Guest blogger, dev-editor, and author Shirin Yim Leos, answers the question she’s most often asked: What is developmental editing, does it really make a difference, do I need it and how much—HOW MUCH?!?!—can I do for myself? What is Developmental Editing? It’s the big, high level, Is the book working? edit. Does it make a difference? Resoundingly yes. Ask any author with a career. Do I need it? No writer can accurately see their own work. It’s a fact, like refraction through water or distortion through atmosphere. How much does developmental editing cost? It varies, but here are some recently published rates in The Write Life. How to be your own Developmental Editor Can I do it for myself? Try to duplicate a dev editor’s distance. They come to your pages cold and you can replicate that: Put your writing away in a drawer for 3-6 months. I can hear…
Tag: Shirin Bridges
Ingram Spark? Bookbaby? CreateSpace?
Guest Blogger Shirin Bridges sheds light on Ingram Spark, BookBaby, and CreateSpace. The following is an excerpt from Shirin Bridges’ June 24, 2016 blog post on Goose Tracks. I was recently asked for the pros and cons of Ingram Spark vs. BookBaby. The answer, I quickly realized, is a complex one, greatly dependent on the particular publishing goals for the book. I also thought that in any decision tree, Amazon’s CreateSpace would have to rate a mention. So what follows is my attempt to delineate the decision tree I would adopt in choosing between these three services . . . [Note from Marlene: For the full post, please go to Shirin’s informative blog, Goose Tracks]. How important are bookstores to your sales strategy? If NOT VERY, skip to 4. If VERY, keep reading. Self-published authors will find it almost impossible to get wide distribution in bookstores. Period. The reasons are legion but boil down to two words: workload and risk. Most self-published authors…