Line editing and proofreading of manuscript drafts before doing an Editorial Assessment, can be a big mistake for authors.
Editorial Assessments: Finding Music in the Noise
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The Book Designer
ARTICLES
Self-Publishing Basics: Book Chapter Headings and Subheadings
The vast majority of books are divided up into chapters. Whether they're fiction or nonfiction, regardless of genre or subgenre, the chapter is the basic building block of a book. But what is a chapter, exactly? And what about chapter headings and subheadings? Are...
Grammar Rules and Our Changing Society
Think about how grammar has changed, let’s say, since the days of Shakespeare. Has it really? What changes most is actually vocabulary.
Cool Writing Fonts: Have You Heard of the Comic Sans Trick? (And 5 Alternatives)
If you’ve been writing for any length of time, you’ve probably encountered the dreaded writer’s block. While there are countless tips out there that claim to help you get over writer’s block, there’s one tried-and-true technique I’ve used to get past my own writer’s...
Strategies to Attract Your First Readers: A Comprehensive Guide for Self-Publishers
Standing out as a newly self-published author can be challenging even for the most gifted writers. How do you find your first readers? How do find enough of those readers to actually make your self-publishing career financially viable? It seems like if you ask ten...
9 Book Design Tips that Authors Absolutely Need to Know
9 Book Design Tips that Authors Need to Know, including how to organize your manuscript and how to avoid unnecessary formatting work, tips on how to prepare your work for page layout.
7 Tips for Getting Your Book into Local Bookstores (and Why You Might Not Want To)
6 Tips for Getting Your Book onto Bookstore Shelves including starting locally, listening to your buyers, and expecting to hear a lot of “no” before you get to “yes”
X/Twitter for Authors: The Ultimate Guide
X, formerly known as Twitter, can be a powerful platform for authors looking to market themselves and their books effectively. Whether you’ve been on Twitter/X since the early days or are new to the platform, there are opportunities still to be had there. And the...
9 Best Font Combinations for Book Design
The font combinations we use for books are a real contradiction. They can be so quiet you just don’t notice them. But if you enlarge the letters, you can see right away that they are full of idiosyncrasies and flourishes. Display fonts, on the other hand, announce...
15 of the Best Writing Organization Tools to Use Now
Writing a book is one of the most meaningful projects you can dedicate your time to. Your book has the potential to entertain and inform people far into the future. It also sets an amazing example for those around you, showing them it’s possible to dream of being an...
8 Milestones to Self Publishing Success
Many new authors have a lot of questions about what it takes to be successful at self publishing. After all, there are so many stories about how self-published authors have made it big, and it seems like each of them took a slightly different approach. So how do you...
The Mindset of Successful Self Publishers: 3 Key Traits
The Mindset of Successful Self-Publishers explores the role that opportunism, self-direction, experimentation, and optimism play.