As soon as you’ve got a working table of contents and a few polished chapters for your book, start thinking about locating experts and celebrities whose kind words will give it instant credibility and marketability through the foreword and testimonial quotes. It’s easier than you think. No one is unreachable in today’s connected world. Locating Experts and Celebrities through Internet Research Start with the Internet. Good Internet research takes patience and persistence. You experiment with keyword combinations while searching for other possible keywords. Begin by typing the name of the person you’re trying to locate into whatever search engine you use. If it doesn’t bring up the right person, or if it brings up so many links your name doesn’t show up until page ten, refine your search. Include the […]
Blog
When you write a nonfiction book, the chances are good that you will include a book index. If you publish through an established company, you will probably end up paying for someone to create it. Do you find the indexer yourself and pay upfront? Or do you trust the publisher to be sensitive to costs they’re going to pass along to you anyway? Taking Responsibility for Your Book Index I prefer to handle the cost on my end to better control both cost and quality. That said, I don’t do the work myself. I farm it out to a professional indexer of my choosing. Roughly speaking, a trained indexer will charge $3 to $4 a page for general trade books and $4 to $5 a page for scholarly books; and […]
In my last entry “Correcting Text Errors: Tsouris Back When, Now a Joy,” I showed you how tedious text correction was back when. Today, “good enough” is never good enough. We’re living in a golden age of text correction. Basic Text Correction Today You have four ways to delete a word on your computer. You can place your cursor after the word you want to delete, hit Backspace to make it disappear, and type the correct word. before the word you want to delete, hit Delete, and type the correct word. before the word you want to delete, hit Insert, and type the correct word to cover the word you want to delete. Or you can 4. highlight the word you want to delete with your cursor and type the […]
Electronic technology has made revising manuscript text and correcting text errors easier. If you don’t understand the awesomeness of that statement, you didn’t grow up before it was around. Correcting Text Errors Back When When I was in ninth-grade typing class in the early sixties, to calculate our typing speed per minute, we would count how many words we typed on our portable Smith-Corona typewriters in five minutes, divide by five, then subtract five words for every error, the premise being that it took you as much time to correct one error as it would have taken you to type five words. That formula was way generous. Our primary tool for correcting text errors was the ink eraser, which came in multiple forms but always ripped the paper by the […]
Passion and facts alone won’t win your written argument no matter how knowledgeable you are. You have to outmaneuver your opposition. Here are two writing weapons for your debating arsenal. Writing Weapon #1: Anticipation/Refutation Imagine yourself the lawyer in a jury trial. You will present your closing arguments; then the other side will speak. Your opponent has been raising the same tired arguments for six months to support his case. You can poke holes in all of them. If you ignore them in your closing arguments and he presents them in his, you can’t jump up at that time and say, “Yes, your honor, but….” You had your chance. So, in your closing arguments, you anticipate that he will present his tired arguments and refute them: “When my opponent says […]