Period Spaces

Sep 18, 2012 by

Period Spaces

Once, a long long time ago, in this here galaxy in which we live, you wrote on a typewriter, and the rule was two spaces after a period. And while even the nefarious Writer’s Digest acknowledges that no, we do not do this anymore, people insist on it, and give many a reason for it. When we used typewriters, readability insisted that two spaces come after every period. It gave the eye a rest, and the irregularities inherent in typewriter text made it necessary. We do not do this in today’s computer-driven world. I understand this is a hard habit to break – that’s what “Find/replace” is for. To remove all those double spaces from your finished manuscript before you send it in. Why, you ask? Publishers don’t want to see it. There are plenty of...

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Writer’s Digest

Sep 14, 2012 by

Writer’s Digest

I subscribe to Writer’s Digest’s newsletter. Many of you do as well, most likely, but while we both read it, this is for vastly different reasons. Writer’s Digest is considered a good source of information for the general public. But in actual fact, if you read closely, you’ll notice that you never actually get said information. Each article or seminar or book is mostly designed to make sure you get just enough to have to buy the next one. Now, this isn’t to say that their information is always inaccurate. It’s not. Just recently, an article went up that I thoroughly agree with and will be writing more on next week. However, this is a bit rare and far between. For the most part, Writer’s Digest is a simply money-making machine. Hardly surprising in today’s world, but...

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Books VS Graphic Novels

Aug 31, 2012 by

Books VS Graphic Novels

Despite wide-spread thoughts, graphic novels are not the same thing as comics. Comics are shorter, tend to be printed as magazines are, and do not usually tell a complete story in each issue. A graphic novel is, in fact, a novel, told using a comic, or “artistic” format. Basically the difference between a Saturday morning cartoon and a feature motion picture. That said, they are not written the way traditional books are. And it is very difficult to apply the principles of either media/style to the other. A graphic novel has the obvious advantage of the artwork. The art can convey the emotion, show the foreshadowing, hint at the lust or betrayal, illustrate the catastrophe and explain to the reader exactly what it is the main character is holding. None of these tools are...

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Streaming Movies on an E-Reader...

Aug 20, 2012 by

Streaming Movies on an E-Reader

Not a new concept, but not really what we really intended those little tablets to do, right? And yet more and more people want, if not expect, their e-readers to do more than just display books. This was posted last...

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The “Self Publishing Company”...

Aug 6, 2012 by

The “Self Publishing Company”

There was a time when no ghost or editor in their right mind would tell you use a vanity press. But the world, she is a-changin’. Originally called vanity press, then subsidy press, and now “self publishing companies”, they’re all still the same: you pay them money, they publish your book. This is in stark contrast to a traditional publisher like Penuin or Harper-Collins, who pays you for the rights to publish your book. Many, many people have been scammed by vanity presses over the years, and yet these days, some people actually have good experiences. This is not a topic I’ll really be able to cover in a single article. So here’s the basics. If you self publish in the traditional way, you find a printer, you find a binder, you buy an...

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E-Book Conversions, vol 2

Jun 28, 2012 by

E-Book Conversions, vol 2

As it turns out, I can’t just convert a book to epub format and be done. No, no, no, that’d be too easy. And if I use InDesign the cover art won’t work correctly with the Nook or iPad bookshelves, though the Kindle seems to read it just fine and the cover shows up, but the pagination doesn’t work correctly and everything’s skip-lined like I’d forwarded an email eighty times and it was still 1998. This really is more of a rant than an article. The fact is, this is my own fault. If I’d been smart, I’d have simply hired someone to do this. We did in fact discuss that idea, and we rejected it for the simple reasons that we wanted to keep our hands on the project from start to finish....

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