Creating a memoir from old family letters and photos can get complicated. You start out with good intentions and then find yourself sorting through hundreds (even thousands) of letters and old photos trying to find a way to make a manuscript. Scrapbooking has been around for years, and it is a convenient way to take [...]
After hours (months? years?) of painstaking work, you’ve finally gotten to the last page of your manuscript and feel ready to show the world. Congratulations! You’ve made it further than a lot of other writers. Are you ready to self-publish or send it off to an agent? Not quite. There are still quite a few revisions needed for your book. Here are some tips to help you learn how to edit your book.
One of your final steps in the journey is the attainment of an ISBN number and a barcode. This number identifies your book’s publisher, edition, publication region, and physical properties. The barcode is a graphical representation of your ISBN and pricing information. Simply put, they are a unique identifier for your publication—no other number or media will have that exact ISBN or barcode.
So, you want to write a book. It’s one that you’ve been considering for a long time. Every time I’ve mentioned what I do for a living, I always have people say that they have wanted to write but just were not sure how to get started. Let's get started.
When writing your novel. It’s important to get an idea of what type of genre, or category, you will be writing for. Here is a list of some of the most popular form of genres. It’s not all inclusive but should give you an idea of what type of books are out there.
Fiction can exist without dialogue, but it’s often the interaction between characters that brings readers into the story. Dialogue helps to move the story along. It also gives your characters a voice and life of their own. So, what exactly is it? Simply put, the dialogue is a conversation between two or more people put down in written form. It’s an exchange of information or ideas. It’s what the character’s say and is most commonly the text between quotation marks.
When writing blogs, articles, and novels, understanding the active and passive voice is important. Most style guides, such as the APA Manual of Style or AMA prefer that author’s use the active voice in general. But what does active voice mean? Is it required to always use active voice? Not necessarily. Let’s discuss what the different styles are what when it is appropriate to use one or the other.
Every book is unique. The book arrangement shouldn't be. It's important that the organization follows standard publishing industry practices. Parts of a book should appear in a standard location in every book. Organizing your book using these rules makes finding things easier for your reader. For example, every book has a front cover and a back cover. Prologues and table of contents are up front, indexes are in the back, etc.
So, you’ve finished your material, and you are ready to publish it. First? You need to protect it. Obtaining copyright, an ISBN, and an LCCN number is critical to protecting your rights. What is copyright? A copyright is an exclusive set of rights, or protection, provided to authors of original work to protect the use of the work by others. These rights include the control of how the work is copied, distributed, publicly displayed, or adapted.
Whether you are designing your own book in Adobe InDesign or hiring someone else to do so, understanding book design and layout terms can be important. InDesign, for example, will ask you what you want to set your trim or margin size when you start a new design. Then, if you want to find your own printer, you’ll need to understand what they mean when they ask for your trim; if you want bleeds; and, if all the images are CMYK, grayscale, or if you want to use spot color.
