I have never worked on the acquisition side, though I’ve been an interested observer. If you’ve got a mind to recommend an author to a house, my advice is don’t. It just isn’t your portion – you’re on the production side – and after the first time you try it, ever after you’re going to...Continue reading

A general rule, if no style guide will tell you: don’t hyphenate unless you have to. (By the same principle, don’t capitalize unless you have to.)  If the house style sheet calls for a hyphen, you have to. If it’s in the house dictionary, you have to. I’d make an exception for long quotes: if...Continue reading

If there is a world’s most famous copyeditor, no one has ever heard of him. I can’t imagine a self-respecting CE who would want to be famous. Most of us, I’m sure, are contented enough to be the guy they keep in the cellar who knows the difference between that and which – let the...Continue reading

I’ve rarely run into another freelancer and haven’t much wanted to. For the sake of my nerves and to keep paranoia in check, I always preferred to fantasize that I was the only one. Sometimes I was able to convince myself.  During an ME’s retirement gathering, it finally happened. I was circulating among the MEs...Continue reading

I got shredded once by a review of a suspense novel. You read some mscripts and tell yourself, “The market won’t bear this.” The Canadian market has room for 200-page cosies and Mrs. Marple-type small-town mysteries, but a politically incorrect action-adventure story was never going to fly up here. In the United States, sure, maybe....Continue reading

When I say bookshelf, I include electronic books. Almost every book that is useful and well established has an online edition or an app. That includes dictionaries and the better-known style guides. House Style Sheet Strictly speaking, this isn’t on your bookshelf, but it’s going to be somewhere in your system, and the house will...Continue reading

There are fewer rules for commas than for any other punctuation. Authors tend to overuse them, and don’t realize it. That preceding sentence is an example of a comma that serves no purpose being there. It isn’t a compound sentence. A compound sentence is two complete sentences linked by a conjunction, and “don’t realize it”...Continue reading

If you’re an ME, you are going to hope that the CE you’ve just assigned a project will be extremely good at his job and do a near-perfect one. Some of them actually come quite close – it’s a perfectionist’s craft, and CEs do want to catch everything. The truth is they never do. The...Continue reading

On the academic side, most books don’t get reviewed. That’s too simple. They’ve been thoroughly reviewed before publication by whatever committee has chosen the book for publication. The reviews of them you’re most likely to encounter are blurbs on Amazon that are basically culls from the book’s back cover. Not so with trade books, and...Continue reading

Practicalities, by which I mean how it’s done. You’ve just been offered a mscript, usually by email. The ME asks if you want to handle it and if you have time. (I almost always say “Hell yes,” but that’s a different discussion.) Then a day or two later the project shows up in another email,...Continue reading