by Jamie Chavez | Jun 6, 2016 | Your Editor Says …
Dear Mr. Author: There are a lot of errors in your manuscript. Not plot holes or lack of clarity, no. Simple things like typos, misspelled words, punctuation mistakes. What happened? It looks like a bomb went off in here. I’m the content editor, so I’ve been looking...
by Jamie Chavez | Feb 8, 2016 | The Book Biz, Your Editor Says …
After you and I spend a couple months working on the content of your manuscript—catching some continuity issues or working on characterization, say, in fiction, or beefing up clarity or connecting a few dots in nonfiction—you might well heave a big sigh of relief. You...
by Jamie Chavez | Dec 7, 2015 | Your Editor Says …
The apostrophe, that is. And what I’ve been seeing lately makes my eyes bleed, y’all. I know I’m not the first. (Here’s looking at you, Lynn Truss. Thanks for bringing it to our attention, but you need a copyeditor, too, friend.) Most recently, Kate Brannen wrote a...
by Jamie Chavez | Aug 8, 2015 | Authors & Other Writers, Your Editor Says …
I read quite a bit of Shirley Jackson’s fiction in middle and high school—lots of her short stories, and the “fictionalized memoirs” Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons. Since the former begins with a family that has “two children and about five thousand books,”...
by Jamie Chavez | Jun 15, 2015 | Your Editor Says …
This happens to me three or four times a year: I get an email referral from an agent, or someone at a publishing house, or another author I’ve worked with for a job that I would really, really love to have. Sometimes that’s because the publisher is one I haven’t...
