s Writing Library. Members receive monthly updates featuring self-publishing news and resources.
Ever wondered how a professional book index is created? My colleague Vanessa Wells offers an honest and humorous glimpse into the world of a pro indexer – the challenges and the joys, and the 'sense of having created a beautiful thing'.
Let's take a peek into Vanessa's diary ... 
I attended the Canadian national indexing conference in Montreal, where we – like most conference attendees – go to strengthen connections with colleagues and expand our professional knowledge. Since the indexing community in Canada is very small, this is a valuable investment and full of good people.
As a result of the conference, I’ve received a referral and am being hired by a university professor to write an index for a 220K-word anthology he’s editing with 22 chapters and almost as many contributors. It’s a ‘straightforward’ index of ‘names and titles’ which, of course, means that it’s both a name and subject index in reality. Yikes.
Against my usual policy, I agree to meet the professor in person, as the campus is close by and it would be faster than exchanging several emails. An excellent meeting results in ironing out expectations, discussing needs and agreeing we’re on the same page! It’s due July 26.
I send him my contract to review, and we discuss rates. Rate structure, I find from speaking to other indexers, is variable. Some people will work for $2/page; others charge much more. A figure I often hear is $5/page, but that definitely depends on your market – geographically and by genre, specialization, and timeline. An independent author writing a non-fiction trade book is not going to generate the same fee as a university-paid gig. Some indexers provide other means of calculating their fees, such as a flat project fee. I tell him my academic rate, and he agrees. I submit my invoice for a non-refundable 30% deposit, payable before work begins. 
Proofs are due. They don’t arrive. They’re rescheduled by publisher for the 30th … While publishing timelines are often shifting (there’s a domino effect when a hitch arises), the end deadlines of proofreading and indexing are rarely budged.
So now I have to recalculate the number of hours and pages per day I’ll have to complete to meet the non-budging due date of July 26. Four days lost means Goodbye, weekends! for the duration. 
It’s a long weekend here for #Canada150, our sesquicentenary. I’m so wiped from the previous month of conferences and making a second website for the new arm of my business that I take (most of) the weekend off. I can’t afford to get sick during this project. Self-care and all that.
Forgot I start a weekly course on Tuesday afternoons for the summer, with an appointment this morning. Will have to start tomorrow. Now that I’ve lost another 5 days, I’ll have not only to work weekends but very long days, everyday. My bad.
21 days to go: I begin the pre-read (see above photo) to start gathering my thoughts on how I’ll approach this behemoth. And I need at least 3 days at the end to edit the written index, so really I only have 18 days available.
I note there are A LOT of errors still in the MS. I judiciously email AU to double check that it’s been edited and that no other file is forthcoming. He confirms it has been copyedited … Sigh. 
Re-install my $500USD indexing software on my new PC. Pay $39 for TextExpander, which is an online tool that lets you build a library of ‘snippets’, sort of like hot keys or macros, but it’s much simpler and faster. Using TextExpander for repeated, long index headings is making my life so much easier: it works pretty well with .ucdx files!
I’m already 50 pages behind. Indexing academic books is so much harder because you have to interpret the often-verbose language to get to the ideas (then re-edit them in your mind) and THEN start forming index relationships between the ideas on that and every other page.
Since there are almost two dozen authors in this anthology, I’m doing a lot of mental shifts. Why do I pine for indexes so much when they can be so draining?!? I’m being foiled by the very poor copyediting that was(n’t) done. I email the author-editor several times regarding his preferences for word options that I’m finding in the errata … 
Working on a Saturday is particularly annoying when you hear other people having a great day off. Such is the freelance life.
Here’s how I start an indexing day. Wish I had more than one monitor and can’t believe I used to do this on a 15-inch one!
CINDEX software file open; Google to check MS info, with related sites and academic books on the subject; book PDF marked up with terms needing indexing; and TextExpander to cut down on keyboard strokes. For the time being, I just type the entries into the index; refining connections comes later.
I emailed the author again about the serious issues around the practically non-existent copyediting of this book. It’s causing me to complete about 3pg/hr instead of 5–10pg/hr, never mind that I’m not being paid to correct such things, so again my budgeted time has to be rethought. He’d like errata forwarded to him so he can take the examples to the publisher and complain. (Understandably, he just doesn’t realize how much is involved in corrections before indexing can be done: research, confirm which instance is the error, note error, find other instances of it in MS, return to indexing the term and fixing all related cross-references). Ctl+F is my BFF. Wish I still drank alcohol. And for all you fellow CCLs, here’s what’s behind it all (because this, after all, is what’s important in life, not crying over indexes). 
I had a good phone chat with the author about the terrible editing. (Again breaking the rules; normally I never share my number – learned the hard way with an abusive client once – but there’s too much to discuss via email.)
We’re hatching a plan to shame the publisher into redoing the copyediting or letting me do it. Either way, my schedule is messed up, and he’s sympathetic. What he’s told me about their process with him this far is appalling. 
Email from author: basically, the publisher will redo the copyediting after indexing (!!!). This is a problem because it can affect pagination, thus rendering entries incorrect. I asked that my name not be included due to peer reviews in a trade journal, and I wouldn’t want residual index errors to be ascribed to me. The prof was cool with this; I am not, but that’s life in publishing.
Slogging away, only getting about 35 pages/day done. Have to step it up to get in an extra day for editing the index. I hired a subcontractor to proofread it the day before it’s due. I need an emoji for dollar bills flying away. [Note from Louise: I've obliged.]
Tenth day. Just shoot me.
I’ve put in 12 hours today. I’m starting to wonder if I’m going too deep with this index. Re-evaluating.
Good thing I hate summer weather. I worked smarter today, however, using more automations.
Panic time. I’m only at pg 385 out of 557 and I have less than 4 indexing days left before I start editing.
Trying a new – and, to me, risky – tactic: indexing on the fly, not marking up first. I’ll see how one chapter goes. I’ve got to save time! I’ve subcontracted out a small job (1–2 hrs) due to the copyedit snafu. I need every hour I can get. I figure it’ll be worth the money. 
What happened to yesterday? Feel like I’m getting sick, which would be disastrous. As an editor, I can always subcontract out a project for an emergency, but not only does indexing have a smaller pool of trained professionals, the intricacies of indexing style are so individual that really no one could easily or seamlessly take over. At least, not if the index is to retain its integrity and essence. Sigh.
Yay, I’m not sick! Done the inputting of entries! 6,388 records, which is on par for a book of this size and topic. The hard part is yet to come: finessing the cross-references and making links to interrelated concepts. While the software can help check for bad references and missing locators, there are many variables to consider. Some cross-references will have to be truncated and reworked; others will simply have to go; and yet others will require double posting due to wording.
This is the part that indexers must educate authors and publishers about – explaining that Word’s ‘indexing’ program just cannot replace a trained human brain. Word creates a concordance: that’s like taking the ingredients off a cereal box and listing them in alphabetical order. An index, analogously, takes the main words, interrelates them, looks at their nutrient values and considers how the ingredients work to give us a food product, but we can also just know what’s in there if that’s all we need. In fact, there’s our professional comparison: indexers are the food chemists of the book world – ta da! This stage is exciting and a bit terrifying. I read an article in our UK journal, The Indexer, wherein another indexer (Margie Towery, Ten Characteristics of Quality Indexes) admitted to having two moments of feeling stuck during the process: getting started and this stage. Glad I’m not the only one! 
I’m just doing some basic cleanup so that I can get to the editing described yesterday. Fixing typos deletes erroneously duplicated entries and ensures consistency: now’s the time to go back to the MS and confirm correct spellings; get rid of unnecessary, duplicated or differently phrased duplicate subheadings (the latter because you don’t see repeats in the Draft Format that you might have entered previously); add subheadings for entries that have too many unrelated locators, etc.
It’s 11 a.m. and I’m only at the Cs. As the meteorologist at the beginning of Twister says, ‘This is going to be a long day’… 
Finished cleanup from the Ms to Z; also a lot of double-checking that sufficient entries existed for major and meta topics, as well as the book’s contributors, which the author-editor requested. I’ve planned out the editing for tomorrow before a review by software on Monday.
And to prevent potential meltdowns, I save every 30 minutes or so, and back up to hard drive and Dropbox every 4 hours. That’s because once someone turned off the fuse box, and I lost a huge part of an index I had been working on. Live and learn. 
Sunday morning, so starting late at 10 a.m. I had a good night’s sleep, which is great because today’s to-do list is intimidating … Except my optical mouse isn’t working, so thank god I have a wired spare. Kind of like giving a chef a loaner knife they’re not used to.
The mouse worked after a reboot, but the reboot took about 20 mins, so essentially I’m half an hour behind again. I can’t just Control + F terms in the PDF, type the page numbers in and I’m done: half of them are in citations, references or footnotes, and the latter should usually only be included when they’re substantive (which can take some time to decide). So whittling down the number is time-consuming. Then they have to be organized by thought. Then entered, and without page-number errors. 
Butterflies. I heard a reminder on the radio yesterday talking about how, philosophically, Good Enough should be good enough, i.e. that striving for perfection is not good for us. I don’t think this is the inclination of the indexer (or editor or proofreader for that matter), no matter who says it. But I’m sure Annie Lamott would tell us to be gentler with our sorry-ass selves.
I confirmed that the proofreader is available to complete their part tomorrow. On to my penultimate review … 
Due to other commitments, I had to forget about the index today and trust it would be well proofread by my subcontractor. Not easy to do ...
Bad dreams all night about repeatedly calling said subcontractor because the file was late.
Spent several hours correcting, finessing, re-sorting (getting the locator order right – Roman numerals, ascending page numbers interspersed with those with an i for illustration (sometimes we just put illustrated page numbers in italics), so it would show thus: ix–x, 132, i234, 496), and double-checking things before putting it in a double-columned .rtf file. I’ve heard that before this editing stage, an error rate for page numbers of about 10% can occur, but with the ones my subcontractor found, I was at 0.002% errors: I hope that’s true! Corrected, I hope it’s near-perfect. Even human indexers with software can make mistakes. In a book of 220K words to be considered for indexing, perfection cannot be expected. I’ve clicked Send … 
Anti-climax: the author couldn’t access the file properly (the .rtf was showing up strangely), so he just asked for a new file format. He hadn’t got past the first 10 lines. But he did thank me for my ‘copious explanatory notes’, i.e. my return-file letter, which outlined info about the parameters of the index and changes that had to be used.
The prof is going to read the index this weekend, as he’s travelling. I could have had extra days after all! Waah!
Author got back to me with a few queries and the following: ‘Thanks for the painstaking and thorough job – it’s clear you took a lot of care, and I appreciate that … Thanks again for all of your hard work.’
Hopefully he’ll call me again in the future or refer a colleague to me. But after a few days’ reflection and relaxation, I’m not sure I’ll accept such a long and dense manuscript again – unless it truly is strictly names and titles! And I’ve realized that an index you’ve written is more like your baby than a book edit: there’s the same pride of accomplishment, but there’s more of a sense of having created a beautiful thing. And the labour and delivery stories are way better!
Vanessa Wells is a subtitle, caption and copyeditor, proofreader and indexer, who taught Latin for almost 20 years before becoming a freelance editor. She recently wrote an article summarizing the current state of indexing. When she’s not working, she’s either reading, watching films, or cat-sitting for senior cats with special medical needs. She lives in Toronto, Canada.
www.reelwords.ca www.wellsreadediting.ca
How to get 10 blogs posts from 1 booklet. Stretching exercises for proofreaders and editors7/8/2017
Why marketing is sometimes a struggle Here are two reasons why a lot of proofreaders and editors struggle with marketing:
Here’s an option that will solve both problems. I’m talking about something I bet all of you do rather well, and how you can get some efficiencies from it that will stretch your marketing budget (no Lycra required!).
What do you do really, really well? I’ve not yet met one of my peers who couldn’t have a decent conversation with me about editing and proofreading – whether it be a technical or stylistic issue, or a business-development matter. You're all great at it. And if you can talk about it, you can write about it. And if you can write about it, you can offer that information to colleagues and potential clients. And that’s marketing. So, for those of you sitting in the too-difficult camp, you’ve no excuse! And here’s a tip – solving problems is always good fodder for marketing. If you’ve read Marketing Your Editing & Proofreading Business, you’ll recall my discussion of Kevin Daum’s Differentiation–Empathy–Solution framework. The empathy part of the framework is where you identify the problems. The solution part of the framework is … well, it’s pretty obvious! If you’ve read my Content Marketing Primer for Editors & Proofreaders, you’ll recall that I bang on non-stop about solving customers’ problems. So write about all the problems you’ve ever been asked to solve and you’ll not go far wrong in terms of engaging with the audience who asked the questions in the first place. Now we’ve got that out of the way, let’s look at one way you can save yourself time in the long run … Recycling This year I landed a free ticket for the Summit on Content Marketing via content marketing masters Andrew and Pete. One hundred speakers in twelve days. No, I didn’t listen to all of the webinars. And I was up until 1 a.m. frequently, just to catch what I could. But it was worth it because one of the sessions was by Gordon Graham, aka That White Paper Guy. In ‘One White Paper, Five Ways: Stretch Your Content Marketing Budget by Repurposing’, Graham demonstrated how after creating one large, in-depth piece of writing (which can be used as a marketing tool in its own right) you can create additional promo pieces from it by slicing and dicing. More on that later. Now, Graham specializes in the white paper – ‘A persuasive essay that uses facts and logic to promote a better way to solve a business problem’ – but we editorial pros can take the basic principles and use them to create our own problem-solving materials too. Let’s put aside the term white paper and think in terms of booklets instead – ebooklets specifically, since we can post them on a blog and pages of a website, send them out to our mailing list or blog subscribers, email them to colleagues or clients who are looking for answers contained in that booklet, link to them in our social media posts, upload them to our membership forums, and so on. What makes a great booklet? Graham has some wonderful advice on how to approach a white paper, but I think these points are well worth bearing in mind for booklets too. I’m paraphrasing here but it boils down to this:
We’re editors and proofreaders. That’s mostly nuts-and-bolts stuff that editors are paid to look out for, so I’m confident every one of us can do this. Upside-down thinking In the past, I’ve tended to think of my writing upside down. I might create several blog articles and then wonder whether, because they’re related (say, by topic), I can merge them into something more substantive. My first two books emerged, in part, from that mode of thinking. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that approach. However, it’s not always the most efficient way of doing things; I tend to limit myself in terms of word count and perhaps omit information that I’d like to explore in more depth but choose not to because I don’t want to overload the reader. And then, when I want to create something more substantive, I have to go back and rewrite large chunks of material to ensure the detail’s there. By switching things round and creating the big piece first, I don’t limit myself or my ideas. I can put everything into the booklet, and then decide how best to slice and dice later. Examples of white papers and booklets Here are five examples of in-depth pieces – three from the publishing industry, and two from my own stable:
The slice and dice – a case study
To show you how the process works, and why I think it’s effective, I’m using How to write great sex scenes as a case study, because it’s something that’s on the go at the moment and the process is fresh in my mind. Why am I writing it? Because I’m asked about it A LOT, and it’s something that many beginner authors struggle with. That means it solves a problem. And when we solve problems we’re more likely to be trusted. There are tens of thousands of people in the world offering editing and proofreading services. For the beginner author, with no prior experience of self-publishing, trying to find help can be terrifying. Is X trustworthy? Does Y know what she’s doing? Is Z worth the money he’s asking? When we show we’re engaged with our clients’ problems, we begin to earn their trust, and they’re more likely to ask us to quote. So I’m not only helping my clients, but also helping my business. What do I get out of it? I’m learning. This is the realm of writer coaching and developmental editing. That I’m neither of those things is neither here nor there. The fact is that lots of my clients choose not to hire developmental editors or writing coaches before they come to me. So if I learn, at least I can articulate what their problems are, how they might solve them in their future writing projects, and direct them to expert guidance that I’ve discovered on my own journey. Why don’t I just refer them to existing articles? Because there’s tons of the stuff. And that doesn’t help a beginner author who’s in the very early stages of developing their novel-craft and navigating the self-publishing process. Like all of you, I pride myself on being helpful and solving authors’ problems rather than creating more for them! Besides, I want that content on my website. I want my authors to see that I’m engaged with their problems rather than just sending them to someone else – someone they’ll think is more helpful than me. How am I handling the research? I’m reading a lot (research like a think tank). The advice is always wise, and sometimes hilarious, so it’s a joy to do. And this way I get to summarize the advice of expert writing coaches who know how to write about sex well, and the resources they’ve created. There are entire books about this stuff, you know! And I’ll cite like a scholar. Well, perhaps I won’t be using the full author–date system (I do, after all, want to write more like a journalist and communicate like a human being) but all my sources will be attributed fully in a reference section at the end. What about the format? It’ll be a PDF, but I’ll create a hardcopy-style booklet image for marketing purposes – a bit like this one for the audio-book primer. 
I like a landscape format for my booklets because they work well on tablets and laptop screens. But, really, it’s a personal choice.
I’ll create the cover image in Canva (using the principles outlined in an excellent and free Canva Copy Special video and template by Andrew and Pete) using my brand colours and fonts. Then I’ll use that to create a 3D booklet picture with BoxShot 3D (there’s a newer version but I prefer the older one; you can still access it though it’s not supported technically). How long will it be and how long will it take to write? I reckon about 10,000 words max. in total – maybe 9 or 10 sections covering different aspects of the problem. I don’t know how long it will take, to be honest. I tend to write my blog posts and booklets in front of the TV. That way, I’m relaxed and don’t feel like it’s cutting into my spare time. Reading time is something I don’t have trouble fitting into my life – it’s just something that happens, and it’s a pleasure, even when I’m learning. My approach to my marketing and writing is: it takes as long as it takes. It’ll be ready when it’s ready. It might take a week, or a month, or more. It depends what else is going on. My only rule is that I make sure I’m ahead of myself by a couple of months so that I can market my business regularly and consistently with my writing. The thing is, once it’s done, I get to kick back and break out the chopping board! The slice-and-dice-stage Once I have the booklet written and the image produced, I can use it as it is – a substantive, useful and compelling resource that will help current and future clients. But I can also chop it up. If I have 10 different sections, and each one’s around 1,000 words, I can easily create a series of 10 blog posts, each with its own core theme. That’s a lot of useful content to offer potential clients, and I can stagger the publication in whatever way suits me best. Does that detract from the value of the booklet? I don’t think so. It’s about visibility and choice. Regarding visibility, different people find answers to problems in different ways. So they might see my tweet about this booklet and think, ‘That’s useful. I’ll download that.’ But they might also place a longer question into Google, such as ‘How long should a sex scene be in a novel?’ My booklet’s unlikely to show up because its title doesn’t answer that question. But a blog post that looks specifically at that question might well end up in the results. It’s certainly far more likely to than the booklet title alone. As for choice, the thing to remember is that not everyone can be bothered to root around on a blog for Parts 1 to whatever. Blog posts work really well when everything’s in one place, but once you start asking people to jump here, there and everywhere there’s a risk they’ll switch off. What I like to do is slice up the content into several posts but give the reader the option of downloading the full booklet at every stage. Graham also suggests using some of the sliced-off articles as guest posts. This is a great idea because, again, you’re putting your resource in front of a new audience that might otherwise not have seen it. Repurpose and relax Any editor or proofreader can stretch their marketing budget using this recycling method. When we create an in-depth, research-based resource, we help our clients and we teach ourselves. That’s a win–win all round. As long as it’s dripping with value, you should feel free to carve it up in whatever way suits you. Your clients aren’t homogeneous when it comes to finding solutions to their problems, which means you don’t have to be homogeneous when it comes to delivering them. When you slice and dice, and deliver according to your audience’s preferences, you increase engagement, build trust and expand the life cycle of the story you’re telling. What’s not to like? – that’s how I rounded up the discussion of how publishers can stretch their marketing budgets on BookMachine’s blog. I think it stands just the same for the freelance editorial pro. Go on! Write yourself a booklet! Also mentioned
Louise Harnby is a professional fiction proofreader and copyeditor. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.
Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn. If you're an author, you might like to join Louise’s Writing Library. Members receive monthly updates featuring self-publishing news and resources.
‘A good design should be almost invisible. It should support your words, deliver them to the reader, not get in the way.’
Rebecca Brown, Design for Writers 
I'm delighted to welcome Rebecca Brown of Design for Writers to the Proofreader's Parlour. Design for Writers is the team I refer my authors to when they ask for help with book formatting and design.
In this post, Rebecca offers her expert advice on how to get the best from your book interior ...
Congratulations! Having shed blood, sweat and tears, and arrived at a finished manuscript, you’ve decided to take the plunge and self-publish.
As part of the process of finding the best people to help you do that, one of your priorities will be making your book look as professional as possible. Everyone’s heard the saying ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’. Yet most people do just that. And they judge it by how it looks inside, too. The cover will get people to pick your book off the shelf; the interior will help make it a pleasure to read. Why is interior design important? Your words have been carefully edited and chosen to hook your readers, but the best opening lines may never even be read if they’re set in a font that’s difficult to read, the margins are so small that you need to crack the spine just to read the start of each line, or the overall design looks rushed and unprofessional. Many self-published authors rely on online sales of both print books and ebooks though, so, okay, a badly designed book might not necessarily put off all prospective buyers. But do you want your readers to leave reviews saying, ‘I don’t know if this book was any good because it was horrible to read’? It does happen, just as readers will leave reviews that criticize poor editing or a weak story line. And those readers are less likely to return for Book Two. What does a well-designed book look like? The best way of answering that is to look at some professionally published books. This is what you’ll find. Text: The text is large enough to read – usually around 11 or 12 point – but not too large (unless it’s a large-print edition) of course; the point is that the text size is appropriate for the target audience. Margins: There’s plenty of space around the text. You don’t want tiny margins; you need to be able to see the text as it goes in towards the spine, and you need to be able to hold it around the edges without your thumb obscuring the words. Some titles will have bigger margins, like children’s books. Again, it’s about an appropriate design for your readership. Typeface: The most obvious and striking feature is the chosen typeface. It should be a serif font (like Garamond, or Times) not a sans-serif font (like Arial) for the body text. Serif fonts are easier on the eyes for long format, physical text. Sans-serif fonts are easier for on-screen reading on a computer. However, this itself can depend on the type of book – many people prefer a sans-serif for some kinds of non-fiction. For fiction, though, choose a traditional serif font. That way, if you need to make part of the text stand out – for example, if your protagonists exchange text messages, it’ll be more obvious that you’ve made a deliberate style choice, and have a more professional impact. When it comes to print books, small details like embellishments and display fonts for titles all add to the pleasure of reading, and to the sense of your book as a beautiful piece of work. That doesn’t mean you should try to mimic the same experience in your ebook, though …
Print and digital books are different animals Authors often hugely underestimate just how different ebooks and print are. Don’t aim for a duplicate of your print book – it’s a different reading experience. A stand-out feature of ebooks is the extent to which the reader can set up the reading experience to fit their personal preferences (for example, text size, font, and spacing). If you try to force a replica of your print book, you’re doing your book a disservice and making things more difficult for your reader. For example, every ebook device is slightly different, so if you have many different embellishments and beautiful fonts, you’re increasing the risk of the book not displaying as you intended, perhaps not working properly at all. Doing it yourself Authors can, and often do, carry out the work themselves. There are many good guides to setting out your text, and if you bear certain guidelines in mind, such as those mentioned above, you’ll be able to produce a decent book. If your budget is limited, this can be a good option. Bear in mind the following:
Ebook
Hiring a professional
While you can do it yourself, there is a risk that you'll miss out those extra design elements that make your book stand out. Hiring pro interior designers ensures that your files are absolutely guaranteed to work with the major retailers, and that your book will offer your readers the best reading experience possible, regardless of format (e.g. paperback, hardback, ereader). So what should you look for? Price is always a consideration of course. This can be an expensive endeavour, but sometimes you do get what you pay for, and cheaper is not necessarily better. Look for what’s included in the package:
For print, at least, the designer’s use of InDesign demonstrates a level of skill and commitment to using professional tools. Ask to see examples of your prospective formatter work. Find out what books they’ve worked on (from their website or social media, for example) and take a look at the ‘Look Inside’ feature on Amazon, noting the following:
Evaluating the professional designer’s process It’s important to understand how your designer works if you’re to get the best value for your investment. If they’re not interested in getting to know your book and your style, that should be a red flag. Ask them how they would like your manuscript to be sent to them. Most will want final, fully edited text in a common format (such as a Microsoft Word document), but often they’ll allow a ‘reasonable’ number of small changes after proof stage. That’s because designers are human, too! We realize that seeing your work laid out for the first time can alert you to small typos and errors, no matter how carefully you’ve checked it. However, multiple rounds of editing once the text is laid out can have a bigger impact than you might think, so get it as close to finished as you possibly can, and make sure you understand what levels of revision are included by your formatter. Finally, and this goes for any book-publication service, think about your initial contact with them. What are they like to work with? There’ll be quite a lot of back-and-forth. Discussion is important because this is such a personal, important project for you. Having a great rapport with your designer is essential. Good luck! Rebecca’s top tip
Whether you’re doing it yourself or paying someone, keep it simple! Your text is what the reader’s bought, so a good design should be almost invisible. It should support your words, deliver them to the reader, not get in the way.
Design for Writers
For drama-free book design, contact Rebecca or Andrew at hello@designforwriters.com or www.designforwriters.com
How does one go about building a written-communications business from scratch? The person who got in touch is looking to break into a sector that I have almost no experience of, so I wondered whether it might stump me.
However, it soon became clear that the problem is not the sector itself but the challenge of being visible in that sector. 
Those of us who started out by targeting the publishing industry know that there’s an advantage – that sector knows who we are, what we do, and why it needs us. But what do you do if your target clients are corporates?
Jo says:
Firstly, thank you so much for your extremely helpful articles. They’re all I seem to read at the moment. Secondly, a question! You kindly offer to help people solve their business problems, so here’s mine. I recently set up a communications business offering copywriting, proofreading, editing and social media services. I have a professional background in science, business and education, but not specifically within the communication arena. My last role, as a communications manager, was my first within this sector. I’ve spent 15 years helping my partner with his communication requirements, from proofreading and editing to copywriting, so I feel as experienced as I can in this field without having any ‘official’ training. Now comes the hard bit! I am spending each and every day at the computer, emailing companies that I hope will be able to utilize my services, and the one question I keep hearing, time after time is ‘Can you please send me examples of your work?’ Herein lies the problem. Even though I have worked for many years with my other half, I haven’t built a portfolio of any kind, let alone kept any of the work I contributed to. I’m stuck in that cycle of no provable experience so no work, but no work so no way of demonstrating what I can do! Tricky! How would you suggest I get around this? Thanks for taking the time to read this, and for your insightful advice!
Hi, Jo, and thanks so much for your question!
Your problem is essentially one of visibility, competition, and the lack of a stand-out brand identity. Your website looks lovely, but that’s no longer enough to get you found or noticed. Written-communications businesses are ten a penny, so you’re operating in a marketplace that’s highly competitive. You’re also up against specialist editors (like me) and specialist copywriters (like my pal John Espirian), and a ton of big-brand agencies who offer service packages to corporates (your target market). Currently, despite your pretty website, you’re basically an unknown supplier writing to companies who’ve never heard of you and have no way of working out why you’re special, why you’re different, why they should pick you over anyone else. And none of that is a reflection of your capability. It’s simply a reflection of the fact that you can’t prove it. The consequence is that, at the moment, your message is all about you. You’re not the first supplier to be in the position of having a small or non-existent portfolio. Many of my colleagues have to sign non-disclosure agreements that preclude them from advertising the fact that they’ve worked for corporates. And while my fiction writers are more than happy to make it known that they’ve hired me, I’d never send another author a sample of the work I’ve done on behalf of a former client. It would be a breach of confidentiality. Becoming visible and standing out So what to do? My view is that you need to commit to a content marketing strategy that will build trust and get attention. The briefest definition of content marketing I can give you is this: Creating useful stuff that solves problems … and giving it away. That’s because when you help people, you get noticed. You know this is true because that’s why you contacted me! Let me quote you; ‘Thank you so much for your extremely helpful articles. They’re all I seem to read at the moment.’ Think about it … you’ve never met me or seen a sample of my editing work, and yet you devoured my blog and sent me a long email outlining your problem in the hope that I could help you. Then you agreed to let me publish your name, your question and my response in a public place. Somewhere along the line, I made you trust me. And that, Jo, is what you need to mimic with your own business. You found me, which means my clients can find me. Now you need to enable people to find you and make them want to engage with you and your written-communications business. We’re already 690 words in and I haven’t even got started on the nuts and bolts of content marketing, and there isn’t room to do it justice here. But here are the basic principles. My basic principles of content marketing 
Copyright Louise Harnby, 2017 (first published in Content Marketing Primer for Editors & Proofreaders)
When you create solutions to people’s problems – based around these principles – you begin a journey that puts you top of mind and top of the search engines. Changing the focus of the message Remember above how I talked about your message being all about you? When you start content marketing, the message becomes all about the client – their problems, their challenges, their business. And when you offer solutions to those problems via your content marketing strategy, you present yourself as the expert you are – someone with 15 years’ experience of working with a corporate. No one will be looking at your sparse testimonials page if they’re too busy drooling over the free resources you’ve offered them. Then, when it comes to the stuff they can’t do themselves, you’ll be ready to help with paying work. It’s hard graft, make no mistake. There are no quick fixes or overnight solutions. The strategy requires commitment. The principles I outlined above are from my Content Marketing Primer for Editors & Proofreaders, which I wrote at the end of 2016 and published in January 2017. I stand by everything I wrote in that ebook, but I’ve learned a whole lot more since, because I decided to get help from the pros. After all, I’m a professional editor not a professional marketer! And if you want to get serious and make inroads as quickly as possible, you might decide to go for the pro option, too. An example of how content marketing worked … on me The story of the pros I chose provides an example of great content marketing in action. I was looking for free online help with branding and design. I came across a couple of guys on Twitter who were creating video tutorials about how to do just that. They were fun, young (younger than me, for sure!), seemed friendly … and their stuff was brilliant … and free. I watched one vlog after another, and signed up for their mailing list so I’d know when something new was out. For about three months, I took all that free guidance and implemented it. And then I bought from them. Just a book at first. It cost about a tenner. And all the time, I kept thinking: if the free stuff is this good, and this cheap book is this good, what must their membership group be like? By the time April had come around, resistance was futile. Like the Borg. And I joined. So, you see what happened? They gave away a load of stuff that I found useful, and it got my attention and persuaded me to trust them. And then I became a client because when it came to making the big decision about whom to choose, they were top of mind. They'd blown everyone else out of the water. So who are they? Regular readers of my blog will be bored rigid of hearing me talk about Andrew and Pete, and their group Atomic, but I won’t apologize because they’ve made a difference to me. What they teach works. If you decide to go down this route though, do your own research first and make your own decisions. Find what’s right for you. An example of a colleague’s content strategy My colleague Natalie Hailey owns a digital marketing agency called Hot Content. And she uses content to drive her marketing strategy, just like I do, just like you can. Natalie has a blog, a vlog and a newsletter through which she’s building an audience of business owners who are interested in her services – her solutions. But she’s not just creating visual and written online content. She’s also delivering those solutions face to face – by speaking at regional events (via her local chamber of commerce) – and by hosting live training sessions and workshops in her area that focus on helping, educating, building relationships and engaging with local businesswomen. She focuses on a core audience and makes sure that the content she creates and delivers speaks to that audience at every touchpoint of her business – from the font she uses for her logo to the colours she chooses for her blog images; from the way she dresses at speaking engagements to the gentle warmth of her voice when she vlogs; from the tone of her blog posts to the way she engages in forums. Those are the things her potential clients focus on. And, ultimately, they choose to engage with her because she makes them want to. And why on earth wouldn’t they? She’s nothing but helpful. 
Back to you ...
I think you can do what I do, what Natalie does, what John does, and what Andrew and Pete do, so that you and your written-communications business stand out. By focusing on your target clients, what their problems are, and how you can solve them, and in a way that’s based purely on being helpful, by making them ‘feel smarter or happier’, as Andrew and Pete put it, you can move out of the catch-22 you find yourself in. That’s because this type of marketing is about relationships rather than résumés, about problem-solving rather than portfolios, about answering with solutions rather than asking for work. It’s not that testimonials, portfolios and experience aren’t great. They are. They’re wonderful. But, as you know only too well, they’re what you get at the arrivals gate. Content marketing is the departure point. Do it yourself, do it with books, or do it with pros. But do it. (Gawd, I sound like a Nike advert!). Then you'll be irresistible too. Like the Borg. Good luck! You ask. I'll answer
I'm more than happy to tackle questions, especially from beginners. If there's something you want advice about, drop me a line and I'll post a solution to your problem here. The more focused your question, the more in-depth my answer will be! And if you want me to mask your identity, no problem.
Louise Harnby is a fiction copyeditor and proofreader. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.
Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn. If you're an author, you might like to join Louise’s Writing Library. Members receive monthly updates featuring self-publishing news and resources.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of myths about ‘rules’ in writing. Sorting out what’s right or wrong versus what’s preferred or asked for can be tricky for the inexperienced author. In this article, I offer some guidance.
Don't forget to claim your FREE copy of my Guidelines for New Authors booklet at the bottom of this post! Writing well means understanding the difference between a rule and a preference. In the world of the written word, these two things often become confused.
How do you sort out the rules from the preferences?
There is a difference between choosing where to place an apostrophe and choosing how to spell ‘focused’. You can get the first one wrong because different placements will create different meanings. You can’t get the second one wrong, but you can be inconsistent; ‘focused’ and ‘focussed’ are simply variants of the same word and both are correct in British and American English. So, how do you work out what’s a rule and what’s a choice? Check a good-quality dictionary or reference manual if you’re unsure. Oxford Dictionaries Online is a great place to start because it shows spelling variants – e.g. whiskey/whisky, organize/organise, centre/center – and explains whether these are equally acceptable across different regions, more likely to be used in one particular part of the world, or distinct to a particular area. Refer to a style manual. A good-quality style manual should distinguish between a rule and a preference. Which one you choose should be relevant to your audience. If you’re working with a publisher, the press will probably have its own house style, or refer you to a preferred guide like New Hart’s Rules or The Chicago Manual of Style. If you’re a self-publishing author, you can create your own, though a professional editor and proofreader should offer this as part of their service. Creating your own style sheet enables you to record decisions about hyphenation, numbering, capitalization, spelling variation, punctuation style, etc., and enforce common-sense consistency without becoming bogged down in overly prescriptive ‘rules’ taught to you by someone who thought they knew better. You can find a free template for a style sheet on my Self-publishers page. Check online resources from grammarians and linguists to help you separate the good sense from the nonsense. That way, you can defend your decisions. Consider your audience. Certain types of writing (and those who will be reading it) bend more easily to particular style choices.
Broadly speaking, a good piece of writing will be sensitive to its audience. Variations in punctuation style, idiom usage, spelling and grammar abound, but they are just that – variations, not mistakes. The most common myths debunked … There are plenty of excellent online articles highlighting common things that writers are told are ‘wrong’ when in fact they’re perfectly fine. I’ve provided a summary here, though if you read the linked-to articles in full you’ll quickly realize that the same sticking points arise time and again. Myth 1: Verbs with -iz suffixes are Americanisms (for example, specialise vs specialize). This isn’t true. In fact, use of the -iz form has been around for over 400 years and is a completely standard variant that’s recognized, and widely used, within UK publishing and beyond. Consistency is what you should look out for. A word of caution, though – take care not to apply the style globally to your text. There are some words that must retain their -is suffix (e.g. compromise, advertise). Oxford provides a useful list of the most common words that must be spelled with -is. If you’re in doubt, look up a word’s spelling in a good-quality dictionary that includes variants. Myth 2: You can’t split an infinitive. There are numerous online articles debunking this myth, but one of my favourites is Language Myths by Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman (Grammarphobia). They write: ‘Writers of English have been merrily “splitting” infinitives since the 1300s. It was perfectly acceptable until the mid-nineteenth century, when Latin scholars – notably Henry Alford in his book A Plea for the Queen’s English – misguidedly called it a crime. (Some linguists trace the taboo to the Victorians’ slavish fondness for Latin, a language in which you can’t divide an infinitive.) This “rule” was popular for half a century, until leading grammarians debunked it. But its ghost has proved more durable than Freddie Krueger.’ Myth 3: You can’t use a preposition at the end of a sentence. This is incorrect. You can use a preposition at the end of a sentence – in fact, sometimes it’s far more comfortable for your reader. Says the OxfordWords blog: ‘Most of us learned in school that ending a sentence with a preposition was a mistake. This “rule”, however, is misguided, dating from the 17th century, when several notable writers tried to codify English to fit more neatly with Latin grammar. Clearly, there are instances where attempting to avoid ending a sentence in a preposition results in a statement that is either over-formal or simply poor English.’ Consider the following examples:
Myth 4: You mustn’t begin a sentence with a conjunction. This is yet another dose of hypercorrection – obviously, you don’t want your writing to be boring, so it pays to not overdo it, but there’s nothing grammatically wrong with starting a sentence with a conjunction. And in some cases it can even add punch to a sentence (see what I did there?). Richard Feloni, in 10 popular grammar myths debunked by a Harvard Linguist, reviews linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style (published by Allen Lane in 2014), and writes: ‘Teachers instruct young students that it is incorrect to begin a sentence with a conjunction (and, because, but, or, so, also) because it helps keep them from writing in fragments, Pinker writes, but it's advice that adults don't need to follow. Avoid writing an ugly “megasentence” full of connected independent clauses, and feel free to start a sentence with a conjunction’ (Business Insider UK, 2015). Myth 5: You must place two spaces after a full point. Actually, it's best not to – it looks awful on documents produced with modern word-processing software such as Word or InDesign. Publishers don’t do it; nor do professional typographers. When we do it, it makes the text look gappy and amateurish. You can do a quick search and replace in Word to remove double spaces (simply click Ctrl H, and then type two spaces into the Find What box and a single space in the Replace With box). This supposed typographical rule is purported to be a hangover from the days of monospaced letters on typewriters; these had only one font that gave equal space on a page to a wider letter such a ‘w’ and a narrower symbol like a full point. Whether that's true is not the point. Go to your bookshelf and pick up any contemporary, professionally published book; I promise you this – all full points will have a single space after them. Delete your double spaces and you're more likely to look like a pro! For an entertaining discussion of the issue, read Farhad Manjoo’s article Space Invaders (Slate, 2011). Myth 6: You can’t use ‘they’ as a singular pronoun. This old chestnut gets a lot of peevers in a pickle. It’s a shame because it’s a rather splendid solution for those who want to write clearly and succinctly while avoiding gendered language. It’s been in use for a while too – from at least the sixteenth century. Some publisher house styles demand the avoidance of the singular ‘they’; others embrace it, given that, as Arike Okrent notes, ‘[i]t’s perfectly good English. It sounds completely natural. Great writers like Shakespeare and Austen used it’ (4 Fake Grammar Rules You Don’t Need to Worry About, Mental Floss, 2015). Oxford Dictionaries concurs. Note, though, Oxford’s follow-up caution: ‘Two things are matters of fact, however: many people use it, and many others dislike it intensely. If you’re writing something, it is therefore advisable to consider who might read it, and what their views might be.’ Myth 7: You shouldn’t start a sentence with ‘However’. You can, but getting the punctuation right is essential. (a) When it’s being used in the sense of ‘Nevertheless’ or ‘But’, it acts as a connector or conjunction with the previous sentence:
(b) ‘However’ can also be used to mean ‘in whatever way’ or ‘regardless of how’. In this case, I wouldn’t place a comma after it because it would interrupt the sentence.
She also provides some thoughtful advice about avoiding placing ‘However’ at the beginning of a sentence: ‘Sometimes it’s still a good idea to avoid it because a lot of people think it's wrong. I don’t advise starting a sentence with ‘however’ in a cover letter for a job application, for example. You don’t want your résumé to get dumped because someone thinks you’ve made a mistake even if you haven’t’ (Quick and Dirty Tips, 2013). Depressing, but worth bearing in mind! Final thoughts … First, consider Jonathon Owen’s reminder that good writers should never ignore register. ‘There’s a time and a place for following the rules, but the writers of these lists typically treat English as though it had only one register: formal writing. They ignore the fact that following the rules in the wrong setting often sounds stuffy and stilted. Formal written English is not the only legitimate form of the language, and the rules of formal written English don’t apply in all situations. Sure, it’s useful to know when to use who and whom, but it’s probably more useful to know that saying To whom did you give the book? in casual conversation will make you sound like a pompous twit’ (12 Mistakes Nearly Everyone Who Writes About Grammar Mistakes Makes, Arrant Pedantry, 2013). Second, bear in mind that some people’s ‘rules’ are actually just their pet peeves. Taking time to understand the difference between a rule and a preference will at least enable you to defend your choices. However, don’t be surprised if some sticklers still object to your decisions – there’s no consensus. Says editor and writer Stan Carey, ‘There are local and institutional conventions, but since English lacks an official language academy, there is no universal Standard English. Pick a version and you will find it riddled, as Geoffrey Pullum wrote, “with disorder, illogic, inconsistency, oddity, irregularity, and chaos”. Amidst such ragged variability, clarity is desirable and elegance is admirable, but while certain rules facilitate these qualities, others are misguided myths that undermine them’ (Descriptivism vs. prescriptivism: War is over (if you want it), Sentence First, 2010). And as promised, here's your free booklet! It includes lots of useful guidance and links for newbie writers. I hope you find it useful. Click on the picture to get yours. 
Louise Harnby is a fiction copyeditor and proofreader. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.
Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader & Copyeditor, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn. If you're an author, you might like to join Louise’s Writing Library. Members receive monthly updates featuring self-publishing news and resources.
How to organize your best proofreading and editing resources so that they're visible and usable ...
Content hubs for proofreaders and editors
The ‘self-publishers’ page on my site is a content hub. I call it Louise's Writing Library. It’s where potential author clients can find lots of resources to make their lives easier. Each resource has a picture. Clicking on that picture takes the visitor to a blog post, a Word file or a PDF booklet (though it could just as easily link to a video, podcast or Excel spreadsheet). All of that stuff is on my blog too, so why did I create a dedicated page to curate it? Here are 8 reasons why: 1. Hubs help your visitors find your useful stuff It's much easier for a visitor to navigate from one resource to another when you offer clearly titled images in one place than it is to find what you want in a search bar or blog archive. And if they get distracted, it’s easy to start the content review process all over again back in the hub. That might not be so easy if they’re on a 7-year-old blog with several hundred articles on it, especially if the ones they want to read appear in different subject- or month-archives. Your visitor can also bookmark a hub page on your site. They can’t do that with a list of results generated by your search bar. They can probably bookmark an archive, but that will only show the first article or two on your blog, not a chunk of your core resources at a glance. 2. Hubs keeps your visitors on your site for longer because there’s more to engage with The more goodies you offer visitors, the greater their engagement. That’s good for obvious reasons – you’re helping your clients, showing them you’re engaged with their problems and are willing and able to solve them. But there’s another important reason. The longer someone sticks around on your site, the more likely they are to hire your editorial services. It’s no surprise, really – I don’t stick around in a high-street shop, desperately trying to find that one thing I want, if the overall feel of the place and the products it’s selling don’t feel like me. But if I keep finding things that grab my attention, I’m much more likely to walk out of the door with a bag full of something nice. Editorial websites are no different. If your hub makes potential clients drool because you’re offering them a lot of free, helpful, valuable content, if it makes them feel that you get them, and that you’re a good fit for each other, you have a much higher chance of persuading that person to ask for a quote or a sample edit/proofread. 3. Hubs reinforce your brand Content hubs are perfect for reinforcing your brand identity because you can create a uniform look and feel by theming your images with consistent colourways, fonts, and design. Include a few lines of text at the top to explain who your resources are for, and what problems they’ll solve – your mission, so to speak. Here’s a partial sample of the images in my own content hub: 
Content hub for self-publishing authors (Louise Harnby)
My brand identity is premised on a passionate support for the independent author’s right to write, and my empathy with their self-publishing journey (having done it myself). I hope my smiling headshots give them an inkling of my friendliness and supportive nature. I hope that the colours are soft and gentle enough to inspire reassurance. But just in case, I include the following text to explain what my aim is with this hub:
Welcome to the library
And here's a partial shot of John Espirian's Learning Zone. John's hub has a very different feel to it, and so it should. His brand identity is built around a different set of skills, services and target clients.
Content hub for businesses (John Espirian)
4. Hubs demonstrate your expertise and arouse clients’ emotions With a hub you can offer a chunk of accessible information that solves multiple problems. That presents you as an expert who sees the big picture. It’s not a labyrinthine process of discovery that involves extensive scrolling or putting the right keywords into a search box. Rather, you hit them in the heart with a message that you’re on their side and have their backs. It’s about arousing powerful emotions. In episode 3 of Content Mavericks, pro content marketers Andrew and Pete argue that high-arousal messages like awe, excitement, relief, and love are much more likely to generate engagement than lower-arousal messages like contentment. ‘When we care we share … Figure out a way to make people care about your message or your offering.’ If your hub can generate excitement in your potential client – make them feel that they’ve found an editor or proofreader who’s completely on their wavelength, someone who’s demonstrably in touch with their struggles, and is offering resolution – that’s a powerful message. And it’s one that’s more likely to get your visitors telling others about who you are and what you’re up to, and have them clicking the Contact button. 5. Eye candy I cherish my blog, The Proofreader’s Parlour. I’ve lovingly filled it with articles on a weekly (mostly) basis since 2011. But things can get messy. There’s a sidebar with a subscription button, an RSS button, a search box, an archive by subject area, an archive by date, some links to my book, and more. Plus, I love to write meaty posts. Most of my articles are at least 1,500 words long. And while I do include images and header stamps that summarize what’s included in each post, there’s an awful lot of text. That’s not all. There’s a lot of scrolling to do if someone wants to glimpse what’s available on one page of the blog. A content hub is much easier on the eye and allows my author visitors to see at a glance what’s on offer. 6. Segmentation Back in the day when I worked exclusively for publishers, my blog posts were aimed at my colleagues. These days I work pretty much exclusively for indie authors, and now I’m creating content for them, too. So I have two audiences, and two types of content. It’s about a 50–50 split. Creating resource hubs helps me to segment my website so that the right people can find the relevant content. This is particularly important for my author audience because most of them don’t yet know me. They’re less likely to bounce around in my blog, diving from one archive to another in a bid to find what they need. Many of my colleague visitors do know me, at least in an online capacity. And so they have a little more patience because I’ve already built a trusting relationship with them. They’re more likely to spend time rooting around the Parlour for what they want. I do have a Resources page for them, but it houses fewer pieces of content than the author content hub. 7. You can show off what you’ve got planned This is one of the biggest pulls for me. I want potential author clients to see what I’m already offering them, of course, but I have a tonne of great stuff in my head or listed on my content-audit spreadsheet, in production, out with the proofreader, or already scheduled for publication sometime in the next few months. And that’s not visible on my blog. My blog only tells people about what’s available. What’s coming might be equally appealing to a client. They might be more likely to sign up for membership to Louise’s Writing Library (my author newsletter) if they can see there are some exciting things in the pipeline. Furthermore, I encourage library members to tell me what’s missing from the hub. If I’m asked for something, but I know it’s going to take me a few weeks to produce that new resource, I want to have a way of indicating that it’s on its way and that I haven’t ignored the request. 
Showing off what's coming up
8. Hubs encourage ‘you’re worth it’ moments
Certainly, a great content hub will increase the likelihood that your visitor will hit the contact button, but not everyone will be ready to make that commitment. That’s why building a mailing list is a great way to keep in touch with potential clients who are thinking, ‘I’m interested in you and like what you’re doing, but I’m not quite at the point where I’m ready to hire you as my editor or proofreader.’ Still, it seems like everyone and their aunt has a mailing list or newsletter these days. And if you’re going to persuade someone to allow yet another email into their already crowded inbox, and make them want to actually open it, displaying a hub of gorgeous resources might just be the tipping point – the thing that makes them think you’re worth it. Make sure your hub includes a way of signing up to your mailing list, and a clear call to action that tells the visitor what you want them to do, and why. Here’s what mine looks like: 
Louise Harnby: newsletter sign-up
Summing up
Make your wonderful editorial content easy to access. Whether it’s a blog, a vlog, a podcast, or something else, help your potential clients navigate their way around your resources and show them all the marvellous stuff on offer. Tell them who and what it’s for – how it helps, which problems it solves. Explain whether it’s available instantly or whether some sort of access sign-up is required. Finally, make sure it’s designed uniformly (Canva is your free friend – trust me!) so that each resource looks like it’s part of a stable. That way it’s not a hotchpotch of stuff; it’s valuable, client-focused content that represents you, your editorial business, your professional values, and your mission – your brand identity. Resources
Louise Harnby is a professional proofreader and copyeditor. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.
Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn. If you're an author, you might like to join Louise’s Writing Library. Members receive monthly updates featuring self-publishing news and resources. |
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 All text on this blog, The Proofreader's Parlour, and on the other pages of this website (unless indicated otherwise) is in copyright © 2011–17 Louise Harnby. Please do not copy or reproduce any of the content, in whole or part, in any form, unless you ask first.
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 Author Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi). I abide by its Code of Standards in regard to my status as an independent writer.
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Advanced Professional Member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP). I'm a signatory to its code of practice as a professional editor.
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Featured in The Book Designer's Carnival of the Indies: Joel Friedlander's collection of 'outstanding articles recently posted to blogs'.
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Winner of the Judith Butcher Award 2017 in respect of 'highly visible contributions to the SfEP and its membership'.
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