Things Writers Should Know
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We editors are often misunderstood. So, I want to clear the air on some common misconceptions I’ve observed: Misconception #1: Editors kill the story I’ve heard many say that editors gut their client’s writing. Entire paragraphs and pages scrapped, major scenes recommended to be changed, characters amended, morals neutered, vulgarity censored; I get it, I…
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Knowing what style guide you’re using is not just important to your writing, but to your editors, proofreaders and publishers so they know how to work with it. Generally speaking, AP style is used for journalism, Chicago style is for publishing, and APA or MLA are for research and scholastic essays. But, like everything in…
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P&L sheets (in the publishing industry) are profit-and-loss statements based on the revenue gained and lost from comparative titles of a book undergoing the submission process. Say you have a book that’s already written, edited, submitted to an agent, edited by the agent, and sent from the agent to the editor, and we finally move…
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I recently appeared on a PenPodcast with Matthew Harms discussing how to navigate the query process, and we went back and forth on a discussion about self vs. traditional publishing (a topic that warrants many, many different articles on its own) and surmised that a big reason authors find their way to self-publishing is the…
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If you’re waiting around and around and around for publishers to get back to you – that’s normal. The process is like one long assembly line of backlogging and querying – the author edits their manuscript prose and sends it to an agent, then the agent edits the manuscript prose and sends it to the…
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When aiming to publish a book for the first time, debut authors have a lot of resources in front of them as far as the path to take to get their book to print. The two most prominent of these are self-publishing and traditional publishing. Self-publishing, which involves doing all of the drafting, editing, proofreading,…
Donovan Levine | Agent, Writer, Copyeditor 