Award-winning Author
From the moment you first set out to write a story for publication, you become a public figure, a celebrity. People applaud you, fawn over you, tell you how wonderfully clever you are.
Most people can see themselves writing a book someday. They relate to you. They want to be you.
But that will end quickly if you are unlikable. It will hurt your sales, too.
It doesn’t matter that you’re not presenting your book at that moment. You’re representing YOU, the writer, all the time. ALL THE TIME.
Publishing is a business. They want to make money. No-brainer, right?
Yet, I hear lots of people say they can’t get a publisher. Or they write better than so-and-so, but can’t get a representative.
My first advice is to look at your manuscript. Is it grammatically correct? Does it have lots of spelling mistakes? Do all your characters sound the same? Is it descriptive?
It may have a good story, but if it take a lot of time to clean up, it’s a bigger investment than a story that’s already clean and a little bit of a lesser story.
The publisher has to be able to make money on YOUR manuscript and wages are the most expensive part of any business. The longer it takes to get your story ready for market, the more expensive it is to publish, the less money your publisher makes.
Writers often get bogged down in the middle of their work because they keep going back and editing the beginning. Yes, sometimes changes need to be made as we discover different than what we’d originally planned, but editing – honest to goodness editing – should wait until after the first draft is completed.
Why?
Writing and Editing use two different sides of the brain, and sometimes we get hung up on one side and we can’t switch to the other as easily. Sometimes that’s known by another name: Writers’ Block.
Left side creative brain uses a completely different skill set than right side analytical brain.
They’re like oil and water. They just don’t mix.
Keep them separate.
People who have broken legs use crutches. Writers who have broken sentences use crutch words.
A crutch word is an empty word with no purpose. It’s just a filler. Dandelion fluff. If you remove it from your sentence, you won’t even notice. No one likes to hear someone fill their speech with these. No one will like to read them either. They weaken your writing dramatically.
“Um” is the best example. Here are a few more. You can find lots of lists of these all over the web.
